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(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert
As far as I know, that’s as scary as this story gets, but I don’t think that memory is ever very far from my consciousness. There’s not much to tell, really, except we both agree that it happened. One night, in the brief period when we lived in a rental house before moving to our own home, my brother stage-whispered to me from his twin bed, “Trina, there’s a man in the room. Hide under the covers.”
I hid and eventually fell back asleep. The next morning we both told the story to our mother, who doubted it until she discovered the cellar door unlocked. Though we had just moved to a town of no bigger than 600, apparently a man who was losing his battle with mental illness had a habit of entering peoples’ homes in the middle of the night. One resident woke to see a lit cigarette glowing in the kitchen and discovered the man relaxing at the table.
My brother Scott and I in 1964.
Put my early experience together with a vivid imagination and my quicksilver ADD mind, and you can guess that I didn’t really grow up falling asleep too well. My increasing levels of nearsightedness probably didn’t help either. Even though I lived in two more homes before I left for college and then again to strike out on my own for good, my insomnia never abated in my family’s homes.
Luckily, the worst of my insomnia ended with that final move. No idea why—I’ve lived in six places since—all different as far as I can tell.
Which is not to say I’ve made complete peace with the night.
First of all, let me say that I love staying up at night—it’s not just about avoiding falling asleep. I am the queen of getting a second wind around bedtime. However, I don’t really like mornings and I do “get” that if I stay up late all the time, then those mornings will feel even more unpleasant than they normally do.
Second of all, I know that sleeping with my husband makes a big difference. I’m lucky that I haven’t had to sleep alone much in past couple decades. Plus, he got me Lasik surgery which means I can see if any bad guys are in the house—haven’t seen any, thank you very much! Still, he’ll tell you that everyone in my family of origin—including my father, mother, and yes, my brother Scott, as well as our own two children—has or had some problems with sleep.
He likes to say something such as, “What do you people have against going to sleep? I like going to sleep—why don’t you?”
Good question. You see, I like sleep a lot—I just don’t like going to sleep.
After you go through all that sleeplessness when your kids are young—and then again when they’re teenagers and young adults—you really learn to like that sleep. Not waiting for someone to come home and/or living with someone on a vastly different time clock was one of the greatest benefits of our short empty nest period. Doesn’t it seem so ironic, though, that the time when my body slept best happened when I couldn’t sleep much because of my kids?
Let’s just say that lately we’ve been working on improving our sleep setting and our habits since these days it doesn’t seem to take much of a distraction to interrupt our sleep. First we had to deal with old dogs that had to go out in the middle of the night and who played musical dog beds all night—without the music, of course. Then we had to deal with a puppy—at the same time my back began hurting. Well, the puppy got older but then Sherman’s back started hurting, too.
(c) 2012 Trina Lambert
So our latest step in the quest for a good night’s sleep was saying goodbye to our waterbed (with much regret!) and hello to a new mattress, box springs, and bed-frame. The almost eight-week transitional process started when we put the mattress in the waterbed frame (can’t we ever pick anything not on back order??!!), then continued when we set up the new frame and added the box springs, and ended when I also got fitted sheets (never needed those before) and a new comforter.
Even if I’ll never quite forget my early experience, we are finally enjoying sweeter dreams.
Crescent moon on high.
Handful of stars in the sky.
Night—sweet guard of dreams.
by Trina (Lange) Lambert, Age 10
(c) 1992 Sherman Lambert
Well, I still thought pursuing the right timing was important for causing the least amount of disruption in my workplace. That’s when I started charting my cycles and noticing that some patterns didn’t seem right. While driving to work, I’d hear Bonnie Raitt singing “Baby Mine” on the radio, but I’d begun to wonder if there would be a baby mine.
Just under a year after the first time—with some additional help from the doctors—we’d merged back onto the road to parenthood. However, I’d stopped worrying about disrupting work—I was starting to understand that babies are disruptive—no matter what! But, we still experienced problems—which led to our discovering early on that I was carrying twins. I prayed at least one baby mine would make it. Through medical interventions, my focused behaviors, and the grace of God, those babies mine did arrive, just a little early but so healthy we only got to stay in the hospital one day.
Turns out that amateur who read my palm before I ever met my kids’ father had been right about a couple things: I did have twins and each was strong-willed, even if they weren’t both boys.
When your only two kids are twins, each developmental phase is new to you no matter what. If you are also blessed with strong-willed kids who also have ADD, you soon learn that helping to guide their individual development can be exhausting even as you love them. Add in advocating to schools and medical professionals and somehow life becomes so much more complicated than you ever expected.
Now those babies mine are legally adults in many ways—I can’t access their educational or medical records on my own—but they are learning about many of the difficulties associated with life after high school. The world doesn’t really care that kids with ADD are supposed to take longer to figure out how to manage many everyday daily tasks. In fact, the world doesn’t really care that science is showing that even the brains of people without ADD don’t really finish developing until they reach their mid-20s.
My son doesn’t know what exactly he wants, but he seems to be floating on, finding happy moments in each day. For him I worry that he doesn’t worry enough about figuring out how to find a place in this world. If college isn’t his thing now, what is?
And, my daughter—well, I mourn the happy-go-lucky child who brought sunshine into my life. I glimpse her and then she slides back into her worries and sadness. I’ve searched for solutions for her, but in the end that quest isn’t mine.
So we’ve reached the point when I can guide them to resources, but can’t make them access them. What a hard place along the parenting journey . . .
(c) 2010 Sherman Lambert
Though I don’t know the grand plans for them, Someone else does.
(c) 2009 Christiana Lambert
This is one of those years when I can’t talk myself into seeing the happy endings—or at least the unhappy endings that lead to deeper understanding and long-term happier endings. No matter what I said about wanting to be done with talking about unhappy topics, I am not. I can’t will myself to come up with the neat and happy moral of the story that will tie up a less-than-hope-filled post.
Although I’m feeling a bit like George Bailey on the bridge, I’m not looking to jump into the river. No, I just want to take that suitcase I bought with happy travels in mind—and run—anywhere that isn’t where I’ve been.
You see, I know God is hearing my prayers, but I’m having a hard time saying them. The good thing about God is He hears the prayers that have sunk so deep within us that we can’t even use our voices to speak them—they become so much a part of us that they rise from our very pores.
If nothing else, perhaps He’ll send me a bumbling Clarence to show me a better path than the one I am on.
Sometimes no amount of research or any continued pursuit for new solutions can fix a problem. And you especially can’t make someone else choose to see the hope in their situation if they prefer to see only loss.
You’re probably thinking I must be talking about myself, right? See, that’s the irony, isn’t it? So easy to see how to solve someone else’s problem, but then you look in the mirror and realize that maybe you’re so busy trying to solve someone else’s problem because it makes it easy not to be responsible for solving your own problems.
The years of trying to help others with celiac disease, dementia, depression, and ADD have taken their toll on me. I’m fresh out of perky solutions that are always met with a big “but”—because after all I have no idea how bad it is for someone else.
Well, the truth is they don’t know how bad it has been for me to watch them suffer. If I could, I would wave a magic wand and remove the problem. Would be much better than searching for other possible solutions that will never be good enough because the only solution the person really wants is to wake up completely healed.
They also don’t know how much I’ve suffered watching them refuse to consider anything but Plan A when I would fight to find them Plan B through Plan Infinity to aid in their movements forward. This week I realize I’m done being the pep squad. All that energy spent helping those who at this point won’t help themselves is making me feel like a failure. I know I am not—I tried, as God is my witness, I tried. Maybe I tried so hard that they didn’t think they needed to do so. But in the end all any of us really can do is help ourselves.
And during all those times of caregiving, I did not help myself. In some ways it’s just not possible to take care of yourself in the midst of others’ crises, but in other ways you have to be careful not to see any results as the only proof that what you did mattered. Some problems can’t be fixed despite anyone’s best efforts.
And so, I need a Clarence to come show me how I helped even if I could not beat back the demons of the diseases. I need to know that without me this place would have become a Potterville. Maybe I have a bit of a savior complex, but, by God, I’d like to know that sacrificing my potential trips around the world made some difference to others.
But short of that, the only thing I can control is the direction of my own footsteps in the future. A future where I stop trying to find solutions for everyone else and start looking for my own regardless of who is coming along with me on the trip.
Clarence, are you ready to earn your wings? Then help me climb down from this bridge so I can pack my suitcase for the trip of my lifetime.
(c) 2011 Christiana Lambert
Major depression, however, seems closer to not believing in that someday.
And as much as I don’t know what that’s like for me, I do know what it sounds like in my daughter. When someone you love has fallen into the abyss of major depression, you just can’t give them platitudes such as “just deal with it” or let them experience every natural consequence of their actions.
To each person who tells me to relax and let her get herself through this blue period, there is this gut response that tells me we can’t afford to see if that will work—the potential cost is just too high—and Sherman agrees.
Until we’d walked with her on this path before, I would have thought they—especially the experts—were right.
This time she didn’t cry for help as early. You see, she’s older and wiser, which may actually mean she is deeper into depression this bout because of the coping skills she has gained over the past few years.
So why, during this period in her life, is this the semester she is studying The Bell Jar? What is purely literary or a treatise on various aspects of society in a time and place long past becomes something more to those who identify too well with the narrator’s thoughts. I’m an English major, for goodness’ sake, but this book has long since moved from the academic to the personal for me—and I still don’t really “get” what Plath is saying in the same way my daughter does.
While I did what I could to get her connected with help within the university, I cannot assume it is enough, even if we’ve been really blessed to encounter caring, knowledgeable professionals—and believe me, after our previous experiences with her depression, we do not trust someone just because of a title or supposed experience. Still, at a time when I do not live where my daughter does, it helps me to have these contacts who can reach out to her if she stops reaching out to them or those closest to her.
Constant vigilance—despite the cost for me. Yes, this is supposed to be my time—to either move on to what’s next or at least to mourn my losses—but I no longer feel this discord with our daughter is something personal or natural to this age in her life.
No, I believe major depression is talking for her, drowning out the sounds of possibility and hope that do exist in the midst of all that seems so hard right now. The good she minimizes while amplifying the bad.
I must fight for the someday of her feeling better while her defenses are down, even as I and others direct her to believe that she can fight for herself. Someday can’t come soon enough—especially for her.
And so, I also pray without ceasing all the day long.
(c) 2009 Christiana Lambert
This is the very first year Christiana and Jackson are not in school together. Unlike many twins, they did not separate for their freshmen year in college. That made our lives easier—one location, one calendar, one move-in day, one school to get to know.
1995 First Day of Preschool
The kids’ initial separation occurred earlier this year when Christiana accepted a job working as a conference assistant for Fort Lewis College. When I picked her up for a short stay between the end of the semester and the start of her job, she was pretty angry with him. We took her back before he arrived home. While talking with Jackson, we discovered he was frustrated with her.
Although they had moved into different dorm buildings, she had moved into his building within a couple months. Easier to spend time to together that way, but also easier to fall into old patterns. We didn’t used to call them “The Bickersons” for nothing—and, yet, they are very close.
Within a couple weeks of being apart this spring, they were already missing each other and trying to figure out how to visit one another despite the 13-hour round trip drive.
All along we’ve worried about whether Jackson could stay at Fort Lewis, but Christiana is the one who started to question whether the college was right for her, ultimately giving notice from her work there after two months and coming home to her old job.
Meanwhile she waited to see if she could get accepted into Colorado State University and get everything in order to transfer for the fall—if she decided to make the change. Jackson was happy to have her back home, but not so excited about the possible longer separation.
The funny thing was that our relationship with him became less strong once she came home. Reminded me of how often those two were a force against us when they were children. Twins can be a powerful team and woe to those who would try to get in between them, even unintentionally.
1997 First Day of School
Here it is the second week of school already for her and the first for him.
She and we jumped through a lot of hoops to get her set up for fall semester. We moved her possessions into an apartment a couple weekends ago and then she and I returned a few days later for transfer orientation—she to stay and I to return home. During orientation, the facilitators’ words allowed me to see I was in mourning for the change myself even though I feel it is the right move for her and am glad to have her closer to us. It’s just I thought I knew what to expect for this their sophomore year.
Very few parents of multiples get to have their kids at the same college—we’re just going through the more typical transition in our family a year later than most do. In the end what matters is that each kid follows the path that is right for him or her.
Jackson had time off work before needing to leave for school, so he insisted on going to visit Christiana to “help” her with her first few days of school. I know he slept in late while she started the next step in her education, but I also think he provided a steadying presence as she starts to adjust to the paradigm shift of moving her studies from a small liberal arts college to a large university.
He came home saying he’d like to live with her again in the few years after they get out on their own. I have no idea if that’s a good plan or not, but I think they’ll have a better idea after they have lived separately for the next few years.
1997
Sherman and I helped him move into his college apartment last Saturday. How strange to be at that school again without her.
The transition back to school lasted a couple weeks for our family this time around—which is exhausting no doubt for all of us.
The road to independence has additional twists for twins and their parents—as well as a possible fork or two. We parents will just try to enjoy the drive, even while traveling without a map.
(c) 2009 Christiana Lambert
Just Monday our foster dachshund crossed over that Rainbow Bridge. We don’t know how old he was, but when the rescue group found him emaciated and wandering the streets three years ago, they thought he was twelve. Despite his sketchy background and his pronounced health problems, he lived a full lifespan.
We weren’t being totally altruistic when we let him come to our house—in fact, Christiana was convinced having a small dog, specifically a dachshund, was an anecdote to the sadness she felt late at night when Fordham, our love sponge of an English Springer Spaniel, had retired to his cushion for a long night’s sleep. And though Sherman and I weren’t looking for another dog—especially a small dog—we were in favor of anything positive that would help her through the night.
Besides, he wasn’t supposed to be our forever dog. According to the rescue group, we were just supposed to have him for a week or two. But the economy hit dogs and rescue groups hard—our contacts with the group became fewer and fewer, until we knew we must be his forever family—how could we break a heart again that had already been so broken?.
(c) 2010
Although he never won over the jealous Fordham, he did worm his way into the rest of our hearts, even if he could only give so much love before he seemed to need to retreat. Christiana was disappointed in that, but she understood brokenness enough to love him still.
I would not have chosen to bring home a dog with a small dog bladder or an enlarged heart. I had dealt with hypothyroidism in dogs before, but not in this era of constant expensive blood tests and not with a dog with such a resistant thyroid function—he ended up taking almost as much thyroid medication as I do even though his weight was about 90% lower than mine. And, I had never even heard of the dog lice that apparently arrived with him and required expensive treatments for both him and Fordham.
And, yet, there was something about how jaunty his short-legged run was every time we returned home. He liked us; he really did, just in a very different manner than a spaniel does.
(c) 2010
Though Fordham’s possessive behavior and big dog klutzy ways made Abel nervous, he never stopped wanting to share his company. When Fordham’s final illness became evident, even Abel seemed stressed.
For about six weeks after Fordham was gone, when Abel’s thyroid level was ideal, he seemed just a little younger and a little more relaxed. If Christiana had not brought him into our home a couple years earlier, we would have really felt the emptiness of our arms after losing my mother and Fordham one after the other. Abel settled into the stillness that was that time and took care of us.
We are essentially people who crave the chaos and over-the-top love that comes from English Springer Spaniels, but we will always be grateful to Abel for helping us through our dark spring.
When I returned from my puppy fever road trip, I saw how much Abel had aged and just how late it was for him. I prayed he would not be too stressed by the newest family members and that we still had a few more months with him.
(c) 2011
In the end, Abel was a guy who rolled with life, accepting Furgus and Sam into what was now his home—and even acting a little envious of their young limbs and ability to play together. I’m so glad that Furgus calmed down enough in Abel’s last few weeks to begin napping and sleeping with Abel, giving him a closeness he had craved with Fordham but never experienced.
(c) 2011 Sherman Lambert
Abel required a lot of care in these past four months or so, but what I want to remember is his joy on car rides as he got to sit on my lap while the big dogs were confined, the excitement he showed on our mountain camping trip, or how happy he looked when he accompanied the boys on their walks—from the seat of a converted baby umbrella stroller. He longed to be part of a pack and to the end, he was.
Crossing over was hard work for him, but he did it here—in his forever home—with us all under the same roof.
In a year of so much loss, I know who rescued whom, even though loving him also added to my losses.
Today’s my birthday and I’m getting a pretty big present: my daughter.
What a difference a year makes. We took both kids to college—six and a half hours away—in late August. The distance is just a little too far away for many weekend visits and when they do come home during the school year, they really aren’t in town for much longer than 36 hours. Their physical absence from home was pretty complete.
And yet, kids today communicate differently than we did. It’s hard to cut the apron strings when you can be in constant contact through texting, chat, and e-mail.
Those first weeks, Christiana found herself in a less than warm dorm situation while Jackson was having the social time of his life. Although she had plenty of time to call us, I knew she needed to be connecting with her life there and that I wasn’t supposed to be trying to solve all her problems from a distance.
Most of us find it hard to let go of our kids these days, but even agreeing to have her go to school so far away was difficult for me after her dance with depression.
I tried to set up her medical care through the college’s counseling center, but they bungled the care enough that neither she nor we trusted them to come through for her. Continuing to work with longtime trusted providers so far away from where she was living was only slightly better than having no providers at all.
Just when things seemed darkest for her, Christiana figured out—on her own—what she needed to do to integrate better into college. She found a roommate who was living in her brother’s dorm building. Won’t go in to the whole long story, but that place became home.
Which—unfortunately for us—meant she, like her brother, stopped talking with us much.
I know our kids are supposed to separate from us at this point in life, but here’s where I go back to sounding like that really old-timer again. Really, kids today do communicate differently. Because they can contact you at all hours, they don’t contact you regularly. I know from talking with parents that I’m not the only parent who has this problem with their college-aged kids.
Despite being able to talk almost at will thanks to today’s technology, we just don’t. Or at least our kids can’t slow down enough to talk with us during the normal waking hours for middle-aged parents. I think my kids were more disconnected from me than I was from my parents for my three months studying in Spain. We talked once for five minutes, but wrote very detailed letters.
When you only hear from your kids when they are in crisis, you don’t know if they are in a constant state of crisis or if they are only having a bad moment. You lose the connection with what’s going right in their lives and you can’t say whether your perspective on what’s going wrong is very accurate.
Christiana interviewed for and was offered a full-time summer job at school. Although we wanted her to come home, earning for four solid months seemed a pretty good opportunity during these times of high unemployment for young people.
Despite the fact we helped her get set up for staying the summer and then moved her to her new apartment, we just felt distant from her. Without a whole lot of communication or time together, she seemed to be someone we didn’t know anymore.
Meanwhile Jackson came home. He’s been here for almost two months. Even though he rarely called us while away at college, being around him in person has been a joy.
Something just didn’t feel right about Christiana’s being gone still—maybe it’s too soon for this separation, maybe the situation wasn’t right—but when she explained why she’d like to come home, things finally felt right. After working another couple weeks, today’s the day we welcome her back into our home.
Although we haven’t been empty nesters since Jackson returned, it’s still going to be a big adjustment to have everyone in one house. All I know is though I was ready for her to go away to college, I wasn’t ready to feel so far removed from her life.
Welcome back, dear one! Time to create a new normal in our changing relationship.
Happy birthday to me.
(c) 2009 Christiana Lambert
Such transitions in life were different when everything wasn’t available 24/7.
Every Sunday night, whether convenient or not, I called my parents at 11:00 p.m. EST and my brother called them at 11:00 p.m. CST. Long distance was expensive, so we tried hard to discuss anything necessary, money-wise and/or decision-wise at that time, as well as fit in talk about what was happening with me at college and with them back home.
Yes, we had no e-mail, IM, Facebook, Skype, or any of that. Gone was gone. We did not see each other, period. And it was a rare (and spoiled) person in my dorms who talked to her parents frequently on the telephone, even though many of my dorm-mates came from families with money.
When we communicated, we had to make it count.
Now I can see pictures of my kids in real time, thanks to mobile uploading on Facebook and can talk to their images thanks to Skype. They can text me with “send money” requests and call me when there is trouble or decisions to be made.
What we don’t seem to do is connect. I can only surmise how they are doing from Facebook pictures and status updates.
Look, I’m fine with this empty nest thing from a day-to-day living standpoint. I like having a neater house and getting more sleep and not having to decline activities because they conflict with the kids’ events. I am enjoying developing a life after the constant focus on our kids.
But I’m not fine with being disconnected from them while they live 6 ½ hours and several mountain passes away. In the chaos of a 24/7 world, they can’t find any regular time to talk with us on their phones? Really.
In their defense, I think it takes a lot of discipline to fight against letting technology control our lives. We can spend our days and nights responding to instant attempts to connect with us while not initiating those that require us to act rather than react. We can confuse the supposed urgent contact with being the important contact.
And, it’s even harder for people who have ADD, now that the world has gone hyper-ADD itself.
Yes, both my kids have ADD and struggle with time now that they don’t have me to point out the chronos from the kairos. Apparently I wore my chronos role too strongly in our household and they are ill-prepared for a world that, though it may run 24/7, does indeed have time limitations.
However, technology or not, at some point a person has to realize that making real time for people is the only way to maintain connections.
I can’t make my kids contact me and I refuse to sit around waiting for calls that aren’t going to come.
For myself, I’m going to add a little low-tech structure to my life—even if it will cause me to be more reactive than proactive for several months—by getting a puppy and maybe even rescuing or fostering a young adult dog. Short of acquiring opposable thumbs, the dogs will just have to communicate with me face to face.
(c) 2000 Trina Lambert
Sherman and I are doing OK, despite our losses, but I’ve got to tell you we’ve been through a long season of loss. What we think we need is a distraction that will last for years—something that is a sign of growth, of life in full expansion, not decline. Thank goodness it is spring, but we’d like a more specific sign and that’s why we feel we’re ready for a puppy in our home.
OK, you can never be ready for a puppy, but we think our lives are open again to all the activity associated with puppyhood.
After losing Mom and our dog Fordham, we want to live with some tangible proof that life goes on. As others lose parents and we hold our collective breaths as Sherman’s parents change, we just want to be mixed up in the joy of youth.
The thing is this time we’d rather not start out batting clean-up after someone else has broken a pup’s heart. We’ve helped work through the damage in our last two dogs, as well as in our foster dog that appears to be our forever dog, but we got them when we hadn’t spent so much energy taking care of our own emotional damage.
Now maybe it’s our own hearts that need bandages.
Though Fordham hasn’t been gone long and he can’t be replaced, I can tell it’s going to take another English Springer Spaniel to move us forward.
Abel, no matter how sweet he is, is the breed Christiana wanted. Without Fordham here, it’s so easy to figure out why Springers and not dachshunds are my breed—even with the neater home I now enjoy. You see, Abel gets and gives his love, then walks away.
Just last week this concept really hit me when a waterbed leak forced us to spend three nights sleeping on the office futon. Although we moved Abel’s bedding, he couldn’t be cajoled into spending the night in the room with us—he’s attached to his space more than he is to us. I am convinced that none of our Springers would have cared more for the specific room. Heck, Fordham pretty much went to sleep at 8:00 p.m. for years, but he wasn’t about to go to bed until the last person did—whether that bed was in our room or downstairs with Christiana.
How many times did I mutter about having dogs under my feet over the years? These days we still have a dog, but he’s rarely under our feet unless someone is in the kitchen with food—then he can’t follow us enough.
Even Chelsea, who was our most food-oriented Springer, would follow us around outside of the kitchen. In fact, one of her favorite routines (she was the kind of dog that had to circle three times before entering a door or lying down—her routines bordered on compulsions) was coming out to the living room and curling up on the rug for story time with our young twins.
Just last week I thought we’d found a way to resolve both our desire to start out as a pup’s forever family and our consciences. I wasn’t expecting it, but discovered there were available rescue pups almost ready to leave their mother. However, we are not the only people who made that discovery, it seems, and, alas, although we have gone through the phone interview and veterinarian recommendation, we still await the home inspection.
The impatient child in me wants to stamp my feet and say, “It’s not fair!” I didn’t request a puppy now because I knew there were puppies—I requested a puppy only after making it through the last three years and then losing my dog just as I had more time to give him again. If we were the kind of people who would abandon a dog, specifically an energetic English Springer Spaniel, we would have done so already because both Chelsea and Fordham were not for Springer-lite people. Trust me, we also had to learn (and erect!) a few tricks in order to keep them safely in the yard.
The adult in me reminds that child we just need to take our turn and be patient with the process—the right pup is or will be out there. The dog we get will be the one that is meant to join our family.
So for now, we continue making the property pup-friendly again and figuring out how to puppy-proof our possessions. We have to look beyond our mostly easy current set-up with the elderly dachshund (however, even “nervous” spaniel bladder habits are no match for many a dachshund’s attitude bladder habits—that clean-up could be a lot easier, even with a puppy!) and prepare for the future.
In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer (Albert Camus), but I’m sure that summer would feel warmer with a puppy playing beside my feet.
(c) 2009 Christiana Lambert
Here’s a warning: I’m not going to respect the metaphor today. My friend Dawn always said to be careful about mixing metaphors and yet here I am talking about walking and sailing in the same blog post. But in the earliest days of Spring and during the windy month of March, wind is associated with both land and sea in my mind. No respect at all, I tell you.
Yesterday I stepped onto the labyrinth at our church, Bethany Lutheran, prepared to stick with one word in my mind and to let God guide that path. Calling or vocare or however you want to define being called to a profession. What is to be the next turn on my journey now that I am no longer a caregiver?
Of course, my mind being mine, I couldn’t stick with one word—just as I can’t seem to stick with one metaphor. Maybe it’s because I have taken so little time to be contemplative over the last few months.
Oh, it would appear that the busyness of the past few years is over and that I could take time to just be. To sit and listen for what comes next.
But so far that hasn’t happened—I don’t know if that is about to change or if I keep myself from slowing down. There have been so many tasks in these past two months since Mom has been gone. True I have the time I used to spend visiting or doing paperwork—plus I sleep better. My nights have become more restful now that I am no longer being asked to make multiple decisions for someone else or waiting for a call that will tell me things are worse or that the worst has happened.
Nonetheless, I have had tasks associated with the before and after of her services, such as the planning for the services and handling memorial donations and our expressions of gratitude. And a look around our house will tell you that I am still dealing with additional physical items that are not my own, be they for donation, preservation, or disposal. Despite my having given several large bags of clothing to ARC last month, more donations remain. Then there are the photos and papers—to stay or to go—either to someone else or in the trash.
I won’t even discuss the storage unit.
See, I could make up a boatload of excuses for not getting on with my own life, but why do I want to stay in this harbor of uncertainty? I was called to provide care over the last several years, but I feel certain God didn’t put me on this earth to be a full-time caregiver. I just wonder how and when he’s going to give me more directions on how to pull away from the dock in order to go toward other horizons.
(Here’s where I must take care with this metaphor, as I am no sailor though Sherman is. What little I know comes from movies like Peter Pan and Pirates of the Caribbean and a few sails across reservoirs in Nebraska where I was so not in charge—not being in charge is the part of sailing I truly understand! And, that’s how I’m going to “respect the metaphor” in this writing.)
In the meantime I start uncoiling the ropes: I work on a financial plan, search for a puppy, and train for instructing Zumba® fitness. My cleared desk leaves room to focus on the writing work I accepted with the caveat that first I leave home to bid farewell to my mother.
And, so I wonder, can I be a dancing writer who works at home enough to raise a new canine-friend by her feet?
Not knowing, yesterday I took those feet on the path, walking and talking, despite not being still—in the end, my stillness is best achieved while moving.
Today this harbor is calm, but I am at the ready for the wind to pick up, fill the sails on my ship, and guide me out to sea.
My captain (my captain!)—unlike the one in Walt Whitman’s poem—still breathes: Come, Holy Spirit, come.
(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert
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