May As Well Enjoy (Part Deux)

I'm coming back to apply an add-on to Sunday's post...mostly because honesty is important to me and balance is a necessary ingredient when we talk about perspective (which is a theme that keeps cropping up for me here). I realized that my original post just needed a little more fleshing out, so bear with me.

This afternoon, I took the kids back to base housing to let the twins and Twinkle play on that little playground I mentioned Sunday and let the big boys enjoy the basketball court next door. We'd been there about fifteen minutes before I noticed: the sand where the playground sat was covered in broken glass shards leftover from the hurricane. I am not talking, "There were a few broken beer bottles that I easily picked up and threw away." I'm also not talking, "The sun glistened on the broken glass, its rays reflecting to create a beautiful rainbow blah blah blah fantastic life lesson blah blah." I'm talking, "I am letting my five year olds and two year old slide into a sand pit full of broken glass, and someone is going to die or at the very least get sent the the ER, at which point, protective services is going to take my children away from me forever...and I'll probably deserve it."

It felt like a slap in the face.

And I'm not going to lie, it especially felt like a slap in the face because I had literally just written a super positive post about embracing where you are. So let me caveat: if where you are is covered in broken glass, embrace with caution. At the very least, maybe keep scouting for another playground.

But I also want to say this: I had someone tell me this week about how they could never do what I do (RV living with five homeschooled kids in a disaster zone, I guess) and how they are amazed at how positive I am. If this thought has ever crossed your mind or some version of this thought in relation to some other person, let me say this: God calls us to different kinds of hard. And this is a hard season that God has clearly called me to. He has something else for you.

Just like I don't need to embrace a playground covered in broken glass, so you don't need to force yourself into hard situations that are not intended for you.

With that said, I am not always positive (far from it), and this is not always easy. Just this morning, I was making pancakes (nothing so hard about that), and looking around our RV and had a complete panic moment about being there for another year. Another year without accessing any of the things we threw into a storage unit (that are hopefully not covered in mold), things that most of our friends lost outright in the hurricane (so, note that I'm aware how petty this is). Another year of emptying out black tanks and gray tanks. Another year of the washer/dryer cheerfully shrinking our clothes and leaving them nice and wrinkly. Another year of hoping we don't run out of gas before I've made my coffee in the morning. Another year of wanting to hide in the RV because I don't want to see the destruction around me.

And then, very quietly, I heard in my heart, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." Even this. I can do small things like fry a batch of pancakes. I can do hard things like fight back tears day in and day out so that I can be emotionally available to my kids. I can do impossible things like choosing joy when the world around looks incredibly bleak. All things through Christ. Who strengthens me. Whether or not I deserve it. Whether or not I remember to ask for it. Whether or not I make the wisest choices with my time and energy. He is always there (Emmanuel--Christ with us) offering to strengthen me, offering to revive me, offering to hold me up in his everlasting arms.

So yes, embrace where you are and who you are with and enjoy, but know that you are not doing it because you are some positive, effervescent embodiment of spirituality--you are doing it because Christ strengthens you. But that doesn't mean you should let your kids go play in broken glass.

May As Well Enjoy

There is a tendency, for many of us, to go into survival mode when things get rough. We concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other and find ourselves with hardly any energy left for anything else. Survival begins to feel like all we are capable of. If you are there: this is not me judging. 90% of the time, I am there too.

But the last couple of weeks, there has been a little voice in my head saying, "You live here. You may as well enjoy it." So we've started occasionally walking the dog on the beach near where the RV is parked. We have to drive, but it's still a beach. There's a lot of debris around, but the water is beautiful. And we took a picnic down there last week and played on a playground that is miraculously still standing.

Today, I drove the kids back into base housing. They aren't mowing any more, of course, and so the fields between houses have been taken over by wildflowers. We picked a vaseful and found another playground that was (miraculously!) also stable. And this afternoon, I broke my own rule about not going to the beach unless it's at least 75 degrees, and we drove back to the old neighborhood and snuck down to our old beach. I say snuck, but there's no one there to notice.

It was fascinating walking on the sand and seeing the tracks of bear, raccoon, heron, and deer, but not a single footprint other than the ones we were leaving behind. Someone had abandoned a couple older kayaks, and the kids had a great time paddling them around in the shallow water, using their hands for oars. They're hoping the Man will buy them a real paddle next time. Or two.

But today, as I've been thinking about enjoying where I live (to the best of my ability--broken windows and half torn off roofs aren't terribly picturesque), I realized that this applies to so much more than just setting. It's looking at my kids and asking myself: do I enjoy them or am I just enduring until they move out of the house at 18? It's looking at my husband and asking myself: have I forgotten how much fun he is? When was the last time we went on a date together? Are we just co-parents and roommates or am I remembering he was my best friend first? It's even asking about my relationship with Christ: was my quiet time just a check mark for the day? Am I fully reveling in his joy? Do I truly treasure him?

And sometimes, it's in small ways. I poured that cup of coffee. Let me sit down and enjoy it, instead of racing around washing dishes and starting the laundry and sweeping the floor while it gets cold. I picked up that book from the library. Let me really savor it, instead of forgetting that it's there while instead mindlessly surfing the internet. I washed those sheets. Let me take a quick shower and put on clean pajamas so I can really enjoy the one night this week when I will be sleeping without an extra blanket of pet fur.

Enjoyment doesn't take very long. And it takes hardly any energy at all. But it is sometimes so easy to miss out on when we've been in survival mode for too long.

I guess this is just a little reminder to myself for later down the road (and possibly for you too, if you need it), you live here: you may as well enjoy it. You have those kids: you may as well enjoy them. You married that man: you may as well enjoy him. Slow down (even if not for very long). Really look around you. Savor. Enjoy. Don't miss the good gifts God is giving even in the midst of the struggle.

But maybe don't enjoy it quite this much.

A Garden of Should

We have now lived in the RV half of the amount of time that we lived in the actual house on base here. It's redefining the way I see permanent and temporary. It's also been making me think some about the way we put down roots...or intentionally avoid putting down roots...or think we should be putting down more roots than we actually are.

This last week the kids and I bought plants, which always seems to me to be one way of planting my flag and saying, "Here, I stay! This is home!" Admittedly, I brought a potted gardenia bush down from my mom's last month, but she gave it to me while tactfully informing me that it was already dying so I couldn't do any worse. I was really excited that it seemed to be sprouting new leaves in the last few weeks only to notice it looking a bit scraggly the last couple of days. Turns out Bee was stealing leaves from it to make "soup" having been banned from pulling up the newly growing grass. She is now banned from all "soup" making endeavors from here on out.

Anyway, we have now added two small pots of succulents for the inside of the house (place your bets now on how long it will take me to kill them) and an herb garden that the kids conned me into. But this is just one kind of roots.

I knew we were putting down an altogether different kind when we went to the library on base the other day. I was last in line, herding the kids up the stairs and around the corner to the library when I heard footsteps and a male voice saying, "Well, hi there!" Followed by a brief pause. "And hi to you too! And you! And hi to you!" I rounded the corner, holding Twinkle, to see a pair of men walking past my line of children, and I said to them, "They just keep coming, don't they?" The men laughed, and we proceeded down the hall to the library only to hear, faintly drifting up from the stairwell, "Oh, that's the Frizzells!"

Yes, that is the Frizzells. We may be infamous.

We are on a first name basis with the librarians (at both libraries). The office workers at the RV park expect Trigger to come in with us to get a dog treat when we check the mail. And they even brought our mail by for us when we'd been out of town for a week. But honestly, aside from the Man's work, our homeschool co-op, and our immediate RV neighbors (who can hear shrieks of glee and sometimes bellows of rage emanating from our trailer at all hours of the day), this is it. It is a small life.

And it feels kind of temporary. I guess that's what happens when you are living in an RV. And maybe that's as it should be. People here are busy rebuilding their lives, and we are just hanging on until the next assignment. Hanging on sounds like we are just barely surviving, and that's not what I mean. I bought plants, for goodness sake. But we know that this is not forever. You can do anything for a year (and some change). Even put down tiny tentative roots.

I find myself thinking, sometimes, about all the ways I "should" be putting down "real" roots. In my mind, I should be planting a metaphorical vegetable garden, with flowering borders and well-labeled signs, instead of being content with succulents and herbs. But oftentimes our "shoulds" are more a reflection of our own guilt and not really a reflection of reality.

I don't know if you are in a season of planting trees (and watering them well) or buying small succulents (and occasionally spritzing them with water while crossing your fingers and hoping for the best), but may we be faithful to walk in the right way...and then to ignore our own voices telling ourselves that it's not enough. May we remember today that it is enough to be faithful to what Christ calls us to do...and not try to unnecessarily add on more. The cross he has given us to bear is enough. Plant what he has called you to plant. Be where he has called you to be. Serve where he has asked you to serve. And be content to be small and let him be large, knowing that it's not about you, but about him, and the roots that hold us best are the ones sunk deeply into him.

Books for Suffering

Victor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist who survived three years in the Nazi death camps, observed how some of his fellow prisoners were able to endure the horror and pass through it while others could not. The difference came down to what Frankl called meaning. The problem is that contemporary people think life is all about finding happiness. We decide what conditions will make us happy and then we work to bring those conditions about. To live for happiness means that you were trying to get something out of life. But when suffering comes along, it takes the conditions for happiness away, and so suffering destroys all your reason to keep living. But to "live for meaning" means not that you try to get something out of life but rather that life expects something from us. In other words, you have meaning only when there is something in life more important than your own personal freedom and happiness, something for which you are glad to sacrifice your happiness.

Timothy Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, p. 70-71

There are seasons in our reading lives when we begin to notice themes emerge. I'm not talking, of course, about how we have a preference for reading military biographies or historical fiction or young adult novels. I'm talking about how we find ourselves reading books that centralize around something that is resonating within us. Sometimes we do this on purpose. We seek out books that we feel we are needing for the stage of life that we are in. But sometimes we are five or six books in before we realize that the books we are reading all have the same underlying theme (or the same sort of character or the same setting).

This has been my experience the last two months. I was halfway through January before I realized that almost every book I was reading (with the exception of the kids' read alouds and a few fluff novels) centered around the idea of suffering. Let me clarify before I go any farther. While many would say that living in a hurricane disaster zone in an RV with five kids while homeschooling could qualify as suffering, I wouldn't use that word for where we are right now. As I told the Man, our RV is bigger than many of the homes where I grew up (and is certainly nicer, though the kids are doing their best to trash it every time my back is turned). Also, we are together right now--and that is huge. But there are so many around me who truly are suffering still. And I've also been in my own suffering seasons before and probably will be again.

But for some reason, these last two months have been ones where I've read books full of deep truths about what it means to trust God when everything around you is falling apart. And some of these books have used stories to teach those truths, which always resonates with me more fully. It will come as no surprise that the other day I heard Littles yelling to his siblings, "Mom's crying while reading again!" In my defense, I was reading about the Holocaust. And I'm a weeper, which is entirely his fault for permanently screwing up my hormones by making me a mother.

At any rate, if you want to understand suffering better or have more compassion for those who are suffering or just need a good cry, a couple of these books might just fit the bill:

The Hawk and the Dove series by Penelope Wilcock :: I know. These have been on the blog before--sue me! It's been a few years and they are worth the reread. Every time I read them, I find something new. Every time I read them, I'm texting quotes to my husband (and then trying to convince him to read them...with his vast amounts of spare time). This series was one of only a handful of books that I kept out of storage, and it is worth the bookshelf space.

Zion Covenant and Zion Chronicles by Bodie Thoene :: I read these books as a teenager, and a few years ago started wondering if they were really as good as I remembered. I've been checking every library since then and finally found them. The timing was right. It's hard to feel sorry for yourself when you're reading about Dachau and Kristallnacht. Zion Covenant is set at the beginning of WW2, following multiple characters (the majority of whom are Jewish) as Germany takes over first Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then Poland. Zion Chronicles follows some of the same characters later as the Jewish state is established. There is enough humor to offset the tough subject matter, but the big draw for me was the honest discussion of what it looks like to trust God when the evidence seems to say he has abandoned you. How do we really say with faith (and honesty!) when we have lost everything in this world that we hold dear, "What God has done is rightly done"?

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card :: What does a YA SciFi book have to do with suffering? Read this book, and tell me what you think. We humans make a mess of things, over and over again. We reach for power. We play God. We think that our way of looking at things is the only way. We see one small sliver of the universe and think that we're seeing it all. This was a reread for me (again, revisited after having read it as a young teen), but it's still giving me food for thought.

The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris :: I got to read part of this book while we were in California, but sadly had to return it to the library before we left. Nonfiction takes me so much longer than fiction does. I am so glad that I found another copy though. Norris walks us through her own struggling Protestant faith as she allows herself to be ministered to by a community of Benedictines. One of my favorite chapters is where she talks about the Benedictine practice of daily reading the Psalms and how that shapes their understanding of honest grief. She also challenges me to seek out healthy community in order to combat more fully the daily suffering (small and large) that can threaten to overwhelm.

Walking with God through Pain and Suffering by Tim Keller :: One chapter into this book, I texted the Man and told him to find a copy. It's an engaging read with plenty of real life illustrations to flesh out the philosophy Keller is dealing with, and it has been timely for me. I am currently a third of the way through and looking forward to everything else I get to learn. I read the above quotation out loud to the Bigs this morning while they were doing math. They gave me blank stares so I texted it to the Man who was stuck in a meeting and didn't respond...so now I'm putting it on the blog because somebody else should be mulling over these ideas with me!

If you are looking for something a bit more light hearted to read these days, I have those too, but for now: this is where I am in my reading life. And for right now, my overlapping books are enriching the way I see my every day life, and for that I am grateful.

Friendship Lessons at the Football Field

This year, we have four kids playing flag football. Because the family that plays football together...stays together. Or something like that. Really, I think it's about a) minimizing drive time (no, Bee, you cannot go to gymnastic classes like a normal girl child--here! learn how to play football!) and b) making sure all the kids get their energy out so that we don't kill each other in the RV.

My favorite thing about football: thing one and thing two
fortuitously being their jersey numbers.

On the whole, this has worked out fairly well for us, but occasionally, we run into scheduling snags. Like Saturday, when Littles' team played at the same time as the team the other kids are on. Thankfully, the teams played at fields that were side by side, and the Man and I sat in between the games, trying to watch all four kids play at the same time (while also keeping an eye on Twinkle who likes to challenge our parenting skills by trying to join her siblings on the field). It was kind of like watching the ball at a tennis match. But worse. Also, it was cold. And my legs and hands froze into icicles and then splintered off. But that's not the point.

The point is that halfway through the game, I heard two of my new football mom friends yelling my name from across the field. I turned to look and see them making the touch down sign and pointing excitedly at Tiny. He had just scored the only touch down of the game (for our team--we were slaughtered), and we had missed it. But those two women made sure that I turned... just in time to cheer for Tiny with everyone else.

Tiny makes that football look good.

Good grief. I'm crying about it right now, just writing this.

I'm not crying because I missed my kid's touchdown. There will be other touchdowns. I'm crying because...oh, I want to be a friend like that. And I am so grateful for those two women who have gone out of their way to welcome me and talk to me for the three hours a week that we are together, and who know what friendship looks like.

Twinkle's favorite part of football is the snacks.
My child, right there...
Also, stealing her sister's jersey.

Friendship is not always going to be someone having your back or knowing the depths of your heart. Friendship is not always going to be about being physically there or even staying in great contact once you move. Thank God for that when it happens. We need friends like that too. But sometimes, being a friend is just looking for those small opportunities to help someone else celebrate. It's calling out someone's name from across a field so they don't miss the moment because you know they've got twenty gazillion things on their plate and you want to make sure that they get the joy too.

Somehow this is the only picture I got of Littles.
He is the far left, looking too cool for school. Or football, rather.

Today I'm thanking God for two women who barely know me who taught me that being a friend is sometimes just about being willing to do one small thing. I'm praying that I get to go do one small thing for someone else to bring them joy too.

Of RV Life

Telling people that you're living in an RV...with five kids...while homeschooling...is almost as much fun as telling people that your husband is deploying...and you're pregnant again...with twins. I keep getting the "You should write a book about that!" line from people who forget that I have five kids and am not naturally self motivated. Basically, if I don't have at least three kids whining at me for breakfast, why would I even get out of bed in the mornings? And at what point are they going to stop whining for yogurt and start whining at me to go write?

But the five kids in an RV thing is actually going really well. There's just something about going outside to dump the coffee grounds out of my French press and seeing the smooth, silver grey back of a dolphin slipping through the water in front of me, reappearing and disappearing while I hold my breath.

Littles making use of our really expensive whiteboard

Marine life aside, the lack of cleaning time from living here is the real selling point for me. If I need to vacuum, I vacuum. There's no need to put it off until I have a thirty minute window. It takes literally five minutes and the whole "house" is done. Sometimes I even get Twinkle to do it. One year olds think vacuums are amazing. I think any time a one year old is occupied with anything that is productive instead of destructive is amazing. I don't have endless bathrooms to clean up. I don't have endless shelves to dust. I don't have endless dishes to wash. We wash them immediately or we use a paper towel. It doesn't pile up because there's no where to pile up.

I've moved the picture frame since I took this picture,
but look at how clean that counter is.

Our washing machine has been a source of endless pleasure for me. Having a washing machine in the RV was kind of a deal breaker for me because I do a lot of laundry. This one keeps me motivated to stay up with laundry because it takes forever to churn out a load, and if you leave the laundry in the dryer for more than three seconds after it finishes, the wrinkles set in. You have to pull out the clean clothes while they are still steaming, risk burning your hands off permanently, and do a quick shake and fold or resign yourself to looking like you've returned to the 90s and the days of crinkle broom skirts. Bonus for our washing machine, when it's running, it gently shakes the whole RV so that you can pretend you are on a boat, floating somewhere warm and beautiful where your children can climb coconut trees that haven't been snapped in half like matchsticks and you can eat fresh pineapple while blatantly abandoning all plans to homeschool.

Photo courtesy of Littles. Wobbly table putting in an appearance on the right.

I did tell the kids though that I won't miss these wobbly RV tables. We have a long U shaped couch with two small tables that can be packed away when not in use. They are always in use for us because our family has ongoing school work and insatiable appetites. They are useful (the tables, but also occasionally the kids) but they would never be termed as sturdy. Friday, in the middle of school, Tiny's Wordly Wise book got a nice coffee bath when he accidentally bumped the underside of the table with his knee and sent my coffee sloshing all over the table. Unluckily for Tiny, his book was still completely legible and he then had to be taught by a mother who was missing out on half a cup of coffee.

One of our main concerns with moving into the RV was where to put the pet's stuff. We found a spot for the dog bed and bowls immediately under the fire place. The dog water only gets splashed on the floor a couple times a day, so I'm taking it as a win. The cats get fed in the kitchen sink. As soon as they're done, we have to wipe down the entire kitchen because Blythe insists on eating with her paws and flinging wet cat food to the heavens, but at least it encourages me to wipe things down more regularly. Anything that forces me to clean more regularly is a positive. Similarly, the litter box has been placed underneath the girl's bed, the only place it wouldn't get stepped on, which motivates me to scoop waste 2 to 3 times a day in order to make sure the bunk house doesn't smell like moldy cat pee.

Don't be fooled.
RV life isn't always this idyllic.

All these silver linings. I really enjoy getting to pretend to be a good house keeper for once. I'm never letting the Man move us back into a regular house. Except for the tables. That keep spilling my coffee. And possibly the lack of bookshelf space.

But for the duration of our time here, I will put our library to good use, never set down my coffee mug while the kids are up and about, and revel in my upgraded house keeping skills. Luckily for my lack of bookshelf space, the Books-a-Million is still closed. And there are dolphins to keep me distracted from Amazon Prime which could very quickly ship whole boxes of paperbacks straight to our RV. Although now that I think of it, my chocolate drawer is almost empty so I could probably put five to six books in there...

As It Should

On Halloween this year, I saw an unforgettable photograph of a young girl trick-or-treating on streets clogged with Michael's wreckage. She walked towards the sunset, her bag over her shoulder, with broken shingles and chunks of brick on either side of the street and a row of blue tarped houses in front of her. And part of me thought: that's so great that she gets to go do something totally normal right now when everything else is so not normal. And another part of me thought: how can we even think about something like trick-or-treating with everything that's going on?

But the truth is that life doesn't stop when we are grieving. The children still have to be fed. The dog still needs to be walked. The baby still has to have a nap at a relatively regular time. This is true whether we are walking through a wide spread community grief (like a hurricane) or an intimate personal grief (like a miscarriage). At least when it's the former, we are not the only ones walking around in a daze wondering how this normalcy can exist when the fabric of our lives has just been shredded.

Part of us wants life to stop, as if that would validate our pain. We ask ourselves how someone else can be laughing, when we feel that all the joy has been stripped from the world, how someone else can be falling in love, when we're pretty sure that love has been lost forever because of what we have been through. We are too numb to be cynical, but that is, of course, the next place we will land once our grief begins to fade.

Except that life goes on...as it should. We realize that while we may be in a season of loss, there is still hope that it is not forever. While we are in a season of grief, there are still joys worth celebrating. While our hearts are broken, they still function, at least in part. We make the next meal. We take the next walk. We prioritize the next nap time. And we wake up the next morning and do it over again, and maybe--just maybe--it's not quite as hard as it was the day before.

We find ourselves taking in the muted fire of sunrise, awestruck at the beauty. We remember how much comfort there is when given a hug that squeezes us just the right amount. We are served a meal that suddenly tastes like life instead of sawdust.

And we may not stay in that moment for very long, that moment where we felt fully whole again, but it happened and it may happened again. If we wait for it. If we grieve honestly but keep hope in our hearts. If we keep waking up day after day and putting one foot in front of the other.

We want life to stop in the face of our loss, but we don't get what we want. Thankfully. Instead, we get a chance to learn that his mercies are new every morning. And his faithfulness is great. Even when it doesn't look that way. Even when it doesn't feel that way. And sometimes especially when it doesn't look or feel that way.