The soul's winter

I know I have a blessed life. I have to preface this post this way because I don't want to be a whiner.  I am blessed to have a love with a man who knocks the wind out of me with it's intensity, I have healthy children who color my world (sometimes a bit too literally), and we have had the enormous blessing of building our dream house together, in a peaceful quiet neighborhood where my children can have space to roam. But I have to write this any way, because I hope it will be a gift to those who know what I mean. In all the blessing, something is missing. The surety of knowing what I was made for has gone.

When I met Lance I was passionate and intense with creative purpose, but amid my days of motherhood, I feel my self shrinking to fit into the tiniest nooks and crannies of my life.  I long to do something meaningful, but my reality is such that if I have gotten to clip my toenails without interruption, it's a good day. How do you fit in meaning? And the longer time goes on, the less sure I am that I have anything worth while to offer.  The once contemplative parts of my brain are filling with the minutia of menu plans, to do lists, and school schedules. I long for deep friendships, but fear I have nothing to contribute, no ideas of substance, no vibrant energy, just a wrung out mom self who would just as often as not choose a nap over an adventure.

I want to write books like this, because when I read them, I cling to them like a shred of hope, a bright blue feather falling through a bleak sky, and it keeps that part of me from extinguishing. I want to do that for someone. To tell another mother, you are not alone, you are worthwhile, you are in there somewhere.

Levi was so crabby today.  He screamed and screamed as we took turns trying to sooth him.  The girls were fighting, and whining, and begging for something to do. Finally, to escape, if only momentarily from the cacophony of noise outside and inside my brain, I stole away to my front porch, where the only sounds were geese and distant cars.  The sunset was ablaze, making an ebony silhouette of my neighbor's trees, but all I could see out there was myself, in the way the trees were planted too close together, stretching upward into the glowing sky, just to find some room to be; in the way the blue was pressing down upon the fiery sunset, pressing it into submission, until it was only a sliver on the horizon, fighting a loosing battle against the dome of indigo above. And then I heard my son screaming through the window, and I went back to join the fray.

God made me to be with this man, as though it is his very rib I was made from in heaven.  These children were given to me to mother, but these things are not all that I am, and if that longing in me were to die, I would not be whole to be their mother and wife. I will clutch my feather like a secret, like a seed in winter, until the season comes when I can plant it, and it will bloom fearlessly.