On Being a Mom

I was not ready to be a mom.  Growing up, my plan was to be a stay at home mom, maybe have a daycare in my house (My mom did that until I was 7, and I always had nostalgic memories of that.  Probably because I was a kid and not in charge of all the kids.  She started with a 6 month old and a 2 year old when I was 3 months!  How much in awe of my mom are you now?)  Anyway, I got older and didn't get married in my very early twenties like I planned, which was totally fine.  I had a few jobs in daycares and babysitting and as a nanny, and I realized...I don't really like taking care of other people's kids.  I don't like it at all.  It's a little weird, because kids generally tend to like me and I like them.  I like hanging out with them and playing, but I don't like watching them like it is my job.  So all that to say that plans change.  I married Brandt in 2008 and he didn't want any kids at all.  At that point, I still wanted kids at some point, but I was certainly willing to wait a few years.  I was quite happy to wait a few years, actually.  Then a few months later I was nauseous for a week and I knew I was pregnant.  I took a test and it was confirmed.  Honestly, my immediate reaction was, "Oh shit."  (Sorry for swearing, but that is really what I said.)  So after being sick for nine more months, we were blessed with Zephra Katheryn Sanderson.

That was a really long intro.

I have to say that my advice to people who are pregnant is to stop reading things about being pregnant.  You get fat and your body goes completely haywire for the duration.  If there is a part of you that starts doing something strange, it is totally normal.  Be worried if nothing changes.  What you really need to read is what to do after the baby gets here.  Oh my gosh, why didn't I do that?  I think the problem is that raising kids is so absolutely hard and crazy and individualized that there are too many opinions.  There are sooooo (infinite o's here) many different "methods" to raising kids.  Here is a personality trait of mine:  when I am faced with too many options I cannot choose.  Don't ever tell me, "Anything you want," because I will totally freeze.  I will have to go through every option available in detail so as to be sure to choose the very best one.  (This is probably why I can never seem to settle on what I want to be when I grow up.)  The other thing (back to baby-raising here) is that everyone is so damned certain that their method is the right one and if you use someone else's you are wrong.  No matter how you make your decision, there is a book out there designed to make you feel like crap about it.  But this is why you need to read a lot about this while you are pregnant.  That way, once the baby is here you at least have a strategy to start from.  You might throw it completely out the window, but then you will have read other strategies and can have some fall back options.  Maybe this is good for you or maybe not, I don't know, but I think it would have helped me.  Not to mention that once the baby is here, you are not firing on all cylinders (Lord help you if you are like me and are short some cylinders to begin with).

Well, that made a long intro even longer.

So.  There I was with a bouncing baby girl (emphasis on the bouncing in this situation) on November 20, 2009 without one clue on what to do with her.  Brandt and I have done our best.  People tell us we are doing it wrong all the time.  Other people say that we are not.  It is pretty hard, like the hardest thing ever.  But we think that Zephra is the coolest little kid that could possibly exist anywhere.  Obviously, we think so, we are her parents after all.  But, oh my goodness, is she tough sometimes.  She isn't bad, really.  I mean, she's one, so it's not like she's out smoking and drinking past her curfew (We have a strict limit of no smoking after 7pm for her.  Kind of strict, I know. ;-)  ).  She tests her limits constantly, she has a one track mind and a very strong will.  She is a girl who knows what she wants.  You can't pull the wool over this baby's eyes (unless it's a blanket - she loves that game).  She is not easily distracted away from what she is doing.  She hates sleep like crime hates justice (by far, the hardest test ever), and she thinks discipline is hilarious (Like, the funniest thing she has ever come across in her whole 14 1/2 months.  Honest, and I'm super serious with her, sigh.)

What I'm coming to realize now is that some of these qualities are harmful to her.  She needs to learn to embrace sleep as a friend (Personally, I view sleep as a long lost friend.  Absence has absolutely made my heart grow fonder).  Her life will go so much more smoothly if she would do the same with discipline (Isn't that the case for all of us, though?).  But there are other qualities she has that may be a pain in the butt to me now, but that will be very useful to her later in life.  Boundless energy, determination, and the ability to focus?  Yes, please, and could you share some with me?  My job (and I would soooo appreciate you coming along side me in prayer and encouragement in this) is to guide her and help her learn to use her powers for good.  I don't know if I'm up for the task, but I don't really have a choice in this, do I?  My job is to keep her safe, while still allowing her to learn things on her own (a terrifying prospect for a control freak like me); to teach her the value of listening to and loving others while still being able to think for herself; to allow her to have passions that are her own; and to let her be hurt (gah!  Do I have to?  I don't know if I can do it; it will break my fragile heart.) so she can grow and mature and turn into a capable and confident adult.

So, yeah, that's it.  Discourage the harmful things, encourage the good stuff, and embrace the annoying, but good-for-her-later things that sort of stink for me now (Example:  I can appreciate her ingenuity that allows her to figure out how to climb up onto a chair, but I am wary of the world of opportunity for trouble that this opens).  Easy, right?

Just Another House

I was going to do a post on being a mom, but I'm not ready to do that yet.  It's hard, we know.  It's hard for everybody, you just have to do it and learn to love it (I am, I really am).  So I'm not ready to write about it because I feel like I have nothing new or very inspired to say.  (Haha, I'm so weird.  After I wrote that I immediately thought, "Hey!  I know what I want to say!"  So I wrote a sentence down to write about later.  Anyway...)

Today I want to talk about one more struggle I am having.  After I talked about the others, they seemed to get a little better, so I might as well keep going, right?  This one is different, but totally related to my other struggle.

I want a house so bad.  Sigh.  I know, I need to learn to be content.  I am so blessed.  I have a place to live that is warm and safe and in the town where we want to live.  It's even bigger than the house where I lived with my parents until I was 7.  But.  I want to be settled.  I want to live somewhere and not move any more.  I want to own it and be able to do anything I want to it.

It might seem like a silly thing, but I have moved every year since college except one (I switched roommates that year instead of moving).  I have lived in 7 different houses in the last 7 years.  In the first apartment I moved into I painted every room and put up pictures and decorated.  I made it homey.  The next place I painted, but I didn't quite unpack everything.  Every house since then I have done less and less until now I haven't even considered painting and didn't bother unpacking anything decorative.  I just don't have the will to make yet another house a home if I'm not staying here long.  That mentality is taxing on me because I don't have a sanctuary.  My house is more of a frustration than a home base.  I look at the mess around me that I can't figure out what to do with and just sort of give up.  Why bother getting everything organized again?  But when my environment is scattered, my brain is, too.  (Which is all I need when I am running on minimal sleep).

The other thing is that we are renting and our rent is as much as a mortgage payment would be, if not more.  It's at the top of our budget, so we aren't really able to save very much (when we do our car breaks down and we use all the savings to fix it).  Which means we will never have enough for a down payment. 

There, I said it.  My whine is complete.  I'm sorry for being so materialistic.  I truly want to learn to be content in whatever situation I am in.  If you have advice or prayers for me, I will gladly take them.

Appreciation (and Germans)

I know it has been another long while since the last post, but you are going to have to get used to that.  I have a one year old who has a pact with sleep that she won't bother it if it won't bother her and a husband who likes to play games.  And a really messy house, but who am I kidding?  That is definitely not what is keeping me from blogging, it's not like I've been cleaning it.

I was singing in church on Sunday and I heard a line that really hit me and I thought that I should blog about it.  It's kind of funny, because there I was up on the stage thinking about blogging.  I was not the one singing at that exact moment, though, so I think it's okay.  I'll actually get to that line in the next paragraph, but I'm going to take a side trip here to tell you that as a "worship leader"  I am definitely not standing up there...hm.  I've been sitting here for a little while thinking about what you might think that I might be thinking about.  (Haha, let me know if you can figure that sentence out.)  I'm not sure, but I will tell you that I'm still the same me there as anywhere.  I'm having a hard time explaining this right now.  I can tell you that my worship is always from my heart, but not necessarily always from my head.  Like, there was also a point this week when I noticed that the slide on the video screen was an ocean wave and it reminded me of the dream I had had the night before where we lived happily on an island until the Germans took it over and our house burned down.  And I laughed to myself at the strangeness of the dream. 

But I definitely don't take it lightly (worship leading, that is, not the dream about the Germans... Okay, I lied, you have to wait one more paragraph before I tell you the line that inspired this post to begin with.)  Every time I get up on that stage (or very nearly so, I am not perfect) I am doing it because it is one of my acts of worship to God.  I don't sing a song that I don't believe and I try very hard to ensure that I never sing without thinking about it and what I am saying.  But that doesn't mean that I don't wince when someone hits a wrong note (myself included) or think "shoot, I hope I remember how this part goes," or "Yay!  The whole band remembered to come in on 1, not 4!"  I could go on and on, but that is not what I am here to talk about, so...

"All we are and all we have is all a gift from God that we receive."  There you go, that is the line that must change everything.  It is from the song, "Made to Worship" by Chris Tomlin.  I have spent so much of my life a little mad at God for who I am.  I have been ungrateful for the me He gave me.  I am not good at appreciating who I am.  I am not going to use the phrase "loving myself," because I think that society puts way too much emphasis on that now and it wouldn't bother me if it didn't result in people being complete assholes ahem, jerks to everyone else.  But the me that I am is the me that God made.  And I am alive.  Ha.  A-LIVE.  Living.  Sitting here just straight up BEING.  So there.  I have choices and I can choose to be grumpy about the way I am wired or I can just learn to be grateful that I am here.  I get to experience the marvelous wonder of my life.

"Hm," you might say, "this is quite a turn around from previous posts."  Well, yes, sort of.  I don't suddenly have a joyous outlook on my life, but I do recognize now that I think I can find the wonder in the little things that are maybe not so little.  I have the option to, anyway, maybe you can help me be accountable to doing so.  Or maybe I'll be upset and you can remind me that there is wonder in the simple state of being and I can be annoyed with you for bringing it up when I was perfectly content to be grumpy.  Either way, I know now that it will help my outlook if I am grateful for the me I am, rather than there being no me at all.

Well, this was a lengthy post, wasn't it?  Congratulations that you made it to the end.  Really, I do so appreciate you.  I think this is helping me quite a bit, getting everything written down and out there.  Thank you for listening and for the comments you have left.  You are really quite encouraging.

P.S.  I re-read this before I posted it, and if you made it past the paragraph with the thought about the blog and the Germans, then you deserve far more praise than I previously gave you for getting to the end.  Thanks.  :)

The Best Me

I just finished the pistachios that Brandt got for Christmas (well, all except the last four that weren't open enough to eat without some sort of tool).  He wasn't eating them anyway.

Whew.  Each of these last posts, I have put up on facebook and gone to bed.  Then I would think about them the next morning and decide I didn't want people to read them.  By the time I would try to do anything about it, I had received a comment or two or an email from someone and it encouraged me to keep going.  There is a war going on in my mind.  Why am I writing all of this crap about myself?  It is true, to be sure, but who wants to read that?  What good is it doing anyone?  The other side says, well, some people say they identify with it.  Maybe it is making them feel less alone.  But I think of all the other people who might read it who might not identify with it, and I think maybe I don't want them to read it and look at me funny.  But then I think, well, I am being real; this is who I am.  I guess they should know.  Or should they?  (I could go back and forth for a long time, but I will spare you.)

All of my life, I think, I have always wanted to be good.  I don't mean do good things, but actually BE good.  I'm not, though.  I am truly awful.  I have bad motives, I have a really hard time loving people, I worry ALL. OF. THE. TIME.  I am terribly lazy and unmotivated.  I get overwhelmed easily and I get super frustrated and take it out on other people.  I am sad most of the time.  I am totally disorganized and messy.  Most of the time, I just give up.  I have in my mind exactly the person I want to be, but I am no closer to being that person now than I was ever.  Maybe I'm even farther.  Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be someone I am not, but I want to be the best me.  I can't seem to figure out how to get there.

There is definitely a big part of me that is struggling with being a mom.  That is probably enough for a whole other post, so I will just say for now that I am starting off not operating on all cylinders.  I am exhausted from lack of sleep and depleted from lack of time to myself.  That doesn't help.  But the thing is, I am a mom, and, Lord willing, I will be for the rest of my life, so I need to figure out how to be the best me while being a mom.  This is the new normal and I don't want it to be second best.  I want to live this new life and love it.

I am really excited to be getting together later this week with a couple other moms who are in a similar situation.  I hope we can really talk about things and help each other out.  I really suck at talking about things like this in person, but sometimes when other people start, it makes it easier.  We'll see.  I'll try to write the mom post soon.

Goodnight.  (Hey, and thanks for reading, even if you are someone who is going to look at me funny).

If You Ask, I May Not Answer

Oops.  I waited too long to write again.  I'm not really sure where I'm going with it anyway.  It's funny how hard it is to write a follow up.  I got a few wonderful responses to my last posts.  They were so supportive and understanding.  A couple people knew how I was feeling because they felt that way too.  Now I don't really know what to say.  I feel glad that some people know and that it isn't quite as dark in here as it was, but I still feel crappy, too.  It's definitely not bright yet.  I always hit this block when someone reaches out to me.  B said it exactly right in his comment that I hold my cards pretty close to my chest.  I can't help it.  When someone notices me and really wants to know how I am, my immediate reaction is immense joy (what am I, a puppy?) followed so closely by "Nevermind, I'm fine," that they are almost simultaneous.  It's like my real self just shuts off and I can't even access it, let alone let someone else in. 

I think I feel ashamed.  I can't come up with one good reason that I feel so sad, so I feel guilty, like I'm stealing or cheapening someone else's right to feeling like this.  I didn't have a big tragedy happen to me.  I have a good life with a loving husband and a beautiful daughter and so many wonderful family and friends.  I have a place to live and food and clothing.  I have everything I need and more, so I must be a pretty ungrateful person to feel like this.  I think the biggest part of my sadness stems from frustration with myself.  It is not the outside that makes me unhappy; it is the inside.  It is ugly in here, and I feel really powerless to change it at all.  My thoughts are driven by fear.  I am so overwhelmed by life and the prospect of living it all that it makes me shut down.  I am paralyzed by it.  I can't be a good wife and mom, as I so desperately want to be, because I can't even be a good me.  I circle down.

Even as I read what I have written over, I am disgusted.  How self-centered that last paragraph was.  Absolutely every sentence had "I" or "me" in it several times.  Well, there you go, that is some of the ugly truth.  That is part of the answer to the question.  I don't like it, but I'm stuck here for now.  I feel really bad telling you because I don't want to put darkness in your life (not that I think that I am actually making your life worse or anything, but this is certainly not uplifting reading material, and I would so prefer that it was).  I think that I just need to be open a little with someone, so you are it.  Don't feel obligated to be the question asker. 

I have been sitting here way too long.  I'm going to go to bed now.  But I typed and deleted a sentence that I will use in an upcoming post, so maybe it will not be so long before I post again.  Thanks for listening.

Not Recommended. But...

Well, first I should tell you that I kind of changed my mind.  I think I maybe do want someone to read my blog.  Maybe I feel a little bit extra alone when I am not heard in cyberspace.  Gosh, I don't really want to say that, but I think that it is true, so I will leave it.  I am a bit self-consumed, so please forgive me.  Hopefully, I will work through that very soon.  I want someone to care.  I know that the moment I let people know that I have a blog, there will be people who care, but that is really hard to do, so I have not yet done it.  Plus, I want someone to care for the long haul, not just a day or two after they read that I am sad.  It will only make me more sad when they go back to the important people and things in their life.  I am not an easy person to get into, and I retreat the second I see signs of disinterest.  I will not stick around where I'm not wanted or force myself on anyone.  I also don't like letting people know how much I suck (Haha, I have typed and erased that line 3 or 4 times now.  All I can hear is a well-meaning person saying, "Oh, no, you don't suck, Kathy, don't say that," but really they would just be well-meaning and not recognize the fact that we all suck in some way or other, but that's what God's grace is for, isn't it?)

How narcissistic is it of me to write a blog about the crappy way I feel about my life and want people to read it to make me feel better?  And this is how I go back and forth, wearing a path further and further down into my loneliness.

Anyway, that was really all a side note, because today I wanted to write about leading worship from this state of being that I am in right now.  I sing on the worship team most weeks at church, and about once a month or so I lead the worship (like pick the songs, organize practice, and do the talking during the music at church, etc.).  I have been doing this in some form or other for most of my life.  There have definitely been seasons where I did not belong in that position, but I think that now is not one of them.  I have gone back and forth with this thought, and I can't say for sure that I am correct with my conclusion, but I will talk about it a little bit.  You are welcome to tell me your opinion, if you exist.  :-)

First, I believe God can and does use anybody.  He has no qualms about any of the things that we worry about when we are picking people for our team.  I think sometimes He even uses people who aren't on the team and don't want to play.  So I know that He can use me whatever state I am in.  However, that in itself doesn't mean that I should be leading other people to worship.

Today, though, I sang, "I may be down, but I will rise.  It may be dark, but God is light," and I meant it so thoroughly.  I picked the music today, and we surely weren't singing the Happy Song.  But we sang the prayer, "Let everything about me be hallelujah," and although I know that I am so broken and hurting right now, I meant it so hard.  We sang, "This is the place I've known - here in the arms of One Who Loves further than I could run," and I know it is true.  And when I sang, "When all else fades my soul will dance with You where the love lasts forever," I felt a little bit of hope.  Can you believe that?  I, the hopeless one, thought for a minute that maybe someday I would dance again and it would be joyous and good. 

I feel like the only thing I have to give right now is my singing, so I have to keep doing it.  Hopefully it really is a gift and not just another selfish thing that is taking over my life right now.  It is hard to tell sometimes.

I honestly am not writing any of this so that you feel bad for me, and I don't want you to say nice things to me just to make me feel better.  I would rather, if you are there and you want to say something, that you say helpful, true things, even if they are hard to hear.  You probably can't say anything more harsh than I have said to myself; maybe you could shed some light for me.

I guess that's it.  I'm going to post this on Facebook before I lose my nerve.  I think.

Because If I Don't...

Hey, I'm really not here to write anything lengthy at the moment. I really need to go to bed. But I figured if I really wanted to do this, then I need to write something more often than not. So there you go, here is my something. Remind me tomorrow or the next day that I next want to talk about worship leading at some point.

Goodnight.