I’m a list-maker. I just love making lists.
I love that feeling of putting a check beside a line, of crossing out a line. It gives me a thrill.
When it comes to dealing with the though stuff of life, I want to put it in a list too. I want to deal with it and get it over with so that I can put a check beside that line.
But it just so happens to be that you can’t deal with everything by throwing it in a list and checking it of. A pity.
I started writing baby names in my journal when I was 13.
99% of them girl names.
I made it my mission to repeat my favorite names to my husband before we were even married, to get him used to the ones he didn’t like.
It worked (yay me), but we didn’t need the girl name for the first, the second or the third baby.
And I had the hardest time with that.
I brought it to God and tried to leave it there, I read this wonderful book about how God redeems our pain, and wrote down in my journal that I was […]
In the evening I sit on the steps that go from the kitchen down to the living room, and I want to take a picture.
For Instagram, you know. This moment is perfect, and I want to remember it. If perfect food goes on Instagram, shouldn’t perfect moments?
Because there is Mike, with Caleb on his feet, dancing to Billy Joel’s Piano Man.
Gabriel jumps from couch to couch to coffee table.
Abel dances around his daddy and two brothers, running and skipping.
But Caleb’s worn out sweatpants are sagging down. His t-shirt is dirty. Then there’s Gabriel who still has a considerable amount of food on his face, with a generous helping of snot wiped over and around it.
Abel’s one sock is falling off and the other one is pulled up high over his pants.
I don’t have a white wall, and they always do so well on Instagram.
So I sit here, looking as hard as I can. Sitting in the 3-D picture and it’s going viral in my heart.
To this perfect moment that looks so incredibly imperfect.
I send a laugh to Gabriel, who is telling me about the dragon he will kill. Dancing and […]
I’d like to have energy and feel great. That is to say, I wish I did not have fibromyalgia.
That is to say, I wish I did not have continuous headaches, I wish I did not have a sore throat and earache 6 out of 10 days. I wish I didn’t feel like I was burning right under my skin down to my bones on the worse days. Like a huge elastic band snapped back and stung all over on the better days.
I wish I didn’t have lower back pain, shoulder and neck pain and I wish I didn’t have sharp pains in random places and I wish I wasn’t exhausted and feverish-feeling all the time. I wish stirring porridge and mashing potatoes and lifting children and fastening seat belts and sitting and standing up and not lying in bed all day with a hot water bottle didn’t hurt and exhaust me quite so much.
I wish I didn’t have muscles that tell me I have an infection that really is just a figment of their imagination. Who knew muscles had an imagination?
I wish that even though I do have those things, I didn’t have the depressing feeling […]
Sunny summer afternoons. I close my eyes and I am lying beside a little creek that happily rumbles on by. Little flowers brighten the grass.
A cottage stands a few meters away, doors open, and inside the teapot stands, making a little chimney of damp up in the little kitchen.
A rabbit is eating clovers unders some bushes right behind me and I don’t move, not wanting to scare if off.
Butterflies and birds sing in the trees, the sun shines and everything sparkles in a calm, bright sort of way.
?
A loud crash sends me running to the kitchen to see what it is that broke and there it was, my most favoritest teacup, in a whole lot of pieces.
I gather the pieces and just before putting them in a bag to throw away, I change my mind and put them on the counter, consider glueing them together.
My smartness and brains and remarkable intelligence all tell me that is not possible. So I do what anyone would do in such a predicament.
I Google it.
Pinterest has some very pretty links, to make jewelry and mosaic platters out of broken china.
But then I need […]
At the end of the sand, the beginning of the water, and the water comes and goes. Feet in the wet sand and the wave comes back, covering my feet.
Waiting on the next wave, staring at the blue sky and the clouds far away. Seagulls fly there and come back and I want to ask them what they found there, far away in the golden sky. I can almost feel my wings as I imagine flying there but they are missing and so I stand and wait. I don’t know what I wait for, really. It’s always something different, something small and insignificant yet important to me at the moment. Underneath, surrounding that, there is a mysterious longing for something I don’t know and something I haven’t seen yet. It’s on a child and a house and security. A husband who comes home, the oven timer that goes of. The washing machine that’s done so I can empty it out. That vacation and that meeting, a visit from a friend. It’s on a home in Heaven, in which I believe and look forward too, for which I received a longing, built into me and wrapped with mystery […]
Abel is going to fight lions and Gabriel is going to save the world like Superman.
A little later they are scared of the dark and they don’t get the discrepancy in that.
I used to plan to go and save orphans, do big things and make everything better.
Now I clean the floor and I don’t know what to cook tonight. I am impatient with my boys who disturb me in my fretting about food. In my subconscious, I assume I will become patient in an orphanage full of children. I will most likely undergo a character transformation on the plane ride there. I must have figured that was how it would go when I was younger. Because although I never showed many signs of patience with my younger siblings, in the orphanage of my dreams I was almost a saint.
Walking on water. As if I can only do that when I’m somewhere else, doing something great and noble and good. It has no use whatsoever to do it right here and right now.
It is quite sad, of course, that there are children who have no mom and do dad. I would be totally awesome […]
Summer VacationLong summer days, running through the grass barefoot. Playing in the sandbox. Sea, sun, reading books.These first days of our belgian summer vacation aren’t all that summery and idylic, like the slow-motion images of my childhood that play in my mind, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be as much fun.We can read inside, on the couch, just as well. We are big fans of this book:
We have a sponsor child as well, and I think Abel finally gets what it means. This book is about a boy named Abel, and our Abel loves that. Abel lives in Kenia, where our sponsor child Leperan happens to live as well. The drawings are unbelievably pretty, and I’m thinking about getting another book to take some drawings out and frame them.
I would like to involve the boys more in writing to Leperan, but until now they didn’t understand what it was about. I think they might be ready for it now.
It’s my own fault, really. I originally sponsored a little girl, but her family left the Compassion project and because of some slowness of the letter getting to me, they automatically assigned me a boy. And […]
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