Two of our favorite people on this planet are Matt and Ginny Mooney, who founded 99 Balloons. Many know Matt through the story of his son, Eliot- whose 99 days on this earth were commemorated with 99 balloons. Matt is the author of  “A Story Unfinished,” and he blogs at The Atypical Life. Ginny meets with me once a week, and there are no words for how she has helped me see the world in a different, life-giving, no b-s sort of way. Moreover, Ginny’s firstborn, Eliot, a little boy I never got to meet, has changed my life. I dare say that he’ll change yours, too.

This is me nearly begging you to buy A Story Unfinished. It will change you.

Today I share with you a glimpse I’ve had of redemption. It’s my own story unfinished, the story of a good man.

Please head over to The Atypical Life and celebrate with me?

I actually wrote something!

I’ll be back around these parts soon, by the way. We still haven’t moved and are still living with all our things in boxes. I miss this and I miss you. Find me on Facebook today! I have an awesome babysitter and get chat a little thanks to her.

I’m not sure I’ve ever endured such actual physical chaos. I’m wild-eyed, ready to pounce. Watch out. I’ve got a sharpie marker and a tape gun in my back pocket. Before long, I’ll start tally marks on the wall in that permanent ink. Line line line line, scratch. That’s how many times today I’ve said to my children “Just stop touching each other, and no more talking!”

The closing date on our house was today, but then suddenly it got moved to a day that is soon but unknown. Moving is so squirrelly, and the controller in me doesn’t like squirrels. I’ve strung about 4,000 metaphors together concerning these things, and I’m sure they will eek into my writing someday, but for now I’m learning to breathe. No really. I’m a half-held breath away from a panic attack. I’m laughing, yes. And in fetal position.

So while I try to calm the mama drama down with some poetry, I thought I would share that lovely book of poetry with you here. You may also lean toward drama like I do. You may love a poem now and then, especially when they catch you by surprise like that cardinal I saw yesterday through the kitchen window.

Sarah Park just published What It Is Is Beautiful: Honest Poems for Mothers of Small Children, and she wrote it for such a time as this.

Today she’s sharing a post and a poem with us, and I am so grateful. Soon I’ll be back to normal here. I can’t promise I won’t be coo coo for cocoa puffs, but I do miss this crew so much. Soon!

Now enjoy, Sarah:

***

I find that in the middle of a chaotic day, it’s only too easy for me to forget the deeper purpose behind the hard work of mothering. My perspective narrows in scope until all I can see is that my three children are melting down, the volume has risen to intolerable levels, and I want to quit.

To be honest, many of our days are marked by power struggles. I’m not in control of them — that much is clear. So I try to remember, in the moment, to take the long view, to pick my battles carefully, and to let the most prominent messages I send be ones of grace and love. But I know that on many days, I don’t succeed.

On days like those, the saving grace comes when the kids have all finally fallen asleep. In that time of quiet, I make the rounds to check on everyone. For the first time that day, I can actually hear myself think, and I can pray long enough to be reminded of who they are and what I’m doing.

You know the biological mechanism by which babies and small children are naturally “cute”? The one that triggers the caregiving adults of the species to provide protection for their young? Sometimes I feel as though the evening quiet acts as a similar mechanism. I’ve had days of turmoil that were only salvaged by the fact that they were capped by a nighttime — when I could finally recall just how much I love this family.

My poem, “Night Rummaging,” is about one of those difficult days, and the gift of evening quiet:

Night Rummaging

“It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for the next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day.” —J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

I crack the door
to noisy mouth breathing
and see her head thrown back,
face slack-jawed,
cheeks baby-full.

Her limbs are improbably
arranged, an elbow up there,
legs curving behind and back,
as if in mid-spring
to the moon.

Today she stared me down
when I issued a command
and then crumpled
when I finally
lost it.

Now her floor is littered
with wadded socks,
the day’s smeary shirt,
a pair of pants pulled clear through
to inside out.

I leave them there;
this moment must not be
for my straightening hands.
I merely breathe in
the uncanny peace,

wordlessly asking
for such peace to dwell
in every drawer
of her mind

and exhaling my gratitude
for making it to this point,
when I get to right
the ransacked corners
of mine.

© Sarah Dunning Park, 2012,
from What It Is Is Beautiful: Honest Poems for Mothers of Small Children
All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Sarah Dunning Park is the author of What It Is Is Beautiful: Honest Poems for Mothers of Small Children

She lives in rural Virginia with her husband and three daughters. Visit her at sarahdunningpark.com.

My friend, Emily Wierenga, has been one of the kindest online friends I have ever had. The proof is in the pudding, how she has treated me time and again. I do believe so often that we learn to be kind to others by learning to be kind to ourselves. After all, we’ve been told to love others as ourselves.

Today Emily shares with us here a little about her process of learning how to love herself – and thereby how to nourish herself. Maybe this is why I have felt so fed by her.

Notice that comments are open today, because Emily is offering a copy of Mom in the Mirror! Now enjoy — Emily:

—

I never wanted to be known as the girl with the eating disorder.

And now I’ve got a book with chapters and paragraphs and sentences stating that I am that very girl, the one who starved herself from the ages of nine until 13, and nine? People ask. Why so young?

But I tell them, I didn’t feel nine. I felt very, very old.

And sometimes it’s hard to remember (as I put down words like Hospital and Calories and Mirror), that I am more than that now. That I have always been more. That we are all more than our reflection.

But you couldn’t have told that to the girl with the mushroom cut and the big plastic glasses who stared into the long mirror in the dim-lit hallway while Dad typed away in his office, the door that was always closed because he was a pastor, and why do churches keep their entrances locked?

And Mum in the kitchen cooking supper in her apron.

I really don’t think it had much at all to do with eating, and does it ever? Do we sneak bags of chips or cookies or bowls of ice cream because we love food? Or because we hate ourselves?

And I think it’s because as women, as mothers, we put ourselves last so often, that we don’t believe we deserve goodness. We feel we don’t deserve beauty or gifts or to sit down and enjoy a good long meal with a glass of wine because there are children to be bathed and put to bed, and clothes to be folded and toys to be put away and, and…

And this is what I saw stretched across my mother’s face, as she stood weary by the stove in her apron. And she tried to love us the only way she knew how: by homeschooling us and dishing up heaping plates of food and sewing us clothes, but all I wanted was for her to hold me and tell me I was beautiful.

But she’d never had anyone do that for her, not her mother nor her father nor my father.

We all need someone to be love, incarnate, so we can put our faith in it.

My husband leans in on the pillows and I ask him to tell me, just one more time. “But why?” he says, this farm-boy that walked me through my relapse when I was 23.

“Don’t you know?” I shake my head.

“Tell me again,” I say.

“I love you.” He pulls me close. “I’ve never stopped loving you,” he says. “And I never will.”

I let him kiss me then.

And I’m learning to stand up for myself this way, to treat my body with kindness. And I know it has nothing to do with me. I know it has everything to do with me being a product of God’s genius. His hands molding dust into skin into breath.

He’s the one who makes me beautiful. So I sit boldly at the kitchen table in the afternoon light and eat a bowl of ice cream, my sons beside me, eating theirs, because we need to do this together, this life. This learning to eat, this learning to be gentle with ourselves and others.

Because lies can’t grow in the light.

And light is love.

***

I’m giving away a hard-cover copy of my new book today, Mom in the Mirror: Body Image, Beauty and Life After Pregnancy, co-authored by Dr. Dena Cabrera, and foreword by supermodel Emme. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

Giving birth produces life in more than one sense. It’s the baby powder, milky-breathed spirit found in the softest limbs you’ve ever felt, and it’s the respect a man feels for his wife as he watches her give up her body for another.

And it’s the deep-rooted soul satisfying feeling of knowing you were born for more than the mirror. That you were born to see the face of God in your child, and to know, you yourself are a miracle.

I want you to have this book! Tell me ONE thing that you love about yourself, and you’ll be entered into the draw!

Otherwise, you can order it through the book’s website, here: www.mominthemirrorbook.com.

Emily Wierenga is a mom to two beautiful boys, wife to a handsome math teacher, and author of Chasing Silhouettes: How to Help a Loved One Battling an Eating Disorder (www.chasingsilhouettes.com) and Mom in the Mirror: Body Image, Beauty and Life After Pregnancy (www.mominthemirrorbook.com). To learn more, please visit www.emilywierenga.com.

Something strange has happened the past few months. Come on over to (in)courage and let me tell you about it!

The property here with this rock house has many old buildings. The outhouse is at the very back with a tree through the seat. It’s caddywompus, leaning in the same direction as the chicken house. Once upon a time this place had chickens and was a tomato cannery. Now the antique tin waves in the wind. The tool shed is hanging with iron pulleys rusted to hooks. Strangely shaped jars are full of spiders and nails. I’ve loved it that way for so long.

When Grandma lived here, the small coy pond was lined in black-eyed susans and coneflowers. The azaleas were huge, pruned and watered like a woman had made it her day job. And she had.

Now the entire place is tangled in honeysuckle. I don’t love honeysuckle any more. I pull it away like a rope around the neck of my roses. The lilacs still overcome, peeking purple heads out and filling our yard with rich perfume. The wisteria droops way up high from a towering tree. Theses plants, especially the lily bulbs, may be at least 60 years old.

Our boys are the 6^th generation to have lived in this house. Grandma planted the yellow roses during World War II while Grandpa was in Italy, the Grandpa with a purple heart who held my firstborn and wept.

But I didn’t know that when I started praying Kingdom Come how it would trump my other requests, even in my own heart. Part of asking the Kingdom here as it is in Heaven is asking for debts to be pardoned: accounts balanced, hurts forgiven, everything aimed at Jubilee.

It wasn’t our plan, but we own two houses – one where friends rent, and this rock house property. I’ve asked Him to do what He does in His strange way to set us free, and then Seth got an email from a very nice family asking if they could buy the Rock House.

They came from far away to view it, twice. And as they were making a decision, our friends in our other house decided to buy that house, too.

I walked the property, crawled through the chicken house, squished my mud boots in the horse field. I buried my face in the lilacs and stood still. The bees and the train whistle.

There’s an ache, but I am not sad, not one little lick.

I packed photographs. What meant to be a ten minute project turned into an hour. One by one, I noted the smoother skin on faces I love. Our lives are beautiful. On to the next thing, and it will be beautiful, too – such a lily, then gone.

I hope to be writing my book in the Fall, settled into a new house. We immediately found one that we love. The thing about it though is that we have to move into it before the end of May! That explains why I have disappeared from the webbernets. My brain is a scramble of furniture and what’s for supper and bow and yard sale and Man boy boy boy boy.

My extroverted heart has sucked up inside itself and has made roughly 67 lists of things to do. I also got the kind of sick that happens when you haven’t rested, the kind where you only use your voice to horse whisper scream that the baby is asleep.

I’ll have a few guest posts, and I’ll write a few, too, but these parts will be mostly quiet. I can’t wait to show you my new house and to settle into a good spot to write. I’ll have an office. I haven’t had a room of my own since I was in high school. It’s a complex, happy thing, but it’s pretty simple, too – all temporary. Let’s hold it, love it, and let it run right through our blessed fingers.

Kingdom Come.

—

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