I’m not sure how long a person is supposed to struggle before they reach the point where they’ve done all they can. If there is a timeframe, or a limit, it does truly feel as though I have met it. Last month I wrote, “But somehow the rope keeps getting extended every single time I come to the end of it.” Now I am just sitting at the end of the rope wondering what I’m supposed to do and where I’m supposed to go now.

This isn’t any one person’s fault. I am guilty and have done my share of the damage. I have toxic traits that continue to this day. But something else has grown in me, even more than a fighting spirit or a weak and defeated one. It’s a peace to acknowledge the truth, and not just acknowledge it, but to live and breathe and also walk in it.

I have never lived apart from the life that I have known, and I think that is in part what has added to my struggle and what has taken me so long. Plus, eases I’ve enjoyed I’ve not wanted to give up. I still don’t. And honestly now I do not know if I can, so much have our lives become so intertwined, and so much have I formed myself to and been formed by this life. I’ve been known to say a lot of things, it’s the actions that get me.

It’s been a one-day-at-a-time policy here since getting back. Little things that are part of the every day but are just different enough to prevent the groove from returning. The younger boys do not start school until Monday, so they’ve been trying to keep themselves busy with Dad’s newly decided and established limits on the Minecraft and YouTube. We ran some errands in town including a Walmart run and a library pickup. I stayed in the van while they went in. Too many overdue books for me lately.

I am thoroughly exhausted from our trip, but the memories were worth it. Our time together still is lingering in my mind, though it’s fading with the return of forward movement into the days. I looked for another calendar at Walmart but the one I have goes through this year so I didn’t need one. I picked up another journal to have one ready for whenever this one runs out, which it isn’t going to run out any time soon.

We found cards for my mother-in-law’s birthday tomorrow. It was day we were driving back, but we made plans to go over to her house and bring supper. We could’ve gone out to eat but I feel like they have that house, we need to be making efforts to spend time there. Tonight I am spending the night with a sweet lady friend who recently had knee surgery. It’s been arranged for me and her daughter-in-law to split through the end of the month to have someone there at night. I was happy she asked me.

One of the boys and I went driving this evening. We hadn’t been since the winter. I can tell that with the summer of mowing he’s become more comfortable behind the wheel. Dad had the other boys cleaning out the garage. They’re supposed to work on it for 20 minutes a day until it’s clean. In Nebraska I saw some very clean garages, so much so they almost looked dustless.

Earlier this morning I had to go in for an in-service training session. They are putting all the nurses through a Preventing Medication Errors class that is specially designed for our facility. They are also trying to bring back us having more of a “charge nurse” mindset. This is where they give us a list of CNA task items and want us to be in better communication and holding CNA’s accountable.

The whole thing can be very anxiety inducing, especially when they start saying things like “it’s your license on the line” when it comes to the others under you making mistakes. With Covid everyone was just trying to get by, trying to survive the shift and do whatever had to be done to help one another get through. Now they are wanting to re-establish a little more order.

We did go through the putting in of orders, so I am hoping that I finally have that down. It did help to go through it. Our Director of Nurses (DON) has been in this job for over 12 years. She says she loves it, which I would think that you’d have to. I personally can’t imagine why anyone would want to have a job such as that one. They usually have very high turnover rates especially in long term care.

There was some starting of the laundry. I feel more like I need to sort out some thoughts after all the activity. Here we are back to where we started, except another whole trip around the sun. It hit me again that a child is missing, even as I felt much stronger in leaving him. I only really got emotional once, “We will be as involved as you will let us/as much as we are able.”

It’s like you spend so much time in the thick of it raising a family. It’s all-consuming and feels so long, like you’ve got all the time in the world, like the twenty years to the grown-up is so far away. And then slowly, little by little, it arrives. And then the cycle repeats. What was once your nuclear family slowly disintegrates, the pieces break off, and then what was before is no more. They start their own.

“We will fade into the background”, I said. I didn’t mean for any of it to sound negative, but I had to clarify when the push-back came, or rather, they clarified for me. Loving others doesn’t mean you love them less, it doesn’t mean we’ll be forgotten, even though we kind of in some ways will. They were first, they were everything. For all these years we have had this joint passion.

What will we do when we do not have them to hold us there? We will have to find another one. The first passion we had was camp, and then it was the family. It still is and we are not done. There are suppers to make and schoolrooms to keep cleaning. The boys made lemonade tonight with the juicer mom gave me when I was sick. I was happy to pass it along and have it finally get some use.

The morning drop off went well. Early in the morning the cross country team had an unofficial practice where they decided to get together and run. Elianna and I looked out the window and of the two boys stepping out of a car were like, “Yep, those are cross country guys.” You can tell by their physiques. They are tall and lean, like the wind could blow through them. But some of them too are shorter and also strong.

They looked fast. “Oh boy”, I thought, “just what we need”. More fast guys to leave my son behind in the dust. His legs are probably twice as thick around. Winning isn’t everything but it was hard on even me to see his name come in time after time behind the others. The girls run 6K in their races, the boys, the official term is “men”, run 8K. Why is it so long? Why can’t they just stick to the much more reasonable race lengths?

The coach has everybody meet in the morning for move-in. Returning athletes are to help the new athletes move in. We meet several sets of parents in the hotel dining room, including the parents of the fast ones. They are the nicest people, trying to learn the kids’ names, and I am telling them about how you can watch the races online. Not by video for cross country, but by the live timing that shows up with live times.

They are from Indiana. One dad is planning to come to a meet on his way for a work trip. I remember now Ethan telling me about the guy from Indiana, he’s going to take the place of Calvin as the fastest on the team. The other one is fast too, he ran a sub 10 3200. More Lutherans in the Lutheran world, one studying pre-Sem and I did not catch the other. I am at peace in the move-in energy, scanning the returning faces.

The boys are standing in groups, some still walking in. Oh there’s Mason, and Adric. There’s Nate and Aiden. Trey, Caleb, Charlie, another Nathan. I’m saying all of this out loud for the sheer delight as well as to amuse and show off. My husband and daughter look at me, a huge smile on my face. What??? All you have to do is watch the names a couple of times, then look up the team roster page and you’ve got it.

We left our VRBO home in the morning to head back to Seward. For four nights we enjoyed spacious yet cozy accommodations. On the inside it looked like a log cabin in the woods. With the seven of us, two hotel rooms is pretty much a necessity. With six of us we can still make it work when you find a place with two queen beds and pull-out sofa. With the house there were enough beds for almost each child to have their own.

The way back was uneventful. We emptied the fridge of the remaining food we’d collected over the week for our picnic lunch at the beach, the time we ordered pizza, and the one night when we cooked. To take everyone out to eat averaged $150 for a sit down place. We didn’t stop for a meal and used the remaining food to manage for lunch. Dad and the kids walked to McDonalds for supper tonight and spent around $70.

I wasn’t hungry until they came back. They had already had the conversation about guarding against Mom stealing their fries. Josh asked me on their way out if I was sure, if I wanted any fries and I said no. I was prepared to live with my choice even as my daughter’s chicken sandwich revealed to me that I probably could have eaten something. I was saving room for dessert to meet some friends who’d recently moved.

She was a junior counselor with me at camp. Her husband is now an assistant professor at the university and they’ve only been living there about a month. She reached out to me yesterday mentioning their recent move and saying we’d come to her mind. Isn’t that something? I told her we’d be in Seward the next day, and that Ethan was a student there returning for his sophomore year. We hung out for two hours and they all played.

They have four kids a little younger, but they remembered each other from camp. They are a wonderful Lutheran family who will make a great addition to the community and I anticipate and pray that the community will also be a blessing to them and for continuously growing children. Her sister lives very close to us and recently had a baby. It’s been on my mind to contact her. The high school kids missed their first day today.

Mountain isn’t the right word, but it’s the one I keep using. The Rockies are mountains, the Appalachians are mountains. They don’t have anything like that here. What they have here are mounds of barren rock, some reaching heights that are frighteningly tall. I keep trying to figure out what the landscape is missing and I’ve not been able to put my finger on it. More trees? Colors? I’ve never seen anything like this before.

This morning we visited a local LCMS church. They have three Lutheran churches in this town: ELCA, Wisconsin synod, and LCMS. The church we visited, we were told, has five retired pastors as part of its membership. Today they had a guest pastor and did Divine Service three. On the bulletin board was a missionary letter from a couple we knew a short time during seminary. Both of us were pregnant and due with our first babies.

After that we went back to Sylvan Lake, which is the same place they have the trail entrances for hikes. This time though we went to the beach. It wasn’t packed or overly crowded, though the parking lots again were full. They have hikes you can do around the lake which we did about halfway just to see what was over there. The kids saw a man who was naked changing his clothes. I turned around but Dad said it was okay.

The old house sold in less than two days. It’s fine and I’m glad that it wasn’t a big hassle. If we had more money we’d have bought it ourselves. It could’ve been a nice home base for the kids with their town and school activities. It was such a great house for being so close to things. The high school, the grade schools, the churches, the stores.

Our mountain climb began around 8:45. For whatever reason it didn’t quite fit my mental image of what mountains are supposed to look like up close, or how big they are supposed to appear in the distance. It was Black Elk Peak which is the highest point in South Dakota and also east of the Rockies until you get to somewhere in Spain.

The kids timed everything on their running watches. The rounded split times for the miles going up were 24, 27, 30, and 36 minutes. It was only supposed to be 3.5ish miles up so I’m not sure where the extra half mile came from. Going down was more like 28, 28, 28, 10. At the top we sat in a shaded ledge, ate our snacks, and took in the view.

Today we traveled to see Mt. Rushmore. There is a scenic route you can take which is longer in miles and requires you to drive slower but it was well worth the extra time. The route contained multiple viewings of the monument, each time with the faces getting bigger and bigger. A highlight was definitely seeing it for the first time after Elianna spotted it from the middle back seats.

The four presidents displayed 0n the monument are (L to R) George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. Each president represents something significant about our nation’s history. Washington represented the foundation of a new country. Jefferson represented the expansion of it through the Louisiana Purchase. Roosevelt represented the conservation, and I don’t remember the word with Lincoln. It had to do with the unifying of the states.

I enjoyed it very much and would recommend it to others. There is a .6 or so mile loop around the area where you can walk and get a closer view. There are two small movie theatres where you can watch a short history about the monument’s construction, along with the normal tourist attraction things like a gift shop and book store. The path into the park is lined with all of the state flags.

(Photo: Mt. Rushmore)

I open my eyes to cup of coffee on the hotel nightstand. I know that my husband, whose shower I can hear through the wall, is the one who has placed it there. This registers as positive points. Later in the morning I sit down on the bed and say to him, “Listen, everything you do it is being filtered and sorted into one of two categories in the recesses of my mind: 1) Okay, he does love me, and 2) He doesn’t care at all.

This sorting, I have figured out, is really going on at all times, but only now am I truly conscious of it. For the past two days I have been hurting with thoughts in my head that number two is winning out. The night before last was the worst. I unleash my pain and sudden fury in a series of texts. A man who loves a woman need not be begged to give attention, needs no direct and repetitive asking for what she needs on a regular basis.

I am right, and if he would simply concede, if he could find the truth in my words and know, to understand, their true desperation. I have never known a creature, this one they call “man”, to so much lack such a natural sympathy, to be able to cause such pain to women, and at the same time, have no capacity to comfort them in any of it. I know I’ve gone too far somewhere and I do apologize, for the suddenness, for the method.

Just get down here and hold me, you stupid fool. I don’t say the last part. I have no interest in giving in to his direction. He will hold me and I will cry this out in his arms. And I know my limits. I can do this if the complaints, if the pain and bitterness I harbor has to do with anything else except for him. He comes down to where I am and I can see he’s trying. I cry it out, relieved, yet remain quiet and depressed the entire next day.

But that’s all in the past now. Today I felt better, though still baffled by these repeated pains that come upon me. We leave Seward, Nebraska to make the second leg of our trip to Custer, South Dakota. We pass the day in peace, with the suspense gradually building with the change of the landscape from plains into bluffs. For the most part I read, grateful to have a book to keep me busy as we ride. I find a woman in the story.

The kids and I went to the car wash this morning. I wanted both the vehicles vacuumed out but they don’t let you use the vacuums without a membership or first purchasing a car wash. A couple of weeks ago one of the boys and I went to find a vacuum for the van. I pulled up and asked a lady who was also there with her car where we were supposed to pay.

She said it was free. I couldn’t imagine how something like that could be free nowadays but we went ahead and vacuumed it out. Later I came back and told everyone about this car wash place we’d found where you could get free vacuuming. My husband was like, “I think you have to have a membership first” and of course he was right. But today they were having twelve-dollar Tuesday where you can get the most expensive wash done plus the free vacuuming.

So that’s what we did. I don’t know why I never thought to take the kids to something like this when they were little. We could’ve had such a fun tradition that when things got hairy at home and everybody was going stir-crazy we just hopped into the van and drove to the car wash. It would’ve mesmerized them surely and we wouldn’t have even had to go in anywhere.

They said they used to do this with Grandma. I had no idea but I was very happy to hear this. So they all knew what to do when we came out of the laugh-inducing washing tunnel and there were enough vacuum hoses around so that everyone could help. I felt like a civilized adult having a vacuumed out car. The boys drove home with one and then Elianna and I continued on to Walmart. I felt like I needed a couple of shirts in addition to cat food and things.

Then we stopped by Aldi to get snacks. Later this afternoon we all went to the Athens track for the boys to run their 4×400. No one was able to find the baton so they used a hammer handle. They shaved around 20 seconds off of last year’s time. After that I took a nap and then wanted to swim to help my joints. Dad came with. It was early enough to still swim in the sun.