I was talking to my friend Ann and she described the boost we get from creativity and connecting as a spiritual airlift and I was all,

YES. That’s the best thing to say and yes.

Then one night I was mixing baby cereal and Elsie didn’t think I was doing it fast enough, and with her teething fuss fussing she was MAD. So while I stirred I started lip-syncing and dancing to the music that was playing in the kitchen. She stopped crying and started watching, wide-eyed and smiling.

I said to myself, Ellie would love this, because I think about Ellie and her struggle with cancer all the time. I think about how she’s too far away. And I know how much she loves it when I do weird things, so I knew that if she was there in the kitchen, she’d be dancing and laughing with us.

Ellie and Elsie have this connection that can’t be explained in any other way than something that is born in heart and soul. (Remember how Ellie is the person who received Elsie Jane’s first real smiles? Like upon meeting her?) So I just love how this idea was born out of a moment with Elsie Jane, with Ellie on my heart.

I knew Ellie could obviously use a spiritual airlift (or many), so I asked some friends to help me make it come to life. The result is what came together through our silly and Ellie-loving hearts.

Ellie,

The way we care about you is proof that we can live a hundreds of miles away and have most of our communication and connection online, and still come to know and love someone in a very real way. So. Here’s the ridiculous and heartfelt video born out of a moment with EJ.

Your friends? We’re with you…

(if you have trouble with this stalling, it may play better if you push play and then push pause and let it buffer up a little bit and then push play again)

Operation Spiritual Airlift from Heather King on Vimeo.

{Featuring: Jessica Bern~Ann Imig~Maggie~Eileen~Becky~Smacksy and Lee and family}

This was totally not possible without the editing skills and immeasurable patience of someone who shall remain nameless because his humility will not allow the praise. {No, it is not my husband. Although, he was also supportive by listening to me constantly talk about this. ahem.}

How do you do this?

I am on week three of four of solo parenting.
I’ve hit that wall in which I can still kind of handle it but I can’t handle the waffle getting stuck in the toaster.

Right now
the teething sleep deprivation
is so severe I’m not sure at all ever what I’m doing exactly.

Just getting him to school and then him to school and feeding and wiping and trying.

Then I want to throw the toaster and I follow that I’m losing it feeling with
guilt
of course
because look…

Just LOOK at what I have…

They are sooooo…

THEM, you know?

When I am solo, we all move down the totem pole, so to speak. No time for all of our needs or for the family utopia in my head to even come close to existing and I suppose this is good in the grander scheme of things

but it is still a constant tug at my heart.

I mean, the more the merrier and the more the less of me to go around
into all the many spaces in home and hearts.

Even when we grown ups are both here
it feels a little like being tied up
spinning ’round with rope wrapping

and tightening.

Just trying to get it all done, meet the needs inside too few hours that feel so long. I love them so much and I just can’t keep up.

I cried hard into my bed last night, harder than in a very long time and I swore at God like He was punishing me by way of Awake. I am only one me, I told Him. I cannot do this!

and then I picked up the crying baby and found calm and peace in her settling again and I had no choice but surrender. Absolutely no choice. I have been awake 44 hours of the last 48 and there is no other choice.

Is this what you know, Single Mother? Is your wisdom born in letting go?  In the acceptance that you are only one you and what you do is good?  I am astounded (ASTOUNDED) by the way you keep going.

{Just to be totally clear: I’m in no way saying that my life situation is the same as a single parent. I just so often think of single parents when my husband travels. I think of single parents with awe and complete respect, whether they are parenting alone by choice or not.}

It’s a coffee shop made from an old house with hidden nooks and rooms. It’s cold up here in the middle room. I can hear a boy and his mother in the next space. The walls are thin and I am always tuned into a child’s voice.

It’s becoming more and more obvious that they don’t just struggle here but everywhere. The mother’s voice is well-versed in soothing responses, trying to calm the boy who cannot leave the rigid confines of his concrete mind. She is kind and she sighs when he repeats over and over and over that she sucks because she won’t take him home right this second for video games. He’s loud. Louder and louder as he repeats and repeats and does not get the answer that is the only one he wants. Someone comes to close the door from another room and awkwardly explains why she’s closing the door.

It’s not just because you’re loud, we just don’t want to bother you. Her voice is all shaky with discomfort and annoyance held behind a passive-aggresive lilt.

The mother is silent to this and I hear the door close and the boy starts to say, over and over, You were loud and I am not, it’s you that’s loud, I am not being loud this is stupid stupid stupid…He pounds on the table, over and over.

I want to hug her. She has to sit there and wait it out and be quiet with no quiet, so much of the time. All I can think about are my freezing feet and her days and how she probably doesn’t even notice when her feet are cold. She is a mother of the strongest kind, because of the boy who is a gift.

{Mother Marathoners of kids with special needs–I want to hold you up.}

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This is the 18th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.}  I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page. There are really no rules, besides Just Write! (Then link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.) (Any links not following those two guidelines will be deleted.) 

Also. Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word?

Before Asher and Elsie Jane came along, I was out with some friends and I was venting about a hard day with Miles. I was surrounded by mothers with more than one child and they rolled their eyes and sighed and looked at each other and started laughing. One of them said something to the other like, Do you remember the last time you even showered alone?

Their reaction hurt a lot, as unintentional as that may have been. I got a message–they had it harder than I did–and in that moment I felt foolish for feeling tired or maybe even for having feelings.

Today, just like that day around five years ago, two more kiddos later, I am exceptionally tired.  Is it different than it was back then? Yes. Do I look back and see how much “easier” it was when there was Miles and Miles alone? Sure.

Does that change the hard day with the hard feelings as a mother of one five years ago? Not a bit.

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Going from two to three children has been a difficult transition for me, so lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what a mother means by hard and how that’s perceived and internalized by other mothers. It so often feels like a competition and so I notice that I stop myself from talking about Hard when I’m talking to mothers with one or two children because I don’t want them to think I’m telling them I have  it harder. Then I don’t want to vent to mothers with more than three children or with older children because I’m expecting the sigh or eye roll or the, just you wait or the, you’ll want these days back.

I hesitate in venting because when I’m doing that it so often seems that other mothers assume I’m saying I win the Hardest Award, or that I’m wishing away my life. But I’m not. I’m just talking. I’m seeking validation and there is nothing more refreshing than another mother who simply sees me and acknowledges The Hard and nods and says, Yes, it’s so hard, isn’t it? The End.

Why is she so rare?

It’s so inspiring when that fellow mother keeps it at that, but it’s like we’re afraid if we do that it’s going to steal something from us, when actually it’s just like anything else–if you want something, you must give it away. That is what this wise mother knows. It fills her up to show compassion to another mother, whatever their differences.

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Being a part of the online mom space has made it very clear to me that motherhood often becomes a competition born out of this need for validation, one in which the goal is to win some kind of internal reward that can never be won this way. We wouldn’t have The (ridiculous) Mommy Wars that are always playing out if this weren’t true. It’s there. Validation is so hard to come by and then we get desparate for it and shake our fists at each other in false comparisons, forgetting that comparing always ends as a loss.

Lose-lose.

I don’t care if you work at home all day or work out of the home or if you do or don’t co-sleep or breastfeed or attachment parent or helicopter parent or have 1 child or 17 or have teens or grown children…mothering is hard, and when we look at each other with that in mind and with compassion at heart we win-win. It seems simple but we get all tripped up by our need to be seen. Look at me running, look at how it never stops, please say you see me.

Motherhood is a (terribly repetitive and grueling and absolutely beautiful) race with a photo finish tie and we all end up at the same place. With all of our heart’s desires for our kids and the pressure and the heavy weight of responsibility and all of its grown-up things. The reality for all of us, every single one, is that we fall through the finish line and then we get up and start over again. We are mother marathoners.

This kind of hard that is equal is a result of a love we never could have expected and that is how we tie.  I am running this marathon with all mothers and I look around and I see that all of you are carrying some enormous things on top of simply running which is hard enough on its own and I see you.

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A few days ago, Miles brought what is in the picture below home from school. Even though it was most likely a mistake, for him to write both SEE and LAV (love) spoke everything to my heart:

Because he does, even when it seems he does not. And so do I, when I set aside my insecurity and give myself the credit I deserve and the validation I’m seeking. It’s in there already. I don’t need to try to steal yours. This is what will make me into one of those refreshing mother-friends, one who says I see you and I hear you and this is hard and you are good. The End.

{Edited to add: In writing this I was so aware of those Mamas with More Hard in the way of special needs or grief or infertility or single parenting, etc. Please see the comment conversation with the lovely Cheairs below for more on that.}

It’s been 2 years.

2 years
365 days
plus 365 days
or
24 hours
strung together
730
times.

I suppose I could go on with all kinds of numbers, but I’m terrible at math and the day must go on. That’s what they do, you know. The days go on, sometimes walking and sometimes running and sometimes marching. Oh the ones that march, they are the stompy and defiant ones, annoying and hard but entirely necessary.

This morning I woke up to Elsie Talk, crackling at me over the monitor.  I went to get her and nursed her in bed and when she was done she looked up at me and made the silliest face you’ve ever seen. Then Miles came in and sniffed her head and sniffed her head some more. It’s his favorite thing to do. We got up, we three early risers and I made coffee and thought my thinks about being sober for two years. Or, I sort of thought about it momentarily because there was spit up and Nutella and the answering of questions. That’s how it is, I suppose. I don’t get a lot of time to think about much, but when I do think about how many days have been pulled together with no alcohol, I’m still astonished.

While I still struggle with so many of the same old things so much of the time, everything is different. My brain constantly wants to fall back into its ‘isms’ and I get very little time or energy to fight that, and yet, glorious grace abounds in the way that I am still sitting her un-hung-over. It is there in the face of a baby I have no idea if I would have had if I were still consuming copious amounts of red wine and tequila and whiskey, and my heart implodes at the thought of not knowing Elsie Jane. Then Grace h0vers around the way that I can pull it together for these children, to make it just a few more hours with some semblance of patience intact in a way I never could before. And it is there when I totally don’t have patience and I’m able to forgive myself.

It is there in the way that I’m learning to accept myself just exactly as I messy am every once and a while, and it is there in the hope that I can do more of that, as more days pull together.

Here we are, two years later and one recent night I was driving home and it had been a hard day with Big Things in it and I thought, I don’t have to drink. I used to think something akin to, I don’t get to drink, maybe like I felt sorry for myself for not being like normal drinkers. But it hit me, I was a person driven to booze like a moth to a flame, one who could not focus on much other than the carrot at the end of the stick and now, even on that not-so-good day that would have driven me straight to a bottle, I could drive along and not be driven.

That’s a miracle.

{If you’re new-ish here and want to read more about motherhood and addiction, hit up the search box and type ‘sobriety’ or ‘addiction’}

I came across this:

No one else will ever know the strength of my love for you. After all, you’re the only one who knows what my heart sounds like from the inside.

ba boom ba boom ba boom…

I guess I’d change that to, you’re one of the only ones who knows what my heart sounds like from the inside. Since there are three children that have been there. Putting it that way makes three sound like not very many at all. Just three people, the only ones who will ever know my heart this way. Only three, on all the planet in all my days.

So I have three to think of, as I sit here and listen to their sounds all around me. The boys discussing a made-up game of cars that race in just this way and in just this time. And Elsie rolling around me in her little baby walker, garbly-gooking her infant language. I think of them all the time, if I can hear them or not and my anxiety wants me to believe it’s all too much. Too much to do, to much to say, too much to stay awake for, to much to do.

But there are only three. Even when there is too much, there are just these few. These few are the only ones and I can’t try to describe the strength of this love ever again without thinking of my heart beating for them now and back inside. They are the only ones that know and I want to keep telling them and that’s enough.

ba boom ba boom ba boom…

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This is the 18th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.}  I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page. There are really no rules, besides Just Write! (Then link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.) (Any links not following those two guidelines will be deleted.) 

Also. Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word?

I am a dreamer stuck in a realist’s body and sometimes I’m a realist stuck in a dreamer’s body. It just depends on the day. Either side gets really enormous and frustrates the other side. My dreamer self is lately crushed under the weight of the real life daily grind. My realist self is fine with it, content even, and then the dreamer swims to the surface and begs for adventure while she also knows that adventure is right here, every day. I mean, life is never dull.

When I hear of people on Grand Adventures, selling off everything they own and traveling with their family in an RV, or moving to Haiti to help or moving across country or adopting, taking a risk, I come alive inside. The dreamer starts banging on my chest.

Then the realist grabs the dreamer’s fists and holds them to stop and shakes her head and says things like, are you kidding me? what about the dog or going to the doctor or what if the house won’t sell? And then she wags her realistic finger and asks the dreamer why she’s not just content already, resolved to stay in one place, at peace.

The dreamer goes hush okay fine hush but she never goes away and I know why. She’s not supposed to because we’re all made with adventure and desire strung from one side of our hearts to the other and the more we stifle it the more it says okay fine hush fine hush until we forget it’s there.

I don’t want to forget. I am happiest when my dreamer is pounding fists on my chest.

And anyway, Great Adventure with Great Responsibility may be crazy but so is a mortgage or a car payment or even a fence, you know? If you really stop to think about it, which of course, I do.

The dreamer is confusing because she changes her mind a lot and lately I realize she’s doing that to keep my attention. Just let me out one way or the other, lady. And the realist shakes her head again while hardly being able to put one foot in front of the other with the up all night fatigue and the exhaustion from the spinning of the days with small children. She laughs and says there’s always later and then the dreamer stomps and says, maybe not?!

The other day all three of us (ha) were looking at Pinterest.

THE DREAMER LOVES PINTEREST.

We found this:

Then the realist put her head in her hands and started with BUT
and the dreamer said YES
and I agreed most with her.

{The realist would like you to know that I was interrupted 294 times while trying to type this as fast as I could. She’s laughing. She’s all, and how will you have time for dreams, silly lady? I’m trying to ignore her. Happy Friday.}

I talked to myself today, as I cleaned up the kitchen. I forced myself to think of good things and I told myself that I’m a good mother. It felt weird. Maybe it shouldn’t feel weird, but apparently I’m much better at self-deprecation than cheering myself on.

Sometimes when someone says Oh hi, how are you? I want to say something like, All twisted up inside! I want to say it with gusto, like how we say Fine! Or Great!

Being all twisted up inside is just the truth and it’s not always bad. Sometimes it just means I’m a bundle of all different emotions, many of them good. We don’t say these things though, so I don’t.

I was at the grocery store today and I was standing in front of the cheese. I don’t know how long I stood there but somehow it became a very difficult decision, choosing cheese. I’m pretty sure my mind wandered and then I was startled back to reality by a woman saying excuse me while trying to push past me to get to the cheese.

I felt a little embarrassed in that moment, to have been so unaware of someone waiting behind me until they finally gave up on waiting and pushed through. So I made a joke about the cheese stumping me but she was already walking away, a much faster cheese chooser than myself.

There’s a good chance I was enjoying myself in the grocery store, with the kids at home with their Daddy and some time to just think my thinks while walking the aisles. So I took my time and probably drove all the people rushing through crazy.

It’s just that Ryan was out of town last week and he leaves again today for the rest of the week and then again next week. I will be home almost all the time, so grocery shopping is quite a luxury if you ask me. I’m all twisted up inside because it makes me nervous when he goes away and also, I’m realizing that I’m a pretty good mother. Finally. I’m slowly learning that Good Mother doesn’t have anything to do with perfection or crafts or being patient all the time. It’s more about keeping on keeping on, you know?

I chose the cheddar. The boys love it most.

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This is the 17th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.}  I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page. There are really no rules, besides Just Write! (Then link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.) (Any links not following those two guidelines will be deleted.) 

Also. Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word?

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You have lashes that go on and on with those always surprised eyebrows. You have less and less hair than the day you were born which seems a little unfair, a balding little girl. Of course at seven months old today, you do not mind at all.You are otherwise occupied with trying to sit up without falling over and learning how to belly crawl across the hardwoods.

You don’t like to do your own thing for long. You mostly fight the exersaucer or walker unless your brothers are hopping and dancing and running around you, very close to entertain you. You love to be held and you grab on like a koala, long arms and legs wrapped tight to waist and neck.

Sometimes I just say right out loud, I have a daughter because I will always be surprised by it. Like your eyes with their eyebrows, full of wonder and delight.

You have this toy that dangles on your car seat and for the longest time now, you fall asleep grasping it, your little fingers holding on tight like the minivan is a roller coaster.

We weren’t going to give you a snuggly blanket like your brothers have because it seems we’re always looking for one of those things and not finding it until past bedtime, inside a lunch box or some such thing. But we did and right away you started nuzzling right to sleep because of it. I love that.

We tried putting you to sleep on your own because I could kind of remember it from the baby books before Miles came, years back now. Put the baby in the crib, sleepy but still awake. I guess we just didn’t try that hard and I don’t really mind even when I mind because I’m exhausted. I mean, I really do love rocking you. For a while that crib thing worked. You would just drift off to sleep but then you got wise to that and the jig was up or something.

You baby giggle in the face of my expectations and you do things your own way, in your time. Every month you prove it’s true that you’ll grow out of the things we think you never will, sometimes really fast and sometimes not. These things just have a way of working themselves out.

You are not only new because you’re a baby and our first and only girl. You are new because you’re third and this whole third thing has thrown me for more of a loop than I like to admit. It’s hard. Stunningly hard. It’s not just that you’ve had your tummy troubles and crying and all of that–it’s not at all your fault.  It just is. And a lot of the time it’s why I cry every single time you koala hug me, when I can most feel the way your life is refining mine and how could I not cry over that? So I squeeze you back and have only lived that moment, right then.

I thought I’d learned so much, you know? Especially in the last couple of years, about letting go and being grateful and working for peace. Acceptance. Sobriety and the fight for it has been a seed for my life, to grow me up and you are water and water and more water. I see so clearly now how little I know, how far I have to go, and it is painful and arduous and the best thing that could have happened to me.

Lately I start to think too much about how BIG this job is, being the  mother of the three of you, and I start to get ahead of myself and I’m so overwhelmed. Then you demand that I stay in the day. I have no choice and that’s just what I need.

EJ, your mother is a control freak and a perfectionist underneath all my pretending that I’m not. Forgive me now and thank you. Thank you for sweeping me off my firmly planted stubborn feet and turning me upside down and inside out. I will not hide in a bottle but I know I have a tendency to keep running from true vulnerability and I’ve never seen that more clearly. It’s like you came with an agenda to kill that in me, to teach me more fully to allow this breathtaking love for my children to not smother me, but to force me to untie the knots of my most deeply rooted weeds.

So at night, in the moments when I’m lying awake with the expectation of your next cry, as ugly as my heart can sometimes feel, it is not. It is simply right out in the open and wounded and healing. It is always waiting for you and for your brothers, my teachers.

There are so many things I want to say about you and to you and the littlest joys come to mind. You still have that little pointed tongue out so much of the time and it’s just one of the thousands of things I’m going to miss about Elsie Jane, age 7 months. You will slip into Elsie Jane, 8 and 9 months, and you will turn years older and I’m going to miss every one of you, just as I miss the different people your brothers once were. Then I’ll have trouble remembering and that astounds me every day.

I am so grateful that I am the one who gets to keep meeting the next person that you are
from my front row seat
day in and day out
while we both
keep saying goodbye
to our old selves.

I don’t very often resolve to do things for the new year. I try to find the resolve every day and fail and triumph and triumph and fail.

The time does fly but sometimes I wonder if that’s just because we forget so quickly so it just seems like it when really a lot of the time it’s kind of slow. Either way, there is the illusion of fast and so fast it is.

I was writing the numbers on the wipe off calendar in the little squares inside the bigger squares and it felt like I just did this, writing July and then October and now it’s a new year. I am writing those little numbers so often. Almost every time I have to try hard to remember how many days are in the month.

The months fly by forgotten and it still says “Get Asher left-handed kid scissors” at the top of the calendar. I keep forgetting.

A few days back I started to write dreams and goals for 2012. I always hesitate to do that because I have this tendency to get over-zealous and then I end mostly only writing small numbers in small squares. So I tried to keep it simple and almost everything I wrote had to do with my family and our home and not My Own Things. Those just weren’t coming to mind. I just want to be a mother and I’m learning exactly what that word means for me. I never thought I would say this but lately I’m content with sweeping and laundering and organizing with my “free time” and doing nothing much else at all. Is there such a thing as a frenzied peace? Because in the daily grind the frantic feeling doesn’t ever stop so we just have to figure out what to do with it.

I’m guessing I might be back to feeling more angst and frustration by the next time I wipe off the calendar but that’s okay because there is just today. One little square at the corner of a bigger square and this is how just that one little number feels right now. One little number is good and enough no matter how it feels.

Happy New Year, friends.

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This is the 16th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.}  I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page. There are really no rules, besides Just Write! (Then link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.) (Any links not following those two guidelines will be deleted.) 

Also. Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word?

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