This evening one of the boys and I walked down to the dining hall to look for suppers. Josh had gotten a text from one of the cooks saying she’d left us some chicken wraps and chips in the staff fridge. I have all this meat still from when I went grocery shopping and have yet to make a meal with any of it. Yesterday everyone ate with some family friends at the meet. The night before that I’d used chicken that we already had and was needing to be used.

I put the meat in the freezer so it wouldn’t go bad. Dad came home with other boys from the regular pickups and running a few other errands in town. He and I ate at the table and the boys ate in the living room. We caught up briefly before he had to leave for a school meeting. The high school is still trying to figure out what to do with their old and mostly un-usable land. As of now there still isn’t much direction as to how or where to build a new school.

Last night no one else had begun their paper sections either. For some reason I’m not all that worried about it. I worked on my sections for a decent portion of the day and got the title page and skeleton typed and sent to the other two in my group. I’ve kind of taken it upon myself to make sure this gets done and also gets done semi-decently. That’s at least the role I was playing today. I’m okay with my group and feel comfortable working with them.

Today I am still really missing my kids. My daughter stays busy and is often gone late for practice and sometimes later for youth group or doing something with Miles. She goes to his house which I’m fine with because I also know his mom. Of course I still miss my older son all the time but haven’t been crying every day since he left. It’s just this thing I’ve accepted that this is how it’s got to be and is another thing where slowly you will find the new normal.

I took this picture because I was trying to get a picture of the acorns. This is the time of year when they drop. It makes you watch your step more when walking on the camp roads because you don’t want to step on one and accidently roll your ankle. For some reason the air felt more humid today even though the humidity was only 48%. I wish we could’ve had more beach days this summer but every year is different. That’s just the way the seasons go.

This morning I dropped the younger boys off at school. Yesterday I picked them up a little later than normal. Josh had texted and said his dad was getting moved to the ICU because of tremors and other symptoms they were wanting to look into. They were worried about an infection which with cancer patients can cause more problems because of their immunocompromised state.

He’s supposed to go back to a regular room sometime today. This’ll be different than the rehab, so I’m not sure where that puts him for the current rehab he was getting. They do have the ramp built and ready at the house now. He has been in the hospital since August 9th and his health has continued to slowly decline. It is discouraging for everyone that he has not been able to come home.

There is a paper due next Tuesday which I am hoping to get started on tomorrow and finish Sunday. We’re supposed to travel to Nebraska this Friday and Saturday for another meet. I texted this morning with an update on Papa and to give a heads up that plans could change but as of now we’re still intending to be there. Cross country is in Pittsfield tonight. It was a pretty drive home.

I am trying to move forward in my life as a healthier person. These past several years have involved being in a hell hole of misery as I have had to deal with certain things about my life that should’ve been dealt with a long, long time ago. Most of it has hardly been talked about here. I don’t know why certain things have taken so long.

There is a narrative being shaped that I am not forming. It bothers me when I write here sometimes because it feels like I am trying to push my own story, like I’ve already got my life figured out. I absolutely do not. This isn’t some grand redemption story about God healing me personally so that I can then go out into the world and heal others. That’s what I want it to be. That’s how I’d want the story to go if I was writing it.

I do not feel like I am healed. For several months I’ve had this shooting pain in my left arm, radiating tingling and numbness, sometimes more of a burning. The left side of my neck is currently sore. My body has these bouts of feeling feverish when its not. These are all things that make me stop and wonder, “Now what?” I want to feel normal again. I make references to the mind-body connections of things, but sometimes there are no explanations. Sometimes you are simply too tired anymore to try and find any.

This isn’t meant to sound hopeless, this is just where I’m at. I am weary from traveling the same old roads. A couple of classes ago we talked about how it is not enough for a person to have emotional release either through venting, crying, or just expressing themselves. You’re supposed to come back and say to that person, “What was that like for you to share that?” They have to be able to put their feelings back into a story.

All I can say is that I have grown tremendously as a person. I don’t think I’ve ever had period of time where I have learned so much and been able to process so much. I am grateful for that time I’ve had, not that it’s completely over, but I’m feeling less inclined to examine and analyze certain things from my past. I am wanting a forward motion, not stuckness. There will always be here new problems to be had, new joys to live in.

Yesterday was a bad day, and today kind of was too. A bad day does not define your life. They happen, they pass, the world keeps spinning. I know that God’s ultimate will for us is flourishing, that is, for his people to flourish in love and community. We will feel and know this fully at the end of time when God returns from heaven to make all things new. And here we know in part. We are given glimpses of our sure and certain hope.

After church we drove out to the farm. We had to get the dolly from the shed that we needed in order to move the two refrigerators in my in-laws garage. They decided to build the ramp in there, and it’s supposed to be getting done sometime this week. Before that we had gone out to eat with my mother-in-law at MCL. We enjoyed our meal and got caught up with pictures of meets and floors. The house has drywall up now.

The boys and I went grocery shopping after picking up my son from the bus. He gets carted around a lot, either up to the hospital after getting picked up, or over to the other brother’s school to wait for practice to be over. Josh was at a camp fundraiser most of the day so I did the pickups. Normally we are able to split them up and it works out fine.

I forgot the grocery list at home. I really get so tired of writing sentences like that, and I suppose I could leave them out, but they seem like relevant details. Before going to Aldi we stopped at Culvers to get him some food. He’d forgotten his lunch, a rare occurrence. Thankfully a friend at school had shared but I still wanted to get him something.

They got rid of most of the normal check out aisles in Aldi and replaced them with those tiny self-checkout stations. Those come handy for situations, but not when you’re buying an overflowing cart full of food. It’s been a while since we’ve done this all together as the four of us. They always are a help, though today were a little more wild than usual.

Thankfully they still have one regularly staffed checkout aisle. There wasn’t a line when we start but by the end there were two guys waiting behind us. You get more assertive as time goes on, and with that comes less concern with others are thinking. The lamb code wasn’t working and it took a few minutes to figure that out. Part of life is learning to wait.

Aldi doesn’t have cat food anymore for some reason. So my daughter and I went out after supper tonight to get a bag. It’s pumpkin and mums season now. The pumpkins looked nice displayed outside of the seasonal corner shop and the mums were lined up outside of Country Market. I had no desire to buy any. We had a nice day mid-September.

I made way too many chicken nuggets tonight. Two bags of anything is pretty much standard at our house, or it was. Included was some rice to go with it and for some reason multiple kids complimented my broccoli. Coconut oil and salt, I said, that’s all I had done to it. That is the thing next time I’ll make multiple bags of. I would’ve used butter but we didn’t have any in the fridge. Our grocery shopping system is still adjusting with the new fall schedules.

We talked to Ethan on the phone for over an hour tonight, almost an hour and a half. Last night there was a volleyball game, and I was happy. Tonight was more open on all of our parts. Our talking has dwindled more over the past week or so, more like the past two weeks. We’ve texted something almost ever day. This last high school track meet he had texted me asking if I was there and I didn’t even see it until almost an hour later when the meet was already over.

I texted back right away with all the pictures I’d taken. I am not usually a huge meet picture taker, but I am taking more now. There was a part of me that had hoped he would go to UIS and live at home and get a job and coach cross country especially for the freshman boys. He’d run with them before during the junior high practices. They still keep in touch now through their own group chat on Discord. This past Tuesday out at Seward they had to run 20 400’s.

I saw something rather amusing on social media this evening. My sister was on there asking, “Am I the only one that gets sad about all the things I’ll never be able to learn because the human lifespan (and my attention span) isn’t long enough?” Of course I had to call her right away. She was eating supper, and said in my voice I sounded down. I told her I was fine I was just kind of blah and I’d read her post. I told her I’d been going through pretty much the same thing.

The attention span thing isn’t something I’d thought of. But the rest of it, yes. We laughed about these painful ways. And I remembered that I am not the only one of my brothers and sisters who has this. She couldn’t talk long, they were eating their supper. It was almost time for ours too. We’d planned to call after seven but he was still eating by the time we were done. We asked and then we listened, new spikes, more socks, change and times, and I was happy.

I’ve been having these weird acute pains where I start crying because I’m not actually going to be an author. My husband found me this morning holding my pencil and journal, “I’m just needing to let some things go,” I said, but later I was able to give him more specific words. “But Tolkein”, he said, “he was older…” and I am grateful for the comfort but am unable to take it.

“I need to make room for the things in my life”, I continued, by now I was just working on one of our 2-3 page process summaries where we have to talk about the experience of class group therapy from our perspective. I’m actually saying these things to people, at least I am to the teacher. A musician. A dancer. The list keeps going on. These are all things that I have wanted to be.

It sounds really dumb. Of all the problems in the world this is definitely not one of them. I really do think about plenty of other things besides the things that I write here. A lot more. This doesn’t happen all the time, nowhere near all the time. But for whatever reason this is the place that gets the dance of my circles. The writing thing is different and the only one that I cry about.

One time I was in a Facebook group called Hooters for Husbands. I did not pick the name. It was an offshoot of a mom’s group I was in called Night Hooters. It’d been started by a group of moms who were up feeding their babies in the night and wanted some comradery. I liked it. It was a place of support for mothers with young children.

People will ask almost anything in Facebook groups. Several times the topic had turned to post-partum sex or related things having to do with marriage. So just as they had started a fitness group, a fashion group, a small business group, and surely a few others, they started a group for marital sex questions. It was me and two other women who become the moderators. I didn’t volunteer, the founder asked me if I’d do it.

One of the first posts there quickly became problematic. It turned into the women more or less bragging about where the craziest place they had ever had sex was. What made this group occasionally awkward at times was that you knew some of the people. These were people who sort of became your friends and were people in the circle of people you got to know online.

So then we had to course correct. One of the other moderators made a post about how this isn’t a comparison game. Some of the women were feeling self-conscious that they had never had sex on the hood of a car or on their dining room tables or wherever. I found the stories entertaining and I remember being taken aback by the sexual natures of women in general. It can be an interesting topic but also an incredibly sensitive and painful one.

I recently started reading Shannon Bonne’s new memoir The Woman They Wanted. So far I have found it pretty fascinating. This last chapter I read she is talking about the process of what felt like an audition to be the official girlfriend of Josh Harris, who at that time was becoming the poster child for the increasingly popular way of Christian (non) dating and courtship.

She wasn’t a virgin. Her parents were divorced. She wasn’t raised in a Christian home. It’s painful to hear her write all of this. I can remember when Josh’s second book came out, Boy Meets Girl. I was surprised that she was the one he picked. He told a little bit about her story. She says she didn’t feel shame about sex at first. She had thought sex was just a regular part of growing up.

I was thinking earlier today about Jesus when he talks about a man looking at a woman lustfully. Like, he doesn’t say anything about women there, that is, it made me wonder, do women in the same way ever look at a man lustfully? The Christian women’s books likened lusting after a man more in the way of wanting a man who wasn’t yours and comparing your husband’s perceived faults with another man’s perceived strengths.

I don’t know why I’m saying this.

People have lived such different lives.

September beach days and skies are the best. This afternoon I took a nap, and when I woke up I called my husband to see where he was and what he was doing. He was over at the CGC. There was a Lutheran Laymen’s League meeting happening over there and they’d asked him if he’d come and give a devotion. As soon as he said that I remembered. He’d told me about the LLL group already.

The kids were watching Finding Nemo or some other movie that looked like it. I asked if they wanted to go down to the beach. We’re in those days now where the weather starts to turn and the beach days slip away before you realized they were over. Dad came down when his devotion was over. There was a group of younger, teenage girls down there swimming. You get used to sharing.

They left after about twenty minutes of us being there. The water was chilly but felt good. Everyone relaxed and did they’re own beach thing. These are what Saturdays are supposed to be like, or Sundays, whatever day you want to make it, but these times when there is nothing else going on except being together or relaxing in nature and filling our cups in the ways that bring peace and rest.

My Dad took these first two pictures last September. My mom had texted while I was working on homework and asked if it’d be okay if she and dad came up and baptized each other in the lake. I said that should be fine, just to let me know when they were coming. They came on a Thursday.

I don’t remember what now, but there had been more going on to where I didn’t feel comfortable walking down and back to the beach, so we drove. When we got to the bottom of the road they parked by the shed. It was me and my parents. They started talking about the baptizing and my mom shared her reasons for wanting to be baptized. She’d been baptized before on a mission trip in South America somewhere. But for various reasons wanted to be rebaptized.

My dad, after hearing this, said that maybe it should just be her that got baptized. He wasn’t feeling the same need to do it again, but was still happy to do it for her if that’s what she wanted. So my mom gave her testimony while dad sat in the drivers seat and I sat in the back seat of the truck and listened.

Then we went over to the water and they both got in. Dad baptized Mom and it was awkward because you’re not as agile to lean backwards once you get into your upper decades. He said the only other person he’s baptized was Brandon. We drove back up in the truck and they stayed at the house for a little while longer. They played me a song, I don’t remember the name of it. They hooked it up to their speaker and we listened.

Dad started sharing about his life then, how he’d become a Christian during his young adult years. He’s told these stories before but I think it helps him to tell them and I do like to hear them.

After that they went back home. They passed Josh on the road who was coming home from the high school and picking up the boys. When they left I sat on the couch in awe of the ins and outs and fleeting nature of our days. I’d already asked about the baptizing thing a while back when they had asked another time but it didn’t end up working out to come. I’d almost forgotten all about it until today, when I was locking up the beach shed.

“I think we need to get you some new shorts”, he said to me this morning while reading from the table. I was up in the kitchen in that half hour between waking up the boys and leaving to take them to school. I get dressed, or try to eat, or ask if everyone else has eaten or what they’ve put in their lunch or if they found enough to make their lunch or if anyone needs anything.

It sounds more hectic than it is. But I answered him something along the lines of, “Well, if you want to take me to the store to find some shorts, that’d be great.” I don’t like clothes shopping. I’ve already been out a few times this summer and I did already look for new shorts. I’m down to one pair, the one I’ve been wearing for the past three years, not counting the other pair I wear to the beach.

They are pretty beat up. They are fraying on the inseam and the once light aqua color has faded to what now looks more like white. They’ve had period stains including ones I gave up on and they are so worn and stretched out that they don’t even fit. I have to pull them up constantly, or at least wear a shirt long enough to cover the areas where everything droops off the waist.

Besides the pulling them up part they’re comfortable. It’s hard for me to get rid of these kinds of clothes, the ones I’ve worn and liked and have become like a layer of skin to my frame because of how much I’ve worn them. But I guess he was serious because later this morning he said something about going over to Scheels to get shorts before we picked up the boys. I would’ve never thought to go there.

Nor would I have taken time out of my day today to do it, but, if he was going to come, and since it really would be nice to have more than just that one pair of shorts, I went. Shorts are not cheap there, not even on the clearance racks where the picked over sizes of shorts are these days. Out of the pile I tried on I found three that fit. They weren’t perfect, but since he’d brought me…

Actually they were alright. I put them back on and tried to roll up the bottoms. That looked better. Something about the straight leg looked too boxy, and I wasn’t going to spend that much with my husband on anything that would leave me feeling less than at least average. The lights in these fitting rooms get you every time. It’s like anything that ever used to be smooth catches the bright fluorescent ray.

So then while I was there I went ahead and looked at the shoes. I’ve been wearing these strappy open sandals to my practicum site. The dress code there is business casual, and no one’s every said anything about my shoes, but I feel like I would look more the part in closed shoes, and more comfortable, and as the weather starts to get cooler it would be more fitting. I found some light pink ones.

Which then needed a few pairs of no show socks. I have the socks I kept from my oldest sons dresser, but those are too thick for those kinds of shoes. The other socks I do have are not the no show kind. “We can just go to Walmart”, I said, seeing the prices. But we found some that were not as expensive. After spending almost $300 we went to the uniform store to buy a school shirt for each of the younger boys.

We had time after that to walk in the park. “I still can’t figure out where I am in this place”, I said, or something like it. MacArthur is that way, and Chatham road that way. Before too long we were back in the car, and the boys were at the office door eager and waiting. I think they liked their shirts. They didn’t have much selection or color to choose from, but something new sometimes is nice to have.

This feels hard to write. Yesterday was Josh’s birthday and everyone was free in the evening to celebrate. I’d bought food to make his requested dinner and most of the stuff to make one of his favorite desserts. He’d taken the boys to visit his dad and I’d gone after resting and falling asleep. I made the first part of the dessert and started on the meal and a short while after my daughter came home I said, “Elianna, I am needing some help.”

“Yeah, I know”, she said, “I could tell the minute I walked in the door”. She was joking, I was joking, and I did the whole thing when I act proud of myself for doing something basic like making a birthday éclair crust. But I really did need help and was serious about that part, and she was serious about helping me. She finished the dessert after going down to camp and finding cream cheese in the main camp fridge. The boys set the table and we had a nice supper.

I guess Hobbits for their birthdays buy other people presents. Anyone who comes to their party gets a gift, so that’s what he’d planned to do for each person. We called Ethan over Facetime and were all outside on the picnic table with the last of the sun giving light to our gathering. We sang Happy Birthday and the “God’s blessings to you” verse like we have done for a long time now whenever it is somebody’s birthday.

After the singing I took the phone and we dispersed. I wanted to catch up on the latest college news since I’d heard last. My brain will fill in its own stories if I don’t have the facts, so I just plain out asked, is it going okay? Are you liking it there? He said it was alright, not the shrugging kind of alright, but the assuring yes, college is good kind. Sometimes you can read a person and other times it’s like I am crawling around in the dark waiting for somebody to give some kind of thought direction.

The last two posts I’ve written have got me triggered for some reason. It’s like this is all starting to get and feel a little bit too real. It’s one thing to go to school. It’s another to have to show up at a place where I am scheduled to be there and expected to be there. It’s one thing to talk about constellations and act all cutesy about liking the stars and yeah that’s one of my interests and a thing that makes me myself.

But it’s another thing to show up here and not be able to explain basic orbits after all of these years. It’s one thing to talk about being a student and writing papers but to never show a single one because they aren’t “good enough” in my eyes to seen by smarter people. But even if they were, average enough, would I show them? And this is what’s got me. This realization that the longer time goes, the more I can’t hide this, the more I am realizing who I am not.

I don’t know if it’s the hospital, or the being at my practicum site with these strangers, or my son going away, or my husband’s father facing down a terminal illness. But it’s like all of a sudden I am seeing who I wasn’t, who maybe I could have been but chose not to. And then there are things that you wanted to be but couldn’t be. Either that was not your gifting, or the genes you were dealt, or the choices you made for yourself, or God’s plan for your life.

And so no, I’m not going to be an Olympic gymnast. I’m not going to join the traveling circus as a trapeze artist or a clown. I am not going to be a journalist, or an orthopedic surgeon, or a scientist, and yes while I’ve kept my license up I’m not even really a nurse anymore. I don’t have almost decades of experience under my belt. I’m not the charge nurse of a unit or training new grads or working part-time at the local college as a clinical instructor.

The obsession with being great, I don’t know where it comes from. The arrogance, the hubris, I didn’t ask for these things and no one made me this way. My sisters don’t have this, my brothers don’t have it. It felt brave back then, defiant and large. To say no to “the world” and embrace my life as a wife and a mother. It was enough, and it’s all I wanted. But there were these parts you left along the way, that you had to leave behind, that you had to let go of.

The clouds are still out but this picture was taken at some point recently. I was out for a walk trying to get some steps after sitting. The sitting is good because it gives me a chance to not have to be physically active. But then you still have to walk and be out, so you need to have both in order to stay more balanced.

That’s another thing I like about the yoga. I still can hardly stand saying (typing) the word, but the way I describe it is like with exercise we talk about the importance of moving our bodies. Our bodies need movement to keep our lymphatic fluid flowing, our muscles active, our joints from becoming too rusty and stiff.

I had heard before about intentional movement. What I had not heard before was anything about intentional stilling. There is benefit to having your body stop in way that does not involve being unconscious in bed or watching tv or some other passive bodily state where our mind is not also tuned into the moment.

It’s where the mind and the body catch back up with themselves and are given the chance to come back together. If I could lead my own sessions I would do it where everyone had their own space on a mat. I would also want to have men in class. In yoga classes when I used to go you hardly ever saw men there.

It was harder for them. Women would be holding the positions just fine but the one man in the room would be sweating buckets and shaking trying to hold himself up in the twists. These weren’t men who were out of shape. It might have been different if it were men who’d been practicing yoga for longer.

I would want to be able to touch people. There is debate whether or not touch is a good thing or a bad thing. Some say touch is good because it allows for corrective experiences in a safe environment for those who have had bad experiences with physical touch, such as assault or other forms of abuse.

One reason you would touch a person would be to adjust a position. If someone’s hips were sagging or someone’s arms were slightly out of alignment, you would gently adjust the person’s body or body part. The anti-touch people say it is actually more healing for people to not have the pressure of having to do it “right”.

I would not use gloves like I did, I think, too much as a nurse. I wouldn’t necessarily need to correct their positions but would want any of the energies between us to flow. You can touch a person and energy passes from you to them and from them to you. If you hold it long enough, in theory, things become balanced.