Weeping Definitely Endures for the Night...

I am holding two realities in tandem:  I loving being a momma, and I am really really dead tired.  

Last night was one of the worst yet, and our child is well out of the newborn stage.   I don’t know if it was teething, tummy ache, or just fussiness, but she screamed for three hours in the middle of the night.  We don’t sleep much to begin with.  This is an understatement.  She usually sleeps for two hours at a time, and she is seven months old. I can’t really figure out sleep training thing.  I can’t even figure out how I feel about sleep training.  

Sometimes Jordan has to hold me down at night so that I don’t get up to comfort at the first sound of distress.  Other times, I punch him, or scream at him, or both punch and scream, leap out of bed, and swoop in to “rescue” my baby.  I don’t condone punching or screaming at your husband.  It just seems instinctual at times. I'm trying to stop. 

Consistency at night is not my best quality.  I am genuinely happy for mommies who have babies that start sleeping through the night at seven weeks, or four months, or six months.  And I also have moments when am ferociously envious of those mommas.  Mainly those moments arise at one in the morning.  

I LOVE being the one who gets to nurse my baby.  That communion together is precious, and most of the time I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.  And I get really mad at God that He didn’t make daddies with the capability of lactation. Come on, God, it would have been so easy. Just insert the little mammary glands into their boobies too. Then we could share duties. This anger with God also usually surfaces in the wee hours of the morning.  

In the middle of the night, muddling through hours of screaming, I don’t know how we are going to make it through.  I can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.  I feel like a terrible mommy and an even worse wife.  Then the dawn comes.  Another night over.  The light of the morning comes every day.  There is grace.  There are apologies. Sometimes many profuse apologies.  Maybe we will figure out sleep.  Maybe we won’t.  Hopefully we will. But we love.  

Her morning smiles, babbling, giggling, and playing wash over the dirty remnants of the difficult night. It is cleansed.  Joy will come after tears. 

I am so glad that the morning follows night.  Always.

The Beautiful Agony of Writing

“There is no greater agony than bearing the untold story inside of you.”

Maya Angelou

I stopped writing for six days.  I turned off that part of my brain.  It seems that when I shut down other parts of my brain, the writing part goes with them.  I have only located one power button in my emotional brain, and it controls the creative part as well as other parts.  I can’t really pick and choose what sections I turn off.  I guess that this is why lobotomies don’t work that great. 

On the surface, I didn't feel too great of a loss, but...

I haven’t decided yet if I am a writer or a writer wannabe.  I usually consider myself a wannabe in all of my endeavors.  I think that this assessment protects me from really becoming disappointed if I fail.  

Writer or poser, however, I guess that I feel really sad and empty when I don’t write. 

For a couple of years, I buried that part of my heart so deeply that I didn’t know that I missed it.   With the encouragement of wonderful friends and a committed husband, I located the burial plot and resurrected the writer in me. (Or the wannabe).  The problem with writing is that it also resurrects other parts that I might not want to dig up.  If I am going to really truly write from the heart, it means that I start feeling more emotions and becoming...duh duh duh...authentic.  Authenticity can be terrifying. 

This might be why I took a week off.  I needed a break from the realness of writing. I needed to slip back into the false reality of being shut down. Writing opens up the world to me, and the world hemorrhages all over my keyboard.  And I’m squeamish. Like really squeamish. Like faint-from-clipping-a-fingernail-too-low-squeamish. Writing heightens my awareness to life.  I see the universe through different eyes, and these eyes are willingly open to a greater level of experience than they were before.  This is good and bad.  It is breathtakingly beautiful and devastatingly heartbreaking.  I come face-to-face with glory and eye-to-eye with evil.

So I am faced with a decision.  Do I write or not write? The pen can be a weapon. It can be an instrument of healing.  Can I handle the surgeon’s tools slicing open my heart? There are words that want to flow.  I fear that they will be messy.  Do I dam them or unleash them? Writing is incredibly dangerous.  But so is living, REALLY living.