I received an email last night from my cousin, asking me to please and and finally return my grandmother’s phone calls. It accused me of not being aware that life is fleeting and can be full of regret if you don’t take opportunities to love people when you can. It said again and again that it was not trying to be offensive, just trying to help, dear, just trying to help. It tried to reassure me that there are still people in this family that care about me.

I found it pretty presumptuous. Not in the least because my gramma hasn’t called me in a good month and a half. But also because no one on my mom’s side of the family calls me ever, at all, for any reason, unless they guilting me into doing something or want to rub in what kind of wonderful people they are. Up on the gossip and doing their good deed. If, that is, by “good deed” they mean speaking in hushed tones and clucking their tongues in mournful disdain. My life? Is none of their business.

Yes, I have a problem with bitterness.

I’m actually just becoming aware of it, so thank God for His mysterious ways. If you’d asked me last week if I was a bitter person, I would have said absolutely not and spouted some meandering life lesson about letting go of the past. Most of my intimates can tell you I’ve demonstrated such at some time or another in life. Yet still, just reading just those few well intentioned lines made me livid. I felt imposed upon and exposed and misjudged and misunderstood and lied to all at the same time.

If I may exhaust my vitriol, I don’t think my extended family still cares for me. I don’t think it matters to them one way or the other what I do or whether I ever see them again, so long as they can feel sorry for me about decisions I’ve made or successes I have yet to have. I’m speaking about them as a unit, not as individuals. Because as individuals, they are always polite, always polished, always chuckling lightly at some joke and laying the coats on their beds. But I’m not one of them, am I? I’m the guest, not the host.  Not the Friend or the Sister or even the beloved Relation. Just the Guest.

Even that line (I typed “lie” at first on accident-do my fingers know something Idon’t?), about there still being people in the family who love me and my sister is alienating. There are people in the group that care for you, O Out Of The Group One. You are being honored by the collective. Will you, can’t you, won’t you please be nice? Can’t you just come over and be valiant and upstanding and obviously pretending to be as perfect as we actually are?

Ugh.

I know what this stems from. I’ve been angry at them for a long time and it’s simply festered over the years. All that time my mother was so ill, all that time her body was wasting away-O goodly, kindly ones-where were you? Where were you while she was suffering? You only came to watch her die, dragging your mass of bodies into my and my sister and my father and my grandmother’s private space. She was ours, because we loved her, and we watched her life either from the beginning of our own or the beginning of hers, and we saw everything she grew from and into. We saw her shrink in ways we had never imagined after she had spent the whole rest of her life growing in strength and wisdom and promise. We cleaned her up and took her out and went to Wendy’s to buy her chicken sandwiches and sit with her, and talk with her, and breathe her same air. We were the ones she called to lift her up when her body began failing her. We were the ones who bound her feet at night.

And where were you? Except for three days after they had assured us that nothing else could be done, sitting in a stale hospice room with your four hundred pint sized relations who were too young to come and look at death like that, whom you sent to go and color, whom you told without saying so that the slipping away of my mother’s life wasn’t something that was worth their notice, that you knew they couldn’t sit down and pay attention to? And afterward, with your arms outstretched toward my sister and I, to ask for a piano for your church.

It isn’t as though my cousin is to blame for these things. She wasn’t even a part of most of them. She isn’t to blame for anything that happened at hospice or afterward and neither is her brother. And neither are the rest of them really. I know I’m being unfair. I’m being grossly unfair. Part of me wants to object and complain that they never talk to me about her. And the other part of me knows that if they did, I would inwardly rebel and shout that they didn’t know who my mother was at all and how dare they make presumptions. I can’t be pleased . . .

But God will ease.

I am praying for strength to let all these things go. To stop clutching at them with righteous indignation. The truth is no one knows what to do with something like that, and that we all make mistakes, and that we all overlook our own. The Truth is that if Christ can ask his Father to forgive for not knowing, I should certainly be able to forgive for doing no worse than perhaps I would have done if I were they and they, I. I praise God that He can make so many lessons out of loss. I praise Him that He keeps revealing and healing and working on me. He certainly knows I need it.

When I started writing, I did so because I was angry. I’m not anymore. God has such a particular way of absorbing the thrashing of my soul until it is spent and soothing me with the duties that I have to preform, regardless of the actions of anyone else. He is . . . He is . . .

He is marvelous.

It’s nine in the morning and I haven’t slept yet. I can’t seem to sleep for anything lately. I know what the reason is. It’s that even though I’m trying not to pay attention, even though I put it out of my head, somehow my body is recognizing that this . . . is coming up on a year since it happened.

My body is making me think about my mother.

I look around me and see all these nice, kind people who are certainly as entitled as anyone would be to their families and suddenly it all seems so grossly unfair. It feels grossly unfair that some people get to have grandchildren. It feels grossly unfair that some people get to have parents. It feels grossly unfair that my daughter will never get to know my mother. It all just seems so terribly unfair.

I know it isn’t. The Lord is sovereign. I know that. And part of me can look at this and be pleased that she isn’t suffering anymore, not only in her illness but with any of the discomforts of just being human. She’s never tired anymore, or achy, she’s never hungry or cold-that makes me grateful. But sometimes I feel awful and rebellious and broken wondering why she had to be sick at all, and for it to be then, and to have to die that way. I know there’s purpose in it. I take comfort in that. To trust the Lord in one thing requires trusting Him in all things and I do, really. I just have these moments sometimes.I am having quite a few lately.

I keep thinking that these rushing feelings of loss will dissipate. And they have in some ways-in frequency if not in form. Sometimes I feel so sorry for myself it’s pathetic. And the Lord is patient in that, which is so gracious. He has yet to give me the supernatural talking to that Job got, although reading through it I see that it still applies.

I feel like a cavern. I feel like empty space. My heart aches.

And so I did something foolish. I reached out to someone in an inappropriate way because I wanted to heal my heart too quickly and with the wrong medicine. In the blush of morning, I am blushing myself. The truth is a boy can’t fix this. The truth is I already knew that, though part of me still wants to be held.

It’s an awkward thing to admit, but there it is. The truth is also that I don’t know how to be interested in anyone anymore. These things, the adoption, the death of my mom, the loss of my friendship with Simon, they’ve all taken a toll on me and have apparently manifested in simply not being able to have my head turned by anyone. I’m disappointed about it. But at this moment, perhaps the cavern is too deep to be filled no matter who might try. Perhaps the Lord is telling me to let Him heal this first.

I am sighing with the breeze. The morning is growing stale. I will try my hand at sleep once more.

I am small.

I’m just so small.

I’m this tiny creature. I don’t have the benefit of seeing it all from the beginning. I don’t have the benefit of seeing through to the end. I am just this tiny little thing.

I am one of seven billion. I am one of four. I forgot that for a moment, that I am one of four. And in that new one, after the loss of the other one, perhaps the promise of all this will be seen.

But I must remind myself of how very miniscule I am. Because sometimes I get to thinking that as special as He considers me is how special I am by my own merits, and that simply isn’t true.

Do I ask God why He’s done this? Do I recognize how small this thing is? Do I ask, knowing how small it is, but still longing to understand?

I do.

There are times when it is difficult not to worry if I’m doing this right. There are times when waiting on God to move seems like sitting on my hands and I just want to Do Something. To make it better? To make it worse? Sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter. I want to Do Something, I want to make my way in the world.

But I can’t, being tiny as I am. And I don’t know the plans that He has for me, and how I can lead myself astray. I don’t know the way He will work or how things are being brought to fruition throughout this quiet and still time. But . . . sometimes I am pained still, knowing that this is how it must be.

This is the Lord’s doing. It is marvelous in our eyes.

I’m supposed to meet Sarah and her parents and Natalie and Sean for dinner tonight, and I’m afraid. I don’t know what my problem is. I should be happy to see her-it’s been a while. And I am, I really am. But I’m also scared, nervous, anxious. This is all new ground for me. I don’t know how to do this. And she’s at that age where she’s getting very attached and it’s difficult for me to even think about being around her when she doesn’t even know me.

(more…)

There’ s nothing noble in

Being corpulent and spent.

Looking like a moody marshmallow or maybe

A sad sack of potatoes,

Who really cares?

You’re too broad to be narrow like this.

But despair looks lovely

On the slender and the slim

Who sit with bony knees uplifting bony elbows

With a board flat abdomen that curves,

The head in the hands is only the point that comes at the bottom

Of the body’s question mark.

And the question is:

What’s the point?

I want to run away. I don’t want to be here anymore. I can imagine myself in places all over the world, sitting, accepting, some place that is quiet and strange to me. I can see myself breathing out my days with some sense of . . . peace? With some sense of rest.

I can’t sleep at night. I either refuse to go to bed because of some free floating anxiety or I wake up again and again and can’t fall back asleep. Grief is choking me. It creeps up on me while I lay in the dark with my eyes closed and suddenly I hear my mind say, “My mother is dead.” It’s as if I just realized it. I weep. My mother is dead.

(more…)

If you happen to be unfamiliar with the term “to winge”, let me please explain. To winge is to whine excessively, to become so frustrated with one’s circumstances that one is paralysed from the top lip up and the bottom lip down. To winge is to make a thorough annoyance of oneself based on consistent and usually ridiculous complaints issuing forth from one’s mouth, preferably with an alternating, but always very high, pitch. To winge is to take a long hard look at the cruel world you live in, stick out your tongue, and call it a meanie face. To plant your feet firmly on the ground, cross your arms, and pout like a three year old.

It is this practice that I would like to demonstrate for you now.

(more…)

he said: “This is Step Three. Step One was to stop hating you. Step Two was to start talking to you again. Step Three is building a friendship. And that’s what I’m doing.”

I said: “Wow. You should give a seminar.”

I thought: “I know you’ve been hurt. But will you ever see what He’s made me? Will you? It’s a matter of will at this point, you know.”

He said: “You have forgiveness, but you also have consequence. And not everyone is going to see what I see when they look at you.”

————————————————————————————————–

he said: “I don’t want to get distracted. I’m just trying to sit back and see what He has for me, if you know what I mean.”

I said: “That’s wonderful. I want to do that too.”

I thought: “What He has for you may not be what you want Him to have. What He has for you is up to Him.”

He said: “I told you before. I have a purpose in this. I have a purpose in everything.”

————————————————————————————————–

he said: “I have to think about it. I just don’t know.”

I said: “Tell me one way or the other. You don’t not know. If you don’t want to, then you don’t want to. If it isn’t yes, it’s no.”

I thought: “You’re afraid and you have every right to be. You’re afraid, but you won’t get any further until you aren’t.”

He said: “Forget everything else. My will will be done.”

—————————————————————————————————

(more…)