That Girl

At least once I day I find myself shaking my head, smiling bemusedly and thinking, that girl.

Sometimes there is a bit of exasperation in this statement.  When we were in the throws of potty training earlier this month and I realized that she was very intentionally peeing on me, for example. 

Potty training essentials: batman underwear, 7 necklaces and princess slippers.

But there is always a chuckle or full belly laugh accompanying this thought too.

Toots turns two today.  She continues to take my breath away with her very “her-ness.”

She is a character.  A personality.  An entertainer.  A light.

She is feisty and spirited, silly and unencumbered.  She loves music, Katy Perry is her favorite.  She can sing along with “Let It Go” and “The Wheels on the Bus” and “Happy Birthday.”  She chatters constantly, carrying on conversations with whoever will entertain her and herself when no one will.  She knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to ask for it.

Typical behavior- everyone else is engrossed in the movie and she is hamming it up for the camera.

Oh, and she is joy personified.  One of her favorite songs is “You are my Sunshine” and I sing it to her wholeheartedly, truth in every word.  There is just something about her that lights up a room and makes you laugh.  You can’t help but smile in her presence.  After my dad died for weeks she was the only one who could bring any amount of light into my mom’s face.

taking time out very seriously, obviously

She takes up space.  And makes no apologies for it.  It’s one of my favorite things about her.  Physically she sprawls out wherever she is.  On your lap, on the floor, in the brown leather chair that is her favorite TV watching spot.  Instead of sitting up contained and defined she spreads her whole body out covering every square inch she’s been given.  And it’s not just with her body that she takes up space.  In a nebulous way I can’t quite describe I watch my daughter fill a room with her presence, naturally and unaware that there is any other way of being.

As a woman I’ve often felt like life has taught me to stay contained.  Don’t ask for too much, stay within defined boundaries, take less than you need, deny yourself always for the sake of others.  There are valuable things about living with selfless regard to others to be sure.  But when I watch my daughter take up all the space she’s been given I have an overwhelming urge to preserve that in her.  To protect this natural instinct from the barrage of voices that will tell her to stay small.  I want her to continue to fill her space, and learn to respect others’ at the same time.  To live fully into whom God created her to be while also giving room for others to do the same.  Mostly though I don't want her to ever lose her unapologetic way of being fully Toots.

Somehow I can’t believe that my baby is two and also can’t believe that she’s only been in our lives for two years.  And on this, her second birthday my prayer for her remains largely the same.  I pray that her identity would be rooted in the truth that she is loved so deeply by the God who perfectly made her.  And I pray that she would appreciate that everyone else is loved that way too.  I pray that she would have the quiet strength of knowing who she is without needing to please anyone or prove it either.  And I pray that our relationship would grow stronger each year, that I would love her exactly as she is and give her all the space to be just that.

Happy Birthday Toots.  We love you so much!

For Amy, On Her Wedding Day

I met Amy almost 9 years ago.  I remember one of our first conversations, on the corner in Tribeca where our church met.  She carried her guitar case and told me about her recent time living in Australia.  She had beautiful red hair and was living the office worker by day/ musician by night New York life.  I knew instantly that I liked her and that maybe, just maybe, she’d be my first New York friend.  As a native of Nebraska she shared my Midwest sensibility but as a fellow 20-somethings living in New York City we shared the same sense of adventure and dreaming that people who moved to New York after college carry with them.

She became the first of my New York girls, a group of women who changed my life and loved me so very completely.  During my first year in the city Amy was at times my only friend but throughout the course of that year we built community.  First it was with Aimee and Bob and Ben.  Then, at the beginning of that second year Amy and Aimee and I began a little “small group” of sorts, joined by Rachel and April, Kim and Becca.  These women were my family in the Big Apple.  They were the best things I took with me when I left.

Amy was always the start of it all and the one I continued to return to over the years.  She was the one to stand up for me at my wedding and the one to show up for my dad’s funeral.  She is beautiful, inside and out.  An incredibly talented singer and songwriter, Amy wrote the song she played at our wedding that I still cherish to this day.  She loves others so well.  She cares for her people, works hard to keep in touch with the friends she’s made around the world.  She shows up when she needs to, listens well and doesn’t judge.  Amy is the kind of friend everyone should have- loyal, loving and true.  I’ve been so blessed by her love and friendship.

Today is her wedding day.  Because I am 38 weeks pregnant and her wedding is in DC, I am not wearing the beautiful gray bridesmaid dress and standing by her side as she says her vows like I wanted to be.  Instead I am home, thinking about my sweet friend and what this day means.

I’ve walked with Amy through the past nine years as she’s courageously opened her heart to the wrong guys or the right-on-paper guys or the almost enough guys.  I’ve watched her take chances and put herself out there in big, brave ways.  I’ve watched her get hurt and heal and grow.  I’ve always known that Amy was a gem and that someday the right guy would see all that I’ve seen.  I knew if she was patient enough and continued to open her heart even though it had been mishandled before, the guy that was worth it would finally show up.    

And he did.  Her future husband knew instantly what I’ve always known; this is one you don’t let get away.  He was honest and up front and played no games.  He cherished her and valued her and took her aback with his straightforwardness.  And he himself is as much of a gem as she is. 

Today, on her wedding day, I want her to know how proud I am of her.  She had every reason to close her heart and stay small and safe.  She could have chosen not to take another risk, to let heartbreak and wrong guys jade and harden her.  But she instead chose the more difficult path of vulnerability.  She chose to stay open.  To take a chance.  To continue to love big.  I’m so very proud of her for this choice. 

She chose to stay true to herself.  To not compromise for the wrong guy.  She chose to wait for the one who loved her for her.  I’m so thankful she did.

Today, on her wedding day, I hope she knows how loved she is.  I hope she knows how many people are so excited for this day.  I hope she knows that we all cheering to know that she is marrying someone who is worthy, who values her in all the ways she deserves to be valued, who is an equal partner. 

Today, on her wedding day, I pray that she can feel all the joy, love and happiness that surround her.  I pray that this day, the beginning of the journey, is one that is filled with laughter and joyful tears, and enough certain happiness to sustain her through the eventual hard times every marriage encounters.  I pray that she knows she is surrounded by a community of people who are rooting for her marriage, committed to support it along the way.  I pray that my sweet friend knows how loved she is.

Happy wedding day Amy.  I am so very sad that I can’t be there.  But know I am thinking of you all day, loving you from afar and cheering for you in spirit.   This is a happy, happy day.

On Holding the Happy and the Sad- My Messy Beautiful

This essay and I are part of the Messy, Beautiful Warrior Project — To learn more and join us, CLICK HERE! And to learn about the New York Times Bestselling Memoir Carry On Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life, just released in paperback, CLICK HERE!  I LOVE Carry on Warrior.  I keep ordering more copies for myself because I keep giving them away to my friends.  If you haven't read it yet- do.  Please.  She says it all better than I ever could :)

We bought a house last month.  If my dad were alive there would have been champagne popping and celebratory hugs.  Instead there were tears and panicked phone calls to my friends for reassurance that moving forward was permissible.  We moved our family of four into my parents’ home 12 months ago, expecting our stay to be a year, tops, while we got Monster into his school and through surgery then found a home of our own.  We moved in whole and intact and then 7 months into this new living arrangement my dad died and nothing was as it should be.

Once I swam through the swamp thick waters of hard feelings about our new house I was able to tread in clearer, stiller waters of excitement about this house that will become our home.  It has character and charm and an openness that is begging to be filled with our people.  When I let myself get there, I was excited, happy, and grateful for our new home. 

But buying a new house means not living with my mom anymore.  When we moved in a year ago my dad helped direct the movers and every morning he drove Tommy to the train station on his way to the gym, then rushed home early to help get the kids breakfast.  It’s where the four of us, my mom and dad, Tommy and I would sit down with a glass of wine after the kids were down and watch episode after episode of The West Wing.  And then it was where we rushed home to the night we got the call that my dad died.  Where we woke up, morning after morning, overwhelmed by grief.  It’s where we’ve been with my mom, watching helplessly as she has struggled to learn what life looks like without her other half.  Where my sister has come home to every weekend.  It’s where we’ve been as we’ve grieved the loss of my dad together, so that we wouldn’t do it alone.

And so the sadness of leaving here, of moving forward taints the happiness of leaving here, of moving forward.  Sometimes the sadness distorts the happy altogether. 

Over the coming weeks we will welcome a baby into this world.  Our third.  And yet all I can think about is what it will feel like without my dad.  Will it be more bitter than sweet?  More tears than joy?

The list of these types of occasions goes on and on- occasions we always assumed my dad would be present for.  Will sadness over his absence eclipse all the happiness in these moments?  I worry about my sister’s wedding day, my brother’s graduation from art school, the day my youngest brother gets his first real job.  When you lose a parent so young the greatest heartache seems to surround all the future happy events.  Can they still be happy without a key player?  Can I hold happy and sad together?

I’ve been fumbling, carrying these opposing emotions for months as the pain has eclipsed the joy, tainting it beyond recognition at times.  And I long for the carefree days before my loss when happy didn’t also contain a bit of sad.

Maybe I’m longing for something that can’t be.  I don’t know if any of us who want to live fully present and wholeheartedly in our lives can expect to not have to hold joy and pain simultaneously.  My messy beautiful is learning to hold the happy and the sad together in my heart. 

I’m learning that holding these opposing emotions together may be the necessary work of growing up and living with my whole heart.

Because life is not getting any easier.  When I look at my friends, all of us in our thirties now for the most part, I see that life is getting harder, heavier, sometimes sadder.  Our 20’s were all about the happy.  Weddings and fun trips, disposable income and babies and lots of showers to celebrate all the happy.  As we approached our 30’s I noticed a shift.  Suddenly we found ourselves facing the scary stuff.  Spouses had health scares, mortgages and bills added pressure, marriages went through significant battles, we lost babies and jobs, our kids got diagnoses and our parents died.  I can’t tell you how many friends waged difficult seasons in the last few years.  Time and again I listened to friends nostalgically wish for the ease and happiness of our twenties, watched as they worked to find ways to bring lightness to their world.

image credit

I’m accepting the truth of Ann Voskamp’s words above more and more these days.  If I want to live fully, presently, and whole-heartedly in this messy beautiful world God created I have to learn to live in both dynamics.  Maybe the holiness is being able to coexist with them both, not just to tolerate the pain but to embrace it, to let it make you fully human.   Maybe the sad doesn’t just taint the happy.  Maybe the happy also seeps into the sad.

I want a life that sadness doesn’t touch, I want happy to just be happy.  For most of my life until now, that’s been pretty realistic.  I’ve had hard things, but never a loss like this.  Never something that felt so permanent.  The last five months have taught me that life is hard.  Life is messy and darkness can sometimes abound.  But it is oh so beautiful too.  If I don’t learn to hold the messy with the beautiful I’ll never see the beautiful.  But I think too, that the messy enhances the beautiful.  The sad is real and true and in some ways beautiful in it’s own messy right.  I could write thousands more words on the ways that my grieving has opened me up to deeper relationships and more honesty and vulnerability.  There is value in the sadness; it's not just something to endure.   

Holding both the sad and the happy keeps me from going numb.  Keeps the happy from feeling fake.  It’s a hard won happy, the kind that coexists with sad.  But I’m learning that it may just be the best kind.

On Practicing Gratitude...

gratitude journals should always be polka dotted...

It’s Holy Week.  In a few days people will return to Facebook and social media after their 40 day fast during Lent.  Others will consume sweets again or other forbidden foods.  Catholics will no longer frequent Fish Frys on Friday nights, finally able to eat meat any day of the week they please.  If my dad were alive he’d be counting down the days until he could enjoy scotch again, his yearly Lenten “fast.”

In the past I’ve fasted from television and online/impersonal shopping during the season of Lent.  I hadn’t planned on doing anything this year, but a few days before Ash Wednesday I saw Momastery’s

challenge on Facebook to “fast from ingratitude” for Lent this year by noting three things you were grateful for each night.  To be honest I dismissed it pretty immediately.  I felt like I didn’t have much to be grateful for at the moment and in light of these past few months I didn’t think I should have to practice gratitude.  I felt like I deserved to be ungrateful.  I was angry with the turn my life has taken and the ways that everything feels heavy and hard.

In short, I was in the midst of the Infinite Sadness and practicing gratitude felt like more work than I wanted to do.  It required me to claw and scratch, to work at something that I just wanted to come naturally.  And in this season gratitude has not come naturally.

But as Ash Wednesday approached I found myself rethinking this stance.  It’s a poor way to live, really.  I had felt like Eeyore for weeks and if I wasn’t careful I knew I would find myself so deep in that mindset that it would require much more than I had to get out.   Still, I waffled, not sure of what I wanted to do.

Then something happened on that Wednesday that made me so deeply and profoundly grateful.  I broke down in the shower at the gym that morning, desperately needing some sign that hope and light still existed in my life and I begged God for just that, hope and light.  And then, later that day, two incredible friends gave me an early birthday gift that was so thoughtful, so loving, and so generous that it took my breath away.  It was a gift that made me feel loved and cared for, that supported my marriage that has borne the weight of so much stress these past few months and that gave me something to hope for and look forward to after many months of feeling hopeless and dark.  It was light and hope all in one.

And so I knew I needed to keep looking for things to be thankful for.  If God had given me such a big gift of hope and light maybe there was more I was missing while I held onto my “right” to be ungrateful.  And maybe this would be what I needed to pull myself out of the Infinite Sadness.

things I'm grateful for

I’ve been writing down three things every night and it’s been a good practice.  There is so much to be thankful for.  Even in the midst of the hardest season of my life so far, there is still hope and light.  Noting things each night helped me to feel profoundly grateful in the moment each day.  Most things were as small as gratitude for the way Toots shines when she laughs or Monster’s sweet little voice when he tells me “I like you Mommy.”  But to acknowledge them, to see them as the gifts that they are is a choice, an act of work at times.  It’s good work, though.  And I think I’d rather scratch and claw my way to a life of gratitude than wallow in Eeyore land. 

The Infinite Sadness

Well, it’s been a spell since I’ve posted.  Truthfully I was waiting until I could write about anything besides grief and loss.  Turns out grief and loss have a tendency to eclipse everything else and if you wait until you are able to write honestly about happier topics it may be months in between posts.  So today I’m embracing what’s true and sharing some things I’ve learned about grief and loss in these long months.

In February I slipped into the Infinite Sadness. 

Suddenly, without much warning, about a month ago I fell into what I’ve come to think of as the Infinite Sadness.  Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was a Smashing Pumpkins album from the mid-nineties.  I was in no way cool enough to be listening to The Smashing Pumpkins in the mid-nineties, but I remember kids in middle school wearing tee shirts with that album cover on them.  Of all the albums in the mid-nineties that I was in no way cool enough to listen to, that one has stuck with me for some reason.  I found my mind ruminating on that phrase “melancholy and the infinite sadness” as I was consumed with a heavy sadness a few weeks ago. 

It was a different kind of sadness than the one I’d been dealing with these months following my dad’s passing.  For much of January I had started to feel better.  Sure thoughts of my dad and this loss were never far from my mind, but they remained docile, manageable.  The moments of sadness spread out, and something like peace could be felt for long stretches. 

The Infinite Sadness was different.  It was heavy and thick.  I couldn’t shake it and found myself crying multiple times a day, every day.  I couldn’t look at pictures of my dad, couldn’t hear my dad’s voice on the answering machine, couldn’t handle any of life’s little inconveniences without falling to pieces.  I was coming undone by the weight of this grief but I couldn’t seem to shake it.  It threw me for a loop because for weeks before I seemed to be doing better.  And then all of a sudden waves of sadness crashed over me, knocking me down.

It was during these weeks that house hunting came to a head for Tommy and I.  In early February we started our search again after taking some months off when my dad died.  This time around though it had lost its shine as our innate differences rubbed against each other.  We both had vastly different priorities and couldn’t afford a house that would fulfill all of our requirements.  Neither one of us could see where the other was coming from nor were we communicating very well in the process.  In the middle of my Infinite Sadness we didn’t act quickly enough on a house that would have been perfect for us and lost it.  I slipped deeper into despair.  I couldn’t handle one more heavy thing in my life and it felt like hope was lost on us ever finding a place to live that felt good for the both of us.

It was exhausting, really.  I was tired of my thoughts, of the tears that couldn’t seem to stop falling.  I didn’t want to be in my head any more but couldn’t seem to escape.  I had a hard time sleeping at night, waking for hours at a time my mind racing.

It was hard to write honestly about everything during this time.   I worried my real life people would go on suicide watch with me.  I worried it would seem more dramatic than it actually was.  It felt like too much to share.  I was embarrassed by it.  Like I just couldn’t get over something that those around me had grown tired of.  I didn’t quite understand why, after weeks of feeling like time was starting to heal and hope may be around the corner, all of a sudden I was flung back into darkness and despair.

I realized during this time that I don’t know how to talk about sadness.  I know how to talk about stress or anxiety.  I know how to spin positive on trying situations.  I know how to talk about what’s overwhelming, but why I’m still hopeful.  I don’t know how to talk about despair, about the complete lack of hope I felt during those weeks of Infinite Sadness. 

Perhaps because this is such a new emotion for me, because for the first time in my life I am walking through something I can’t spin positive, reverse or fix, I found my sadness to be an incredible vulnerability.  I didn’t know how people would react to it and I didn’t trust it with anyone right away.   I wasn’t sure I trusted myself with it, honestly.  I berated myself for not being able to shake my sadness, for not just being happier, for being unable to control the flood of emotions that came at the slightest trigger.

And so I floundered there in the deep end of depression with only my hard, unforgiving thoughts to keep me company.

Needless to say, it was a great February.

A few things came a long that lifted me out of it finally.  Two of my nearest and dearest friends gave me a birthday gift a few days early that was so incredibly thoughtful and loving that a bit of hope pierced its way through the Infinite Sadness.  It was a gift that loved me, and my marriage, which has taken a beating in these past few months.  It was a gift that gave me something to look forward to.  But mostly it was a gift that made me feel seen.  That reminded me I wasn’t drowning alone and those who loved me saw me, and saw that things were still hard.

And then one of those same friends spoke words that helped me to change the way I grieved all together.  During one of our regular Wednesday morning play dates I opened up about my current mental state, apologizing profusely that I was still crying, still unable to fully shake this grief.  Lauren said, “Col, we fully expect this grieving to be for years and we are in it for the long haul so stop apologizing.”  It was such a simple statement, one that I’m sure any and all of my real life people would echo.  But to hear it out loud, to be freed from the timeline I’d created that forced me to bear this burden alone, there are simply no words for what it lifted inside of me.

As a grieving person I have more than once put a timeline on my mourning, given myself a deadline for my feelings.  Time and again I’ve found myself frustrated that I seem to have no control over what this looks and feels like.  Good days come just as unexpectedly as the bad ones and I never seem to be prepared for either.  I’m learning, once again, to be more graceful with myself.  And to have more faith in my people.  I have surrounded myself with some incredibly good ones and I’m not doing any of us any favors by bearing unbearable loads alone. 

I believe that God gave us to each other for more than just laughter and parties.  I believe we are called to walk hard paths together.  I want to do that with the people I love.  Both their hard paths and my own.

The Infinite Sadness may come again.  But this time I’m prepared.  I’m ready to enter into the vulnerability of sharing that which is scary to share.