Stuck...

Something is wrong with me these last few days.  I have been quick to get angry and frustrated.  Yesterday, after searching vigorously for over an hour to find Madeline's sippy cup I just started crying and feeling like anger was literally bubbling inside of me!  I called Evan and explained to him how I was feeling...how could a cup just simply disappear?  I had looked everywhere, I had vacuumed and put all their toys away, and I had even searched in places where she would never go...the cup had simply disappeared!  I hated feeling out of control and unorganized...I HATE losing things.  Evan wasn't in the mood for my hysterics and called me "crazy"!  I hung up on him and promptly said something I was glad he would never hear!  I was alone in our bedroom so the kids hadn't heard me yelling and crying either.  Ugh, what was the big deal?  Aside from my feeling out of control!!

It started again today.  I took the kids outside and it seemed like every 17 seconds I was telling someone to stop throwing sand or putting it in their hair.  Eli went missing for a few minutes and would not come when I was calling (okay, screaming) for him.  Madeline REFUSED to SIT to eat her lunch...then decided licking the trash can was more appetizing.  After I had told her "NO!" and moved her away from it..she got up and waddled right back over to it, looked over at me...AND LICKED IT AGAIN!  I threw my hands up and said that was it she was going for an early nap.  I couldn't handle any more disobedience...the anger was bubbling up again!

I usually have no patience when I am tired.  Maddie still doesn't sleep through the night.  This morning she was up around 4:30 clapping and getting her leg stuck in the rails of the crib (her new talent I suppose).  I just can't seem to get over my exhaustion and still find a way to be a good mother...one who does not spend 87% of the day in tears, regret, and screaming!!!  I feel like something is wrong with me...but what??

I feel like an incredible failure...I feel like my mother.  My children can't possibly be enjoying me and I have to admit that I haven't enjoyed them over the last few days.  I feel like I live for their bed time or at least for when Evan gets home so that he can be the bad guy!  I don't know what is blocking me...or whatever this is!!  I don't know what to do to get rid of this!!  I have even resorted to taking something to help me sleep so that I could feel rested the next morning...as long as Madeline stays asleep all night!

Sometimes I want to live in a picture.  Where the smiling moments are frozen and the kids are still...I wonder if I could sleep with my eyes open!!

He is with you

It is always a sore subject with me when someone puts a limit or suggests frustration over another's grief and the amount of time it takes one person to the next to "let it go". What a shame. I have come to see that true grief...grief that just leaves you completely raw and empty of tears of energy...of a will to get out of bed...that kind of grief is/can be a beautiful thing. The ultimate truth is that God is in control whether we accept that or even trust it. God sees the places inside us we hide from even the ones dearest to us...those places where we feel our grief, our hearts. Let grief sort itself out for AS LONG as it takes...God meets us there. He meets us in the place where there is nothing left....the place where God's truth is to our left and our right...the place where and when we are ready to let God fill the emptiness that grief has left behind. What is beautiful is that God lets us run away always overshadowing us (just like I do as Maddie runs down the driveway...I know she will/might fall and mommy will be there in a split second to scoop her up...an actual joy as a parent. Knowing your kisses wipe away the pain=JOY!!). Why wouldn't God feel the same way. He watches us run away and waits patiently for us to fall and He'll scoop us up and dry the tears...right!!! I know where my grief will lead me...I know the path...what I learn along the way is priceless. Didn't Solomon ask God for wisdom over anything else in the entire universe? Wisdom or life lessons...let me fill myself up with the things no one can take from me!!

This leads me to Ecclesiastes 3:1-8..."There is an opportune time to do things, a right time for everything on earth. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to tear down and a time to build up. A time to cry and a time to laugh. A time to grieve and a time to dance. A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones. A time to embrace and time to turn away. A time to tear and a time to mend. A time to be quiet and a time to speak. A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace."

I heard yet another song on the radio based on these verses. It makes me think that there are so many people in grief. I think in our humanity we are uncomfortable when people are not happy or when they cry. For whatever reason we feel a rushing need to make their worlds whole again. Our compassion is often an afterthought when the uncomfortable situation isn't in front of us...usually by then it is too late and the damage has been done to the relationship or otherwise. Just another reason not to count on man to fill our empty spaces, huh?



He Is With You byMandisa

There's a time to live
And a time to die
There's a time to laugh
And a time to cry


There's a time for war
And a time for peace
There's a hand to hold
In the worst of things
In the worst of things


He is with you when your faith is dead
And you can't even get out of bed
Or your husband doesn't kiss you anymore
He is with you when your baby's gone
And your house is still
And your hearts are stone
Crying "God what'd you do that for?"
He is with you


There's a time for yes
And a time for no
There's a time to be angry
And a time to let it go
There's a time to run
And a time to face it
There's love to seek
In all of this
Through all of this


He is with you in the conference room
When the world is coming down on you
And your wife and kids don't know you anymore
And He is with you in the ICU when the doctors don't know what to do
And it scares you to the core
He is with you


We may weep for a time but joy will come in the morning
The morning light


He is with you when your kids are grown
When there's too much space and you feel alone
And your worried if you got it right or wrong
Yes He is with you when you've given up on ever finding your true love
Someone who feels like home
He is with you


When nothing else is left and you take your final breath
He is with you

He is with you

Hello ladies! I promise to blog soon...been a long month. I wanted to wish the moms (and even the teachers) out there a blessed Mother's Day!
I am so proud of myself for being able to saturate myself in the joy of being a mother on mother's day. My past...and my mother...would desire to make me feel bitter or guilty tomorrow but that won't happen. I have no regrets inside of me for where my relationship (or lack of) is with my mother. I have come as close to her as I felt safe in doing and protected my children in the meantime. I don't really miss her. Sad, I know but I don't feel the loss anymore. The ladies reading this have filled my mother void...and I am deeply grateful.
On a lighter note, there may be one regret I have in the "dealings" with my mother...I never got her macaroni and cheese recipe. I could kick myself for that...it was delish!!!

My scars are showing

I woke up this morning feeling like the evil inside of me was up to my eyeballs and soon my husband and everyone would see it...how long can I keep hiding what I am?  I don't know where this is coming from!  It might be the stress of having a visitor or it could be the 2:30 am wake up call from Maddie!  I get this way when I am tired.  All the surface things can't seem to hold up and I feel stripped down without a defense or a support.

I once again find myself in a battle with the in-laws.  Diane can't understand why I don't trust everyone that she trusts.  I am not sure what in our relationship ever pointed to my being able to trust in abundance!  In her eyes this is wrong.  I am wrong!  I can forgive the past and I am closer than ever...but why would I ever forget it?  For one thing it helps other people for me to remember what it feels like to feel pain so deep you feel like it has become you.  Our pasts create a commodore and a bond...a very special bond.  As we move beyond the past we carry each other along over the good days and the bad.  No, I will never forget...I will never be normal and I like that.  I trust the woman who read these posts.  There is no doubt about that.  I just get so so so so tired of being wrong.  I get so exhausted from trying to live up to standards that are unattainable.  I am never going to be sweet, quiet, or sensitive like my sisters-in-law.  It would be so refreshing to be told things that are good about me...things I am doing right.  There has to be something...right?!

Having my sister here, although exhausting, is quite validating.  I don't think I have ever cooked so many meals back to back in my life!  But I watch her go about her day.  I see that she doesn't offer to do dishes or help me in the kitchen...now that doesn't bother me or shock me at all.  I was and still am the same way.  To us, those things were punishments.  In our house chores were...like breathing.  They were 24/7 and very tedious and stressful.  Often times me were made to repeat them for whatever reason she could pull out of her manipulative mind.  Chores caused fear and anxiety.  They were solid proof we were worthless..."I can't even clean the floor right!"  Because chores like these were and are still saturated in anxiety...we avoid them if there is a chance for failure.  I have been accused more than once in the Warden family of avoiding "work".  Try explaining to someone why washing dishes makes you feel like you are going to have a panic attack!!  They will never understand that.  So, yes, watching my sister is validating.  She also just doesn't think that way.  We were never given a chance to offer to help.  It just never came up...we were violently told to clean this and clean that.  We were told we were disgusting and made to clean up after ourselves...thus the feeling of being a greasy, smelly, bloated bum was attached to household chores...um, again, try to relay that feeling to a "normal" person!  I can recall that most Saturdays we were woken very early by my mother screaming at us to get downstairs and clean up the house or to clean our rooms...vacuum, scrub the floor, do the dishes...(is anyone else flashing back to Cinderella?).  Talk about anxiety and fear from sun up to sun down.  The weekends were the worst because our days didn't have the interruption of school.  This is where I come from...and now I try to live in a world with expectations weighing heavy.  I often feel like I am running a race with only one leg...but no one can see I am missing a leg or they just don't care.  "She's had all this time to recover lets start living life like the rest of us!"  I can't live like the author of the Tutu blog in the real world or the world of the Warden's.  I had found a balance though.  I can pretend or just keep my feelings out of my interactions with them.  Since I don't really want to share that part of my heart with them...it was working and it felt good.  I pretended to be normal and I even felt normal.  I came here when things hurt me or bothered me...worked through it...and kept moving on.  Am I wrong here?  It kept the peace!  We even spent a night at Joel and Angie's house and there was NO PROBLEMS!!!  Can you believe it???  I separated the "tutu" in me from the "Warden" in me...and it was peaceful.  I know this isn't trusting the Warden's...but I say again, it was peaceful!  I don't know that I want to move away from this system!  I fill myself up with these posts and your responses.  I am just filled up in every corner.  It feels so unsafe to let the Warden's back in...because I will mess up again and I will feel wrong again.  Ugh, I don't want to go back there.  What would you do?

A restoration unforseen

Most of you know that my sister Rebecca is in Toccoa for a few weeks.  I am sitting in my living room right now.  Everyone is asleep.  My son is curled up on one couch...and my sister is stretched out on the other couch.  I stared at them for a long while.  It doesn't seem...probable.  All that has been suffered over her life and mine...compared, we should not be so calm.  We should no be so easy going.  The weight we have each carried would bring the strongest man to his knees...but yet here we are, together, sharing a roof...sharing meals...sharing my children.  Restoration, unexpected and unforseen.  Last night, after a long but fun day, we all struggled to keep our eyes open.  She laid her head on my shoulder.  I had forgotten how touchy she was.  I am not someone who likes to be touched..at all!!  Anyway, she laid her head on my shoulder and I thought, "This has been too easy!".  We picked up where we left off.  It seems as if the last 5 years has not separated us at all.  Oddly, it prevokes a small unnerving feeling in me.  I am not the sister she saw 5 years ago.  Does she notice that?  Should that bother me?  It won't ruin this time...but I wonder if all I have been through in the last 5 years makes the difference to the ones who matter most. 

She arrived Wednesday morning early.  She had never met my kids so when I had to go in and take Eli to the potty she walked into the kids room.  Eli saw her and did a total (and totally obvious) double take.  We just laughed together.  I don't know that my kids have seen many black people...and I can assure you no black people in their room at night.  She enjoys them so much.  They are still warming up to having to share their house and their mom.  Maddie will snuggle with Aunt Becca a few times a day!  That makes Becca's day...of course<3

Say it isn't so!

On Sunday our small group at church got to talking about what we thought Hell really was or what it would be like.  It was such an interesting topic...it inevitably lead to what Heaven would be like.  Since no one knows the exact details of these places it leaves so much to the imagination.  I wonder if that is what God intended so that each place ends up being beyond our imaginations. 

Our group leader asked us to describe what we thought hell would be like in one word.  I felt like I had a lot to say...as if my life in abuse and even before recovery was a small taste of hell.  How could I sum up all of that in one word?  There was pain, anger, confusion...but what would it be like to live in that "state" for all eternity?  What would it be like to have no more hope...not even a small spec...not even the hope that tomorrow wouldn't be as bad?  Sorrow....complete sorrow.  That is my one word to describe what Hell would be for me...sorrow.  A sorrow that was all within me...a sorrow I could feel in my bones.  I don't have to worry about sorrow like that!  People I know though may have nothing but eternal sorrow!

Someone mentioned the phrase in the Bible, "There will be a new Heaven and a new Earth".  It was suggested that we may very well be living in a place similar to where we are now...and all that that entails but with new bodies (PRAISE GOD!!!).  As this person went on a scary thought hit me.  Where would God be?  I knew the facts but I had to ask.  Wouldn't God be where we (the saved) were?  I was reassured but what a scary thought.  Isn't that what this life is for?  I struggle and I fight in this life knowing that I will rest in heaven.  I don't fight to earn a spot in heaven.  It doesn't work that way.  I fight to "convince" my children that God is worth the fight.  I fight to show my sister what love looks like.  I fight to light the path for the rest in pain looking at a future of sorrow.  After I enter heaven I can do no more...but I wait there for my children and there children...and there children...  I have this one life to convince others that the sorrows of this life are only temporary.  We feel pain and dark days always come.  Take joy in what you'll learn, eventually, from those trials and look forward to your time to rest and wait for the rewards...the lives you've touched.

Today was a good start to my Easter weekend! I was getting the kids dressed after their baths this morning. Eli picked out his shirt and started putting it on by himself. I turned to finish Maddie's hair and all the sudden I hear my son say, "I di yit!"...translation, "I did it!". Clear as day to me my son said a full sentence!! I pour the praise on heavily. I asked him to put his pants on. I handed him the right ones and turned again to put Maddie's shoes on (multitasking queen!!!!). All the sudden I heard the same, "I di yit!". He ran up to me with his pants on backwards...I just laughed and praised him again! He probably had no clue I was more excited for his words than him dressing himself. He has been dressing himself for a while but today it just seemed...better! He could be proud of himself and communicate his accomplishment!