Monthly Archives: September 2011

fake hipster


I exist.

Therefore I cost money.

I have kids.

Therefore I cost even more money.

I like making stuff.

Therefore I need money.

I hate boring.

Therefore I like interesting.

Therefore I need even more money.

I cost money.

Therefore I have no money.

I painted my living room → dining room → kitchen → hallway a few months ago.  It used to be white.  Nasty, chalky, primer white that picks up smudges from even freshly laundered white t-shirts.  Those kids I referred to: they are small.  And who among us doesn’t know that size is inversely proportionate to mess?  In the land of the young human, that is…  Ergo: chalky, colorless, easily influenced walls are not acceptable.  Or maybe I’m just projecting.  Since I lurve color, texture, basically anything that isn’t nasty white.

The rooms left in this condition after the Great Painting Project of whatever month that was are as follows: the 3 bedrooms and my bathroom.  The kids’ rooms – not a big deal.  Levi’s room is furnished with enough variation to offset some of the boredom.  Besides, with a floor covered in toys, who’s even looking at the walls?  The princess room has also been decorated adequately, as toddlers go, to postpone the need for pigment intervention.  Christmas lights, sheer drapes, beaded curtains, you know – princess essentials.  And a slate blue bunkbed the size of Texas.

My room… sad.  pasty.  uninspired.

Yesterday, Emberleigh took it upon herself to help me.  A loose paint chip in the hallway caught her attention.  Because it was partially attached, yet dangling pathetically, she proceeded to put the thing out of its misery.  An 18″ x 5″ strip decided to follow suit.  Along with the top layer of drywall.  Yep.

So naptime rolled around (thank heavens!) and I dug up the 5 gallon bucket containing the remnants of Sandstorm 205 or Almond 32 or whatever the slightly better than white I had picked to spruce up my dwelling.  Come on people.  When you rent, there’s only so much excitement you can introduce to your environs.

I touched up that not-helpful-helpers-help.

I cannot hold a paintbrush and then put it away 3 minutes later.  It.  Is.  Not.  Possible.  I have this paint out.  It’ll be months before the paint comes out again.  So I touched up dings.  And spots.  Hand prints.  You know the kind.  And still the longing in my soul was not satisfied.  I heard a whispering.  Coming from my room.  It was dust.  From the walls.  The white primer.  Desperately desiring to be covered just as I longed to cover it.  Yet the paint in my bucket was not enough.  Dilemma indeed.

This is where being poor pays off.  You see, the hipster generation we live in is not just a fad.  I believe in the depths of my soul that it is art, forced to be expressed in new ways due to the economy.  There just isn’t money for the joy of beauty.  So we create our own.  We find expression in the lack of ability to express it.  It started with college kids at the Goodwill or Salvation Army or various hole-in-the-wall, one-of-a-kind thrift shops and spread like the plague.  If I can be cool by tweaking what I found at a garage sale or in the Lost & Found, then just call me Iceman.  Right on up there with lofts and bare block walls in my artist crib.  Ahem.  That’s what I dream of, anyways.

Masking tape in hand, and a deformed paint roller at the ready, I created.  I designed.  I hipster-ed.  I lofted.  I artist-ed.  Requiring less time to dry (important when considering toddler nap duration) and less quantity of paint, it seemed the solution to the problem at hand.  As well as my burning need to rid my room of its devastating lack of anything but white.  And my newly found hipster self.  Inspired by abject poverty and my insatiable need to sit at the cool kids’ table.

Further inspired while facing a shortage of time and paint, I armed myself with a staple gun and conquered a 3rd wall of despair.  Hanging a quilt I made a few years back completed the corner, and left 1 side of the room bare.  Quite an upgrade if you ask me.  Besides, we wouldn’t want too much excitement.  Might not be able to sleep at night for the overwhelming hipster vibe.

My bathroom is cozy now.  Is that a thing?  Can bathrooms be cozy?  Mine is awesome.  Come to think of it, I think I look better in the mirror with the new backdrop.  And Audrey looks pleased.  That’s important.

The beauty of it is that if we ever move, I can just “finish painting”.

Now I have to find somewhere to put all my sewing stuff.  The white side of my room looks like self storage.  I guess I can pretend it’s part of “the look”.

Poor Little Bunny


A gold nugget of truth has been circulating YouTube for some time now.  At least the female 1/2 of the population knows this to be so.  The male quadrant may or may not dispute it, but opposition does not negate fact.  Man + illness is an obnoxious combination.

Paradoxically, the male gender, for the most part, is incapable of getting medical attention.  Unless it is against their will.  Or something equally dramatic.

If a man will not see a doctor when he is ill, and yet require the women in his life function in the capacity of doctor, nurse, surgeon, candy striper, etc, then it goes without saying that a physical is out of the question.  A regular, run-of-the-mill check-up is not even to be considered.

What if the possibility exists that you have a sleep disorder?  What if these resting irregularities could be taxing your body and health?  With the eventual outcome of leaving your wife a widow with children to raise, past her prime and therefore reducing the odds that a nice, wealthy man would marry her and give her financial stability.  Aging her more quickly and leaving those poor fatherless children fully orphaned.  Jerk.

That was called hyperbole.

It worked.

For the first time in years, my husband acquired a primary care physician and scheduled himself an appointment.

I am proud of him.  That was a difficult thing to do.  Men are not like us.  Setting up appointments to have strangers inspect your person does not come easily to someone whose body was not built to house, incubate, and grow another human.  That’s how I see it, anyways.  I have no dignity left when it comes to my body, so neither should anyone else.  It’s for the common good.  And a happy wife (with a living husband) is beneficial for a happy family.

While I have greatly exaggerated the extent of spousal malady, the fact remains that taking care of ourselves ranks high on the ‘caring for your family’ to-do list.

Also, the man I married is a bit of a hypochondriac with a penchant for browsing WebMD.  It was in the best interest of my sanity to convince him to schedule said appointment.

So I pat myself on the back.  My job is to make sure my husband and children are healthy.  By whatever means necessary.

Ahem.

Gotta run.  Dentist appointments to schedule.

 

Hey, Lady!


Dear Brain,

You make me dizzy.

Slow down.

 

Dear Miles Davis Pandora Station ,

…deep sigh of relaxation…

That is all.

 

Dear Tree Hut Shea Sugar Body Scrub,

O.  My.  Heavens.

 

Dear Molting Peacock,

Thank you for making me feel glamorous and unique.

 

Dear Far-Away Friends,

You are beautiful.

Distance be damned.

 

Dear Near-by Friends,

You are not chopped liver.

Unless you’re into that sort of thing.

 

Dear Face,

Why do you hate me?

 

Dear Crackle,

Fingernails are fashion.

I love you Katy Perry.

 

Dear InStyle September 2011,

*droool*

 

Dear Old Navy Maxi Dress,

You are now a skirt.

I own you.

 

Dear Jim,

Thank you for scrubbing my bathroom.

Bubble baths are more awesome when you don’t have to clean them first.

 

Dear Coffee,

Hello, lover.

 

Dear Resurrection,

This is not the end.

Tomorrow is beautiful.

 

 

 

The Flipside of Dark


The long breaks are because I’m busy.

Sometimes this is true, but more often than not, I am lying to you.  I am lying to myself.  I don’t want to talk to anyone.  I want to be depressed.  I want to wallow.  I want to be dragged down and sucked into the vortex of my own mind and over-agonizing thoughts.  While it hurts like hell, the slowly numbing pain is easier than fighting.  It’s simpler than pushing aside the black-out curtains of despair and stepping into the clarifying light.  I don’t like the light.  It shows me who I am.  It reveals the truth from which I love to hide.

I adore the light.  It means hope.  It makes my steps visible.  It allows me to see the care around me.

I have always been a bit mystical, if you will.  Which wars with the intensely logical side of me.  It confuses my cynicism.  I do not like that because my cynicism is keeping me safe from my life.  Until it is my life and I’m drowning in my own murky angst.

Whatever you want to call it: mystical, magical, aware of the bigger picture, imaginative, fantastical, I have it locked away in the tower.  I let it out to play at library hour, where I pretend it is all fiction.  I tell myself and the world that I don’t believe in it.

But believe I do!  With the persistent part of me that loves the light and will not be banished by my fear.

I grew up hiding the knowledge in my heart that I my name had a purpose, a reason for belonging to me.

  • “Bright”
  • “Radiant”
  • Something to do with the moon.  Which we all know reflects light.  And makes some people crazy when out in all it’s glory.

All joking aside, it’s part of what helped me to survive the battering years of judgmental oppression.  I’m returning to my childhood belief that God, in His ultimate wisdom and bottomless affection, gifted me with something that could not be taken away from me unless I chose to give it up.

The last 5 years have been difficult.  My husband & I just celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary on the 10th of September.  While I love him and would not give up our life for the world, being married is like laying a plain sheet of paper over a rough surface and running a crayon over it.  The damage stands out in glaring relief and what was once perfection now bears the marks of who you really are.  When you grow up with the warped and twisted philosophy that yours is the only family to whom God has given His ultimate truth, it both tears you down and builds you up.  Problem is, that the wrong things are destroyed and the wrong things are enforced.

So God in His perfect foreknowledge gives us very small and infinitely valuable trinkets.  Nuggets of encouragement to sustain us.

  • I am bright in a dark home.
  • I am radiant in the midst of parental abuse.
  • I can shine though each child is pitted against the other.
  • I am reflecting the light of a Creator though my ‘disposition is terrible’.
  • I am loved when I’m alone even in the crowd.
  • He sees what I will be despite what I am now.

“God sets the solitary in families.”  (Psalm 68:6a)

“God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5)

Adulthood happens and with it comes reality.  We lose the magic of being a child and seeing things for what they are.  We lose the hope that a brighter future is ahead because we’ve reached the future and it is not shiny like we dreamed it would be.  We’re growing older and what’s ahead of us gets shorter and shorter, ever narrowing the field of possibilities.

And then we acquire adult acne and weep in the mirror because the only thing we had left is now marred.  No, really.  I’m annoying.  Incapable.  Aggravating.  Damaged.  Stubborn.  Mental.  Etc.  But for 5 minutes a stranger could look at me and kinda think I’m cute.

That’s gone.  Vanished.  Inflamed.  Cystic.

A minor deviation from my carefully restricted diet and cleverly regimented beauty routine resulted in angry, aching facial breakouts.

Having reclaimed myself from paralyzing insecurity, the kind incurred by floor length khaki, I claimed a measure of pride in my “up by the bootstraps” success.  I considered myself marginally tough.

I’m a jellyfish.

An oozing mass of self-pity.

This is what God has to say to me:

“God… has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ.”  (Ephesians 1:3)

“My old self has been crucified with Christ.  It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”  (Galatians 2:20)

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.”  (James 1:17)

So, I’ll wax a bit mystical.

Levi: joined, attached.

When I look at my son, or he looks at me and says, “Mom, are you crazy?!” (just happened), I remember that I am united with Christ.  So I have everything I need.  Simply because I am united with Christ.  All of that.  Every spiritual blessing.

Emberleigh: a smoldering meadow.

Matthew 12:20 – “a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench.”  (or the story in Judges 15 of Samson setting a field on fire?)  But no matter the weakness of the flame, He’s promised not to put out the tiny spark of hope I carry inside.  In fact, my all-time cherished portion of Scripture is this: “For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.”  (Philippians 1:6)  I see destruction and damage.  He sees fruitfulness and worth.  And I see a possible tattoo…

Molly: bitter.

It’s in the bitterest of times that the sweetest things can be born because that’s when I’m at my most dependent on the life of Creator.  “So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable.  It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.  It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.”  (1 Corinthians 15:42-44)  ” The Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you…” (Romans 8:11)

Bringing me full circle to “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ”.  

While I still feel the pain, I can be thankful for the dark, for it lets me understand the Light more fully.  I embrace the pain for the healing it brings.  A surgeon’s scalpel and not a butcher’s knife.  A gardener’s pruning shears and not a vandal’s axe.

I hold onto the light.  Because it’s a gift.

I write through the tears because He meant for me to shine.  Even if He’s the only one who sees the spark.