Some days, her heart is
red
and it breaks
open

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

Hallowed silence surrounds her:
fallen stars flickering amid mist-frosted grass
and autumn leaves in their myriad faded hues,
bruised petals and baubles strewn
at the base of each cold marble plinth–
all the familiar remembrances,
the bittersweet farewells she knows by heart.

She wanders ghost-like among these tombs,
an unseen witness to mute devotion and grief,
carrying the holiness of this singular night
within her heart until time circles back upon itself,
an exquisitely inconspicuous ouroboros
that brings it all around again,
the gifts the living offer to the beloved dead.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

The most basic personal need of each person
is to regard himself as a worthwhile human being.
Dr. Lawrence J. Crabb, Jr.

All my life, I have appeased bullies and stayed in toxic relationships at devastating cost to my own well-being, hoping my willingness to forgive these false friends would demonstrate my love for them and earn their love in return. In my efforts to please others, I have apologized for and/or suppressed every good thing about myself many times over: my creativity, my playfulness, my talents, my enthusiasm, even my love and compassion.

I carry these scars with me into every relationship. I’ll be the first one to admit this sometimes leads me to behave in a way that causes misunderstandings and hurt feelings on both sides, even with people who truly care about me. I try to be mindful of this and go out of my way to prevent it from happening, but somehow that tends to backfire and make matters worse. I’m still trying to understand exactly why that’s the case, but in the meantime I’m doing my best to identify and eradicate this problematic behavior.

Recently, one of these misunderstandings led to a huge explosion and the loss of a friendship that meant a lot to me. I don’t blame this person, since I did hurt them, no matter how inadvertently. However, in their pain and anger, they hurt me in return.

I can do one of the following things in response: shut down and withdraw, then spiral into depression as this event becomes another permanent wound reinforcing my feelings of worthlessness; harden my heart and never love anyone again in an effort to protect myself; or address the foundational issues within myself that have led to this situation in hopes of preventing it from happening again.

I am choosing to heal and grow. It will be a long and difficult process. These thought patterns and behaviors are deeply entrenched—some of them go back as far as thirty years, so it’s inevitable that I will slip back into them from time to time. Still, I’m determined to keep going, and I hope people will be patient with me as I work on this.

Recent events have proven I have no control over how others perceive me. I can do what I genuinely believe to be the right thing and try my best to do it in a kind and helpful way, and still have the other party make unfair assumptions about my motives and character.

This has led me to realize I can no longer base my self-worth other people’s approval. I will be my weird, creative, passionate, and loving self–and rediscover how to love myself for those oft-rejected traits. Other people’s perceptions of me are their responsibility, and I refuse to let them define me anymore. I know my heart. God knows my heart. My family and friends know my heart. That heart has been shattered for a long time, but I’m finally facing the source of that damage and rooting it out for good. Ultimately, those are the only things that matter.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

My earliest clear memory of my mother goes like this: I was four years old, and I loved to swim. My mother took us to El Salido Pool several times a week. My brother was only about a year old, so he stayed with her on the side while I frolicked around the pool pretending to be a mermaid.

El Salido didn’t have a kiddy pool, just a shallow end that gradually sloped into deeper water. About halfway across the pool, the slope dropped out sharply from three feet to six in a matter of inches. I knew this, since my mother was careful to warn me about it every time we went swimming, and I’d never been tempted to test my swimming skills where I couldn’t touch bottom. Or at least, I was never tempted until the day Brendan showed up at El Salido.

Brendan was one of the boys in my kindergarten class, and I was utterly fascinated by him. He was almost five, and he was already a foot taller than anyone else in the class. When our teacher would force us to line up in the hall outside of the bathrooms and go in two at a time, I always stood next to Brendan, staring up at him and thinking vague, little girl thoughts of awe and admiration. I was desperately in love with him, mainly because of his height.

I don’t remember whether or not Brennen ever saw me that day, but the second I spotted him, I began to follow him (at a distance) all over the pool. Brendan was just so cool, and I knew that anywhere he went, I had to go too. When he swam out into the deep end, I never once thought about how much taller than me he was. I scurried right along, straining on tiptoes to keep my head above water.

The bottom of the pool dropped out from under my feet before I realized I was in trouble. Suddenly, I was plunged into water three feet over my head. I flailed around wildly and managed to break the surface of the water, choking on huge gulps of chlorinated water. I thrashed to stay afloat, while all around me, no one paid any attention.

My swimming lessons kicked in on instinct. Still crying and coughing, I paddled and kicked toward the edge of the pool. I swallowed even more water on the way; I was starting to feel very sick, but the concrete ledge of the pool wasn’t very far away.

I reached it and clung to it with shaky fingers, coughing and sputtering in between panicked sobs. I hung onto the wall right where the deep end began—only a few feet from the lifeguard who was making eyes at her coworker across the pool. She never heard me gasping for help, and I began to sob in bitter fear. If the lifeguard wasn’t going to save me, who would?

Then I turned my head toward the shallow end of the pool and saw my mother rushing through the water, my little brother still held in one arm. She reached me and gathered me to her with the other arm, then carried me out of the pool swiftly and calmly.

Looking back now, it doesn’t seem as impressive as it did then. I was never in any serious danger—after all, I had already managed to get to the side of the pool, where I would have eventually recovered my breath and climbed out safely. And any mother would have done the same for her child. Still, it has stuck with me all these years: the image of my mother striding through the crowded waters to save me, the only one to come to my rescue in a pool full of people who should have noticed my distress.

When my father died, my mom asked us to pick out a Bible verse that described her so that the headstone could be completed—his name and hers, with a short verse each to depict their lives, so that when she followed him, she would be able to rest beside him. My brother and I were stumped. How do you describe your parents, the people that raised you, loved you unconditionally, and made you who you are in fifteen words or less, especially when those words are written by someone else?

So the deadline for the epitaph passed and she was forced to choose a verse herself, something from Psalms or Proverbs, something about kindness or gentleness or compassion. I think it hurt her that her children didn’t know her well enough to find a way to describe her. Even now, I still think about it, about the fifteen words that define who my mother is, and how our silence must still hurt her.

How do I define my mother? She is certainly kind and gentle—sometimes too gentle for her own good. But there is so much more to her, too. Only a year after my father died, I started college and my brother had back surgery to correct his scoliosis. The rods in his back caused intense muscle spasms so painful that he was out of school for a year and a half. It took dozens of doctors to properly diagnose his pain, and all that time, my mother was scrambling to get him home tutoring and dealing with some very nasty people at the high school. A year and a half of me not being home to help out, of hearing all her friends disparage her best efforts, of watching her son struggle in agony to do anything at all, and she bore it all with an amazing, quiet strength.

That quiet strength is what strikes me most about my mother. It is a strength that is often close to the breaking point, a strength that has nearly been overwhelmed by doubt and grief more times than I can count. Nothing is more painful than to have your mother call you when you are 2,000 miles away and listen to her sob hopelessly over the phone.

But she has never given up. Somehow, even as she reaches the very edge of sanity, she always finds the courage and willpower to fight through one more day. Her strength lies deep within her, beneath her gentle, meek exterior and the very real pain she experiences as she faces these endless trials. It is silent, but it is resilient and powerful and it never fails. It is the same strength I saw in her when she carried my brother and I out of the pool that day, holding us together as she does even now.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

It is dusk, the evening of the day that I should have arrived in Wenatchee for a week of the most beautiful kind of solitude: just me, a good book, a bit of novel editing, some wine and cheese and pasta, the Bavarian village of Leavenworth three miles away, and the Wenatchee Valley with its apple orchards and towering ice cream colored cliffs (chocolate, vanilla, pistachio, even cherry).

But I am not in Wenatchee, and I feel lonely. Lonely for the friend who could not come, lonely for some quality time by myself–and how can you be lonely for yourself when you are yourself? But I am all the same, and lonely for the upcoming few days when the husband and stepson will go camping for some father/son time and I will still be here, alone in this house, this terribly mundane and claustrophobic world of mine.

The sprinkler is on in the backyard and the evening is so quiet, the street construction by our house done for the day but still keeping all traffic at a distance. The lilies I planted for LilianaLu, my sweet baby bunny who died three years ago this Thursday, are preparing to bloom for the first time since her death. (Until the buds this year, I thought I had accidentally bought some nice but rather plain ornamental grass in her memory.) The sky is darkening fast, but the beads of water on her flowers glint like jewels, so I dash back inside barefoot for the camera, too lazy to grab the tripod, and take a dozen blurry photos just to get one that looks pretty decent. There was a triple rainbow the day she died, the only triple rainbow I have ever seen.

Hello, world. You are vast and wide and beautiful, and I want to know all of you, travel your lands, swim in your seas, name all the stars in your skies. It is difficult to know that I never will, that I will probably never be able to wander more than a single day’s drive from home. But you are beautiful still, and vast no matter how limited my view.

So I will raise a glass to you tonight in the confines of my fenced-in backyard, just as I would have sipped wine on the porch of an old farmhouse in the Wenatchee Valley with the mountains at my back and an apple orchard below me. And someday it will come natural to me and I will no longer need a lily to remind me: even in my small, limited world there is beauty. God is still here, and He is good.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

My husband and I recently started looking into buying a home, and a funny thing started happening as we walked through the houses with our realtor: we got snippy with each other over stuff that didn’t matter. I’ve heard all the stories about couples fighting over whether or not to buy a particular house, but I honestly wasn’t expecting that to happen to us.

For the most part my husband and I want the same things in a home, and we’re pretty good at finding compromises to make us both happy. The odd thing was that we didn’t fight over anything big–we didn’t even fight over anything related to the houses we were looking at. Just tiny, stupid matters like how hot it was last summer and which one of us is more allergic to lilacs.

Maybe it was because we were tired and a bit sore after walking through house after house, or maybe it was just the stress of trying to find a good home in our price range. Or maybe it was because we both know that we can’t afford what we truly want.

Ultimately, we want to leave the city. I dream of modest acreage with a view of the mountains, somewhere I can indulge my love for nature. I want to be able to lie in my yard at night and see the hazy river of the Milky Way stretching across an ocean of numberless, jeweled stars. I want to be surprised by wild deer, turkeys, and quail sauntering past my bedroom window from time to time. I want sunshine and quietude and plenty of room to roam, things to combat the terrible claustrophobia that grips me on even the brightest days in the city.

Honestly, I think it’s because of how I first fell in love with the Pacific Northwest: in a place exactly like that, where all I had to do to drink in the beauties of nature was sit still and watch the world around me. That serenity, that calm joy, has become my definition of home, and I yearn for it terribly. But a place like that is simply out of our reach right now, so we must settle for making a home in the city, with all its noise and graceless appeal.

And yet I don’t want to settle. There’s a lesson I learned the day I finally released my grip on the central Texas landscape of my childhood and allowed myself to fall head-over-heels for the Pacific Northwest. It’s the kind of thing you hear a lot, but the truth of it never quite sinks in until you experience it for yourself: home is what you make of it.

It’s not a mountain view, fresh air, and watching the stars at night. It’s not four bedrooms and two baths with a big kitchen and a cute nook for the dining table. It’s loving where you are, no matter where that happens to be, and it’s loving the ones you have made your life with. It’s repainting the walls your favorite shade of blue, inviting friends over for dinner, laughter and tears, memories forged from the most simple and ordinary things.

And so I have set aside the dream of leaving the city for now. It will be there later, when the time is right. For now, it is enough to know that I can choose to be happy wherever I am. Home is not a specific place on a map: it’s an attitude, a state of mind, a condition of the heart.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain