Positively (Im)perfect

One year ago I wrote a post on the reality of wrinkles. Fast forward 1 year, when life has heaped on more joy, stress, suffering, learning, more freckles-turned-age-spots, and of course, more wrinkles. I’d be lying if I said wasn’t still tempted by sparkly, smoothing filters, products & treatments touting age-defying magic, the pressure to hit the pause button on this gradual process of aging. But I also know that this is temptation over truth. Illusion over reality. Superficiality and pride over authenticity & wisdom enough to consider the long view. So I’m reminding myself of truth today: my life-lines are the visible manifestation of the sometimes invisible crucible of life experience — a lifetime of moments layered upon years of building character, strength, faith, & wisdom. It’s hard to withstand the world’s pressure to conform & compete in the pageantry of physical “flawlessness” as a prerequisite for acceptance; but peeling back the layers reveals

I’m sitting here today in a different state than years past. I’ve begun so many new years with the assurances of a young and confident yet somewhat naive mind intent on turning over a new leaf. But this year, my mind feels older, quieter, tired and spent...yet also somehow clearer and wiser looking into the increasingly cloudy future. For I see better today what I’ve tried to ignore before - today is simply a continuation of yesterday. Tomorrow, a continuation of today. An unbroken and hardly insignificant string yesterdays and yesteryears leading up to the here and now. Though a fresh blank calendar page holds infinite possibilities, it does not--cannot--sever today from the realities of yesterday—bad or {blessedly} good. I’m finally stepping into this new year freed from the delusions that the tick of a seven to an eight might solve the world’s problems or magically transform me into the person I intend to be all at the stroke of midnight. What I do now understand is

It's strange sometimes how what's meant to be an inspirational snippet can become your complete undoing. One late summer day, I innocently watched a preview for a groundbreaking new show whose main character has autism. I was prepared to be touched and uplifted--but suddenly found myself shrinking inward as the reality of the subject matter landed a little too close to home. And there I sat, powerless, as an unwelcome emotional dam broke open to flood the depths of my soul -- a flood I thought I'd successfully ignored into dormancy, but whose currents apparently ran far deeper and stronger than I'd acknowledged. This particular dam goes by the name of "The ASD Mom Keeping it Together." ASD being Autism Spectrum Disorder, of course. And it's not a dam I pay much heed to or a subject I broach very often, here or otherwise — mostly to protect my son’s privacy, somewhat because I've learned over the years how to keep the dam mostly inta

Yesterday, my husband did the most exceptionally loving thing. He cleaned the windshield. You see, we were driving home from a weekend in the mountains, which had, naturally, caused our windshield to collect a fair amount of used-to-be-bugs. Also dirt: copious amounts from our time spent exploring the loveliest places on God's green earth--which, naturally, involved driving down some mud-puddle-covered, out-of-the-way roads. And on the way home we were going be driving past (or, rather, through) another one of these breathtaking places: a narrow canyon with rugged walls reaching toward the heavens, anchored at the bottom by a singing, snaking river. And, because I'm...well, me ... naturally, I wanted to get some good clear pictures and videos of it all. So I asked my husband in passing to run the wipers over the windshield smears or something of the sort, I can't quite remember. All I knew was shortly after we'd merged on to the highway with a fully fueled

Three weeks ago, as I bent down to tuck in my daughter and give her a good night kiss, she whispered, "I don't want you to go. You won't be here to sing my song at night." I sighed and scooted on to the bed next to her, thinking about the two weeks of training that lay ahead of me. "I'll tell you a secret. I don't really want to go either," I whispered, watching a tear slip down her cheek. "But remember when Daddy was gone for the same reason this summer and the two weeks went so fast?"  She looked me in the eye quizzically and tearfully stated the obvious: "It matters more when you're gone."  I sighed again as a tear slipped down my own cheek. "I know. I agree that in a lot of ways it matters more. But I know we'll both do the best we can, won't we? And Daddy will play your song that I recorded, or if we Skype at bedtime I'll sing it to you myself. Okay?" She nodded woefully and whi

The words in this post are my heart's response to stories that are not my own to tell...and therefore, it will be intentionally vague. Because my kids' lives are not my own. But, in the same breath, I must acknowledge that my kids are my life. Like it or not, their worlds collectively define mine. Which means that I cannot help but cradle their hopes and dreams and struggles and fears in my heart in a way that fuses them with my own. Many days, my heart has (and will) try to leap out of me and attempt to run after them, aching, breaking, with the desire to rescue them from their anxieties or fix their fears or find a way to make the big wide world a more gentle place for them to tred. My brain knows that they must (and will), find their own unique way to navigate this inflexible and unforgiving world, but my heart...my heart will always hate the parts of this world that demand an arbitrary standard of "normalcy" from my brilliant loves who a

Last night as we sat in mass, preparing to ring in the New Year with our wired three-year-old on my left and passed-out-exhausted five-year-old on my right, our pastor reminded us that 2015 is the Year of the Family. He talked about Pope Francis dedicating this year to the re-building of family, and the importance of bringing real, authentic love into the world, starting with those closest to us. Than he challenged us as mothers and fathers to "breathe life" into our families this coming year. Breathe Life. I liked the sound of it. I looked at our kids in their different active and non-active states around me, and my husband next to me, and I nodded in agreement. Yes, I would commit to Breathing Life into my family and make it a "non-resolution" in addition to my original focus of health that I just reflected on. 2015, I decided, would be the year of health and Breathing Life into my family. But this morning as I greet the new day and New Year with

The other night, I went to retrieve a picture of myself for a little project. It's one of the few baby pictures I have in my possession, (the rest being maintained in a fabulous 80s-style photo album at my parents' house), and I knew exactly where that picture was: tucked between Ezra and Nehemiah in my NAB Bible. "Kinda strange place to keep a baby picture," one might think. But my Bible is chock full of such things. As I rifled through the pages to find my photo, I found myself pausing continually at each natural break in the binding to look at another card or note or photo, taking in memory after meaningful memory, tucked away in its own special place. It must have been sometime in high school that I started using my Bible as a spiritual scrapbook of sorts; no doubt influenced by my own mother's practice, as I can picture even now hazy memories of paging through her worn Bible, running my fingers over the groove of the underlines and markings, bookmarked

Last week I committed to a week-long focus on hope . My goal was to move beyond the seemingly lovely ideal into the nitty gritty real-life practice of cultivating and maintaining hope--the virtue that sustains us when we're hit with the real stuff life throws at us. As promised, here's my review of how it all turned out. The week by normal standards was fairly average. There was plenty of the usual chaos, some expected and unexpected frustrations, and lots of delightful little happenings that truly redeemed even the greatest of those frustrations. I saw prayers answered, and wait still for some questionsand hopes that remain unanswered. Not a whole lot changed in my world, nothing overly crazy happened, but I did notice a definitive shift in my perspective. Ultimately, I confirmed that hope is hard (shocker). But I honestly surprised myself with how well I actually remembered what I was supposed to be working on. (That's kind of a big deal here, mommy brain and all). I

What the world needs now is love, sweet [real] love... In Greek, it's called agape . In wedding vows, it's called "for better or for worse." In life, it's called reality . We all love us some romantic love--called  eros  in Greek. Affection, flirtation, flowers, chocolate...it's all very attractive. And it's the spice that any good relationship needs to have sprinkled throughout. But when it comes down to it, life isn't always romantic. We don't live in a movie. Real life can be messy. Real life needs real love. Agape . A giving kind of love. Because romantic love only gets us so far... I had the pleasure of reflecting on real love last week while spending some extended time bonding with the bathroom floor. I was the last Chosen One in the family to have a militant stomach bug bestowed upon me, and I was down for the count. It was a long, long day. Even in my misery, I could only sleep for so long, and watching the sun and shadows cr