To the one who wasn't my friend

We all do it. We all compete with people in high school - sometimes very obviously and sometimes in ways that are completely unspoken, but we do it. We have people who we just cannot stand to see in the halls and especially outside them....and then we get out of high school. Life changes. Life gets real, and the world gets huge.

It has been my experience that, immediately upon entering the huge world, the first place we go to find haven is among those with whom we shared history....and probably way more than that. This has happened to me many times, but today it was addressed specifically. "I know we were not close in our younger years, so I may be an unlikely friend, at best, but know I care and pray for you often....". I was so struck by this. There were like 6 years where we were in competing cliques in junior high and high school, but after that, like I said, the rules changed.

My life has been extremely challenging, but so has this person's. We have had little face to face contact, but social networking and the blog world have left us at least partially informed as to the goings on in each others' lives, and let me tell you. This has not been the white picket fence life for this kid. I have watched from afar as her family grew at nearly exactly the same rate as mine did. I watched her grow into her personality and character and achieve dreams that she must have had for a long time. Then I watched life hit her in the face in a way that seems totally unfair - a little one with a very rare, chronic illness. In the time since the diagnosis, she has remained publicly positive and, I assume, privately honest even having the courage to share publicly some of the nitty gritty of her feelings. Not easy stuff. Uncharted waters amid which there is not a ton of camaraderie or support. Despite that, she's still praying for me and apparently feels some regret for crap we did to each other from high school. I would like to address these things right now. I would like to share the things that this person has actually added to my life.

So lady, here goes.

The first major thing I remember about us being adults is when I was about to get married. Though I was not a virgin, my experience in the world of sex was unhealthy at best. You must have known or been able to see that I was scared, so you sat me down and reassured me and explained to me things that you were suspicious that I didn't know. You were correct. You also gave me the prettiest little something to pack in my bag for my honeymoon. It was the prettiest one I received. I could tell you spent time picking it out, and it made me feel special that you did that.

You got pregnant just a few months before I did with our first children. We were in the first time moms club together. I was glad you were blazing the trail for me, and I felt a tiny bond that we were sharing the experience at the relatively same time.

My nephew was born early and had a few complications that worried our family. You were working in the NICU with him. When I remembered that you were there, I felt peace. I knew that he would be loved on and taken care of. I remember telling my family that you were there, so they should feel less worried.

You grew into someone that loved her husband and her children and other people. That is huge for me. Watching someone become a balanced follower in our faith is a hard thing to do given some of the rules that were drilled into our heads our entire growing up life. You figured it out - at least in part. Thanks for that. You probably don't realize what a safe place you have become for people that are still doing the figuring out.

My third baby was my chunkiest at birth, but things went a LOT wrong with her. Despite the fact that I did, in fact, know how to nurse and take care of a newborn, something did go terribly wrong. My chunky baby had turned skeletal, I was horrified and felt really unsure of what to do. You sent me a private message telling me to follow my mommy gut and just have her weighed. This was on a Monday, and she had an appointment on Friday, but you persisted that no one would think ill of me for wanting to make sure she was healthy. The weigh in revealed that she had dropped a third of her body weight. She was the medical mystery of "failure to thrive". She spent the next week in the hospital being poked and prodded and evaluated and scanned. On our first night in the hospital, the head peds physician came in to see her. He stood over her bassinet with a very defeated expression on his face. I said to him "She looks pretty bad, doesn't she?" expecting him to be doctor-diplomatic with me and say something ambiguously positive like "Hey, we're going to do everything we can" or "We are not done investigating ways to help this little gal", but he didn't. He shook his head and let out a giant sigh and said "Yeah." and then turned and left the room. She was in bad shape. It took a LOT of work and an extremely dedicated team to get her stable. Well after we were past this horrible time, her nurse told me that, when they cathed her, no liquid came out....not a drop. Had I waited until our Friday appointment - had you NOT SPOKEN UP, I would have woken up to a dead baby laying beside me. I would not have my Sal gal. Did you know you were the only person that suggested to me to just take her in and have her weighed? Did you know that you were the only person who told me ANYTHING?

I could stop there. That one thing is good enough for me for the rest of my life, but that's not all I've got.

My life got real hairy after that. My marriage went down the toilet and so did my health, but around that same time is when you received you little one's diagnosis. You have spent this time with a hopeful smile on your face when you could manage it and a persistently positive outlook. You have not abandoned your faith in times when I'm sure you felt you'd lost it. You have not stopped loving your family or those around you. I have watched you turn trips to out of town hospitals for exploratory procedures into adventures for your kids. Let me tell you - they were adventures for the rest of us too. You made lemonade from lemons, and boy was it sweet to savor. You took the recipe of your life (see bloggy title) and you made it something that ADDED to everyone's experience here. You have taught us lessons and given us encouragement.

With all that going on, my dear, you have also taken time to find me. You have bothered to care and pray.....for me. You will not know for a long time maybe what the effects of that have been, but every time you have come to me and offered love, it has given me strength. It has replenished some of what was so depleted. That's just me. Don't you know that there are others? So so many others. You are magic, dear girl.

So thanks for high school. Thanks for what are now really funny memories of our cliques spying on each other and making fun of stupid things that wouldn't matter later. Thank you for sharing with me our funny history. Thank you for choosing to include me in the group of people in your life that you deem as friends. It is my honor. "Unlikely at best". No maam. Beauty. It is beauty to get to be counted as your friend. The promises of friendship and prayer and solidarity go both ways. Know that my turn will come to be support for you - a friend for you. I will gladly snatch that up at any moment's notice.

Let's continue this. Let's continue to share with each other these stories. Let's grow together in the quirky way we have found to be effective for the lives we have individually. Let's grow in beauty. Let's......be friends.

It's a little bit funny...

Today I found myself in a terrible mood. I have felt it all day, and I just didn't know why. I wrestled with it covering a bunch of bases by asking myself questions like "Am I hungry?", "Am I mad about something?" or "Did I just not sleep well?". The answers to those questions did not seem to provide any relief for my funk. It was just there. It's been there for a couple days, I think, and as soon as I let myself be still enough for my heart to speak, I heard the answer......I am sad.

I have tried to not be sad because there are so many people doing such wonderful things for me - the primary being Dan. He is so endlessly loving to me that it makes me feel embarrassed sometimes. It is humbling to have someone be so sacrificial with every part of who they are. I have had people from different points of my life offer me amazing encouragement lately. I am healthy. I have the opportunity for the first time in my entire life to sort through all the crap that has happened with someone who went to school to learn how to help people navigate the confusing waters of life. I have a lot to be thankful for, so I felt bad for being sad as if my sadness would imply an ingratitude for the beauty that I have in my life. When my sadness peaked out of my arsenal of emotions, I did as I have done so many times before in my life - I covered it so I couldn't see it. It did not go away, though, because the truth of how we feel never does. Emotions are healthy and part of our humanity. We are entitled, nay, required to have them. I have come to grips with this entitlement this week, so at this point in my evening, I will no longer refuse to acknowledge that I am sad.

I am sad because my 6 year old son got sick in the bathroom at school yesterday and didn't feel the need or permission to tell his teacher. She found out another way. Then he went home to NOT his momma snuggling him in my arms and making him comfortable. I don't know who did that for him or if anyone did, but it wasn't me. It doesn't get to be me right now, and that makes me so sad. It also makes me sad that he might already be very used to the fact that his mommy doesn't do those kind of things so he doesn't miss it.

I have had some really tough conversations this week that, while they were extremely productive, were still so difficult. The need for them is rooted in a lot of sadness. Talking through those things made me sad because I am still feeling the sadness from the original source. Sadness on top of sadness.

In working with a therapist, I have been given homework. I did the homework. It was heart wrenchingly painful to me. So painful. I do not have human words (at least in this language) to articulate the depth of pain that I felt as I relived some of the most painful times in my life knowing full well that, while I was addressing some of them, they were just that - only some. I was instructed to go way far back in my life and live there for long enough to allow the pained person of that moment to speak. She still hurts so bad. I gave her tools to sort out the pain, but just because you can sort pain out does not mean that it goes away. Sometimes, after the anger is gone, after the confusion is gone, after the logic sets in, the sadness stays. It is a weird things when you reach the point of letting your heart break.....for yourself. Not in a self-pitying, perpetual victim kind of way. The kind of heart break that acknowledges the things that you KNOW you felt all along but, for whatever reason, did not feel permission to express the way you needed to. That you were left with damage, in this case, as a very young person. It all makes for some sadness.

I am lonely. I am such a social person by nature. I thrive around people. Cohabitating with someone who likes low to no lighting in a room and does not need interaction with people and who has hours and hours worth of end of semester grading to complete can leave an extrovert feeling a little lost. I even went out to lunch with someone this week - I should feel glad for new friends, right? Yes, and I am. There are just some of my old ones that I miss so desperately. There is something so wonderful to sit with someone or go somewhere with someone and snort-laugh over things drawn from your shared history. I miss those people.

I keep hearing about negative things happening to people for whom I care really deeply. I feel so helpless, and my empathetic nature bursts to the front of my brain and heart ready to love away all the hurts that people are experiencing. I am learning though, that I don't actually have the magic ability to erase people's hurts - just like nobody had the ability to erase mine.

I am still struggling with the fact that my weird recent life events have caused a lot of questions and undoubtedly a lot of hurts that I have no way to address. This makes me really sad too.

I don't know what I'm going to do with all of these things, but I know this much already. I am allowed to be sad. It doesn't mean that I'm dysfunctional or living in the past or being anxious about the future. It doesn't mean I'm being ungrateful or choosing to look past the blessings that I have in my life. It just means I'm sad.

I love you all. The only people who read this blog are most likely friends of mine. You are in my life because we chose each other. This journey of life is so crazy and weird. I love the thought that we're in it together.

On reinventing

I have started writing this post 4 times. This is time number 5. This is one of those days when I'm not sure exactly where to begin or about what thing I would like to write. I'm just at a loss. I have a lot of questions for people, and I'm not sure how to ask them. "Why did you do this?" "What did you want to tell me?" "Did I hurt you?" "Are you mad at me?" "Why does it seem like you erased me?" "Why does it seem like you are protecting yourself from me?" Some of these questions are valid and some of them hold emotions that I have projected onto the person or persons to whom I am asking these silent questions, but I'm not sure which questions fall into which category. It is, at best, confusing. It is, at worst, terrifying. I am terrified.

I once had a very critical heart ask me with a sneer on the lips "What do you WANT from life, SARAH?! I mean, what do you want to DO?!" I am not sure the sort of answer for which the inquirer was looking, but the question sort of blind sided me. Was this heart asking me what my career aspirations were as I sat there rocking my infant son to sleep? Was it asking me what sort of name I wanted to make for myself? Was it asking me what changes I felt needed to be made in my person? These questions fired through my brain in a moment's time, and I didn't really have a way to answer them so I just gave the only answer I had. "I just want to love as many people as possible, and I want to share the love of God with as many people as I possibly can." I looked back at the questioning heart and waited for some sort of response. There was nothing. Instantly it became like the conversation had never occurred, but that was my most honest answer. That is really all I want out of life. 

So why would the questions in the opening paragraph invoke terror in me? Because every possible answer to each and every one of them has to mean that someone did not feel loved or did not, for whatever reason, return the love that I offered. Both of those are heartbreaking to me. What if my actions or the circumstances of my life leave someone or several someones with the question of whether or not I actually love them? How can I repair that? How hard should I work to do that? Do I ask that they meet me in the middle or do I go all the way to where they are? This is dependent on whether or not each person in question is a healthy part of my life or a toxic part of my life. The lines for those classifications are very, very blurry. They're more like an area of a really attractive shade of grey. I want to venture over to the grey to see beauty of the haze. Fogginess can bring out such beauty in some things. What if the beauty of restoration is just inside the fog? Why can't I just wander around in there for a bit and enjoy the glow of mist laden light?......because while this grey can offer some beauty in some cases, in others, it can be an indicator that a very dangerous dark is waiting for me just on the other side. In fact, a person can get lost in grey and find themselves much closer to the darkness than what they ever would have chosen in their right mind when they were still in the light.  There could be, for all I can see at this moment, a really vicious trap laid by someone who does not care for my soul. 

At this point, because my heart is still in such tumult, I am not a good judge of character. I think this has been the case for a long, long time with only short breaks of times of wisdom. This.....is why I am terrified. I have had people offer me what seemed like beautiful, selfless gifts only to realize that said gifts were fashioned with artfully attached Pinnochio-like strings. There have also been other people who gave gifts for which they never even asked to be thanked or repaid. While I have always TRIED to show gratitude for these, I'm sure I fell short mostly because I was so overcome with the love that I felt I had received that I never found a way worthy of showing what I truly felt. 

The hard parts of this thing are these. Someone offering a gift most often refuses to believe that they are doing it for any other reason except the honest benevolence of their heart. They would never be willing to admit that they gave someone something with an agenda in mind. It is also very hard for me to differentiate between these hearts and the ones that have had love erupt in their souls and just want to let it spill over to me. 

My first instinct in life is to offer love and the investment of my love to nearly everyone with whom I spend any length of time. If I receive what looks to me like love, I tend to throw myself into reciprocating that. This has not served me very well. There are people that I assumed would be in my life forever who have chosen to make their exit. This.....hurts. There are also people that I never expected to be a part of my life for the length of time that they have or to offer me completely unconditional love in the way that they have. This dichotomy is so frustrating.

I am living in a new place around new people until May. What investments do I make in that time? When we move back to Florida in May, I will not be able to deny that the invention of the life I created prior to nearly 4 weeks ago will not exist any longer. What do I do then?

Who am I today? Who should I be tomorrow? What am I supposed to be "when I grow up"? Don't think that the ultimate sources of these answers is lost on me. It's not the knowing of the answers or even the knowing where to find the answers that's the hard part. It's the getting to the sources that is the very hardest part. That is the part that has tripped up humanity since it began. While I wait for my next epiphany, I will rest. I will look at the afore mentioned "nails" in my hand and dream about what I would like to build. I will also choose to continue to love. It is hard right now. It is scary, but I will still do everything I can in this finite being of mine to offer to every person unconditional, judgement free love. As time passes, my ways of growing and giving to others will change, but for now, this is all I've got so that is what I will give.