A kind and sweet older lady asked me what I was going to do to refresh my soul now that my school was out. I normally have no problems talking to her, but tonight I just stared, like she’d asked me a question I didn’t know the answer to but should have. Laughing in her face would’ve been just plain rude, as would’ve answering with some passive aggressive comment about all the busy things.

“I haven’t thought that far”, I said, when I finally found some words. People don’t normally ask me questions having to do with my soul. What I had been thinking about was how tired I was again, what I needed to be doing to rest and “listen to” my body who’d said “that was too much”. I haven’t really felt well for much of the week. Resting seems the main way of bringing energy back.

This isn’t the first time she’s mentioned it, the doing something for refreshment. I’ve got a note in my Bible that she wrote me several months ago, maybe a whole year ago by now, saying something along the lines of finding something that brings joy and refreshment to my soul. She’d sent me a note, a deep pink flower in a vase, and instructions on how to harvest the seeds to later sow in the wild.

The boys made a bench using two metal end pieces they found in the woods. I could hear them drilling through the bedroom window. When I finally saw it I was very impressed. The rusted screws blended perfectly with the laminate floor pieces they’d taken from I’m not even sure where they found them. They didn’t ask me, and I maybe could’ve used those floor boards for something.

You can’t really sit on it, or at least you wouldn’t want to sit more than one person. But they were satisfied with their work and so was I. The kids have found very strange things in the woods. On the corner of the road before you fully turn into the camp property, there’s a curve where the woods drop off into a sort of ravine. This is part of camp property too but not a part we frequent often.

One day while we were all taking a walk we saw that someone had dumped two leather recliners over the guardrails. Another time at that same corner somebody dumped a garbage bag of deer legs. If the recliners had been left up at the corner, someone could’ve picked them up from the road and probably used them. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do though with a bag of deer legs.

It’s been another full and very filled to the brim Saturday. I was telling a mom friend that this spring stretch that goes until the end of the school year might even be worse than the one from pre-Thanksgiving to the end of December. For many years we were blissfully removed from the rat-race of what I refer to as the tyranny of the school calendar. I have to remember that in days like this.

There was a track meet in Carlinville about an hour away. Josh took the kids. The boys stayed here with me. They’ve all been fighting off some kind of throat, cold, and sinus-type sickness so this gave them all a chance to sleep in. They really have been such good sports the way they travel around with us from place to place. The kids have always been good travelers.

I have a paper left to finish then I can put that aside for a while. The kids had their prom tonight as well. I did my daughter’s hair then we left to meet everybody for pictures. I wish now I could’ve been more focused on it for her. The boys and I then drove to the park where my son was. Josh came back from church and went to the senior walk. I originally planned to go but stayed home.

By April and May I was beginning to identify with people who described themselves as living with chronic illness. There were accounts on Instagram and YouTube as well. One day I was home, the rest having left for some extra-curricular event, which would be the way through the spring. There was a repair man scheduled to come look at the sink. At this point I could not yet be around strangers, or anyone who wasn’t in my immediate sphere.

A woman named Rebekah sort of moved in next door. She and her husband and homeschooled four daughters lived in a giant RV that they had sold their home for. Her husband was needing to be in town for several months with a job project. Her parents and family were long time supporters of the camp, and her husband mowed when he could as a way to give back. For several months they lived in the camp ground by the maples.

“This is so like God”, I thought, “He answered my prayer.” A woman from church had recently reached out, asking if there was anything she could pray for. I asked her if she could pray that I’d find a few friends, proceeding to tell her that it’d been lonely out here, that the homeschooling was wonderful but that I just needed God to bring a friend. I texted her the day Rebekah and the girls moved in, saying you’d never believe this…

She sold Juice Plus supplements as a side business with homeschooling. I hadn’t been able to talk to her myself yet, but she gave Josh three bottles to give to me. I was deeply grateful and desperate to try anything. At the time I was taking anywhere from ten to twenty different vitamins and supplements, hoping something would soon start to work. It was harder to take the JuicePlus, which at two a piece added six more pills.

I don’t know now if she was the friend that I prayed for. I certainly didn’t end up being able to be much of a friend to her. I couldn’t believe, a homeschool mom who was living that close, and I couldn’t even do anything with her. I sent her texts here and there, apologizing that we couldn’t get together. I was used to living out here with my kids, but for a woman living alone in a bus with four kids, with no other way to drive around, I could imagine.

In the three months she was here we only got together twice. I had thought for sure we’d be able to do something, soon when I was better, or at least doing better than what I was. We kept texting about trying to do supper sometime, which never happened. Once we had a day where the kids played outside in the athletic field. Another homeschool friend brought her four kids too. I sat with my blanket just outside of the house.

I didn’t try to describe it then, but if I did to anyone, I described saying that it was like my force field was missing. It had actually been shattered, broken. Your force field is like that invisible shield that surrounds your body, providing a buffer from outside sounds and energy. This part of us takes a very long time to grow back. People doing nothing but talking to me would create a terrible nervous–as in pertaining to the nerves–discomfort.

Around my own husband and kids, it didn’t happen. It was amazingly as though I was immune to their energies, unaffected by the normalness we’d grown so accustomed to. The only time it did was if voices were raised, which I quickly learned was something that absolutely could not happen. It was like an electric fence that would train my soul, and create the boundary I hadn’t been able to create for myself. There had to be a new way.

The repair man showed up some late afternoon. Still resting in bed, I’d been feeling pretty good that day. I answered the door, just hoping to be as normal as possible. The small talk stung, and I braced myself against the rush of moving air that happens anytime a person walks into a room. He needed to see where the basement pipes were, to find the place where he could shut off the water. I walked him down the stairs and then back up.

I did a very foolish thing when he asked for a vacuum, or a broom or something to clean up the sink mess. I walked to the closet and got the handheld vacuum, plugged it in, and bent down to vacuum the mess up myself. Somehow after that I managed to keeping saying words and sign the needed receipt papers. When he left I went back to bed, spent and exhausted. The trees weren’t fully green and I watched them often in those days.

The boys and I met Grandma at the baseball game today. Papa doesn’t come like he used to, but might be there tomorrow because he’s done in the field now. Dad had a meeting then Wednesday night church. Elianna had track practice, came home for a little bit, and then had play practice. I parked the van in three different spots before the boys were satisfied that it was in a spot where the foul balls would not hit the windshield.

They won their game. That puts their record at 3-13. This has pretty much been the way their seasons have gone. I know winning isn’t everything but it is nice to win every once in a while, or at least have the scores not have such a wide range. I really couldn’t tell you what the team’s “problem” is. They seem to have decent coaches and players, with one of the coaches even being a former minor league pitcher.

But it was nice to see them win. Even more so to see them having fun. The game went fairly quickly and we were on the road again by 6:00. He asked me if he could ride the bus back to school. I said that’d be fine and that we’d just meet him there. We beat the bus to the school, so the boys got out and played catch for a while in the grass while we waited. The bus was soon there pulling in. They unloaded the bus and then we drove home.

Dad picked up the boys from piano lessons. He was going to be there at 3PM sharp. The way we’re doing lessons this time is fitting four of us within an hour and a half. It’s not the usual half hour lesson this way, but he said lesson regularity at this point was more important than lesson length. After a while with our former lessons, I had to to cut the time to only an hour a week, with us alternating with two of us each week. I had started to dread us being there for two hours.

I think it was because I was lonely sitting for that long in the youth room. The kids would bring their school work and I would bring a book. But a book wasn’t enough to keep me occupied that long, and there were steady interruptions with questions about school books. And I tried to do devotions, always feeling like I had to wait until everyone was there, which didn’t happen when there was someone always out for a lesson. I’d also have my journal, pencil, and phone along with me.

It’s like I can look back and see now the cracks starting to form. The increasing feeling like I was holding up something I couldn’t continue to carry. I remember a dream I had that fall, two of them actually. In one I was in a prison cell, in a stone tower with one window, curled up on a dirt floor. Jesus was sitting next to me on a rock. He was spoon-feeding me liquids. The only thing I was able to do was swallow whatever he gave me. The window was small, and high off the ground.

With the other dream there was a terrible force sucking me away into a cosmic black hole. I was holding on to Jesus’s leg with both hands, the side of my face pressed up into his calf and against his leg hairs. They say Jesus holds onto us and I don’t disagree, but in this dream I was very much holding on to him, the darkness trying to pull me away from the Lord. It was the leg hairs in that one that made such an impression. I can still feel my hands on his leg, his physical body that close.

I bawled my eyes out writing the big kids an email. I’d let them know this morning I was staying home from the track meet, but by the middle of the morning I was having second thoughts. Maybe I just needed to push through and go. Could they give me their thoughts and let know? I somehow needed to hear it from them, that they were okay if I wasn’t there again. It will never feel right to choose me over them. Dad and Grandma and the boys were going, and that was blessedly enough.

The boys and I stayed home yesterday from the track meet. I’ve been starting to feel the build-up of just doing too much again, and was needing the time to step back and take it slower. I don’t really try to explain it to many others. Being understood is like praise where you can want too much.

I stayed home from my son’s double-header today. One of the other boys came down with a sore throat and fever last night. He threw up this morning, but felt better after that. He stayed here with me and rested and slept on the couch. I worked on a paper due Monday by midnight.

Yesterday evening the boys and I walked down to the beach. It was sunny, warm, and almost felt like the approach of summer. Today it’s chilly again, only ten to fifteen degrees above freezing. I’m thankful for heaters, for shelter in houses, for blankets and pillows where the soft things are.

The baseball game tonight was cancelled due to rain. Josh came in and told me and I was very relieved. I stayed in bed longer then, taking advantage of the extra time to keep resting. The internet gurus call it being in your masculine energy, when you’re in that mode where you’re just going without stopping, without taking much time to think about it. I like doing things and going places, but I like my quiet time too.

I helped again today with the kids’ after prom lunch program. I really enjoy it. The mom who cooks was a cafeteria lady for five years during one of her jobs while her kids were in school. She had her kids later, having spent time in the workforce, then deciding she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. The devotion these moms have to their children amazes me. Mother-love is one of those things that truly is all-consuming.

It was a blessing again the way these women open up about the lives they’ve had. Talking for us is like breathing, both in ease and necessity. I usually don’t talk as much as the others. I don’t really feel like it’s my place to. It’s enough for me to listen along as they tell their own stories. I will add sometimes the one about staying home with my kids or meeting my husband in high school at the camp we live at. I like being able to tell it.

“Both Creator and creation are joined together forever in Christ.”
~Joshua Ryan Butler~

Josh Butler’s Beautiful Union book came in the mail this week. I couldn’t resist buying it and wanted to give the book a chance. After the whole debacle with his original TGC article, The Gospel Coalition took the article down and directed readers instead to a downloadable first chapter of his book. I read it, and when I did, it seemed to me the book and its message had some potential.

So I started with the second chapter since I’d already read the first one. His chapter is titled Why Sunsets Are Beautiful. His reason delighted me, saying sunsets enchant us because it’s where two become one. The night and the day. The same thing happens with the sunrise, where for a moment in time the day and night merge to create the magic we know as the glow of the morning.

Genesis 1 identifies the structure of these pairs. Land and sea. Day and night. Heaven and earth. The places on earth that charm us most are where these pairs come together. Backyard sunsets. Mountain views. Ocean shores. God creates the man and the woman and completes this picture. The greatest union comes in the person of Jesus. Divinity and humanity. One love made whole.

The kids did well at their track meet. It was basically perfect weather for running. Not too hot, not too cold, and no wind. Josh had to drive one of the team buses, so the boys and I met him at the meet coming straight from piano lessons. Our pastor is a classical pianist and has picked up the piano students from our church that were with our former teacher, the former church organist.

I’ve tried to explain to the kids that music is one of those things that once you learn it, it stays with you your whole life. I wish I could’ve taken piano lessons as a child. Because I was in band and learning some music that way, mom thought it was important for my sister to take the piano lessons so she could get some music education as well. She wasn’t really interested in piano then.

Ballads and hymns, I told him. That’s what I want to be able to play. I’m really not getting too attached to the idea, being as I have started things like this a few times before. We all brought either books or homework to work on while the others had their lesson in the church sanctuary. The rest of us stay in the pews. I started working on the take-home final due on the last day of class.

Yesterday I was working on a paper basically all day. Then I took a nap and read a little bit before leaving for class. We’ve had these group case studies we have to do each night during class from 9-10. None of our brains are functioning well by that time but somehow we’ve managed to get done what we need to do. Last night was the last group case study and we were all very glad.

I ended up going to sit in the van during the meet. Something about the sporting events just gets me all anxious still and its worse when I am tired and have been up more. Our friends whose marriage is ending were both there. I don’t understand why they weren’t able to work it out. I don’t mean that as a judgement, more like a quiet holding that I guess this is just another one of those things.