Olivia came in as I was recovering from my confusion. She was returning some borrowed clothes to my closet and asked it she could wear my new skirt. I love that she does this, and I love that we can wear each other's things. Sometimes I wonder if this means I dress too young, but most times I just don't care anymore. I do want to find that balance between dressing according to my preferences and body type, and dressing normal for my age. I suppose this goes for a lot of things, including behavior and choice of activity. If I'm going to err on one side of the balance, though, I think it's toward free-spiriting it. I've spent far too much of myself and my time pointlessly trying to meet expectation and shoving away myself. Maybe it's more accurate to say that now I want to find the balance between living freely and not appearing mid-life crisis-y!
It has been said that you spend your first forty years trying to become what you've been told you should be, and the next forty years undoing what you became in order to discover who it is you were meant to be all along. Maybe this is true. At least now I'm on the side where freedom grows. What a relief!
Later in the morning Michael and I talked about piercings. He has offered to buy me a tattoo. (Let me just say I absolutely love this about my relationship with my son.)
After brushing my teeth and getting ready to run Jacob and Andrew to school, I stretched my shoulders and upper back in the door frame and then practiced my handstand. I'm still working on holding it steady; I'd also love to regain long lost flexibility in my spine to hold a pretty backbend. It may take me a while, but I'll get it. Why is this my goal? Because I want the joy of movement and freedom to enjoy life well as long as possible. Also, I love a good challenge.
Sometimes I do grown-up things, too. I do some things I want to do and some things I don't, because loving well requires both. Loving well is sometimes more of a challenge than backbends with scoliosis of the spine.
Truly, my greatest desire is to love well. Simply, to love God and to love others is the pursuit of my life. Learning just to accept who God made others to be and who I am in Him is all a part of this pursuit. Just accepting the gift of people and the gift of relationship - without demand to be what we're not, without resentment, without reservation. Just accepting individuality, feelings, preferences, thoughts, opinions, and so on. I think this acceptance is a huge, huge part of loving well, because acceptance is the opposite of rejection.
Rejection comes in so many forms; it can be veiled in well-intentioned sounding excuses, or cloaked in false spirituality. But rejection is never loving well. No one ever feels loved when they detect rejection. Furthermore, no one can love others well if they are in rejection of their own personhood, who God made them to be. "Love your neighbor as yourself." In this fallen world, this doesn't presuppose that we love ourselves perfectly. Love the way you need to be loved.
Truly loving, freely and wholly, is only in the absence of all rejection, because this is how we are loved by God. We get to just come as we are, over and over again.
>:<
Monday ended with a late night walk by the ocean with Michael and Olivia. The night was cool, the beach deserted, and we just walked shoulder-to-shoulder, talking, listening. Mostly I just listened and resisted talking much. I took in the sounds of hopes and dreams, plans, thoughts. I accepted and received, and tried to simply love well.
>:<
I've not been great at picking up my camera. It's getting harder to capture life as it is now with a house full of teens. Nearly gone are the days when my camera pointed in the direction of my kids went unnoticed. I'm sympathetic to that, even though I long to continue documenting these wonderful days we are still living.
The following images are from last October.
Homecoming 2018
friends
endless play
height comparison
my loves
(lump in my throat)
more friends
memorable times
Dear Katherine,
ReplyDeleteOnce again you have put into words feelings and thoughts that I struggle to articulate. I stopped to pray for you after reading this paragraph about your dream. :)
“A squirrel was biting hard onto my finger and wouldn't let go, and no one would help me despite the fact that mysterious surveillance cameras had been set up in our house.”
Thinking about how pastors’ wives can be treated in the church, your squirrel bite and hidden cameras sounded like an illustration of such. We can always do so much better at loving and caring for one another. Your writings always help me to consider my ways and teach me to love others better. You have encouraged me to take a second try at mending a broken relationship and to consider how I may have been the one doing the rejecting and not the other way around.
I thank God for the way our Lord uses you to teach us about relationships and that they are all very different, just as we were all created very different. Love you and miss you and I’d come running if you were in distress or in need of help, especially if a nasty squirrel wouldn’t let go. ;)
Madonna,
DeleteYour comment regarding my dream made me laugh! Oh boy. If the illustration were to continue a bit, I think I'd just learn to pet the squirrel and make it a friend. Then people would continue to watch through those cameras and wonder why I'm so odd.
I miss you. Thank you for always caring for me, and for being willing to fight my squirrels! xo