Night–Sweet Guard of Dreams

(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert

Maybe I’ve always had mixed feelings about nighttime—or maybe those feelings didn’t begin until after my brother Scott and I saw a man in our bedroom when we were two and four.

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

Motherhood in the Middle

Ask a farm mother if she worked . . . my great-grandmother Mattie (Dickson) Jones and my grandmother Elva.

Many years ago I decided I had plenty of my own stress in my own life and made the decision not to listen to the news or talk radio—no more pundits talking at me. The more I see or hear things, the harder it is for me to get them out of my head. So after the Oklahoma City Bombings and Columbine, I backed off.

No, I get my news from the paper edition of The Denver Post, the text from the online edition of our local news, or from what my friends post on Facebook—which might lead me to read the information from more traditional resources.

This means I’ve missed quite a bit about the uproar regarding Ann Romney and our revisited “Mommy Wars”—has nothing changed since Hillary (Clinton) said she wasn’t a cookie-baking woman?

Heck, I’m not a cookie-baking woman, but I took that MBA knowledge I had gained and applied it to school accountability committee work, managing my mother’s financial and health affairs, and fighting to get our insurance company/providers to do the right thing. Not very lucrative, I know, but I had the ability to do so because Sherman’s job covered our expenses.

But that’s not to say we didn’t have to worry about a budget. In our family, as in many in the middle, our choice had many ramifications. When my kids were young, most everything they wore came from my mothers of twins club twice annual clothing sales. I read the Sunday circulars every week to make sure I bought other things when they were on sale—now I take advantage of the online offers that come into my inbox or that post on my Facebook newsfeed.

The kids didn’t play on club teams or go on big trips every year. Though they were twins, they had to have their braces on in separate plan years and their wisdom teeth removed in separate plan years. In an era of big spending for kids, we spent as little as we could in each activity.

I did do some professional writing over the years, but not so much that all the full-time writers in my writing organization consider me a professional—even if the work I did was always done with professional standards.

Before that I did accounting for the family business until it was sold right before the kids started kindergarten—that’s when I truly became an at-home mom. The kids had attended an incredible preschool that helped them learn a lot while keeping them happy and inquisitive. Yet the next year when we were able to send them to day care through my husband’s employer, we discovered that all care situations were not appropriate for our kids. Despite the organization’s national reputation for having quality day care centers, what our kids experienced there seemed like a watered-down version of The Hunger Games—and the adults in charge didn’t seem to care to prevent bullying or even talk to us after we expressed our concerns.

We couldn’t figure out how to have it all without sacrificing something. Maybe we don’t know what’s it’s like be truly working class and for both parents to have no other choice than to work full-time, but we do know what it’s like to be in the middle and know that something has to give.

And that something was my career and our income. We stayed in our modest home and neighborhood, drove used cars, and had enough—for our standards. Yes, I got to exercise during the day, but that was part of what kept me sane enough to deal with my son’s ongoing AD/HD difficulties and his incompatibility with so much of the educational system, my daughter’s battle with depression, and my mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s.

It’s our kids who often can’t keep up with the Jones, so to speak. These are expensive times to be young—concerts, Netflix or On-Demand, computers, game systems, iPods, digital cameras, etc. When I was in school, very few people spent a lot of money or owned a lot of expensive items. Even at my private college, everyone, from the very rich to those on full-ride financial aid, ate the dorm meals—any person who ordered out despite the dorm food’s already being paid for stuck out as really spoiled and out of the norm.

Even so, I don’t regret our choice—I value the time we spent together more than being able to provide more. I’m glad I got to read those books to them, watch their soccer games, go on field trips, and be the parent who drove groups of kids around before they could drive.

But I want to remind people that we didn’t get away with something—we don’t have the money left over at the end of month to pay college tuition, yet we make too much to qualify for anything more than loans. We’re taking on loans when we should be preparing for retirement. That’s the trade-off we chose. We just have to live with it, but that doesn’t make it easy.

The thing we all need to remember is that there are no easy motherhood choices. We’d be better off as a society if we stopped assuming that everyone else has it easy and we should only support those who make the choices we make. Taking care of kids is hard, period.

However, I’d really appreciate it if you don’t assume I haven’t used my intellect since sometime during the Clinton administration. “M” is for the many things motherhood has taught me . . .

Babies Mine

(c) 1992 Sherman Lambert

What woman thinks she’s going to face infertility, at least if she’s relatively young and healthy? I thought you planned for the right timing and then everything else fell in place. And so it seemed at the beginning of our quest to become parents. After the second month we tried, we believed we were on the road to parenthood. However, that pregnancy slipped away from us within a couple weeks of receiving the initial news.

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

I’ve run my part of the course of both their developments—the steps aren’t mine to take anymore. I just have to trust in the process and know that I can’t really control the timing for when these babies of mine find their own separate ways in this world anymore than I could plan when they arrived in this world.

Though I don’t know the grand plans for them, Someone else does.

Ready for Wings?

(c) 2009 Christiana Lambert

You know my messy table isn’t really the problem—it’s just an obvious sign that deep down all is not well with my soul.

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.

Picture-Perfect Finals Week Insanity

(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert

Nope, I don’t want to return to finals week insanity ever again. Got my fill during my secondary school, college, and graduate school years. Lived through my husband’s graduate school and my kids’ high school ends-of-semesters and didn’t really enjoy them that much more even when someone else got to do the work.

Which is why it’s a blessing to have our kids away at college right now during this high-pressure week. Except . . . our daughter had to come home smack dab in the middle of (well, really at the beginning of) finals week to have a medical exam, too. Yes, timing is everything, but nothing we could say could convince the doctors’ practice that their scheduling was about as bad as it could get for a college student.

So instead of waiting another month to get on the road to healing, Christiana agreed to ramp up her stress during finals week. The university worked to coordinate a new exam schedule for her—not like the original plan for finals at 11:00 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. the first day followed by exams the next day at 7:30 a.m., 9:40 a.m., and 2:00 p.m. made any sense in the first place. Yikes.

On the last day of the semester she put to bed one final and has already received the good news that all went well—no given considering how badly the professor’s teaching and testing styles mismatched with Christiana’s learning and testing styles. This afternoon she takes one test and tomorrow morning she finishes with two others.

But first she had to turn in and be critiqued on her final art project today. Yes, she’s an incredibly talented artist, but not only does she set very high standards for herself, but also she has a teensy bit of a problem with jumping into a project before she’s absorbed all of the instructions.

Combine those approaches with her having a cold while coming home for 42 hours for a very ill-timed trip to do an uncomfortable test and you have a very stressed-out cranky art student—who is likely not going to find my observations very funny right now, but maybe she will change her mind after she recovers from this week. Maybe . . .

To complete studies in any areas of academic concentration often requires most of us to take a few courses that do not reflect our passions. Christiana can draw realistically, but she prefers a freer rein for her imagination. Usually, you can’t ride that particular horse in figure drawing class. She was just excited that this final project, for once, allowed a little fantasy: drawing an animal’s head on top of a human’s body.

The problem? The human body needed to be unclothed, just as in all the other assignments. She had a couple choices: she could either go to an optional class session where a model would be provided or she could find her own model. Snicker, right? But would our artist take the easy out? No, because then her work would be too similar to the other classmates’ work. Yes, sometimes her pursuit for artistic uniqueness puts her in challenging situations.

Let’s just say she got a certain nameless person to pose partially clad—and figured she’d just imagine the rest since she’d been drawing nudes all semester—except a lot depends on the angle you’re observing.

After staring at her reference textbook and only coming up with one realistic-looking side for the animal/woman, she was about to give up. No, she wasn’t ready to allow any more real-life models to help out, especially a certain (cringe-worthy) close relative. So I ran back and forth to the mirror several times, observed what I could, and then came back to describe and/or critique her version. Good thing I am a wordsmith!

Yes, I think she may have pulled it off, or at least as well as she could at that point. Oh, this kind of stress did not add to her pre-procedure mood, but thank goodness the procedure meds improved her attitude considerably, at least for an hour or so post-op.

Several hours after her medical procedure, she finished the other details for the project, applied the fixative, and put away the animal/woman.

That’s all the finals-related stress I needed. Thank goodness the doctors got the medical pictures they needed and she finished her drawing in time to rest overnight—before heading back to the insanity that is finals week.

When it comes down to semester’s end preparations, sometimes you just have to throw out a few educated guesses and hope that the details you fill in yourself are close enough to picture-perfect.

Light Therapy

(c) 2011 Christiana Lambert

My grandfather was a man’s man. From my youngest days he used words in everyday conversations that I was never allowed to say, kept his refrigerator stocked with beer, and played pool almost daily with his cronies at the Elks where he tended the “gentlemen’s” bar into his 80s. But every winter when the light turned low in Nebraska, he got restless. I think he had what we call Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD.

Well, I’ve said it before, but I will probably declare it each and every year once Black Friday arrives: I am an Advent person. Advent is the church season preceding the Light coming into this world at Christmas. Advent is all about waiting with expectation and hope for the light that will brighten our days—and our nights. But we are not a world much into waiting these days.

In an era when our culture seems to be experiencing an extended period of SAD—global economic uncertainties, financial difficulties in our own homes and neighborhoods, political stalemates and hostilities, and a real absence of long-term feelings of hope—shortening our Thanksgiving celebrations to jostle in lines to get those shiny new big screen TVs and other devices that run on light is not going to provide long-term light therapy.

No, what we need in these darkest of days is to turn to the true light from true light.

Advent—not this too early, too long, and too lacking in Christ-centered way of celebrating Christmas—is what is lacking in our collective focus.

Even though I am also tempted to forget to seek that true light, my own personal needs have again brought me to my knees. While my grandfather experienced winter blues, most likely my grandmother suffered depression during even the sunniest of days, just as my daughter does. These seasonal changes hit us all, but are often darker for those who struggle with darkness year round.

So I ask for prayers from friends both close and far away, as well as try to pray without ceasing myself. I pray for her, but also I pray for discernment and ideas, as well as for those people, professional and otherwise, who can help her.

What can we do besides pray to reduce the darkness? For one, we got her a light therapy box. Crazy, but the blue lights remind me of Advent and its liturgical color of blue.

We sent her back to college with that box, so our own access to that type of light therapy will have to wait, but for me, light therapy also comes in the lyrics I’ve learned from my choir songs. When darkness overwhelms me so much that I can’t even rest in the peace of sleep, those words arrive unbidden to voice the hope I do not always feel.

I like to think God is telling me to look to Him for the light, while pointing us to resources and support. And, so, in this quiet Advent period (well, in our house anyway) I ask Him to help me to wait, knowing He will in His time dispel the night—and SADness will flee away.

Stitching in Time

"Fantasy"Sewing Organization from 4-H Days

Despite all those 4-H courses, I never turned out to be much of a domestic goddess. (Yes, you know you grew up in Nebraska if you were a 4-H member—whoop-ti-oop-ti-ay!) However, one thing I did learn to do well was sew, even if I just can’t get myself to do it regularly.

Sewing is not a very ADD-friendly activity—if nothing else, there’s all that preparation and then afterwards all the putting away. No matter how well I think I have my sewing area set up to help me, I find it difficult to start the projects. And ever since I upgraded from the trusty Kenmore of my youth, I’ve been avoiding my beautiful “new” machine—too many bells and whistles.

Sad to say, but every—and I do mean every—time I return to sewing, I have to relearn how my machine works. Makes me feel stupid—the operations person in me tries to tell me that maybe it’s just not designed well, but I don’t really buy that. All I know is the learning curve seems to be incredibly steep for me. Would go back to my old machine if it hadn’t been a casualty of twin hijinks many years ago.

That means I pretty much only sit down to sew when I have a deadline. (Hm, sounds like another ADD theme.)

What I like about sewing isn’t really the process and it never was—that’s part of why I’ve never figured out a good way to fit it into my adult life. No, what I love is being able to create something that didn’t exist before. Even better, so often I rummage through the fabric drawers or go to the store planning to make something that looks like “X” and end up with something that looks like the “Y” I hadn’t yet imagined. Amazing how the right trim or buttons can change the picture in my mind from exciting to “Wow!”

So, despite all the activities much higher on my “to do” list—including finishing the jacket I’d started for Christiana last winter—when she asked if I could make her a flapper costume this past weekend, I said I could.

Such a short, uncomplicated, yet creative, project with a very specific deadline spurred me to search for the machine’s product booklet—again.

After the two of us ransacked our fabric as well as my mom’s orphaned pieces, we settled on material that wouldn’t require extra finishing. Our first trip to the craft store led only to a tight black cap and its embellishment. The outrageous styles in the 20s meant we could take advantage of the almost-obscene practice of selling Christmas ornaments in October. Yup, a turquoise-feathered bird with a clip can go on her head—and her tree later this year.

Finding multi-color striped fringe changed our mental pictures again from a rather plain blue and black dress to one with color—she, the artist of many colors, and I, her mother who has painted our walls many colors, were ecstatic.

While I am always terrific at reimagining how a pattern might look with different colors and trims, I have never been able to do anything other than follow a pattern’s layout as prescribed. But any longtime seamstress will tell you that the cost of a pattern, especially without a coupon sale, will raise a project’s price quite a bit when it would be more exciting to spend that money on embellishments. This time I found an old costume pattern of mine (Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble) from my late 20s that didn’t appear as if it would be too hard to re-design and re-size. It wasn’t because I did it!

Trina & Krista (d. 1985) in 1973 wearing 4-H projects.

OK, first I had to grumble about the general disorganization of my sewing area, search and search for the darn instructions for my machine, and set up the machine with the proper thread and adjustments. All the while I needed to remind myself that this was no 4-H project—I didn’t have to worry about some judge declaring my inside seams a disaster and handing me a dreaded white ribbon (to all you non-4Hers: that’s like telling a person she should have just stayed home from the county fair because her work was no good!)

Several times I dropped the shift over Christiana’s shoulders—yes, she got poked by pins often—and assessed the fit. I just eyeballed the changes and kept going until the dress fit as perfectly as a costume needs to fit. The finished costume barely resembled the one we’d imagined when we first found the material. No, it was so much better.

(c) 2011 Cheyenne Kelton

I have always wanted to make my kids’ costumes no matter how much I complained about not having time—at least before I started and once I finished. Christiana’s mostly grown up now, but I can still do this for her—and for me.

And, yes, I did put away the pattern pieces, even if I still have more to do to get ready to finish that coat and even though it needs to be better sewn than a costume. Yes, you heard it here—I’m going back to what I began. I just can’t wait to see what those two-toned buttons and the topstitching do to make that coat even better.

Take that, domestic goddesses!

Surrounded

(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert

This past Sunday our church members lighted candles honoring those living with mental illness. Once upon a time, I would debate with myself whether ADHD was mental illness enough to justify lighting a candle. I know it is, but as much a part as it played in our lives, we seemed to have a reasonably functional family life.

Now that we know how a family can be changed by major depression, there’s no question we need God’s guidance as well as prayers—I don’t debate about lighting candles anymore.

While acting to ignite a wick is a choice, I don’t always have such a choice over which songs pop up unbidden in my head. As I’ve mentioned before, songs stick with me easily—whether or not I want them to do so. Maybe it’s the years of running, when a good rhythm can help keep me on pace or when I’ve even used the time to memorize songs. More likely it’s just one of the quirks of my brain—with a mother like mine, no doubt I began hearing music while still in the womb—before I ever saw this world, let alone walked or ran a step.

Raised on music, but fascinated by words, how can I help but be drawn to the combination?

Though memorization isn’t my strong point, words and notes start to sink into my brain when heard in tandem. Even then, I’m more likely to paraphrase than to store everything just as heard or read.

Seeing all those candles lighted by people who also must know mental illness too well stirred up songs and lyrics again for me. I wonder, how many, like my daughter and me, get hung up in the wrong part of The Fray’s “You Found Me” lyrics?

Where were you when everything was falling apart, all my days were spent by a telephone that never rang and all I needed was a call that never came . . .

Still, much of the music in my head comes from hymns and songs absorbed over years singing in church. Since I don’t have many bible verses memorized, often the biblical words I do access come from those songs. Now that I’m back in a choir, I have added more songs and words available to me in random moments.

My favorite bible verse—which I mostly have memorized—is Micah 6:8b: and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? And yet, I had never really paid attention to the previous verses until singing them—or not singing them, as it often turns out when my throat stops my song mid-note. Micah 6:7b asks: Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

I know that verse 8 declares no child nor living being must be sacrificed, but then why must my daughter be set upon with feeling so abandoned by my God—the God she felt so clearly as a child yet now wonders where He is. While she questions how He can be her God, I often fall to anger, asking how He could do this to my child, my firstborn, to whom he has given many gifts yet seemingly not the gift of believing that who she is matters to Him and to so many others in this world. Once again, I am stuck on the wrong section of the lyrics.

Just as Micah’s words tell me that God has shown me what is good, The Fray also sings:

You found me lying on the floor, surrounded . . .

I only have to look at all those candles to know that God has surrounded me with others lifting up my family. When we ask where God is, we need to look around us. Just because the healing we want doesn’t happen as we want doesn’t mean God has abandoned us. If we can’t hear Him calling on the telephone, maybe we’re looking for the wrong Caller ID. Everyone walking humbly with us is walking humbly with God. In the end, God doesn’t have to find us because He is always with us—and in all those who walk beside us in our darkest days.

Moving On Up

(c) 2011 Christiana Lambert

Sometimes you just have to get back on the road and leave your losses behind. Though it’s only been six weeks since we helped Christiana to move to an apartment at her new college, we spent this past Saturday moving her out—and on.

Cheyenne, moving day, 10/3/11

For all of us involved it was worth every bit of effort. She found the new housing, handled the legal details of getting out of her old lease, and packed up her possessions—no easy tasks there, especially while going to classes and doing coursework. We, along with her friend Cheyenne, talked her through as she waited to leave a bad situation. (Actually, am sure Cheyenne got to do quite a bit of packing while she offered her moral support, too!)

Living with people can be tricky, but for someone with depression, staying with a bad match-up is too risky to continue for very long.

Luckily, Christiana found a house with space as well as house-mates happy to welcome her at the same time she was able to get released from the original lease. Lower rent, closer to campus, and away from constant hostility. That sounds like moving on up, no matter how you look at it.

Open Door, Moving Day 2011

Saturday morning Sherman and I drove up north an hour or so where we met up with the girls—as well as with Cheyenne’s family’s minivan. We four worked hard to pack both our vehicles full so there wouldn’t be too many reasons to return. It was just way past time to get on down the road—which was really up the road since we headed north when Christiana, riding her red and white Schwinn scooter, led our little convoy across campus.

Up a narrow Victorian stairway we carried her boxes until there were no more. Unlike the barren walls in the old space, this house’s walls are covered with posters and post-it messages in a manner very familiar to us—Christiana never met a bare wall she couldn’t improve with her works and words as well as those of others. Surrounded by her boxes, she stood up and started claiming her own walls, picture by picture, until anyone who knew her would have known the room belonged to her.

So much easier to discover your way on a new campus while living in a welcoming environment—knowing she’s found a home, sweet home, makes our home every bit as sweet.

Fighting for Someday

(c) 2011 Christiana Lambert

I’ve been down before, heck I’m most likely down now thanks to assorted losses, but that doesn’t mean I understand what it’s like to have major depression. What I’ve experienced is more that feeling where you hit a bad spot, but you keep problem-solving or trying different things to feel better. You know, you believe that “someday” you will feel better, even if you don’t have a clue when that someday will be.

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.