decompress

I love Tuesdays. For about three hours in the morning, all of my children are at school/preschool. They are out of the house and in good care, and I have some time to get things done and just breathe. 

The scenario each Tuesday morning is pretty similar. I wake up around 6:15am, get some coffee in my system, get Tess up, dressed, fed, and out the door for kindergarten, pack lunches for the littles, unload the dishwasher, get dressed, get Ren and Lu up, get them fed, dressed, loaded into the car, and dropped off at preschool/Mom's Day Out. In the midst of all of this, there are multiple temper tantrums to diffuse and exhausting toddler power struggles to disengage from. It can feel like a volatile emotional obstacle course every morning. 

When I arrive back home it's around 9:30am and I feel as though I've been sprinting for three hours. I walk into the house. It is eerily silent and still. Texanna is at the door to greet me. She sits at my feet and stares at me, as if to say, "Is it my turn now?" I rub her ears and pet her head and tell her we can both just relax. I look around the kitchen. Dried, crusty yogurt remains on the kitchen counter from where the kids ate breakfast. Dirty dishes are stacked in the sink. Bits of last night's rice float around in the pots of cold dishwater. I start to wonder what I'll do with my precious window of time, whether I'll tend to the laundry, the dishes, the dinner that needs to be cooked, the errands that need to be run, the pooch that needs to be walked, the appointments that need to be scheduled, the emails to return, the floors to mop, etc.

Instead, I always find myself standing in the middle of the kitchen, staring blankly around, and the only thought on my mind is coffee. First things first. I measure out the coffee grinds, take a big, deep breathe, and as I exhale, the over stimulation of the morning starts to diffuse out of me. I can feel my spirit start to unwind and I begin to relax into the silence. It's time to decompress.

And that's what I'm doing now. In this moment, I'm here with my coffee in the big white chair in our sunroom. It's cold and sunny outside and I love the way the light pours into this room, especially in the morning hours. It's my favorite room of the house. This is sacred time. It is precious because I do not have it in abundance. Sometimes I just sit and sip and stare out the window. Sometimes I like to write in my journal or write a letter to a friend. Sometimes I like to paint or read. I will start into my "to-do" list later, but for now, I can just BE, and I am grateful.

How do you decompress? What does that precious window of time look like for you? What would you want it to look like? If you are a working mom, how do you find this time for yourself?

"Certain springs are tapped when we are alone. The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer to work out his thoughts; the musician to compose; the saint, to pray. But women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves: that firm strand which will be the indispensable center of a whole web of human relationships." --Anne Morrow Lindbergh

resilience

He stands at the front door each afternoon and waits for her.

"Tessa...school bus!"

He says it again and again until he sees the big yellow bus pull up in front of our house, anxiously awaiting the arrival home of his big sister and the resumption of play and laughter and noise. His little heart seems to cling to these regularities, the assurance of a familiar schedule, when the people he loves come and go with predictability, and when those who leave always return to him again.

My son inspires me. He is a daily reminder of the great beauty and strength of the human spirit. He reminds me of our God-given capacity to withstand great heartache, fear, and trauma, and still live on. We can overcome, we can press forward, hopeful and resilient. We live with scars and also possess the ability to heal and recover, changed and refined by our hardships, and somehow, miraculously, wiser and kinder in spite of them, because of them. We need not be ashamed of them, for these things make us beautiful and unique.

My little boy has a strong spirit, a determined spirit. He is a fighter and will not easily give up. His capacity for love is fierce. He is a protector, a willful little guy who knows what he wants, how he feels, and is unafraid to show it and defend it. He feels things deeply, both grief and joy. His smile lights up an entire room.

Children accept things with an innocence that moves me. Their eyes perceive and understand the world with a simplicity that I often find disarming. I remember one day, last summer, shortly after we'd arrived home with Ren. The children and I were playing in the back yard on the swing set and a neighbor came over to meet us. Tess proudly introduced Ren to our neighbor friend. She said "This is Ren. He's my brother. He's from China!" She stated it matter-of-factly, as if it was the most natural arrangement in the world, as if she'd always known him and loved him and been bound to him by blood. No questions asked. She sees all the things that bind them together, not the things that make them different. We are family. Genetics, ethnicity, heritage, culture. These things are irrelevant. The biggest ties that bind are made of spiritual matter.

My son puts his little hand against the glass door, listening for the distant hum of the school bus as it turns onto our street. The first thing he says when we wakes in the morning is "Tessa? Lucy?," as he inquires after the whereabouts of his sisters. He drapes the full weight of his body over mine at night as we rock and sing, his arms and legs wrap around me like a koala. His head lies heavy on my shoulder and I can feel our chests sink into one another as we breath. When Chris is home on the weekends, Ren is his shadow, trailing his heels, a little man in the making, intrinsically tied to the physical, adventurous, and playful domain that his dad inhabits. My boy displays an ability to love courageously in places that have been previously hurt. I have watched him begin to rest and settle into us with time.

In a world full of ample reasons to remain cynical, untrusting, and isolated, my children are daily reminders that there is always another way, a better way. The resilience of the human spirit, its ability and trust and hope again, to overcome and live, is perhaps the most powerful thing of all.

will be born

Where do I even start? I wondered if I would ever write in this space again. I feel so full of so many things and hardly know where to begin. There are WAY too many gaps to fill since I last wrote, about nine months ago, so I'll just begin with where I am now.

Life has felt too overwhelming and raw to write in this space since returning home with our boy. No one and nothing could have prepared me for the massive transition we faced when we brought Ren home to a new place that essentially wasn't home. There were far too many moments when I wondered, "where am I, who am I, and what has just happened to me?" I think that every member of our family, especially Ren, was wondering the same thing at some point during the transition process. The impact of losing our community during such a pivotal and stressful time was more significant than I could have anticipated.

As I picked up my laptop to write this morning, it felt foreign. I thought about how often I wrote when we were living in California, but so much has changed since then, and more pressing things have squeezed out the time I have for writing. Still, I want to get back to it. It has been on my heart to gradually start breathing some life back into this dormant space--I know it could use a major facelift and I'm looking forward to the process. So...here it goes. I guess I'll just jump right in with the present.

***

March is a hard month for me. It always has been. It's like September. It's a transition month, a month when I am desperately ready for a change of seasons, but nature doesn't seem to move at the pace I would like. In September, I'm craving cooler temperatures but it's still dreadfully hot. In March, I'm craving warmer temps, but there are still so many days that feel like winter. There are buds on the trees but they have not yet bloomed. Just the word March makes me think of springtime, yet it still feels like winter. It's a big tease. The reality doesn't match the expectation. That's why I don't mind January and February too much. The weather is drab and dreary, but it's expected because it's still technically winter. It's harder to get disappointed because there isn't any hope attached to things changing for the better. But March? March is officially the beginning of spring, of more light, longer days, of flowers and warmer temperatures. Or so it should be. But change doesn't happen overnight, and so this is a month of backs and forths, ups and downs, when one can feel the painful pulses and contractions required to birth new life. It all requires so much expectation and energy, and I often find it all a bit exhausting. We know that spring will be born, but March is that uncomfortable and temperamental space between, a time of wondering and doubting and wishing, a time of longing and excitement, like that third trimester of pregnancy when a woman wonders if she'll remain pregnant forever. Of course, no woman has remained pregnant forever. The child WILL be born. But, in those final few weeks, the pain and discomfort are real and that irrational thought does not seem preposterous.

It was Easter weekend, one year ago, that Chris and I came out here to go house hunting. When we first walked through this house last year, I did not think it would be our home. I had a difficult time envisioning us here. I suppose I had some other preconceived idea of what our Virginia home would be like. This home needed a lot of tender loving care and it still does. I knew it would be a hard, long, and expensive process to transform it from its current state into the vision we had for it. It had a lot of potential, but it would not realize this full potential without a liberal amount of patience and perseverance. It's strange to stop and think that now, one year later, this home is ours, and we have made slow yet tangible progress in claiming and transforming it into our own. It's hard to fathom how much can happen in one year, and it's mind-blowing to think about where we were one year ago and how our lives have fundamentally changed since then.

Yesterday I bought a bunch of ranunculus at Trader Joe's. They are gorgeous. I love how unruly their wavy stems are. They have petals that are soft and intertwined like roses, but they are a bit more bohemian and wild; a little less uptight and pretentious. Just my style. They caught my eye immediately because I remember first buying a ranunculus two years ago when we were in California. I planted it in a pot and sat it on my desk--something pretty to look at as I worked on the stacks of adoption paperwork to bring Ren home. Two years later, the paper pregnancy is over and we have a son. As I went to check on him last night before heading to bed, I stared for a long time at his sweet body, breathing heavily in a deep sleep in his crib, in his home. He is home now. 

The child WILL be born. The flowers will bloom. Spring will come. It has come already in so many areas of my life, and this is always cause for celebration, even amidst the many other areas of existence that can still feel drab, dreary, dormant, or just plain dead.

I put the ranunculus on our dining room table. The dining room wallpaper has finally been stripped (good riddance!) and we painted the walls a pale shade of indigo, a true blue with slight hints of violet. 

I hung my Matisse painting on the wall and displayed some of my favorite pottery, all of which has touches of indigo in it. 

We hung the big, bold oil painting that Chris's cousin, John, painted. I smiled as I took it all in yesterday. This place is starting to come together; it is beginning to reflect my style and what I love in life. 

I stood in the middle of the room yesterday and started thinking about the future groups of women who might gather here during Red Tent Dinners...future meals we will share with dear friends and family who come to visit...future family dinners when we teach our children what it means to connect over a nice meal (and have decent table manners)!

I'm so grateful for those places in our homes and our lives that feel like spring has come. I'm grateful for the progress we've made over the past several months and that the massive upheaval we experienced in 2012 is starting to settle. I'm grateful for the change of seasons, for new life, fresh starts, and that after months and years of waiting, life WILL come...life DOES come. And, I'm thankful that we don't have to go back and do it again. God forbid! I am looking forward to what lies ahead. The first day of spring is tomorrow!

BTW, just to give you some frame of reference, here's a "before" photo of the dining room, taken on the day we got the original 1980's wallpaper stripped. We've made progress, indeed!