When Matt first brought me home to the brownstone apartment in Oak Park, we laid down in the marriage bed belonging to his grandparents. It was thick and dark, heavy old wood, storing memories like secrets we would never know. I guess you would call it mid-century, all clean lines and right angles and the start of our prairie life together.

Unfortunately, we broke it less than a year in, the victim of a tickle fight. I swear.

Fate and Jesus would have it that my job at the bookshop provided a hefty Christmas bonus. I'd never had one before - a full time job or a Christmas bonus - and suddenly my rash refusal to put off returning to school seemed fortuitous. We apologized to the parents for accidentally destroying their birthright, took that $500 bonus and bought a mattress set and faux-wrought-iron Ikea bed. Happy Y2K.

That bed moved from Chicagoland to Kansas City with us. It's gone from apartment to house to apartment again, up flights and flights of stairs, been crated and shipped overseas, held our babies as I nursed them to sleep. It's been jumped on, fought on, loved on, peed on, stored for several years and put back together again, always worse for the wear. Still beautiful, still ours, but old and rackety as 14 years, ten moves and three children will do to you.



Today the marriage bed is on its last leg. This bed... this bed is so done. Just sitting on it feels like you're breaking its back. The sounds it makes when I roll over at night keep me awake, not to mention the wee lad sharing the other side of our wall. It literally sounds like it's dying, creaking and groaning loudly with every midnight breath. Between the noise and the no sleeping, it's time to go.

I'm not particularly torn up about it, as beds (even beautiful mid-century oak beds; even especially Ikea beds) don't last forever. The mattresses are wearing thin, too, and at this point in life and marriage, it's time to trade up. And while we know it's time - probably way past time if we were to be honest - I'm dreading it. It's not just the money (of which we have none) or the memories (of which we have so much), but it's the time and the effort and the discernment. It's the future we must take into account now, making the wisest, cheapest, best decision for our family. It's the stress of getting it wrong, spending too much, wincing over every knick or scrape or squeak. I'm all a ball of nerves just thinking about it, the anxiety rising with every move in the night.

And, you know, it's our marriage bed. At 35 I love it as much as I did at 21, in all its fake wrought iron and brushed metal finials glory. It makes every house a home, holds every secret.

But, you know, I kinda hate it, too. Secrets will only allow you so much sleep. Secrets, and lumbar support.

***

I have this habit of writing odes to inanimate objects; the marriage bed is just the latest. What do you love/hate in your own home?

Dear Sister {Jet-lag}

Dear Sister,

I am so tired. 

You know how we thought, "Here we go on this great adventure," thankful for the resilience and joy our kiddos showed despite the uprooting and the leaving and the goodbyes? Well, they're resilient all right. So resilient that they don't need sleep or food for fuel, they need only a random assortment of videos and suddenly they're running rabid through the intersections of an old port town. They need cold peas at three in the morning. They need to push all the buttons on the under-the-sink washing machine. They need pillow fights and rice krispies under foot and maybe a black eye or two.

But what they do not need is sleep.

Me? I need sleep. Before midnight, preferably. It would be good to get out of bed before noon, too. And maybe three square meals a day. Do I ask too much, five days after moving overseas? Is a 10pm bedtime and breakfast before 11am unrealistic?

Pray for me. Think of those chubby, ruddy cheeks on the darling faces of my children and pray, "Sleep, you little monsters. Sleep!" 

I miss you.

Love,
Me.



First in a new series of posts entitled Dear Sister. I have four of them, each one unique, each brought to me in a different way. I thought I'd write to them here... it'll save me a stamp. Plus, I get to make another button!

Naptime :: 31 days of messy parenting {day 17}

He's switched the beds, old for new, baby for toddler. The crib held all three babies born, built by their father, stained and assembled with care the night before we welcomed the first.

A gift of love.

But it's gone now, and it's ok. It did it's job. All babies deserve a comfortable, peaceful, safe place to sleep. And ours had that. Thank you, Lord.

And now? Well, now it's not as peaceful and a bit more explosive. Bedtime routines are less predictable now, and don't even get me started on naptime. Naptimes barely exist anymore. It's not just that he's three, but it's that he's no longer penned in. A toddler bed of pallets and an old door cannot contain him.

And it's ok. He loves this new freedom, the feel of the bounce when he runs and jumps in. How we can lay next to him and read. How he can exhaust himself from playing and land in a heap. How he can wake up, nose to nose, with the father who gave him a place to lay his head.

Loved and led, in the night

today

In the night, we all get jumbled.

She comes in first. "A bad dream," she (always) says. I scooch, give her a pillow, and hug the side of the bed. Then the wee lad calls, "Mommy, I done!" It's 3 am and he's decided he's had enough sleep. Husband sighs, stumbles on feet and over legos, and tries to talk him down for just a few more hours. 

He's barely back in our (crowded) bed when the eldest comes in, holding his nose and covered in blood, "My nose is bleeding," I hear under muffled tissues. I'm up quick and with him at the sink, washing his face and changing his shirt. 

Then I hear the baby again. "Daddy.... I want in Ella's bed!" Husband tells me he kinda lied to him, promising him milk and cuddles in the girl's bed, hoping he'd fall asleep and forget. But he didn't, and in a second Daddy is up and the cries are quieted. It's just me and the girl again, in my bed, for what seems like the thousandth time in her five short years.

2009

A few months ago, I went to the doctor, told her I was feeling run down and asked her to medicate what she could do for me. She quickly recounted the ways I could perk myself up: eight glasses of water a day, endorphin release, make sure I'm in community... oh, and get enough sleep. 

Water, check. Endorphins, mostly check. Community, check check check. Sleep?! She almost had me there! Silly woman, she delivered my babies. Doesn't she know? It's the "get enough sleep" part that shuts the whole thing down!

Nearly ten years in, I keep thinking we'll grow out of this phase. I envision a crisp and sunlit morning of lazy lie-ins, just the two of us alone in our own bed, well-rested and ready to conquer the children the world. Give me another five years and maybe we'll have this whole sleep thing sorted, everyone waking up in the bed they fell asleep in, everyone happy, everyone fixed.

2004

But I'm starting to realize this is what parenting is, how it should be. We open our arms when they come to us, we jump to our feet when they cry out, we clean them up when they bleed. They don't need to be fixed, just loved and led as we go.

"It's a good thing Mom was awake at 4am," I hear the eldest say as I finally emerge from our girl-cocoon at 8am. I walk down the hall and see - not for the first time in this long week - my sweet husband curled up in hot pink zebra sheets. 

It is a good thing, I think. Being here with them is the best thing.

I would really kill for some sleep, though.

The literal call of motherhood, at 4 am

The baby woke up at 4 am this morning.

(perhaps I shouldn't call him "the baby" anymore, as he's all toddler and little boy and craziness, but seeing as how he doesn't say actually enunciated words yet and still gets his bum cleaned up every three hours, we'll stick with "the baby")

It's a strange dichotomy, this motherhood: the dire need for sleep and the utter inability to lift up one's head that early in the morning, together with the sweet thought of baby breath nestled in your neck and a human pillow to hold.

So, I gave in. After waiting for a few moments to see if the crying would peter out, which of course, it never did, I unhooked myself from the girl who had burrowed her way into our bed, steadied my feet in the extreme darkness, and headed towards his call.

The cuddling was short-lived (there was a need for milk), and the laying back down was traumatic (no mother wants to close the door on a baby who wails, "Mama!"), but within seconds the house was silent again. I made my way back to our room, where the mildly sick husband tried to inch out some free space apart from the sleeping daughter.

All it took was five minutes, if that. I did my job and went back to bed. The five of us content.

he has a dimple in his chin, wouldn't you know!

On waking, with a family

It's Five Minute Friday, and I'm doing something strange: writing first thing in the morning. But it's all good... the topic is easier for me now:

Waking Up….
My phone starts buzzing at 7am every morning. I pray for a couple of seconds, hoping that the kids will still be dozing and my day won't yet begin. But, just like he's done every morning for the past 6 or so years, the boy comes lumbering in at 7.01. He squeezes in next to Daddy for a brief cuddle, before husband says the words every 8-year-old wants to hear: "You can go watch cartoons now."

So while the big boy is off, we in our barely coherent sleep/wakefulness companionship, roll to the middle a little bit and wait for the next one to arrive. She's usually just as slightly aware as we are, as she finds her way into our room, fumbles into our bed, and divides our brief slumbering oneness with her warm body. Her hair flies out in all directions. She is just about as much of a morning person as I.

Eventually, the idea of coffee is more pleasurable than dozing, so the husband rolls out of bed and it's just the girl and I. I ask her if she wants to get up, too, reminding her that brother and PBSkids wait for her in the living room. She sighs and rolls over to face me, flings a bony arm around my middle and says, "No, I want to stay here for awhile."

The baby, blessedly, has not woken yet.


waking up, awhile ago


It's morning still in the Western Hemisphere... what did you wake up to?

Late nights are good for writers

I was just thinking that I wish I had time to write or update the blog, but seeing as how I've usually got a child in my hands or around my legs, the writing has been one of those things I've had to sacrifice in order to be an attentive parent. However, Saturday nights the man is away late at youth group, the kids are finally in bed (for now) and I'm finding myself with just a bit of time before the laundry buzzes and the pacifier falls out in order to write.

Now, what to say...

Like everyone else in the world these days, finances weigh heavily on my mind. It's actually been a downright scary few weeks, coming face to face with the possibility of leaving here sooner than expected. But a good friend of ours says all we need to worry about is having enough for today. And amazingly, God has given us enough for all the days up till now and the weight that's been hanging on our shoulders isn't as heavy as it was at first. We're planning on staying put for now, but I have a tendency to prepare myself for disappointment anyway.

This week the boy said something sad that made me audibly gasp and reach for some kleenex.

"It's too bad I don't have any friends." He didn't seem particularly upset about that realisation, but I was!

I said, "Jackson! You don't think you have any friends?"

"Well, I have pretend friends. And that's fun!" he replies.

What is a mother to do? What on earth do I say when I know it is, in fact, a true statement? The child does not have any friends. I think we've dropped the ball somewhere along the way... I'm so sad that the ball that was dropped was a need for our child.

The baby boy is tearing me apart in altogether different ways. Why is sleep always the issue? I'm facing the prospect of permanently giving up caffeine. Not something I'm looking forward to doing, but again, this mother is at a loss on how to proceed otherwise. I just realised that I'm not just a mother, but I'm a mother of boys. Plural. I worry next to nothing about the girl (she's a tough girl, with a capital T), but it's the boys that I fret over. Is that weird?

Oh, and I'm thinking of cutting off all my hair. There's only so much pulling and tearing and spit-up one head of hair can handle in a day. Thoughts? Is it really smart to cut one's hair super short if it is thick and curly?

I should be sleeping...

...but Asher's not, so I gotta wait him out before I hit the sheets.

The man is away in London right now at the NFL game. I'm glad he got to go, but I hate being alone in the house at night. Ever since I walked into my mother's empty house (aged 18) at 3 am in the morning minutes after it had been ransacked by thieves, I just don't do well home alone in the dark. I mean, I really really hate it. Which just goes to show you how much I love him. :)

So when the man's away, I try to stay up as late as possible until I can't keep my eyes open any longer and then no longer have the wits about me to be too afraid to sleep. I do this one of two ways: by watching movies and tv shows downloaded from iTunes, or playing on the internet. Tonight is internet night and I have found myself completely drawn into the world of a baby boy who died three years ago.

I'm not quite sure what it is about this story that intrigues me. I mean, there's the God component. I saw the family on Oprah a few weeks ago and I knew just from the sound of the story that they were believers. Then there's the fact that I just gave birth to my own son, who for some twist of fate or luck or providence is totally, completely healthy. (I always wonder at the supposed randomness of God's works. I mean, I know it's not random, but I really do wonder why He chose me to be the mother of healthy children and yet He chose others... well... it's too hard a question for me, I guess).

And then there's that the baby's name is Eliot. This was the name we chose for the baby we lost in 2005. I've never told anyone that, that that was the name, anyway.

Even though I only discovered this story now, years after the fact, I desperately wanted their Eliot to live. I am completely enraptured by this story, by the pictures, by the faith, by the grief. I really don't know why. I do know one thing, though. This family knows God in a way I don't yet know Him. For that, I long...