motherhood, for me:

I have been trying to write a piece on motherhood for a few weeks now. I wanted to have something new on the blog for mother's day... sort of a reflective piece on 'life as a mom six months in..."

Turns out, I don't get as much time to write precisely because I am a mom. Also, everything I wrote felt accurate for some moods, and totally fictitious...depending on what kind of day it was. Yesterday I had a day that provided a bit of clarity for how I have experienced motherhood and I'd like to share this with you today.

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I’m pretty sure I would sum up motherhood as a combination of two kinds of days. There are days when I feel like I've got it together, all plates are spinning in the air and I feel confident that I might just have this whole multi-tasking thing down. I walk around singing Chaka Khan's I’m every woman and enjoy a fridge full of food, the baby sleeping in his crib and the house looking clean and tidy. The laundry is clean and the dishes are done and the sunshine is pouring in through the windows. Right on the heels of those magical days come other days when I wonder if I could be any more disorganized, google recipes for what I can make with baking soda, A1 sauce and eggs that might be expired, do a double take to be sure those dust bunnies aren't actual bunnies and walk around the house singing Gnarls Barkley's I think I’m crazy.

Trouble is, when I wake up in the morning, there is no telling which song is waiting for me to sing.

For example, Friday I woke up ready for coffee with a group of women from church to celebrate a friend who is walking through a really challenging season. We were all supposed to bring something for her to enjoy, so the night before I baked chocolate chip cookies and found a few of my very favorite magazines, tied these gifts up with a lovely fabric ribbon, printed out the directions to where we were meeting and woke in time to get a shower in. I was about to leave my house with plenty of time to arrive right on time, directions in hand, feeling cute (read: showered) and I just may have been thinking proud thoughts like, “looks like someone’s got her act together.”

Checked my phone on the way out the door and the coffee had been postponed. It was a bummer, but Rory encouraged me to still use the time to do something by myself- he had Ivar.

The day was a great day. I went grocery shopping, bought birthday gifts for nieces and nephews and felt in control.

Fast forward to yesterday morning, the morning of the rescheduled ladies coffee.

I wake up and am not feeling super rested. The cookies that had been baked for last Friday have been consumed. No new cookies were baked. The magazines that were wrapped in a pretty ribbon were forgotten in the church nursery on Sunday morning. The directions for where I am heading were thrown away during a weekend cleaning.

I thought about taking a shower, but upon unzipping my son’s sleep sack, I realize that he is the one who gets to bathe this morning, as he is smeared in poo from the neck down. I have a flashback of me changing his diaper at 6 am and actually thinking, “I don’t need to keep my eyes open. Blind people change their baby's diapers all the time.” I regret not having opened my eyes during the changing as the diaper was only covering one butt cheek so that all of his poo snuck out the side, avoiding the diaper entirely. I made a mental note to leave blind diaper changing to the actual blind and to use my sight for all future diaper changes.

I call the church, and my friend Allie spots the magazines in the nursery right where I had left them.

As I leave the house, I am already late, though I still need to stop by the church to get my gift. I have not showered…in fact, I am sporting my glasses as there was no time for contacts. I carry no cookies and if we are really honest, I believe Rory and Ivar are probably relieved to see moody-me walk out the door.

The contrast between these two days is the very best way I can sum up what my new life is like as a mom. Some days I’m every woman, and other days I think I’m crazy. And yet, I have never in my life been so happy, been so hormonal, been so high, and been so humbled as I have while walking through this first year of motherhood.

Our Vegetable Garden

The weather turned nice in Minnesota and Rory and I hit the yard with wild abandon. We had been visualizing our game plan all spring-that-was-really-winter-still. So when the weather turned lovely, we got busy.

Rory worked on his raised bed vegetable garden and I planted a raspberry patch (more on that later). Ivar was a champ and either napped incredibly long naps or came out to kick it with us in the back yard. He is such a content kid.

Rory preps the ground for his raised bed.

One side of the frame is tarped to block topsoil weeds.

The finished frame.

Rory made his soil from scratch. He had to pick up bulk supplies from a garden wholesaler: compost (with manure of course), peat moss, and vermiculite.

The only way to mix the large quantities (almost 40 cubic feet) was rolling it around in a large tarp.

Rory followed a technique called Square Foot Gardening, where every crop gets planted in its own square. This lets him rotate the vegetables and stagger the harvest all summer long.
Next he'll plant lettuce, spinach, broccoli, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, onions and potatoes.

morning snuggles

Ivar has been sneaking into our bed in the morning lately, unclothed and super cuddly. I don't know how he manages to get from his crib into our room, but it seems to be happening daily lately and might just be a new favorite time of the day for the rest of us. He's so soft and loves laying between us, moving his head from mom to dad back to mom and back to dad.

heaven is for real

Mom Groves gave us a book for Easter called ‘Heaven is for Real.’ The book is coming up in conversations all over the place, and after Rory finished I picked it up for my turn. I read it in two days and my reaction to the ending surprised me.

The book is about an almost 4-year-old who gets terribly ill and visits Heaven for three minutes. The story unfolds over the next few years as this little boy mentions things about Jesus and Heaven and his ancestors that he really could not have known unless he really was there. When I was half way through the book I told Rory that I was still skeptical, justifying everything he said and how he might have known such information without actually visiting heaven.

I’m not sure when in my adult-life I acquired my adult-like faith. But somewhere along the way I found this voice that wants to reason everything through, rationalize the possibilities and find intelligible ways to justify phenomenal things happening.

I read this book to the end, and I am changed. And I am shocked because my cheese-ball detector was so stinkin high while I read it. I was cynical, skeptical and guarded, but in the end I just felt sorry for myself. When did I lose my child-like faith? I believe in Jesus! Why is it hard for me to believe he is waiting to meet me face to face? I believe in Heaven! Why is it so hard for me to believe that I will go there with every other person who professes Jesus as their God, and that when I do, I will be reunited with my grandpa’s and grandma’s, Hildur, Karen Dwyer, Ed Solomonson, Andy Kingsbury, Marj Engebretson, great aunt Chrystal, great uncle Lawrence and Papa.

Something happened in my adult-like thinking that changed the way I saw heaven and Jesus. Heaven had somehow become this spirit-world filled with balls of light that were actually our souls and there we would just hover together, lights together, formless but bright. And Jesus would be the brightest light and God would be everywhere. And because Jesus and God and the Holy Spirit are triune, they’d just be one intermingled blobby thing radiating over all of us other spirit blobs.

How bizarre.

Through the retelling of this little boy’s experience, and the actual scriptural references to support the details he mentions to his family, I finally got back the faces and flesh to return to those blobby souls. I rediscovered a place I once believed in where Jesus himself will welcome me and then introduce me to my Heavenly Father. I will be reunited with my great cloud of witnesses, and I’ll recognize them and they’ll recognize me.

The thing this changes the very most, then, is that the great commission becomes so much more urgent. If we’re not just light blobs bouncing around (who knows where I had picked up this weirdo thinking!) but we are there, recognizable to one another, then there is a whole new sadness and grief in thinking of family or friends who do not know Jesus as the one who saved them from this selfish life of me, here, now. It makes me want to be so much bolder in how I share Jesus, eternity, salvation.

I remember a few months ago, Rory and I sat in church and watched over 30 immersion baptisms. It moved me to my core and later we shared a conversation about how good it is to remember that what we were witnessing that morning was real life. Everything else we fill our days with are mere distractions from the true call we have been given to seek the lost and share the good news that this world we have constructed all around us isn’t all there is. Thank God. Real life is still to come.

If you have an evening or two, grab yourself a copy of Heaven is for Real. Your cheesy detector may be high, but I believe through this little four-year-old, your thinking may very well be changed.

I worshiped this morning picturing the face of Jesus during every song, and all of the faces of the saints who have gone before me. I envisioned wings on my grandpa’s and I saw them cheering me on, yelling for me to get back in the game…to be courageous in my living. And then I envisioned my Heavenly Father, huge and great and powerful, and real.

I started saying “I believe you are real. I believe you are real. I believe you are real.” It was like I could breathe deeper. I feel something new starting to grow in me again. It’s been a long time since I felt that and it feels so good.

happy friday

Ivar's shirt says: Even my poop is cute. It's a favorite of mine, given to us by Tony, a college friend of Rory's. The onesie now fits Ivar and I find it well timed since Ivar is now eating rice cereal, fruits and veggies and his own poo has gone from that mellow unpopped-microwave-popcorn-smell to something much more potent. To say it kindly.