In my skin.

Have you ever had one of those experiences where you feel like you're reading something and YOU could have written it? TDH Man sent me a link yesterday and honestly, it made me teary-eyed. I swear, it's like this blogger was channeling me; I could have written this.  Change her hair color to my blonde-red-auburn-whatever and it's me, even down to the height. It was eerie and foreign and sad all at once.  Why?  Well, because it mirrors an issue that I've been dealing with lately and I've been ashamed to admit for a while: I'm uncomfortable in my own skin. There, said it.

When I was younger, I never had issues with my body image. And if I did, I either ignored them or just got through them without a problem. I'm lucky enough that the majority of the women in my life weren't self-conscious about their bodies and I can't recall my blood-mother ever, ever saying a single thing about her body other than complaining about the large scar on her knee. My father, who was the one major constant presence in my under-ten years, tried to instill an equal-opportunity atmosphere into his daughters without being overbearing about it. One of the first pieces of clothing that I can remember owning was a shirt that said "Anything boys can do, girls can do better" and my Dad lived by that mantra. I once asked him if he would have preferred to have a son and he looked at me as if I had three heads and answered blandly "Why? There isn't anything that a son can do that you couldn't."

Me, days before G made his very late arrival

So imagine my surprise when, three kids later, I can't stand to be naked in front of a mirror. I loved being pregnant with my children. I love breastfeeding my youngest child right now. I love knowing that my body was, and is still, sustaining a life outside my own. Yet... I don't feel like me. It's taken me a long time to admit that it's because my body has changed and now, my mind has yet to catch up with it which is causing all sorts of havoc internally.

It seems that TDH Man and I have been talking about this issue a lot lately. We've made a pact to ditch the sweets in an effort to get our eating more in line with what we believe is healthy. We've tried the Paleo style of eating and while it 'worked' for us in the beginning, I disliked the fad of it all and became rather disillusioned about what was 'right' to eat and what wasn't. I realized that I don't like strict rules about my food and I needed to find peace with eating how I wanted to eat without feeling like an entire community was staring over my shoulder, tsking me to death when I let a piece of pasta or rice pass my lips. Do I eat that 'stuff' now? Mostly not. I aim as much as possible for WHOLE FOODS, foods in their original form, cooked how I like them, skipping overly processed things when I can. No raw-only diets, no grain-free diets, no eat-this-and-never-that diets. No diets in general. Just eating. So that's step one, I'm guessing, in my effort to move towards something new.

But will it be enough? I've changed. My body has changed. The years, gasp, are catching up to me. And yes, I'm only in my mid-30's. Laugh if you want, at my naivete, but if you have one iota of sensitivity in you, you won't. You'll understand that every person is dealing with their own demons and struggling with what they want versus what they have. I know that God has given me this body to care for while I am on His earth, but I'm struggling. I'm struggling to find peace with what I've transformed into and to find a way to be me in this skin again.

So it begins.

As a Mom, I know that there are going to be many, many times in my children's lives that I'm going to want to protect them from a broken heart. Sometime that'll be possible, most times it won't and when it's not possible, I know my heart is going to break for and with them. Last week, I got the first taste of heartbreak for G, our middle child.

Little ear and all

See, not only was our precious boy born with three holes in his heart, but he was also born with two other congenital defects called microtia and atresia. It came as a complete surprise to my husband and me and wasn't discovered until G was born, (more on that journey later). The long and the short of it is that G doesn't have more than a little earlobe on his right side and no ear canal. He's been found to have about 10% of the hearing he should have on the right side, but believe me when I tell you that he's got perfect hearing on the left. As a result of this difference, TDH Man and I  have discussed many, many times the things G is going to have to experience on his own. Since he was three weeks old, he's undergone therapies for hearing, speech and other issues to prepare him for the day when he turns three and they set him free into the preschool world.

I'm not going to lie: when G was first born, his 'little ear' (as we learned to call it) was all I saw. But gradually, I stopped seeing it and just saw my child, different and beautiful. And now, three years later, it seems that others are seeing it too.

TDH Man has had the week off because our daycare is on vacation, so he's been Mr. Mom. One of the difference between when I stay home with the three young'uns and he stays home is that I tend to stay home. TDH Man, on the other hand, is a bit of a wanderlust and tends to find an adventure for the kids and barrels forth. Last week, he took G and AD to the park. While he was sitting with AD on the blanket, letting her practice her belly-rolls, TDH Man watched G playing in the sand with two little girls whom he'd never met. Later, when TDH Man was relating the story, he tells me that he couldn't be sure, but he was pretty certain that he heard one of the girls point and laugh, saying "Look at his ear!".

Despite three years of waiting for it, it still broke my heart to hear it.

I've had people tell me they didn't even notice G's difference at all. I'm never sure if they're saying that because they're being nice, or if they really didn't see it. As a parent of a child with a facial difference, I'm telling you right now, be honest. Don't make stuff up, just to be nice. I would rather you just didn't say anything at all if it freaks you out that my son has no ear than to give me a white lie and say you didn't notice because I wonder. I wonder so much that it keeps me up some nights. Yes, I understand that you don't want to be uncomfortable around my boy, and that he's got something different in his bag of tricks, but he's still my boy. He's still funny, smart, sweet, feisty and a toddler. But still, I wonder what people think some times. And that's my hang-up, not G's.

See, that little girl pointed and laughed, but G didn't hear her.  And not because he's partially deaf, but because it's the first time that someone has pointed it out and laughed at it and because it was the first time, he didn't realize it was directed at him. I know there will be a day when he'll realize it, but for now, I'm glad he's oblivious because right now, I needed it. I need to watch him and learn from his reaction and remember that no matter what, he's my boy, little ear and all.

Some things you don't want to know.

I got WD-40 up my nose.

Don't ask.

Sharing your faith, one life at a time

This speech was originally given at the Portsmouth United Methodist Church by me on July 31, 2011 as part of our church's Faith in Action series. I give a speech every month about practical ways you can share your faith with others. If you ever have a suggestion, please let me know in the comments!

Do any of us really know what a hug is worth?  I'm not sure you can assign a monetary value to it, but have you ever thought about it?  What does it cost to give one?  What does it cost to receive just a hug?  I know it seems like a silly question, but if you ever find yourself wondering what it costs you or what one hug is worth, I'd like you to think of the story I'm about to tell you.

Before our son G was born, my husband Michael and I were pregnant with our first child.  After having been told that I would have a 1% chance of conceiving a child naturally, this baby was truly our little miracle.  Sadly, 10 weeks into our pregnancy, God called our baby home.  We never got to meet that child and as you can imagine, we were crushed by the loss.  At the time, Michael and I were living in separate cities, so we didn't have the ability to comfort each other and the only consolation to offer each other was through long-distance phone calls.  I can't tell you how many tears we cried to each other on the phone.  It was a terribly lonely time for both of us.  A few days after our baby had passed, I was in a local drug store.  I'm sure I looked a wreck after not having slept well for days, weeping an endless river of tears and barely able to speak without crying.  While in line to purchase whatever it was I was at the drugstore for, the cashier looked up from her register and gasped when she saw me.  She was a young woman, probably not older than 20 and although I had lived in the neighborhood for 10 years, I had never seen her there before.  I was at the point where I didn't care what I looked like or what a stranger thought of me.  I wanted nothing more than to get back to my house and drown in my tears.  Yet, this cashier, seeing me in this state, gasped and said "Oh, honey, are you ok?"  I looked up and couldn't say a word to her; it took all my strength just to nod my head.  Seeing the tears in my eyes, she came out from behind the counter and she said "Can I give you a hug?"  She wrapped her arms around me and the tears started again.  While she held me I sobbed, saying that we had just lost our baby.  She said "Oh dear Jesus.  Let me pray for you" and right there, in that line with probably ten other people looking on, she prayed to Jesus, asking him to take my pain away and to watch over our little one in heaven.

When asked the question "Do you share your faith with others?" most people have said to me that they try, but that it's uncomfortable or that they're afraid of being rejected. I can completely understand that.  It's not fun to be rejected and I'll admit that I worry about talking about my faith sometimes too. But what if you don't have to talk much at all?  What if the cost of sharing your faith is one hug?  Could you afford that?  That cashier's hug meant more to me than I can tell you.  Michael was 1,000 miles away from me and having someone physically console me and even more, to pray over me in my time of need truly made me feel like Jesus was by my side.  Even in that terrible time, in my grief, I knew that God had sent that stranger to give me one hug, to let me know that He was there.  One hug.  It really doesn't cost that much.

I should be put in librarian time out.

There are way too many awesome things about being a librarian to list here. You know that joy you feel when you see your kid falling in love with a book you had as a kid? Or when you see him lugging a huge pile of books up to his bedroom so that he can spend hours lolling on his bed, surrounded by his newest treasures? Yeah, well I get to experience that all the time. I'm sure I'd get it even more if I worked in a library that had books that I could half-way understand, but that's another story. The short version is that I really, really love being a librarian. But last night, I broke all the unspoken librarian rules and morphed into a parent. I'm thinking of calling that ALA on myself...

E, our nine year old, has always been a precocious reader, but he's also a timid reader in the sense that certain themes scare the daylights out of him. He tends to choose books that are WAY below his reading level because the subject matter is safer. Let's just say he's a sensitive reader. Heck, he's sensitive about everything; he couldn't watch the Fox and the Hound because there was too much yelling. Seriously. So it baffles me just a bit that he loves books about wars and battles, but being the supportive librarian that I am, I encourage his love of reading and ignore the topic. But last night was different. TDH Man, also a librarian, knows E's love of history and these particular topics so he picked out seven or eight new books for him. He picked them up from our local library the other night and E sat on the couch, engrossed for an hour before coming up for a breath. Last night, before bed, E asked me if he could take a book about the Vietnam War to day camp today.  And I did the unthinkable: I told him no.

Even worse, I told him "I think that some people wouldn't be pleased to see a young boy reading a book about war."

Gracious.

Sometimes I'm clueless. I fully admit that. Sometimes I don't even realize what I've done until it's over and this was one of those times. I mentioned to TDH Man that E had asked me about taking the book to camp and he said "Why not?" and I realized what I had done. I'd censored my own child. For shame, really, for shame.

So, this morning, I atoned for my mistake. As he was walking downstairs, the challenged book in hand to pore over while eating breakfast, I called him over to me. And I told him that it was wrong of me to tell him he couldn't take that book. I told him that it shouldn't matter to anyone else what he wants to read and that if he really wanted to read it, he could take it with him.

He tried to suppress a smile, but I could see he was pleased. Whether or not it was because he was able to take the book or because he caught his mom apologizing, I don't know. My hope is that it's a lesson he'll remember.