Falling In Love All Over Again

My love for my firstborn has been fought for, scratched out of the shock of adjusting to motherhood, built on the strong tension of two firstborns raising the first firstborn of the next generation.

• I love her deeply, because her arrival forever divided my life into before and after.
• I love her fiercely, because she represents all I want to pass on to a world I will never see.
• But I find it hard to love her lovingly, passionately.

I hold her to high standards, because I know the world does not wait for those who don’t keep up. And yet she marches to her own drumbeat.

I get so frustrated with her for being her own person. She didn’t do well with swimming or karate. I received calls from her teachers twice in the first three weeks of school. She just lives in her own world!

I forget sometimes, the gift we all have, of being allowed to make our own mistakes. We all get to come to this world and draw our own conclusions of it, to be shaped by our experience and to live with the results of our own choices.

This 30 Days of Excellence challenge, noticing excellent qualities in my kids every day in September, has blessed me so richly. Either it was really well timed, or it changed my perspective, for by September 2 I began to notice myself falling in love with my firstborn more than ever before.

In the month of September I have begun to appreciate her so much. She has begun to confide things in me that reassure me she is listening, she is getting the things that are important to me:

• She loves science.
• She loves being weird like me.
• She wants to own an alpaca farm when she grows up.

She came home from school a few days ago saying,

You were so right, Mom, about what you said yesterday. When someone would say to me, “You’re weird!” I used to say back, “No, you’re weird!” But today when someone said it, I said, “Thank you!” and he did not know what to say or do! It was so great!

This kid gets more awesome every day!

She still struggles with focusing in school. Maybe she always will.

But her character has begun to emerge, and I love it! She is really becoming the young woman I have always wanted her to be.

This morning before school, I read her the story of Samuel anointing David the next king of Israel. The point was that we look at outward appearances, but what’s important to God is what we are like on the inside. And what’s important to God is really all that matters.

Then I took her shopping after dinner. We were picking out clothes and she said:

Everyone’s going to love my new clothes! Oh, wait. Well, really it doesn’t matter, because I know God doesn’t care about my clothes as much as he cares about the rest of me. But I still like my new clothes.

I don’t know why I am so astonished, but here I am, declaring myself thrilled to realize my daughter is growing up, growing into herself, showing some character qualities that were always important to me. And I like the person I am beginning to see!

We had so much fun shopping together tonight, just the two of us. I really like my daughter. Her emerging personality and character are an amazing gift that I find I am only just beginning to unwrap.

Linking up today to Tuesdays Unwrapped.

Farmers’ Market Fun

Q: How do you follow a Friday evening assembling dinner entrees to fill your freezer?

A: By visiting the Farmers’ Market Saturday morning, for produce to fill the crisper!

Since watching the documentary Food, Inc a month ago, I have been trying to grow more knowledgeable about the origins of the food I feed my family. I’ve got the Batch Party process under review, thinking about how I can buy the meats & ingredients with identifiable origins while also sharing the assembly process with my friends, but that’s a whole other piece of the puzzle.

For now, I am at least reducing the amount of processed food I purchase, and choosing locally sourced food whenever possible. This week I made it to the Brazos Valley Farmers’ Market and for $13 came away with a pound of carrots, a pound of onions, two pounds of potatoes, a 2 qt container filled with sweet red peppers, a quart ziplock bag of spinach, a pound of okra, and 3 pounds of blackeyed peas, still in jackets.

On my way home from the Farmers’ Market, I happened along a country property with a large hand-lettered sign reading, “PEARS FREE.” I made time to stop and chat with the lovely lady of the house, and went home with two shopping bags full of sweet, crunchy, cooking pears I picked myself.

Saturday night we already had dinner plans, but Sunday dinner was bound to be divine given the contents of my kitchen!

Of my ten entree choices, I went with Dijon Pork Chops.

Boo literally spent hours shelling the blackeyed peas for one side dish. I was so proud. Rooster joined her for awhile, and the two of them amused themselves opening each pod and exclaiming, “Look! These peas have black eyes, too!” They didn’t tire of it nearly as fast as I expected, but I still ended up recruiting Boo’s next door neighbor friend to help finish the job. Eventually all the peas were shelled.

Then my Louisiana neighbor not only told me how to cook the peas, she sent over a bit of Crisco so I could make them authentic. I’m still not sure what was more hysterical about that whole exchange: my horror at the idea of using (a teaspoon of) Crisco, or hers at my suggested alternative of bacon fat.

I mean, c’mon, at least I know where the bacon fat came from, and it was something I ate, and it’s tasty! I don’t really know what Crisco exactly is, but I think it’s related to death.

I just enjoyed laughing at both of us. It’s fun. I love that we entertain each other.

Later I sent over a taste test for her to approve. Crisco and all, she pronounced my peas authentic. I might be learning how to be a little bit Southern. (May one claim such a thing?)

Meanwhile, once the girls finished shelling peas, I put them to work peeling/coring/slicing the pears so I could cook them into pearsauce. The pears were exactly as promised, sweet and crunchy. Sprinkled with a little cinnamon sugar, they paired nicely with the chops and peas.

Dinner rounded out with a salad including the spinach from the market, and everyone pronounced it a spectacular meal.

Well, everyone except Boo, who privately confided to Louisiana Sammy afterward that those peas weren’t very tasty, considering how much work it took to shell them.

I can’t say as I blame her.

This post is linked to Tuesdays Unwrapped. Today I unwrap the pleasure of preparing new food; something I got directly from the farmer or picked off the tree.

Indigo Files: Day One

Today I unwrap an unusual gift for the Tuesdays Unwrapped series. Today I unwrap Indigo. Indigo describes a part of me that I allowed to dominate me for a long time, that I finally took action to put in balance. Today marks the beginning of the story that will be told throughout the month of September.

Think of the colors of the rainbow. We usually speak in terms of three primary and three secondary colors: Red, Yellow, Blue. Orange, Green, Purple. Six colors that make up most of our verbal crayon box. Yet there are seven colors listed in the colors of the rainbow when we use the acronym ROYGBIV. Red, Orange, Yellow. Green. Blue, Indigo, Violet.

So what is Indigo? The bastard child? The elephant in the room? The unmentionable? Do we leave it out because it doesn’t fit into our tidy primary/secondary color wheel interpretation of color?

Indigo fascinates me. It lends depth to the deep end of the color spectrum. It justifies that some things in life do carry more weight, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

I have chosen to describe the melancholy aspect of my personality as the Indigo. It really is a gift, because without that melancholy element, I wouldn’t always be thinking about the world, or feeling the need to write about it. However, Indigo was ruling my life, and I have finally taken action not to eliminate it, but to get it back to its proportionate place in my personal spectrum.

The enemy lives in darkness. When we reveal our darkest struggles to the light, the enemy can no longer whisper his lies into our hearts. My hope is that by sharing this experience and bringing it to the light of day, someone else might be Encouraged that they are not alone, Empowered to reach for help, and Inspired to bring their own situation to the light.

So here we go, the first week of taking control of the Indigo. My experience, my thoughts, my world.

(May 13) Day 1: 11:30am, first pill. Had a bit of an upset stomach, but an otherwise good day. I have a lot of good days, so it’s hard to know if it was just a good day or if the pill made a difference. It’s probably too early to see results, but I’m still looking. The Captain says I seemed more consistently stable throughout the day. Makes me wonder if I only mentally record the moments when I feel good, and blank out the ones when I’m irritable and overwhelmed. I told him I’m putting him in charge of noting changes in my disposition. I think he’s got better perspective than I do.

11:30pm, bedtime. Woke up in a cold sweat at 12:30 because the Captain was watching a thriller movie tonight, of all nights. Some post-apocalyptic story about plants trying to kill the remaining people. Had such a huge adrenaline rush that I couldn’t go back to sleep. Finally got up at 2:30 and staggered out of the room, hoping to find another place to sleep. The sofa was covered in a pile of unfolded laundry, but I was overcome with a wave of nausea and dizziness, so I just allowed myself to crumple to the floor. Dozed there for an hour before returning to my bed.

Not five minutes later, the baby cried out in her sleep and I felt it necessary to rush upstairs to help her. She was asleep again by the time I got there, but more nausea and dizziness swept over me. Couldn’t make it back downstairs, crumpled up next to the crib on the mattress where Boo slept last time we had company. Dozed for another hour, then made my way back to bed about 4:30. Had to get up at 6am, felt sick and migraine-y like I had pulled an all-nighter.

What just happened? Sometimes when we start along a new path, we can’t tell right away whether or not we should have taken this one. All we can do is feel our way forward, and trust that God will direct us to continue or not.

“Trust in the Lord, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5-6).

The morning of the second day dawned bleakly. But the first day was ended, and sometimes that’s the best you can say about a difficult experience. I will share more about the second day in another post later this week.