call me adolf

my little blue-faced wild girl who is happiest when covered in filth of one kind or another.

All of this newfound responsibility and maturity (that has come, for me, with having a baby) has two faces. The one is wise and learning and reliable and constant. The other is crotchety and anal-retentive and boring.

I spent a long long time cleaning the house yesterday only to have someone want a sandwich! And they wanted me to make it! In the newly cleaned kitchen!! Crumbs soon covered the clean floor and bits of mayonnaise-covered bread were flung from the high-chair. And instead of laughing and saying, you silly baby, I clenched my jaw and my stomach locked up and I thought, MY CLEAN FLOOOOOOORS!!!

And Nathan came in from rolling in the dirt with wrenches and power tools and with each step I could see little puffs of dried dust and dirt and grass escape his clothes and settle on the floor. I decided to refrain from telling him very loudly with hands on hips, I JUST MOPPED RIGHT THERE, and go for the more subtle approach - pulling out the broom and urgently sweeping up his tracks. Completely oblivious he moved into the kitchen and pulled out...some CHIPS! CHIPS!!!! ON A FRESHLY MOPPED FLOOR!! I felt an ulcer forming on my stomach.

Which is when I realized, I'm a much nicer person when my house is dirty. Stella can practice her baseball pitch with a cup of cheerios, Nathan can stomp around with muddy boots and I don't even bat an eyelash. When my house is dirty I can appreciate it for what it is - a place to live and eat and play and get comfortable. Not to be confused with a tediously polished museum relic that must be protected from every speck of dirt and germ.

Nathan says there's a bigger issue at hand here. Namely, the impulse to nail everything neatly in place once some measure of order and comfortability is achieved so that there's no possibility of loss.

To that I say, I'm sure I'd be cured if YOU took over the cleaning. 

healing

photo from here

Our bodies are such complicated machines. The way they're affected by everything, you know? It's like raising a kid. Everything you do (or don't do) to them, for them, with them...it affects them somehow. And they remember it forever. Maybe not in their conscious minds, but it's stored deep down in there. In the place where our beliefs are shaped. We have such power to influence. And not only us as parents, but friends, relatives, people who we're surrounded by. We're such dynamic creatures. The scope of which we don't even completely understand yet. Yet.


Yet brings me to my next observation, which is that some people don't seem to care a bit that they don't understand themselves, the way their bodies work, the things they're affected by. Or maybe it's just that they don't know it's possible. Or useful. I find this so interesting. We've become so accustomed to looking outward for answers, solutions, medicines to provide quick fixes, advice from people who have been through years of schooling but who can't possibly know us. Our unique circumstances. What's going on in our lives. What's happened to us in the past. I believe that all of these things dictate our health, or un-health.


Fear, stress, worry, anger...these are some of my predators. Sometimes they shoot at me from down below as I'm traversing this tight-rope balancing act of optimal health. Sometimes they miss, sometimes they don't. I have the propensity to nurse a grudge, as if it is the dearest thing to my heart. I always realize weeks, months, years (sadly) later that it was nothing but a hungry parasite sucking me dry of peace. 


I'm going through this thing right now. It's disheartening at best, scary at worst. I'm resisting the temptation to high-tail it to the doctors office to get some chemicals to "fix" it. Instead I'm waking up an hour early every day, devouring every good book that's been written on the topic, following that with some sincere, honest prayer, and topping it off with some time to sit in quiet. To listen and observe. To ask myself probing questions and then carefully watch how my body responds. I've been eliminating the junk from my life - processed food, toxic emotions, negative people. I wish I could say miracles are happening. Someday I'll be able to say that. But I know this kind of healing takes time, and I'm okay with that. Better than okay. Because at the end of the day it is so empowering to realize that healing is a completely personal endeavor. It's made possible through faith. Faith in myself, in my own competence and in my body's ability to restore balance once the junk is removed. Faith in Christ, that He will lead me to answers, be there as the one and only person who can completely understand, and that He will bridge the gap between what I'm bringing to the table and what is required for healing to take place. It is a beautiful process.


If our bodies are like kids that we're raising, I want mine to grow up to know that it has marvelous intrinsic healing capabilities. Not just believe it, but to have been given the chance to prove itself, first-hand. I want it to know that it has all of the answers, it's just a matter of decoding them. I want it to know that I have time for it. I am all ears. I'm thankful that it has served me all of these years without so much as a peep of complaint.


Life is so fast-paced and I'm thankful for the "quick-fixes" in times when I don't have the energy or motivation to heal myself otherwise. But in reality, this is the kind of education that I came here to get, which is how I'm able to truly count these periods of un-health as a happy blessing. An opportunity to learn, understand, grow more confident and self-respecting is always a happy blessing.

Let's just say her vocabulary is growing.

More Stella videos here and here.

Things I couldn't have guessed

I've been in a funk. Maybe it's exhaustion? Too much sugar? The current moon phase? Regardless, I'm catching myself staring blankly at the wall more frequently than I'm comfortable with. Like my brain has sand in the gears and I'm crunch-crunch-crunching my way through the daily routine. 

I woke up this morning and the image of our cat filled the expanse of my dark, empty head. When I went to feed her last night she was meow-ing in the most pathetic way, as if to say, "Please good woman! Just pet me a while." And I would have, if I felt up to sneezing and snotting and eyes-swelling-up-like-Rango. I'm awfully allergic. Trust me, it's awful. And if only the poor little kitty knew, then maybe she wouldn't mistake me for a cold-hearted wench that quickly drops the food into her bowl and scurries back into the house, slamming the door. (I'm not mad, little cat. You have to slam our front door in order for it to close properly.)

I heard a piece on NPR the other day about how people with boring food preferences oftentimes have a higher density of taste-buds, causing them to experience tastes more (too) intensely. What a prospect! I thought of my sister, who we teased mercilessly for eating grated cheddar cheese by the bowl-full while the rest of the family ate, say, bean soup. And how at thirty-five she still won't touch a vegetable with a ten foot pole. How positively juvenile, I've been guilty of thinking. And as it turns out, that pitiful soul can't help the density of her taste-buds! If I had only known!

We spent the morning at the beach. Morning at the beach on a weekday in Florida equals speedo-clad, leathery-skinned, age-ripened old people swarming the shoreline like a mess of fruit flies carrying seashells and metal detectors. One such specimen eyed me disgustedly as I took off Stella's diaper to shower her off. There was a little present in there, how could I have known? I wiped her off, showered her off and purposely tried to catch this man's stare. 


My first impulse was to judge: He's obviously never had kids. Selfish old geezer. Doesn't he know children are wonderful? God's gift to the world? Even their poop? 

Then I thought of the cat, and my allergies, and my sister, and her taste-buds. 

My thoughts shifted to: Lonely widower? Got his house broken into last night and his tires slashed? Bad case of Botox that has left him with a permanent scowl? Poor, poor man. You just can't help yourself! 

Then our eyes met. My face broke out in the friendliest smile. He heaved a rude sigh and turned to walk away. 

People are such a mystery. Everyone has a story. Things are almost never what they seem. Isn't it so liberating?

mud soup

Around here, Saturdays in March are some kind of decadent treat. The sun wakes up early and burns just warm enough to make your skin thaw. The garden is buzzing with friends, all here to dig their fingers in the dirt and help tidy the homes of our tiny growing vegetables. I am up to my elbows in sink water, dunking collard greens and watching the water bead up and drip off. It is a blindingly beautiful thing, a home-grown vegetable. 


Stella and her two little Japanese friends sit in the mud hunching over a bucket of water. "We making a potato soup!" the older girl informs me, stirring the water with a muddy hand shovel. Stella finds shriveled kumquats and white little pebbles to contribute. The boy watches them with a scowl and periodically reaches his squat little fingers out and tips the whole bucket over.


Dinnertime is spent in the backyard of new friends. Watching the sunset over a sleepy pond, listening to our babies grapple over a brownie, gushing over their vintage VW bus (my dream car). 


It got me thinking, there are a hundred thousand million reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.