I believe in Christ...and turns out, He believes in me too!

Would someone who actually knows all the answers please tell me where to find them?  I’m rushing headlong to my 52^nd birthday (September 17^th), and I’m so disappointed.  I mean, when I was a kid, I assumed that all adults knew what they were doing and at least had a handle on this “life” thing.  And if someone lived to the ripe old age of 52, I was SURE they knew.  In fact, I assumed by then they were just skating their way through their golden years.

First, I’m not ripe or old yet.  I figure I’m just over halfway through my life, so that would put me smack in the middle of my, well, middle-age years.

I’m sitting in our kitchen at 11:41 p.m.  The kids and Darryl are all in their beds…well, Darryl is.  He’s sound asleep and snoring with a nice, warm kitty curled up near his legs <3  The kids, I don’t know.  Lindsay and Jake are out somewhere and will likely be home soon.  Scott is a night owl and drives me crazy.  Kristi, who knows?  But, heck, they start school in a week, so I’ll cut them some slack.  As for me, yeah, I’ve been having trouble settling down for the night and actually falling asleep.  My mind doesn’t want to shut down.  I feel fine.  I’m not particularly depressed or unhappy, nor am I jumping up and down elated.  Just at that special age where I’m suddenly experiencing things I’ve never experienced before.

Darryl and I went out to the lawn under a tree in front of the church today.  It was Sunday School time, and as we saw the very dry teacher start to pass out slips of paper for people to read…these were portions of the lesson to divvy up among us….Darryl said to me, “Oh, I can’t do this,” and we took our leave.  He loves the Gospel so much and knows so very much about it.  He appreciates the richness of it and is excited to be able to learn and to teach.  Sadly, he only teaches once a month now, and I don’t ever teach anymore.  Very sad face for both of us.

We had a great talk out on the lawn.  It was a beautiful day.  In fact, I am loving Idaho more and more for its climate.  I don’t know how many years we will live in Twin Falls, but it doesn’t seem that we will suffer.  We talked about feelings we’ve had about our new home and how we expect to get along in the next little while.  We have to move because of the debacle with our landlady who is losing her home, despite her assurances to the contrary when we agreed to rent it.  We’ve known for a few months that our move was imminent, but we haven’t yet found a suitable home for our family.

Both of us are feeling a bit detached from our ward, and I think Darryl put his finger on the issue.  People in our ward are friendly and always greet us and seem to like us well enough, but we just don’t really feel a part of the family, so to speak.  Mind you, after almost seven years in one ward, we had grown to a place where we knew and cared about the people who belonged to the same ward.  It wasn’t perfect, or at least our time there wasn’t perfect, but we miss these people more than we had thought.  There are some people I do not miss, and there are some (maybe the same people?) who do not miss us.  And if you are reading this, you are not one of those people.

I don’t want to whine.  I mean, there are worse things.  Believe me.  And chances are good that we won’t have a choice but to move out of the ward when we find a new home.  And we’re okay with that.  So we’ll see how that all works out.  I guess we should do what we know:  Just trust the Lord.  He seems to know what He’s doing :D

At any rate, I’m sitting in the kitchen (Jake and Lindsay just got home, so all the chickadees are safely home). The dishwasher is humming along, the kitchen is clean (shock!), the house is in pretty good shape (shock again!)  I only have one hearing this week, 3:00 tomorrow, but I am going to go into work earlier tomorrow because I have a lot of work to get done.  Friday will be my first vacation day since I came here seven months ago.  We are leaving Thursday to go to Utah for my stepdaughter’s wedding.

I have worked really hard to get some names together from my genealogy and have reserved the right to do the temple work for those ancestors.  I hope to start doing that very soon.  I’m eager to see how that feels, getting the work done after piecing all this together.

I know that I have talked over and over and over again about the sorrow I’ve experienced and the growth I’ve gained through my travails with my extended family rejecting me and my family and finding little reason to reconcile or even care about us and our reputations.  I know it gets boring to read the same things many times.  I’m getting better, but this has created such a huge hole in my very being, and it has troubled me so much that sometimes I feel I can’t deal with any of it.  And then other times I go back and read and realize how very much I have learned, indeed.  As in all things, I am not thrilled with the mechanism of growth, but I am happier with who I am becoming as I continue this journey.

I have hope that my little family here in Twin Falls will be okay.  I see success in unexpected areas, and I am understanding that things that we lost through our move have been replaced with things far more valuable.  I truly want to “be still and know that [He is] God.”  It seems the wisest course.

Let me list some things that I hold dear:

I have good health.

I have a healthy and awesome husband and children.

I have a great job that I just love.

I really like it here.

Just as my patriarchal blessing promised, though I have been through difficult times, my testimony, rooted in my young days, has been there to carry me through those difficult times.  And those difficult times have fed that testimony until it has grown more than I expected.  And that gives me peace.

And I’m not done yet.

Today in Sacrament meeting we closed with “I Believe in Christ.”  Every single time I sing that hymn, I remember Elder McConkie bearing testimony of Jesus Christ in his very last talk in General Conference before he died.  He bore powerful, eloquent testimony, and I will never forget his saying that he would soon wash the Savior’s feet with his own tears; and I believed he would.  So I love that hymn for the memories and the feelings it evokes.

In Relief Society we also closed with the same hymn.  There is a new sister in our ward who sat by me, and we chatted a bit, which was nice.  And when we sang the opening song, I quickly realized that she has a lovely voice.  And when we closed, she switched to the alto part.  I am a soprano.  Okay, a soprano because I don’t read music, and it’s far easier for me to follow the melody, and I’m fortunate to be able to reach most of those high notes.  But when my neighbor starting singing alto, we really sounded lovely together, and the hymn I love suddenly became really FUN to sing.  After church she stopped me and told me I have a beautiful voice.  I will never believe that, I’m afraid, but I do love to sing :D

And, yes, I too believe in Christ.

Is your family Bible filled with the love of the Saviour?

This week has brought some welcomed experiences for me.  First, I received in the mail the family Bible belonging to my fourth great grandmother, who was born in 1823 and married in 1838.  The Bible had been entrusted to a family with the same last name as that particular great grandmother, although the recipients weren’t actually related, and the person who sent me the Bible has been looking for a direct descendant to whom to gift the Bible.  Because she saw on Ancestry.com that I am a direct descendant, she contacted me.  In addition to how cool it is to own something so old that once belonged to someone in my family, I have picked up some information about people in my family tree of whom I’d never heard (likely because they died as children, so they have no descendants) and correct information I had earlier been given incorrectly.

The other welcomed experience was being contacted by a cousin of my father.  She is only 8 ½ years older than I, and I have vague memories of her and her siblings from when I was growing up, but by the time I was old enough to remember, they were scary teenagers, so we didn’t keep in contact.  I was very happy to be contacted and to have another piece of my fragmented family put in place.

And that brings me to what has been preying on my mind this week.  There are so many fractures in my family.  It’s nothing new to this generation of our family.  It has been something that has plagued us for generations.  And isn’t that heartbreaking?

Dabbling in genealogy as I have has cleared up some mysteries for me, and sometimes I wonder how it is that our family even survived long enough to procreate.  Crazy stuff.  Alas, very little tolerance for one another’s weaknesses.  Blessedly, though, I feel more compassion than I ever expected for those who were struggling through various issues and lost so much.  And I feel respect and love even for those who did a lot of the damage.  In fact, some of my favorite people who have been alive in my lifetime were probably more responsible than they’d care to be remembered. 

So what are my weaknesses?  Bear in mind, I’m trying not to make this the very long narrative I am capable of typing.  As I talked with my Sweetie last night about some concerns I’ve had with how to relate to some of our kids, he gave me insight and wisdom that was just what I needed to take a deep breath and keep on trying.  I didn’t realize until last night (and I didn’t share this with him at the time), but it appears I am still bearing the scars of abuse and still want to throw my hands in the air and give up as soon as conflict arises.  I’ve been leading with hurt feelings.  It’s true what I said recently:  Motherhood (heck, parenthood) is not for the faint of heart!

I once knew a person who, as I heard it, was unrepentant in this person’s behavior that ultimately eroded the marriage, despite this person’s spouse’s continued pleading to keep the family together.  And don’t anyone who reads this think I’m talking about YOU because I just realized I know a few people who would fit that vague description.  I’m not writing it to judge, I promise.  Life’s hard.  We all do stupid things.  We all hurt people.  What my comment was leading to was that the person in question is now unhappy because, after the failure of the marriage, the former spouse has found real love and seems happier than I could imagine.  But the ex is outraged at the happiness of the former spouse, as if that is somehow anything of the ex’s concern.

My Facebook post today:  “A thought I've had recently - my first marriage was pretty awful. I tried, I really did. But the issues were finally just too much to bear. When my ex became involved with someone new, I wasn't upset in the least. I hoped he would do better with someone new, someone who had the tools I didn't. Alas, I later learned she was a serial bride who was extremely toxic. But that made me sad, not jealous. And it didn't end at all well for him. It's a real head scratcher for me when someone walks away from a marriage for whatever reason but continues to pile on hate and rage, especially when she/he sees the ex has found a new mate who is a better fit. Why begrudge someone you've come to realize isn't for you if he/she has some happiness? Seeing that person be miserable just isn't going to make your life better, I promise.”

So far I haven’t been called out on it, but trust me, if I am, I will restrain myself.  Because, see, I had every reason to strongly dislike my ex after we separated.  His continued ill treatment gave me every reason to continue to dislike him.  And his ultimate suicide first shocked then horribly saddened me, both for him and our kids. But as time went by, and I realized that my tormentor was GONE, I recognized that my life…MY life….was made easier by his passing.  That brought with it both relief and guilt.  I have actually been chided by someone for not speaking of him and his death in hallowed tones.  That was a person who should be close to me and know my heart but long ago chose to bow out, so the chiding was misplaced, though that person doesn’t know it.

If I had my way, I wouldn’t want him to be gone.  I would have loved for him to stop tormenting me and for him to be happy and able to appreciate the happiness that I have found, but I would also wish for him to have found what he needed to bring him peace in his life.  Because I wish his children still had him to call Dad.  Because my dad has been gone longer, I know that, even when things in your relationship have not always been smooth, there is forever a hole in your heart.  I watched a movie last night where the aging father of an adult man who was facing a very low point in his life comforted his son by holding him and just being there to sympathize.  I miss that.  Every.Single.Day.

So when we are able to take our ancestor’s names to the temple and do the work for them, sealing them to one another, the prayer in my heart will be that they have long since mended rifts between them and embrace one another with joy on becoming a Forever Family.

It hurts my heart to think how many of us in this world are in pain and need to be accepted and loved.  That's probably why I seem to turn to this subject time and again in my blogging.  Trust me, it's much better these days now that I'm on antidepressants :-/ 

I am so blessed.  My imperfect husband and imperfect children complete our family of imperfect people, and we are perfect…for EACH OTHER. 

For the Love of a Potato

My grandma is almost 92 years old.  Mind you, her birthday is still five months away.  Mine is two months away, and I am holding firmly to 51 and will not be “almost 52” until the day before my birthday.  But when you reach the upper ages, you can take charge, once again, of your age and be proud of who you are WHEN you are.  At least that’s my theory.

I am the oldest person in my generation of both my father’s side and my mother’s side.  I am the oldest child, each of them is/was the oldest child.  Even though I was three when my brother was born, I can actually remember being the only one.  Honestly, though, I have always felt like the proverbial square peg.  I still do, in fact.  I shake my head so often anymore, it seems my neck is just going to split in two one of these days.

I’ll never forget the day I found out that being the square peg didn’t mean there’s anything wrong with me.  I have grown up with seemingly preconceived notions that I had developed through listening (my grandma used to say, “Little pictures have big ears,” which I heard as “pitchers,” and I wondered how pitchers could have ears).  When visiting with some extended family and learning more about my life and family as it existed when I was really small, those notions seemed to shatter, and a clearer picture emerged.

I cherished through my late childhood being able to see and often visit with extended family members.  Then when I was 13 ½, that changed abruptly because of a misunderstanding that was clearly blown out of proportion and lasted for four years.  I didn’t say anything then, but even though I supported and believed what I was hearing at home, something didn’t click just right, and it always bothered me.  I still regret those missed years.

Now that I’m 51 (okay, ALMOST 52), I can see the isolation that created.  Thanks to social media, I have developed a cordial relationship with my people, and that has been salve to the wounds of hate and intolerance I’ve personally experienced from my People.  And I’ve recognized that the reason those early days of misunderstanding didn’t click right is because they WEREN’T right.  

Part Deux

Life has been hard for the past few years, both emotionally and financially.  Physically too, I should add.  Now that we’ve moved and I’ve taken on a full-time job, the emotional and physical issues have greatly improved.  Thank you, Modern Science!  Financially, while I am making a much lower salary than the income I made from time to time when we lived in Virginia, the steadiness of the paycheck and always knowing when I’ll get paid is very nice.

We really loved our last landlord in Virginia, especially after how hard it was to deal with Marine Lawyer, our previous landlord.  Our financial struggles began while living in Marine Lawyer’s house, though he saw that as a character flaw.  Nice Guy landlord was kind and generous and very concerned about making sure our home was safe and cared for.  Sadly, the economy just hit him hard, and he lost his rental homes in an effort to save the roof over his and his wife’s heads.  Being a man of integrity, though, he contacted us immediately to let us know his plight and that we were no longer to pay him rent.  We were able to live in the home several months rent free, which helped so much as my work had tanked around the same time, and we wouldn’t have been able to feed our family on what I was making if we hadn’t had the break from paying rent.  Sadly, of course, we were not able to save any money as a result.

We moved to Idaho to a home that just seemed to fall into our laps.  We have been here six months, and despite a few quirks about the place, we love it.  It’s so much nicer than our previous home, at several hundred dollars less per month.  And it’s just a nice place.  We’ve paid our rent each month on time.  We have had no issues with breaking or harming any part of the house (no easy feat when you have six people, two cats, and a huge dog living here!)

And then we find out that our landlady, despite repeated questioning and assurance that she was financially sound and on time with her payments, is facing foreclosure because she has not, in fact, paid ANY house payments since before we moved in.  And now she’s belatedly decided to sell and is breathing down our necks to “cooperate” with a Realtor so we can be booted out if/when it actually sells.  Like we did a single thing to bring about this turn of events.  ::sigh::

We had to hire an attorney, who said, “No $&*@! She said that?” We will either have till the end of September to move, during which time we will pay no rent, or we will be able to continue paying rent and live in the home till our lease ends, the end of January.

I hate moving.  No, really, I HATE moving.

We have looked at a few homes, some of which were very promising, and we just haven’t felt right about it yet.  I’m not sure if it’s just not time to move or we just haven’t found the right place, or what, but we’re not rushing to go anywhere just yet.

Our married daughter and her husband moved in with us about two months ago, so we not only want to live in a four-bedroom home, at this point we HAVE to.  And that’s fine.  Seriously, when they are ready to move out on their own, we’d like to have an extra bedroom so that in case anybody wants to visit, they can.

 

As much success as our son in Virginia is currently experiencing, he’s really feeling isolated out there all by himself.  We actually live closer to him now than the rest of the family (except for my in-laws, who are serving a mission in Georgia but will be back in Utah by Christmas).  Hopefully he’ll be able to get out here closer before too long.  I find that I really want to encourage as much quality familial relationship as possible. 

I’m babbling, I know.  I just have a lot on my mind.  I’m trying to hold onto my belief that we have experiences to help us grow and that it is important to be grateful for the challenges and what they bring.  It is not always easy to be grateful, but it is easier to deal with the trials, when we focus.

So that's how it goes in our corner.  How 'bout yours?