Loose Connections

Last year, at this time, I was kind of waiting for my nervous breakdown to begin. Chloe was leaving for college, Lily was going to kindergarten, my mom was moving in with us, and I was turning 40.

I cried. A lot. I missed Chloe. A LOT. But life went on, as life has a way of doing, and my girls shoved off to college and kindergarten, my mom moved in, and I turned 40, but the nervous breakdown didn’t come. My precious baby boy became a teenager, and the nervous breakdown threatened again, but it didn’t come.

Recently, we spent a week in Florida celebrating my best friend’s 40th birthday, and spending time with her, I gained some perspective on 40 and life. See, my girl is a FIRECRACKER. Once, upon thinking I might have been in danger, she pulled a big knife on an even bigger guy. We were 14, and it was a kitchen knife. But the point is: She don’t play.

She is the most fun, exciting, ALIVE person I know, and if she is what 40 looks like, people will line up for that birthday. But she’s different now. Our friendship is different. She’s calm and confident. We don’t fight with people. We don’t gossip about people we don’t like. In fact, we mostly like everyone. We no longer need to go out and party to have a good time. In fact, the best times I have with her are just sitting and talking.

Similarly, my relationship with Chloe has evolved. While she still needs me to mother her in some ways, in other ways, we connect as women. Last weekend for the first time, I went shopping with both my girls, we had a great time, and no one had a meltdown.

Having such big gaps between my kids has forced me to adapt and change my mothering style to meet their unique needs. It’s hard to switch gears among parenting an adult, a teenager, and a kindergartner, and I have to try harder to listen, understand, and connect to each child at his and her level. The very few times I get it right are extremely gratifying.

Before I turned 40, I made a list of goals. While I’ve accomplished some and strive to reach more, some just don’t seem so important any more. Instead, of reaching feats, I feel guided to make deeper connections. To renew connections that have been severed for one reason or another. To replace some connections and tighten a few loose ones.

Every morning, I pray that God will lead me where He wants me to be. I pray for God to guide me, but I usually have a direction in mind. He rarely leads me in that direction. And this morning I realized that wherever I am as long as I’m loving God and loving His people, I’m right where I should be.

Trouble in this World

The weeks surrounding my 40th birthday are memories I will cherish forever. I received the most wonderful, thoughtful gifts and sentiments from my family and friends, a surprise trip to Florida that became a surprise trip to the Keys, and massive and overwhelming amounts of love. In fact, I’ve never felt so loved.

When things started to return to normal, I remained enamored with a magic new age that held so much promise and basked in the afterglow of all the love. Last week, I crashed. Although, I’ve never used cocaine, I’ve heard you experience a super elated feeling and when the drug wears off, that feeling is replaced by intense despondency.

Well, I was high on love and adoration, and when things went back to normal, I let my guard down, the anniversary of my dad’s death crept up on me, and before I could grab a lifeline, depression had me in its unrelenting grip. Granted, I’ve dealt with bipolar-ish disorder for most of my life, I self-diagnosed it in grad school, and then a doctor confirmed a few years ago. I say, bipolar-ish because I have depressive episodes and manic episodes but they are not usually long enough to meet the diagnostic criteria.

One time I actually had to be medicated out of it. Technically that was too close to my dad’s death to be a major depressive episode. Since it doesn’t happen that often, I mostly just deal with it.

I explained, again, to my darling husband that depression is different than sadness or the blues. He has witnessed these episodes many times over 22 years and encourages and hugs and walks on eggshells around me reminding me to pray and count my blessings. For me, it’s as if someone throws a wet, black, blanket over my head, which I can’t lift no matter how hard I try. So, I quit struggling and just give in to the darkness. I pray so much. I am overwhelmingly grateful for my blessings. No amount of prayer and blessing counting changes it.

Last week brought a really discouraging realization. I honestly felt that as I drew nearer to God, as I made myself smaller so that He could be bigger, as I focused on using the gifts He gave me for His purpose and His good, I never questioned that I would suffer, but I didn’t think it would be from depression.

I was blindsided. Why is this happening again? Am I not following You? Am I not doing Your will? Have I not fasted and prayed and sacrificed as You wanted? I didn’t feel as if God had left me, but I did feel confused. In the past I viewed my depression as caused by emptiness, and I thought that once I was filled with God’s love, filled with the Holy Spirit, I wouldn’t suffer from it anymore. I was wrong. I thought my depression was situational. I was wrong about that too.

It just happens. Sometimes bad things happen, and we can’t understand why. God wasn’t punishing me or using this to show me that I was on the wrong path, I fully believe that now.  In John 16:33, Jesus reminds us, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

Fortunately, I don’t have to have to figure out or overcome this world because Jesus all ready did. Fortunately, I am surrounded by amazing people–many of them mental health professionals, go figure that. Fortunately, I recognize the symptoms and the onset even though I am powerless to control them. Fortunately, this time, it lasted only days rather than months. Fortunately, I was rewarded with a day of manic cleaning energy to make up for the days that I wandered around in a stupor managing only to work and nothing else.

I am not a mental health professional just someone who has dealt with this for many years. If you suffer or have suffered from depression: You aren’t alone. You aren’t crazy. You aren’t being punished. If people tell you to cheer up and get over it, they might be trying to help, but they aren’t the right people to help. Find a doctor, counselor, friend, pastor or someone with knowledge about depression. Don’t suffer alone.

Food Revelations

Last week I read Women Food and God. Have you read? Seriously, it changed my life. I LOVE Geneen Roth as if she were one of my people. After the first few chapters, when I sat down to graze in front of the kids’ snack cupboard as is my habit, I literally stopped and thought, “Wait, am I hungry?” It was revolutionary.

For those of you who are wondering, it’s a lot about Women and Food, but not a lot about God. The God part is more light spirituality and less Bible-based eating plan, but it forced me to sit down and have a long overdue discussion with myself about why and how I eat.

If you ever saw my mom and sister, you’d understand some of my food issues. They are tiny little waifs. So is my daughter. I am not a particularly big person, but they are really, really small. My mom always told me that I was big-boned and didn’t “have the eating habits of a thin person,” and I have always held a pretty distorted image of my 5′ 2″ 125 pound self. Yep, I just said my weight out loud to the whole internet. The absolute true weight I saw on that dang-blasted scale this morning. Have I mentioned how much this book helped me?

So one of my biggest food issues is that when I was growing up, food was my mom’s main expression of love. Whatever was going on, good or bad, could be remedied with food. Sick? Chicken soup. Sad? Cookies. Celebrating? Cake. And since that was pretty much my mom’s only expression of love, when she cooked for you, you ate. And the more you ate, the more you were loved. To this day, her favorite people in life are the people she can control with cookies. I’m kidding. A little.

Additionally, I realized that my happiest memories were wrapped up with food. Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, milestones celebrated by going out to dinner, goals met and rewarded with food. In many ways, I had grown to equate food with happiness. Unfortunately, in many other ways, I also equated skinniness with happiness. That crazy combination cannot possibly add up to happiness. I mean maybe when I was 20 and had a pretty fast metabolism, but now it is kind of a problem.

So for the past few weeks, I’ve had a lot of conversations with myself about food, why I’m eating, when I’m eating, what I’m eating and so forth. Turns out it’s not particularly healthy to sit on the floor and eat from the snack cupboard at 10:30 p.m. Huh. Also turns out that eating an m&m every time you walk past the m&m jar until it’s empty is not a great habit. Go figure. And one of the most important lessons I learned is that I really didn’t even know how hungry felt anymore.

In all this dialoguing about why I’m really eating and what I really want, I haven’t lost one pound–in case you wondered. But, I’ve been eating much healthier foods and much less and I haven’t really had any junk. While I have a long way to go, I have been able to pinpoint some serious issues I have to come to terms with:

• I am almost 40, not 20, so my 20-year-old weight probably shouldn’t be my goal weight. 
• Being skinny doesn’t necessarily make you happy or signify you’re happy.
• Not being skinny doesn’t necessarily make you unhappy or signify that you’re unhappy.
• I have a bread addiction, similar to my nicotine addiction. I cannot eat just one piece of bread.
• Just like my husband is as hot to me today as he was 20 years ago, he looks at me and sees the girl he fell in love with (who was skinny, btw). He literally judges my weight by the size of my boobs, so you can probably guess when he’s happiest.
• Food is an idol, and when I give it this much power in my life, I am putting it before God; that is unacceptable.
• My mom lives with me. I don’t eat her cookies. She still loves me.

 So, if you have a messed up relationship with food, I highly recommend this book. If not? Well, you are a rare breed of fabulosity, and I admire you greatly.

Please don’t let me screw them up.

I overthink nearly every aspect of my life–mostly my mothering. It’s overwhelming and scary to have the ability to screw up three wonderful people God has placed in my really incapable hands. People have commented favorably on mine and Chloe’s relationship. And that both humbles and amazes me. I can’t take credit for our relationship; it is “but for the grace of God.” I mean, my whole life is, but Chloe who transitioned from my treasured baby to my very best friend; well, she is just a brilliant shining example of God’s grace in my life.

So brilliant that if I could hang up my mothering hat when she went to college, Brad Bell and I could exchange high fives and begin redecorating our empty nest. Alas, there are these other two children whose lives I can still potentially ruin.

I will readily admit, that I think I’m a better girl mom. I like to shop and do makeup and girly stuff. I don’t dislike sports, but I will pick Cosmo over Sports Illustrated any day, and unless the Buckeyes are playing, I’m probably reading rather than watching the game. But, I love my son very much. So much so that in this awkward tween phase where he doesn’t cuddle as much or share as many secrets or kiss me on the face anymore, sometimes I sneak into his room a few minutes before he has to get up just so I can snuggle with him and kiss his head. I guess that’s kind of a creepy stalker move, but I do it anyway. 

It’s just that we don’t enjoy a lot of the same things. I treasure our shared interests and am always trying to cultivate more. I love watching him play every sport, but if he had to choose someone to hang with, it would be Daddy. And that’s okay. Brad is a really good dad, and in many ways, he gets to be the kind of dad to P that he always wanted. Plus, sometimes they are each other’s only refuge in this house full of hormones and hairspray.

Then there’s Lily. If I’m gonna screw up any of them, it will be her. She is so much like me it is simultaneously amazing and infuriating. I cannot point out one of her flaws without reprimanding myself in the same breath. I mean, I do, but to be fair and honest, I have to put myself in check at the same time because she learned each bad behavior somewhere, and Brad rarely screams and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him throw a tantrum.

Still, there she is, the baby that I didn’t want (we planned for two kids: one boy and one girl) and never expected–the child who pushes me to the edge of sanity on a daily basis. She has taught me more about myself in six short years than I learned in nearly 40 on my own.

So as I ponder 2012’s blessings and trials, I think about what each of these children taught me. Chloe taught me unconditional love. You know, the kind of love you don’t even realize you are capable of feeling until your whole heart has been pulled from your body and is curled up on your chest. She inspires me not only to be a better mother, but also to be a better person, as I pray to live up to the image she has of me. P taught me joy, and he delights me on a daily basis with his sweet spirit and caring compassionate heart. I pray we raise him into a great man, husband, and father. Lily has taught me to let go of my plans and give in to God’s will. She is full of fire and passion, and I pray I can guide her to use her powers for good rather than evil.

I pray every day to be the mom each of them needs. I pray that God helps me guide them in the direction He has planned for their lives. I pray that I don’t saddle them with any of my own insecurities and flaws and shortcomings. I pray that I don’t screw them up.