Resolution

It's been over two years since I've written on this blog, but it has never been far from my mind.  I wanted to chronicle everything.  The struggle and final completion of my thesis proposal and my current struggle to know what to do with it. My internal thought battle over my husband's choice to become a nurse and my eventual acceptance and celebration of that choice. The moment in the spring of 2012 when my husband and I realized that we wouldn't know his now 16-year-old daughter if we passed her on the street, which led to her beautiful act of forgiveness and her reentry into our lives.  The moment we found out that DJ had ADHD and the difficult moments and hurtful times of having a child who says he wants to kill himself.  His eventual redemption through Christ, and the miraculous changes I've seen in him since.  The period of time that HT spent in day care and my mental trial of accepting that I was a day care mom.  E's graduation from nursing school and his commissioning into the Navy nurse corps.  The five weeks E spent away from us at Officers Training Command.  Our move, for the first time, to a new city, a new home, and a new life. The decline and eventual death of my father.  Every birthday, every holiday, every moment of testing or trial or joy.  I really wanted to chronicle them all.

My beautiful step-daughter, AJ.

But this blog was never intended to be a diary of my life.  Admittedly my best writing comes from the moments of my life and is inspired by my personal struggles, but there is a place for diaries, and in my case, the internet is not it.  There are secrets, deep and dark, that you will never read in this blog.  You wouldn't want to.

So what is it then? I'm not sure. A few weeks ago I went back and re-read most of my entries, and realized that this blog represented me in my most real, authentic, true self.  I stopped writing not because I'd lost sight of that self, but it is possible that I lost sight of that self in part because I stopped writing.  The main culprit in my loss of self was busyness.  I stopped writing when I started graduate school again, and I lost all my creative impulse to exhaustion from pouring myself into paper after paper and eventually a thesis proposal for a thesis that may or may not ever be written.

And then more life happened.  Eric graduated from nursing school and received his commissioning, left us for five weeks of officers' training, and then upon his return we immediately moved to a very nice rental home of my choosing in Virginia Beach, VA.  I took a semester off from school to allow the family time to adjust.  Then in October my father began a rapid decline in his already failing health due to Early Onset Alzheimers disease.  He spent a month in the hospital on hospice care, after which my mother brought him home.  Four days later he died.  I hadn't seen him since early August.  I didn't make it in time to say good-bye.  The funeral was beautiful.  I made a picture collage.

I talked about my father's disease, and my fears of it in an earlier post. I can't say that all those fears have gone now that he is dead, but I can say that his death changed a lot.  My very real fear that I too will one day develop Alzheimers is still there, but I've grown comfortable with it, like an old friend.  But when Dad died something broke in me.  I didn't want to spend any more time making myself perfect, ie. a better version of everyone else, so that I could then live out my days in happiness and joy. I wanted the happiness and joy now.  My dad was only 59.  If I do get Alzheimers through the genetic mutation that caused my father's and grandfather's illness, I am now more than halfway through my life.

I think Weight Watchers was my breaking point.  I joined back in July, but I wasn't getting anywhere fast.  It was November when my mom started calling me almost everyday.  It would only be another year or so.  It would only be a few months.  A few weeks.  A few days.  About a week before dad's passing I went to a Weight Watchers meeting, and before I walked in, I actually prayed and asked God to make sure the number on the scale went down.  I simply couldn't take another reason to be unhappy, and I needed something positive, right at that moment.  The scale was up.  I sat down and tried to be calm about it, to tell myself I just needed to try harder, but I was sick of being strong, sick of striving.  I couldn't stop crying enough, and when I noticed people noticing my tears, I left.  I never went back.

I saw my weight not just as an imperfection or a simple flaw, but as a deep wound.  I hated my body, and I continue to hate my body.  Healthy diet and exercise feel like a punishment for being fat.  And I am done punishing myself.

So after the funeral and the Thanksgiving holiday I set out to get help, not with weight loss, but with acceptance and love.  Don't get me wrong, I have people around me who love me.  The unconditional love of my husband is more than I could ever repay, and when I think of God's love for me to send His Son to die for me, I am ashamed to feel unloved.  But that is how I feel.  Why.  Because I don't accept this love that I receive from God and from those people He puts in my life on a deep enough level.  My mother says she loves me? Pah, she is goofy and sentimental and still sees me as a sweet little child.  My husband says he loves me? Well, he only says it when I ask so that must mean he's just trying to keep me around until he finds someone better.  God says He loves me? That's wonderful, but how can a fat, judgmental, unfaithful sinner like me really accept that love unless she spends every waking moment striving to be better to show Him her gratitude?

"Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth." (Psalm 46:10, NIV)

On my very first day with my new therapist, she quoted this.  And then she told me that "be still" here is best translated as "let go" or cease striving.  

I still haven't wrapped my mind around this.  Cease striving?  Stop trying to do things to show God, and for that matter others, that I love them?  Stop trying to be the best wife, the best mother, the best Christian, the best everything that it's in my power to be?  It goes against everything my sense of work ethic has taught me.  It goes against things my father taught me.

But it's perfectly in line with God's teaching.

I am not a Bible teacher, I have not been to seminary, and I do not feel qualified to sit here and tell you why I believe that.  I'm just going to tell you I do.  Maybe this is just His word for me, I don't know.  But right now this is what I'm going to do: I'm going to cease striving.  I'm going to be still and know.  I'm going to know that God, my husband, and my family and friends love me.  I'm going to accept that by faith, and not question it.  I'm going to learn to love me the same way.  I'm going to learn to accept myself as is, not because I am perfect, but because I am weak, and His power is made more perfect in my weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).  I am going to learn to live without comparison, without judgment, without perfectionism.  I'm going to live, laugh, observe, listen, relax, create, play, and rest.  I'm going to take naps.  I'm going to love me, and everyone else, the way God does.  And I'm not going to do it perfectly.  I'm going to do it authentically.

Call it my new year's resolution.

Living Blind*

I began this blog with the intention of committing to a specific range of topics and sticking to them, but instead I've found myself branching out and making it a bit more personal then was my intention.  I still want to commit to not making this a journal of my daily life, or even my daily thought life, but nevertheless my thought life, and the events and situations in my life that stimulate it, are what I have to bring to you.  I hope to also include some opinions and theories based on research into the psychological and sociological topics that interest me, but as I've come along with this over the past month I've also felt led to share the lessons I've learned and the moments that touch my life, in the hopes that I can offer new insight or even hope to someone who may read this.  (If I do, please comment! I think there is also a link to contact me privately by email, or alternatively you could post it as a comment, but mention clearly that you do not want me to post your comment, and I will read it without posting it.)

I am not a fan of ignoring or bottling up my hurts.  I believe that the first step of learning to cope with or manage the negative feelings and painful circumstances of life is acknowledging one's emotional responses to them, and that keeping them contained in some back corner of one's brain prevents a person from dealing with the pain, which can only result in more pain in the future.  Usually I can be accused of just the opposite of this, in fact -- I am often guilty of stating my feelings in the moment, without stopping to think about how others may react.  In the past few years, however, I have experienced a few hurts that have shown me that bottling the feelings, or keeping them boxed up on a shelf as I like to think of it, has its place.  For the first time in my life I am encountering something so painful that trying to deal with the hurt as I experience it is simply too much for me.  If I were to allow myself to truly experience and express my emotions on this as I felt them, I would be an invalid, because these feelings would overcome my ability to live a normal life.  For that reason, I store them away and don't talk about them much, and then only with those with whom I feel safe.  I can have it no other way, simply because I have a family and responsibilities and I need to keep on living each day.

My father was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimers Disease at fifty.  My grandfather, his father, died in 1987 of the same disease, along with my great aunt a few years later.  It is suspected that their father also died of the disease, and possibly a number of other relatives before him, though the Alzheimers diagnosis was not available at that time.  About a year ago my father received the results of some genetic testing and what we'd always suspected was confirmed -- our family carries a gene mutation that causes the disease.  With this confirmed it leaves me with at least a fifty percent chance of contracting the disease, probably around age fifty, and dying about ten years later, at sixty.  And there it is -- my greatest pain, my greatest fear.  It is a fear that consumes me, despite my best efforts to keep it in a closed up box at the back of the closet that is my brain.  It is a fear that prevents me from being able to fully cope with the reality of losing my father to the disease, probably within the next five years.  In fact, my father's disease leaves me so terrified that I find myself afraid of my father himself.  This disease being what it is, it seems to be gradually consuming his personhood, and while I value him no differently, to see him and speak to him is to see a shell of the man I once admired.  He seems lost in a fog, lonely, at times reaching desperately for the parts of reality he can still grasp, at other times just quietly slipping away.  

When I think about the very real possibility that I will one day be the one slipping away, it grips me.  I am not afraid to die.  I am somewhat afraid of the pain, or more likely the mental anguish of slowly becoming lost in my own mind.  But the fear that threatens to undo me is that of what I will do, and what I have done, to my husband and children.  I may carry a gene mutation that will cause my brain to slowly turn to ameloid mush, and unlike the more typical form of Alzheimers disease that comes after age sixty-five, this may begin as early as my late forties, and kill me by sixty.  And so my thoughts go:

When I am fifty, my children will be twenty-seven, twenty-six, and twenty.  My husband, who will be tasked with carrying for me, will be fifty-eight.  I have one child with a disability, who may or may not continue to live with us at this point.  I may never know a son or daughters-in-law.  I may never know grandchildren.  I may never see my children become the age that I am now.  They will have their own lives, and I will interfere with them, needing care around the clock, but unable to thank them for it because at some point I will forget their names.  And then the worst thought of all -- if it happens to me, chances are strong that it will happen to at least one of them too.  

On Christmas Day, the first year after my father's diagnosis, E, IC, and DJ and I were driving up to visit my parents for the holiday week.  We stopped at a truck stop, where friendly employees and truckers headed home themselves stopped to admire my sweet babies.  One trucker sat down at the next table to talk to me while I nursed, and mentioned that he'd always wanted to have kids.  The reason he didn't?  He had ADHD, and didn't want to pass on such a "terrible thing" to a child.  This was the moment when it first hit me about what I had potentially done to my children, simply by becoming their mother.  Already lost in one of the worst periods of depression in my life at the time, I hit rock bottom for awhile.  I had never seen myself as a good mother, but now my parenting didn't even seem to matter -- my children were doomed by their genes.  While the genetic mutation was not yet confirmed in my family, I had always assumed it to be there.  Three generations of dementia and early death can't be wrong.

The floodgates opened up again last night when I read a friend's blog in which she lamented the possibility that she may have passed on bipolar disorder to her son.  I cried for quite a while, I sat in a dark room and watched the rain, and I pitied myself and my family.  I asked God why.

Then this morning, sitting in church trying to keep my brain the in service and not on which child needed what and when, I followed my pastor's instruction to open my Bible to John 9, and God spoke to me, and I was reminded once again why we call it a "living Word".  In this passage, Jesus is walking along with the disciples when they see a blind man.  Apparently this wasn't unusual; the man had been sitting in the same area begging for probably most of his life (9:8).  They didn't have the Americans with Disabilities Act in ancient Israel.  The disciples ask Jesus the same question I asked God last night -- why.  Why would God allow this man to be born this way?  Informed by what they had been taught as good Hebrew boys, though, they made an assumption.  They asked, "Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" (9:2).  Having read this story a hundred times, their question seems immature to me now, but isn't that exactly what I was asking God last night?  Why, God?  What did my father, or my grandfather, or my great-grandfather do wrong that made you decide to curse my family with this awful sickness?  What can I do for You so that it doesn't happen to me?  Why am I facing this horrible way to end life?  Why is there even a possibility that my children will have to deal with this? WHY?  Though it was uncommon for Him to do so, Jesus gives them a direct answer:

"Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life."

My pastor went on to talk about how the disciples looked at this blind man.  They saw him, and perhaps anyone who was seen suffering, to be a sinner, doomed to suffer with illness because he had sinned.  Jesus directly challenged this assumption, and explained that God uses illness to show His greatness.  Our pastor wanted to change our perspectives with those of the disciples, to see weakness in others as a canvass for God's strength.  Today, for me though, I was sitting in the other seat.  I was the blind man.  I might even be the blind man's parents.  I realized that I was still holding onto an idea I'd had as a child -- that my family was cursed with this illness.  It's amazing how childish thoughts, left unchecked, can grow to become a part of our adult perspectives.  It'd been there so long that I'd accepted it as fact, never accepting this simple truth, that our weakness, including illness, exists to showcase God's strength.  

No, I have no idea why or how God will use Alzheimers disease to reveal his goodness through my father, or perhaps me.  I still can't really imagine something good coming from something that still hurts me so much.  But what I can see is how God has already used my father, and I have enough faith to know that He still can, even as he slips away.  I don't believe that God will miraculously heal my father, like Jesus did the blind man, and I don't believe that He will heal me if I do indeed develop this disease.  What I believe is that there is more to life than how or when we die, and that Christ conquered death, not just so we can go to heaven, but so that even crippling illness and death can be enveloped in His love.  I don't quite know what that will look like, but if I see it in anyone, it will be my dad.  

*Please note that this post was written on Sunday, 5/15/11 around 10PM, but Blogger was down, so it is being posted now.