Joy is Blooming

 Today is the day I start writing again. I don't know if it will last. I don't even know if it will matter, but I know that my heart has been longing to let my words free again. It is always spinning with words and ideas and a longing to tell some small part of my world what God has done. 

Speaking is not my gift at all. One of my kids has struggled with a form of anxiety that essentially makes words freeze up when they feel under pressure and watching it has helped me understand more about myself. Not to the same extreme, but I have often felt the same. Frustratingly, in the chaos of the last few years, even when I put a pen to paper....or sit down at a keyboard...always my greatest form of release: my brain has been doing the same sort of freeze. With so much tumbling around in a million directions, where do I begin.

I guess I begin here. Last year I briefly tried to start blogging again. But now that my kids are older there is more of an intense need to guard their privacy, and with so much of my life tied up with theirs I have struggled to know how to untangle myself in words. I also in the past few years have experienced for the first time the anxiety of being vulnerable to misunderstanding and judgment through the written word. I was always ok with not being liked. If someone didn't want to see the real me, they could just move on. Somehow, I let that get lost in the slippery climb of the transition to the prime of adulthood, melding together as one with my husband and helping my kids navigate the roller coaster of growing up. Maybe it was also partially the loss of my mother, which changed me more than I probably even realized for a while. I knew at once that a part of me grew much stronger, but I think the tiny, wounded part grew a little bit too.

It isn't just the fear of vulnerability that makes my words freeze though. I am now homeschooling 3 out of 4 of my kids on top of working...and time and mental bandwidth are at a minimum these days. I have had to acknowledge the limitations of life and last year I threw my hands up and said something has to give. The easiest thing for me to drop at the time was sitting down at the computer yet again to try to write while a million other things clambered for my attention. 

But recently I have been feeling that nagging feeling that I needed to try again.'

Saturday morning, I woke up ready to try. The kids were happy for a few minutes. But then I discovered that apparently the cantaloupe and roasted cauliflower I had optimistically put at the table for breakfast had been rejected for soft pretzels that were in the freezer. When I picked up the pretzel salt to put it away, I didn't realize it was open and it flew everywhere. The dishwasher dinged that it was ready to be emptied. The 10-year-old middle child whom I know needs more of me said "Mom, will you play Legos with me?" I vacuumed the pretzel salt, emptied the dishwasher and helped the kid find some tractor wheels. I gloried in his smile though I knew it would be fleeting. This is a season of never done. Maybe they all are.

My family and I just experienced one of the hardest seasons of our lives and I wish I could have written all the way through it, but I was just trying to keep my head above water most of the time. I wish I could have taken the time to write about the cold fear, the anxiety clenching in my stomach every time I pulled up to my own home. The blessed assurance through all of it as I sometimes yelled loud enough to make myself believe: "I trust You, God!" After 3.5 years of living in a condo, everything blew up spectacularly with neighbors who wanted our children gone. 6 months we prepared for open houses, went without toys, rushed kids and cats out of the door for showings, walked on tiptoes around our own home, shuddering with every noise and always fearing the knock on the door. We spent time in an Air BNB, stayed with my dad, and even camped for a few days. We dropped our price until finally we got out of there.

By God's grace and an amazing show of His power and goodness, we ended up in a little old house in our favorite neighborhood in the same little town where we have grown together as a family for 17 years. It needs a lot of work: the yard is a jungle, the bedrooms were a mess and needed remodeling, it needs a new roof and garage door, we have to have completely new plumbing put in. But we have thrived as a family in this new adventure. Maybe never more tired, maybe never more alive. My husband, who always feared the work of managing a yard, has been gleefully cutting down invasive trees with an axe. I have spent around 5 hours now wrestling the biggest aloe bush you have ever seen and pulling up its hundreds of roots one by one. I have blisters on my hands from a pickaxe and my shoulders are currently throbbing. So much more to go, but I feel like we've made it. We've made it through. 

Right now, we are clearing the land and that is going to take some time. But every night I hold hands with my husband, and we walk the perimeter quietly and we talk about what we will plant when we are done ripping up all these vines and roots and overgrowth. And I see now what God was doing when we went through what we just went through. He was clearing the land. We had to live day by day, moment by moment during those 6 months of transition. It hurt more than I could have imagined, but at the same time, I could feel those roots loosening away from where they were clinging to the dirt. Could feel all those things of the world it is easy to get comfortable depending on pulling away and now we are living in something that can only be called freedom. Freedom doesn't equal easy, most of the time it is just as hard or harder. But I can remember about a year ago, praying, and asking God if he could just give me more joy.

Joy is flowers blooming, those first fruits of the soil breaking up out of that dirt that was prepared with sweat and back aches. Joy requires first digging out those ugly thick brown roots that hold us captive. 

Joy is what I feel today. I will have to keep fighting for it, keep praying for it every day. And there will be more times of uprooting as there have been in times past. But today, even as I wrestle with the soil outside our new/old front door: all I can see, all I can smell, is the blooming.