be careful that you do not forget...

I got my fresh start in the Flathead Valley over a year ago now.  I moved here in late December of 2010, exhausted, depleted, disheartened, sad, and lonely.  Since then, so many wonderful things have happened.  I returned to my writing roots (which I had had almost no time to devote to during my time in ministry).  I started my blog.  I started doing some copywriting and copyediting.  I got to stay home with my daughter and enjoy making countless wonderful memories with her.  I made friends--wonderful, honest, authentic, welcoming, caring, Jesus-centered friends.  I had great opportunities to use my spiritual gift of teaching through MOPS and Bible studies at church.  I got to connect with members of my church who are just as excited about Jesus' mission on earth as I am and brainstorm ways to live that mission out.  I got to enjoy the beauty of this area--snow-covered mountains and tamaracks and sparkling lakes.  I felt myself coming alive again.  I started to heal from some hurts of the past.

But it's amazing how a person starts to get used to God's blessings.  I think that I do this with my husband as well.  I so easily forget how lonely I was as a single person, how I prayed on my knees with tears, asking God to send me a husband.  I so easily forget worrying that I would die alone.  I so easily forget wondering if I was destined to be single forever.  And now I have a tremendously wonderful husband, who consistently shows me God's love, who is compassionate and kind, who helps me in so many ways around the house, who listens to me without judgment, who understands me better than perhaps anyone...and I easily forget how that is not a normal thing.  That this is a given thing.  That this is a gift.  I so easily pass him by and think he gives me my due.  But in truth, he gives me much more than I deserve.  I pass him by so often like a woman who's gotten used to living by the Grand Canyon.

I get used to God's other blessings too.  God wants me to stop, pay attention, and remember what tremendous gifts He has given me in my life.  Rather than get annoyed with the ways my daughter gets in the way of my plans, God wants me to stop and contemplate the mystery that is an entire human being that one day was not and then one day was.  God wants me to be reverent and joyful and watch as He continues to fashion her, His masterpiece.  I am on the cusp of the flower unfolding.

I have my husband, my daughter, Montana, my friends.  There was a time when I did not have any of these things.  I am thankful.  I am thankful for what I have been given. 

"When the LORD your God brings you into the land he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give you--a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant--then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the LORD, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery."--Deuteronomy 6:10-12 (NIV)

getting used to the mountains

I have lived in Montana for about 6 months now and I already find I'm starting to get used to the mountains. 

I'm disappointed in myself.

When I first moved from the flatlands to the majesty of the mountains, I was constantly in awe of where I lived.  Snow-dusted rocky peaks formed the sides of a bowl made up of sparkling Flathead Lake.  Everywhere I went, I saw the beautiful, majestic mountains.  I went to the grocery store and I saw them.  I stopped by Target and I saw them.  Everywhere I looked was beauty.

But now I find myself rushing more often.  Driving, and thinking, "Oh, yeah, mountains...I've seen those before."  It's not always but it's enough to make me worry about my human tendency to take great things for granted.  I've started to think of getting used to mountains as a metaphor for all too many things in my life.

When I fell in love with my husband, I was in awe of his love, his honesty, his enduring affection, his willingness to communicate, his kindness, his boyish smile.  But after 6 years together, I start getting used to coming home to kindness, consideration and a listening heart.  I start to take him for granted sometimes.  I put less effort into being his wife.  It's the emotional equivalent of, "Eh, he'll be there...." 

It's so stinkin' dumb.  What is it about human nature that we get so used to incredible, beautiful blessings, that we fail to stand in awe of these things?  Is it just that we can't maintain that heightened emotion forever?  Perhaps, but I still think we can practice appreciation of the beautiful and good gifts in our lives.  I think it takes some time and effort that perhaps mountain or husband infatuation don't require in the early days.  In infatuation, God gives us that drive to connect, whether to a place or to a person, an early intensity that necessarily cannot last forever.  It is the thing that dares us to connect, to risk ourselves, where we might otherwise hesitate.  We can't always hold onto that infatuation, and after all, we probably shouldn't.  It can be a selfish thing, "You make me feel good, so I want to be around you."

No, I don't think infatuation can live forever, but appreciation and love can.  These qualities force us to stop and be fully there.  To give thanks, we must first see.  We must open our eyes.  We must stop the flurry of activity and pay attention.  What do I have before me?  Where is the beauty?  Will I soften my heart and open to it?  Today?  Not just, what did I appreciate yesterday, but what do I appreciate today?

In 2007, The Washington Post conducted a social experiment.  They positioned world class violinist Joshua Bell in a Washington DC subway station during rush hour to see if anyone would recognize him or pay attention to the beauty of his music.  The previous night he had played a concert where some tickets sold for $100.  But in the course of Bell's 45 minute subway concert, only seven people stopped to listen and only one recognized Joshua Bell.  It was interesting that children were often interested in who this guy was playing a violin, but their hurried parents pulled them along.  Bell earned only $32.17 in donations for his subway music.  It seems we humans are not so prone to appreciate beauty, especially when we have our minds on something else.  What other great beauty do we miss in day-to-day life?

There is definitely something about having a toddler that opens your heart to more beauty.  A toddler forces you to slow down, to notice, to pay attention.  I can't tell you how many times Burrito has pointed out Dora in an advertisement or sign in a store window.  She sees things.  She notices things that I would have passed by.  Even if they are small or hard to see.  She sees beauty too.  She is deeply excited by simple things.  Having a toddler is a gift.  She helps keep me from getting used to the mountains.  May I never get used to her.

fourth of july weekend in the flathead valley

What a joyful weekend we have had!  Now that the June rains have passed, and the sun is out regularly, we find ourselves out and about and enjoying life in the Flathead Valley more and more each day.

The Von Trapp Children

On Friday, I had tremendous thrill.  I recently found out that the Von Trapp children live in the Flathead Valley.  My Bible study group has an annual 4th of July picnic the weekend before the holiday and for our entertainment, the Von Trapp children came to sing.  Yes, those Von Trapp children, as in the great grandchildren of Captain Von Trapp from The Sound of Music.  Now, you have to understand that growing up, The Sound of Music was a huge part of my childhood.  Our family popped popcorn and watched it almost every Sunday night.  I have large portions of it memorized and I have loved it all of my life.  I never dreamed I would get a chance to meet some of the Von Trapps.  I brought Burrito with me to the picnic, so she could experience it too, and she cuddled close while we listened.  The Von Trapp children are the real deal.  They are not capitalizing on their name, but in fact sing angelically together, their voices blending flawlessly, their faces glowing with joy in song.  They are also humble and approachable.  I got to meet two of them and tell them how much The Sound of Music meant to me as a child. 

A good stretch after a good run.

We started our day on the 4th of July with Christopher taking to the road for his twenty-first 5k, this one for Grateful Nation Montana, an organization that provides scholarships for the children of fallen Montana soldiers, killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He encouraged church members to be involved in running and volunteering.  It was a warm morning, with lots of sunshine and it was great to see people coming together for a good cause.  Christopher, as usual, made great time (28:33...his second fastest time by a second).  We raced home to get chairs and a mat and our friend, Audrey, and hurried back downtown to claim a spot for the parade.

With this much soy sauce at Island Noodles, how can you go wrong?

4th of July is a BIG deal in Bigfork.  I have never seen that many people in town before, and was even told by one local that they thought it was in fact the biggest crowd ever for the 4th. The parade stretched on and on, curiously lacking any high school bands (although a company of bagpipers was present). 

It was a festive atmosphere though, and the line for Island Noodles stretched long down the street.  I braved the line, which moved relatively quickly, figuring any place with giant cannisters of soy sauce was worth the wait (and I'd had my first taste of the noodles earlier that weekend at the Whitefish Art Festival).  As I watched the parade begin, I dug into those hot soba noodles, laden down with crunchy vegetables.  Oh yeah, baby.

The sea of people leave the parade.

After the parade, we braved the crowds to head home for a cookout.  Seriously, how did we cram this many people into town? 

We laid out a feast of grilled hamburgers, roasted corn with Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and butter, potato salad, watermelon, red cabbage slaw, and Maple-Dijon baked beans. 

After supper, we packed up a dessert picnic of pecan shortbread with sugared berries and homemade whipped cream.  We drove down to the lake and sat on the shore watching private fireworks displays.

Burrito had never seen fireworks before and had never been allowed to stay up so late just for fun.  She had a ball, popping her hands in the air, "Fireworks say boom!"  The mountains cupped the bowl of the lake and I stared, in awe of their beauty.  The beach was not crowded, the water was calm, and the air was sweet.  It was a peaceful evening, full of joy and happiness.  And it wrapped up the weekend beautifully. 

relapse

You may have noticed a decrease in frequency of posts on the blog in the past few weeks.  There is a reason for that.  I was unexpectedly blindsided by a relapse of depression and anxiety this past month.  And at first I was embarrassed to write about it.  I build this blog on the picture of a happy mother, writer and cook, living the dream in the gorgeous Flathead Valley.  I didn’t want to show you the struggles I was still having.  I didn’t even want to show them to myself.  But I couldn’t write a gushy post either because it just wasn’t true.  And I hate things that aren’t true.  I owe it to you to give you an honest blog, a true account of what it is to be a mother, to be me the Mother.

So, yes, March was a month of being blindsided.  I say blindsided, because after such a difficult year last year, the year in which my father died, the year in which I underwent strong conflict at the church I pastored, the year in which I struggled to give up my job for the sake of being with my daughter, the year in which I battled insomnia, the year in which I underwent a biopsy…after all of that, there is so much going well in my life.

For the first time in at least 4 years, I have friends nearby that I can call, spend time with, and be myself with.  I live in a beautiful area surrounded by the splendor of God’s creation—beautiful, snow-capped mountains, a glistening lake.  I am finally able to follow my heart and be home with my daughter.  I have a wonderful husband who is thriving in his new call, and is highly supportive of me.  I have many ways to express and broaden my love of cooking.  There is something enjoyable to do in the community all the time.  I have the pleasure of sitting in a Bible study and just listening and soaking it in as a respite for the soul.  For Pete’s sake, I have this blog…and I’m finally writing again for the first time in years.  There is so much going right in my life.

And yet, I found myself yet again stricken with high anxiety and a strong dose of depression.  It made me very upset with myself because there is no earthly reason I should feel that way.

I began to feel really hopeless.  Would I never escape this?  Could I really not let myself be happy?

I read recently in one of my books about anxiety that it often hits when things are going “too well.”  A person who struggles with anxiety almost does a little better sometimes when there is an external, challenging situation.  It sucks up their attention, gives them a visible enemy to fight.  But in good times, our nature still is on “high alert,” still expects struggle and conflict and picks a fight with itself.

Yet again, my internal conflict became so physical and scary that I finally took myself back to the doctor.  I found it impossible to sleep without my sleeping pill, felt hopeless, had racing thoughts.  I began to feel really bad like clock-work at 3:30 or 4 in the afternoon.  Then one day, I had an anxiety attack that lasted all day.  That was the day I trucked myself in to the doctor.

A week or two later, I am feeling better each day.  I was able to talk things out with a friend who was understanding and listened.  A dosage adjustment of my antidepressant has helped a great deal.  I’ve also been working hard to improve my diet.  (I think I got a bit overly excited at all the delicious desserts available in the Flathead and had been consuming way too much white sugar and white flour.)  After doing some reading on the internet about a diet to help with depression and anxiety, I am bumping up my whole grains, flax seed, and walnut consumption (low blood sugar seems to greatly increase my anxiety).  I’ve lowered my coffee consumption a bit.  I’m trying to eat other Omega-3 rich foods like fish and avocado.  I’ve dug out books on anxiety and the issues I struggle with and am working on facing my anxieties, instead of running from them.  Turns out the more we suppress and run from our anxieties, the more they dominate our lives.  Antidepressants work to help us better cope with anxieties, but they don’t eliminate them from our lives.  And if we run from those anxieties, we will still have to come back and cope with them later.

I feel good about the fact that yesterday although I had two or three attacks of anxiety, I was able to work through them.  I was able to lean into the anxiety and face the fear and find relief.

The sun is out for the second day in a row and that helps too.

I’ve come to see that I am a person in recovery from anxiety and depression.  I will probably never fully live without it.  But it doesn’t have to dominate my life and doesn’t mean I can’t experience joy.  I will have relapses.  I’m sure of that.  Sometimes they might make logical sense and sometimes they might not.  But if I can lean into the anxiety, the fear will pass and I will gain courage for the next challenge.  There is a full and wonderful life to be lived, even for a person like me that struggles with this disorder.

a dramatic week

So.  Long time no see.  It has been a crazy week which has really inhibited the time and energy to get much up on the blog.

Everything started at 3 AM last Friday morning.  I got up to use the bathroom and I had a really strong pain in my side.  Like a “I can hardly move” kind of pain.  But I pushed through it and got myself into the bathroom, took care of business.  As I tried to head back to my room, I got a huge rush of nausea and stomach cramping.  I managed to wash my hands and felt like I desperately wanted my bed.  I tried to walk the few paces it takes to get back there.  But instead, I lost consciousness and fell to the floor.

Luckily, my husband, who normally can sleep through anything, heard a “thunk” and came running.  He thought I had dislocated my knee (I have had problems with that).  Nope.  I had passed out. 

Folks, I am not the faintin’ type.  I can think of one time I almost fainted.  In my life.  Sometimes I feel a little light-headed with the stomach flu but I don’t faint.  But shortly before I passed out, I remember thinking, “Something is seriously not right.”  I even wondered if maybe I was going to die (chalk that up to my worst case scenario thinking that apparently is instinctive enough even for these situations). 

When my husband found me I got conscious pretty quick but wasn’t making a lot of sense and I was really pale.  This totally freaked us out. 

So this past weekend and week have been spent in a flurry of tests and doctor visits to try to figure out what went wrong.  It has been a scary week.  The whole hypochondriac in me has bad enough worries about things just on my own but when you add the fact that we are coming up on the one year anniversary of my dad’s death to cancer, and when you add the fact that I had to have a breast biopsy six months ago (thankfully, it was benign), the uncertainty of things this week was pretty tough.  I remember saying to my husband, “Just when I hit my stride, this kind of stuff always happens to me.”  But as came to the end of the week, with relief I found that it appears that there is nothing serious wrong with me.  Ovarian cysts are the cause, they are normal in women my age and mine don’t look particularly worrisome.  Now, most women don’t pass out from them, but likely one ruptured.  The doctor says there’s a good chance it’ll never happen again. 

I am so glad that things appear to be ok in my body, at least.  I’m mindful though that I have another breast check-up in March to make sure things are still fine and nothing has changed.  Is life just a series of heart-pounding worries, sighs of relief, and returns to worry?  Sometimes I fear that by the time I turn 80 and actually have real reason to worry about mortality that I will have whiled away my life shrinking into the corner of fears real and imagined.  I hope not. 

I know that having a toddler has helped me to embrace the moment much more than I used to.  With her, everything is immediate.  Everything is now.  She runs through life with a flurry of excitement.  She routinely runs around kicking her legs up in the air (karate style) with joy.  She gets pumped just going to Costco.  She can hardly wait to meet go see her “new friends” at church.  She laughs with abandon.  Yes, I might be a worst case scenario person, I might have gone through some things in recent years that make me look at the world a bit gloomily, I might be a worrywart, but I have a ray of sunshine in the Burrito.  In ten million ways a day, she makes my life better.  I’m so happy to have gotten through this week, so grateful for life and health.  I want to embrace every moment of life with abandon, like Burrito does.  Or at least more of them than I do already.  There’s a reason Jesus said, “If you want to be the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven, become like a little child.”  All I have to do is look at Burrito to know why.

how I came to be a stay-at-home mommy in montana

This time last year, I was beginning to fray at the edges.  

Ok, I had started to fray a while back.  The truth is, in recent months, I was finally beginning to admit to myself that I was fraying at the edges.  I had a one year old daughter (who I will call “Burrito” for reasons I’ll explain in another post).  My husband and I were serving as pastors of two churches in rural North Dakota.  My father had just been placed on Hospice in Arizona, and I was trying to provide effective care for the wide-ranging needs of 600 or so members of our churches and attempting to still care well for my little family.  And I had just begun to suffer from serious insomnia a few months before. 

The lowest of the low point was the weekend of our biggest service at our northern congregation.  The service was during the big town celebration in a predominantly Icelandic community.  This little North Dakota town didn’t have a lot of notoriety throughout the rest of the year, but every August during the celebration of Icelandic independence from Denmark (the “Deuce of August”), large crowds gathered for the festival.  Important people journeyed from the homeland, including the Prime Minister of Iceland on two of the four summers we were there.  Each year, we conducted a worship service in the heart of the festival and it always turned out to be one of the best attended services of the year.

On this particular day in August, it was my turn to preach.  I had not slept for four nights before this (seemingly out of nowhere) and as I stood up to give my message to the large crowd, I remember the room swaying around me.  I remember a feeling of wispiness and unreality.  It was all I could do to keep my focus on each sentence and try to read what I had written.  My lips and whole body felt weighted down under each heavy word.  When I finished, I collapsed, exhausted, into my chair and my husband led the rest of the service, as we had agreed.

For four nights, I had not slept.  I was wrung out and exhausted and my bed at night became a torture chamber of fear.  Watch the clock.  Count the minutes.  Mind wide-awake.  Unable to shut it down.  “If I go to sleep RIGHT NOW, I can have four hours of sleep.  But I must go to sleep RIGHT NOW.”  But of course, I couldn’t.  It was like I had literally forgotten how to sleep.

Yes, that was the low point.

As you will come to see, I am a particularly stubborn individual.  I was beginning to feel the pull of the exhaustion months and months before.  Some of you might not know a pastor or a pastor’s life very well.  But if you’ve been in any sort of leadership position, you might understand a bit of what I was going through.

I got into ministry because I loved God and His Word and I wanted to share it with others.  I think I was more attached to this work of ministry than I was to the idea of being a mother, in fact.  I had grown up dreaming about getting married and about doing an important work in the world (Writing a book?  Being a missionary?), but not too much about having a baby.  More about that later.

What I didn’t count on was the 24-7 nature of being a pastor.  When you are a pastor, you can get called anytime of the day or night and there’s no telling what kind of situation you will face: someone’s drunken rantings, an expected death, a tragic death, someone’s anger due to your own fault or not due to anything you did at all.  There are countless expectations put on you, some intended, some not.  Everybody who sits in the pew has a different idea of what you should be doing with your time.  Some are charitable, some are not.  That’s human nature; that’s people.  And that’s the burden of leadership.  It goes with the territory, and it went ok for a while, I guess.  Until I had a baby.

The most surprising thing that happened to me when my daughter was born and as I got to know her in the months that followed was the profound love that absolutely captured my heart for her.  Suddenly, my new role as mother—previously not very interesting to me—became the dominant role of my life. 

I know, I know.  Everybody says this will happen to you when you have kids, but you see I really didn’t understand kids before Burrito was born.  I had never babysat a child under the age of 5.  I had never changed a diaper.  I wondered if I had what it took to be a mother.  I had always been much more attached to the idea of having a career or a ministry than the idea of being a mom.  The idea of having a baby was to me something I wanted to be sure to do before I died.  But it was also something I was frankly scared to death of.  But I couldn’t have been more mistaken about how much I was going to love being a mother.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not going to tell you those first few months were easy.  You watch these chick flick movies about having a baby and you think you are supposed to have these rapturous feelings about your screaming, diaper messing little one from day one…even though they are a bit of a stranger to you.  I didn’t have those rapturous feelings all the time right away.

First of all, I got off to a rough start.  I was going to have a home birth, and Burrito didn’t want to come and didn’t want to come.  I was in pretty intense labor at home for two days before I decided, “Yep, I need to go to the hospital.”  Like I said, I’m pretty stubborn.  (And apparently, so is my daughter.)

So, I had a c-section, and I was absolutely exhausted after that.  My maternity leave was spent trying to heal up from the trauma on my body and journeying through a painful start to nursing.

I remember that in the early days it was easy to resent the baby who never wanted to go to sleep and who woke up so often.  I remember the despair and exhaustion and the physical pain from the c-section.  I remember how I felt it physically when she cried.

Yes, those days were tough.  We had family and friends come and help us the first couple of weeks but I was pretty stubborn there too.  I could have gotten a little more help, I think, but somehow it was important to me to do things for myself, my way.  I wanted to own those early days.  But I was very, very tired.

But even in the most painful times, there was this strong attachment to my daughter.  I have never before felt it physically in my body when another human being cried, but I felt it with her.  I think we bonded early on over the trauma we had been through…me to bring her into the world, her to adjust to the world she had been brought into.  I think we neither one like change too well at first.

I went back to work, and I was trying to work, care for the family, take care of the baby, nurse the baby every couple of hours, and somehow remember to eat.  I felt like I was letting everybody down.  I felt really, really empty.  I remember one time agreeing to go to a meeting for a funeral when I should have been nursing and how crummy I felt and how I knew I shouldn’t have done that but how I felt I would let the grieving family down if I didn’t go.

A family friend cautioned me that if things didn’t start getting better for me soon, I might have to face that I was asking too much of myself and my health.  She said I might need to think about making some major changes in my life.  I shrugged her comments off.  No way.  I’m super woman.  I can do this.

I did start going to counseling, and it was helpful, but that was before the onset of the insomnia.  When it began, my counselor convinced me to go to the doctor.  I finally went.  I have battled anxiety and depression since at least my teen years, but I finally had to admit that this had gotten out of control.  Medication slowly began to bring stability back to my life.  I could handle the stress much better, but I still felt like I was letting people down: my husband, my baby, my churches.  Honestly, I want to do things so whole-heartedly, so when I feel I am not giving something my all, it bothers me a lot.  But I was doing better, so I slogged through. In the rural towns in North Dakota where we served, pastors come and go a lot.  It’s pretty tough on people and I really wanted to not let them down, to give this thing a chance.  In my head, I was committed to a ten year stint with them.  I even told some people that that was what I hoped to do.

But then things began to turn.  To add to the stress, my Dad died in February of 2010.  I had barely had a chance to mourn his loss when some major church conflicts and threats on my job began in the summer.  This time I didn’t stop sleeping, but it was awfully stressful.  And I was willing to go through it, to not take the easy way out, but more factors circled around and without going into all the sad details, it became clear…it was time to go. 

We were planning to join a different denomination (kinda like the “brand” of church) and since there were smaller numbers of churches and positions in this “brand”  available, we decided my husband would be the one to look for a call.  To our surprise, he quickly jumped to the top of the list at a church in Bigfork, MT.  My first reaction was “Montana?!”  As far as I knew, there was no state more isolated than North Dakota, except maybe Montana! 

But when I started to look online and when we came to visit, all that changed.  Here was a magical land of trees and mountains, of gourmet food and fine theatre, but the safety of a small town.  I quickly became very excited about Montana. 

But the biggest joy about Montana was that here I could do what my heart had been calling me to do for two years.  Here I could be free to focus on my daughter and her care.  Here I could stop missing out on her priceless moments.  Here I could stop feeling so divided all the time.  And what a surprise it has been that this was my heart’s desire!  I thought I was just a career woman, but my daughter has completely changed my life.  She has turned my desires into something completely different.  She has awakened my heart.  There is no place I’d rather be right now than home with her.  And that is a blessing that this time last year I couldn’t have even predicted.

There’s so much more I want to share with you about my life and the journey of motherhood.  So, stay tuned!