i can finally talk about it: expecting baby number two!

Last month, Christopher and I found out that we are expecting our second baby in December.  I haven't been able to blog much for two reasons: 1) Extreme exhaustion and 2) I couldn't write about what was really going on!

It's amazing how in just weeks, your body COMPLETELY CHANGES as a pregnant lady.  Circulation is affected.  Suddenly, taking a load of clothes out of the washer completely winds me.  I've been sick as a dog when it comes to morning sickness (which in my case should be called evening sickness!). 

I'll be honest...I've been struggling a lot with "receiving with thanksgiving" this first stage of pregnancy.  The exhaustion and nausea have been all-consuming and of course pregnancy brings up all kinds of self-doubt and worry as well.  And I worry about all that I am placing on my husband's shoulders (despite his gracious willingness to shoulder the burden).  I've been looking for resources online to help my attitude improve.  I've been asking for prayers for my attitude to improve.  I know that this too shall pass and I know that ultimately I am struggling with what is a difficult part of a very happy thing (a new baby), but it has been hard.  For those of you with experience in the art of weathering the first trimester, I'd love any advice and encouragement you can offer.  I will share insights I am learning as I go through as well, but for now I am not the expert.  I need to learn and grow.  (And perhaps accept the suffering that comes?)

I did begin to really embrace the joy of this pregnancy when we told Burrito the big secret on Sunday.  I'm sure she thinks that an alien has taken over Mom's body (partially true) since I've been acting so weird.  She was absolutely delighted and has been helping me get Bean's (our nickname for the baby) room organized.  She loves to hear every detail about the pregnancy and how Bean will grow and develop.  She is delighted by it all and it delights me to share with her.  It seems like throughout this time, we have gotten closer as mother and daughter.  She wants to snuggle and talk more (which I always used to wish she would do).  She wants to help.  She's even been acting a little more grown-up as we call her "big sister."  I'm so proud of the new parts of her I see emerging.

My experience with Burrito has taught me a lot.  I had many fears and worries before she was born too.  I was truly worried if I would be a good mother.  But despite some difficulties along the way, Burrito has shown me that there is truly nothing to fear.  My life is so much richer for having her in my life.  I am trying to trust in faith--believing without seeing--that the same will be true of Bean.

I'm also going to buy Creating with God: The Holy Confusing Blessedness of Pregnancy.
The author's argument?  Pregnancy is a way in which God works in us, even when it may be hard to detect His work.  The suffering we go through is not a waste but can train us in the practices of faith.  I think it will be just what the doctor ordered.

P.S. So much for the weight loss plan!

computer Sabbath

A couple of weeks ago, I was totally ready to lose it.  The stress was piling up so high.  It seemed like I had constant commitments and projects: some for church, some of my own goals, some for husband and Burrito, some for others, some for writing projects.  And most of it centered around the computer.  Which makes sense, since my main skill set is writing.  But I just COULDN'T TURN IT OFF.

It wasn't that I disliked doing any of the projects I was committed to.  In fact, I loved every single one of them and every single one used my gifts and abilities.  I wasn't coloring outside the lines of how God designed me.  It was just that there was so much to do.  And I wasn't getting the down time that my introvert self needs in order to function well.

That this coincided with truly in-earnest toddler behaviors and some attempts at potty training did not make it any easier.  I felt upset at myself for over-commiting and doing the things I love to do.  Was I really being fair to my husband and daughter who need an unstressed, stable person at home?

And then I remembered something I have practiced during stressful times in the past.  When I was in North Dakota, I was getting a lot of stressful emails (and in this case, they were not related to happy situations in which I was using my gifts...they related to strife and judgment, and discussing strife and judgment with trusted friends).  And I was getting so stressed out by having to be "on" all the time that I began to adhere to a computer Sabbath.  This meant powering down the socially "on" button, saying no to workaholism and trusting that all the same problems and responsibilities would be there the next day.  I think I took my day off in North Dakota (Monday) as my computer Sabbath.  And it helped.  I was able to get as much of a mental break as I could muster in the situation, such as it was.

So as I began to feel pretty darn stressed out here in Montana, I decided to bring the computer Sabbath back.  I think that finding Sabbath is even harder for stay-at-home parents and other people who work at home than it is for those who work outside the home.  For most people who work outside the home, there is a clear end time of work and oftentimes even a whole weekend to enjoy.  I understand nobody's time schedule is perfect and we all have challenges getting in time to rest, recreate, and build relationships with our loved ones, but I think stay-at-home people and always-on call-people like pastors and doctors have a particularly difficult time.

We all need to learn how to use the "off" button for our work.  Work can be a wonderful and meaningful thing, particularly when it is work that we feel gifted for and called to do (as I do with my writing--for pay and for volunteer opportunities--and my work as a mother and support to my husband).  But even joyful work is a work from which we need rest.

There could be no more joyful work than God's artistic work of creating the whole world.  Think of the colors, the detail, the beauty.  And no one needed rest less than God Himself.  He is self-sufficient in Himself.  But He knew that we would need to rest.  And so on the seventh day, after six days of creation, God rested.  He did this so that we would learn to stop what we are doing and rest too.

To take a Sabbath means to trust in God enough that we take ourselves off of the throne.  Psalm 127:1-3 says, "Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain.  In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat-- for he grants sleep to those he loves" (NIV).

What does this mean?  This means that we trust that at the end of the day, we are not responsible for the fate of the world--or the fate of any part of the world.  God has told us to rest and so we do it, trusting in faith that if we do, what He truly wants us to get done will get done.  We stop idolizing ourselves and our efforts in the world and we worship God alone.

And, oh, what a huge sigh of relief when we do this!  We don't have to always be "on."  We can take a rest and recharge and it will be ok. 

For every person, we may take Sabbath a little differently.  It's not about legalism.  As Jesus once said, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27, NIV).  For me, because I find myself tied to the computer all the time (even for good reasons), because I sometimes focus on it too much, because I get overstressed if I don't take a break from all my projects, a meaningful step is to turn the computer off one day a week.  I do this on Sundays now.

And I'm not gonna kid you.  It's difficult.  Particularly for the first half of the day as I get used to the idea.  I am tempted over and over again to go turn the computer on and check something.  I almost feel like the computer is a third arm; that's how connected I am to it!  And I feel like I am missing an arm when I turn it off.  But that is precisely why I need a break from the computer.  I need to remember that God is on the throne, not me.  I need to nurture relationships with my husband and daughter (all too often, I turn away from them and to a screen).  I need to catch up on my enjoyable reading.  I need to breathe.

And it's amazing...really, amazing...how little I miss when I step away.  Until I do step away, I essentially believe that I will miss everything if I look away from my computer for a second.  And I suppose once and a while, I may miss something fun or important.  But most of the time, there isn't much going on that matters that much.  And even if I do miss something, it will still be there waiting for me the next day.

I can't tell you the relief and stress reduction I am feeling as I step away from my work for a short time to get the rest God counseled us to take.  God truly is wise. 

How do you find Sabbath in your day to day life?  I'd love to hear your experiences.

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!