and i'm here

i breathe in blogged beauty, and i am inspired.   

to write. to let my heart become available once again. be seen.    

loved or rejected, to be me. 

these last few months of silence have been… hard. so much sick, so much tired, so much feeling like i’ve lost my own self in trying to successfully nurture life within and take care of the gifts of man and son i’ve already been given. 

my man, he is wonderful… i call him on his lunch break to let him know how my day has been, and inevitably it sounds like “i’ve been sick, the boy is whiney and driving me crazy, and i can’t get off the couch, much less do the shopping and cooking and cleaning that needs to be done. i can’t even find the energy for a shower.” and his response is all love to my soul. “your job right now is to take care of that baby growing inside and our boy. are they fed? alive? then you’re doing a great job.” 

but they need more than i can give right now and the tears fall more often these days. and in the midst of feeling like i can’t (and should be able to) do it all, that old enemy shame creeps in unnoticed. if i notice, i can take a truth-stand. but it has so many years been the shape of my soul, to know the deeply-something-wrong-with-me feeling, that i so often don’t see it. i’ll notice a day or two (or month) later that i feel disconnected from people, God, life, my own heart. 

these past three months have just been so full of nausea and exhaustion that i rarely find a moment to even take stock, so it builds. 

until some miraculous moment that is God, even when i think it’s not.

like reading comments on a blog post for an hour yesterday that suddenly made me feel less alone. that i’m not crazy. that really engaging my heart with life is the way i can best love Jesus… not the “shoulds”.  even if that looks messy for now.

or what was supposed to be a “romantic comedy” being something else entirely to my heart, honing in on these painful messages of shame that continue to haunt me in the moments i am unaware and leave up no defense; ending up in sobbing tears while folding laundry afterwards, as i remember the woman who could not ask for help, and said to her sister “I’m sorry i make it impossible to love me”…

 or a beautiful post about somebody’s mama that makes me see that being the most me-ish i can be, free and unfettered, is not selfishness, but truly worship of the One who made me that way and delights.

so i come back to my blog, unsure. what it’s about, what it needs to be about, what my heart needs to say… how my words and images can be love to the One and to the ones who need him, too. to connect with the alone-feelers, the shame-fighters, the worshipers, the beauty-delighters, the artists, the recovering perfection-addicts…  

i guess my blog is going to remain a little undefined right now… art? beauty? style? God? maybe. but who i am, my heart experiencing life, really? yes, i think so.