There is something I keep thinking about, though, and it’s this word: Honest. I haven’t worked it all out, why exactly I keep thinking about it. But it’s just a general feeling that I want to be all me, from the deepest part to the outer edge that people actually see. I want my efforts to match what I say is important to me, and my actions to match the priorities of my heart and soul.

I started this in years past, but I want to keep a list of what I want most and be deliberate about whether or not I’m pursuing them. Things like a good relationship with my kids and a place in the world of storytelling. It feels honest that I’ve written a handful of things in my day-planner so far this year: My next cancer checkup, Jake’s class play in February, and Awards Season (People’s Choice, Golden Globes, SAG Awards, the Grammys, and the Oscars). Not everyone in my life will truly get all the parts of me, but I like the idea of being all of me, all the time, whether I’m fully understood or not.

I’ve really always been known as honest, or real, as people say. And in my teens I developed a theory that it’s generally not that complimentary to be known as real, because real people tend to be too blunt and say how they feel without concern for how it might be perceived. I started praying that my real would also be kind. If I don’t think ill of that person, then I can be real with them without being mean. If I face the day bravely and with kindness, then I can be real about how I’m doing without being grouchy and a drag.

And that’s all a part of my word this year too. On Tiffany’s blog, I wrote that serenity is a favorite word of mine – getting older, I’ve loved trying to live up to the beautiful word my parents gave me as a name. And what could be more honest that that? So maybe serenity is also a good word for my year.

“You are one person, indivisible,” I quoted earlier on the blog. And that, in the amplified version, is my word.

~

*I used to clarify that Katie is only my cyber friend, someone I’ve met online but not in real life. But I’ve decided eventually some friends become the real thing, long before you meet them, and I’ve dropped the cyber disclaimer with these.

This time ten years ago I had two of them to bundle before we went outside. Getting out was even more difficult now. (Case in point, Me after one night of loading them in and out: How do people with THREE kids do this? Michael’s answer: Their husbands help more.)

Six years ago I was grouchy and exhausted and waiting for baby number three and the dread of my final cancer treatment for that season, radiation.

One year ago, I had three sons, mostly too old to bundle but much too young to leave, two scary nodules in my lung, and one scary surgery scheduled for the Monday after Thanksgiving. Cancer was totally harshing my cozy.

I like how life changes. I miss the babies in the bunting, but I like feeling so very strongly abut the players on the football fields and basketball courts. I hate that some years bring surprising, terrible trouble. But I love that one year later the trouble can be far behind you except for its scars and small changes like oh-so-short dark curls.

I love a stack of books I want to read but haven’t, peppermint mocha, a candle burning, and Christmas commercials. I love making plans and buttoning coats and going to the movies and turning way, way in.

I heard that question today, and my first thought was to cringe. Because, oh no. Surely I didn’t remember to pause at all yesterday and thank God. I’ve been so focused lately on my goals, the things I haven’t reached or found or achieved. But then I remembered words from my journal written just yesterday, gratitude for “My boys. My man. And the joy of writing.” Whew! Passed that test, eh?

It’s a theme right now. People are doing it on facebook in light of Thanksgiving. My sister began a tradition of gratitude in her home. And I’m reading this book by Ann Voskamp: One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are, and in it she talks a lot about gratitude, including her attempt (which I’m assuming she accomplished) to make a list of one thousand daily, ordinary gifts. I love the idea, the discipline to want what you have.

I actually made my own thankful list in a bright pink notebook once where I recorded all kinds of things – favorite movie quotes and inside jokes, poems, ideas for stories. I wrote an “I love” list and an “I hate” one too. The hate list is no fun – waiting, not knowing, and braces all made the cut. The “I love” list isn’t that great either. Not like Ann’s with her blue jays and morning shadows and jam. Mine was a little more teenaged and untried – shaved legs, new clothes, the Star Spangled Banner before a ballgame, and no more braces. One sticks out to me, though: “Getting my hair short.” Surely not. My short hair hasn’t really been on my grateful list lately. I move it there sometimes, when it’s so easy to wash-and-go in the morning, when the darker color brings out the darker pigment in my hazel eyes (hazel is another word for meh in my opinion), when I remember that hopefully, prayerfully, I lost my hair in order to keep my life. Still, it’s strange to look back and remember there were times I wanted shorter hair.

I think I’ll be haunted for a while by that idea that I could wake up one day with only the things I thanked God for the day before. And it could make those moments after bed but before sleep really, really long.

What’s the smallest, most ordinary thing that makes it to your thank-you list?

Jake, while walking down this sidewalk as we returned from the park: "I love where our house lives."

So, every now and then I get the urge to run. I think, Renee Zellweger does it in New In Town. When I was in Chicago, there were people doing it along Lake Michigan – LOTS of people. Jennifer Aniston was a runner when she was in Chicago too I think. It’s something I should try. And I put on my clothes least likely to make me look like a fraud, and I turn on the iPod to distract me from distractors, and I jog. Soon what felt like Renee Zellweger in New In Town feels more like Po in Kung Fu Panda. All my bones and joints are flopping around, crashing against the pavement, shouting at me, WHY ARE WE MOVING SO QUICKLY? Once I did this three days in a row. That was my streak. And then I totally bail on it and cease to move at all really except from the house to the car when I have to drive people around again.

But lately I felt I needed some forward motion. I needed to walk away from things that were stressing me out and toward a goal that was only in my hands – something like basic heart health. So one day I just put on the shoes and walked. Dr. L told me once a brisk walk will do it – brisk as in you can still have a conversation but you’re quite above a stroll. And some guru said on tv the other day that you don’t start burning fat until twenty minutes in, so I go with that advice too and shoot for more. And I put it all together, along with the iPod and a charming little walking trail, and I became a walker.

And besides the fact that my foot bones aren’t crashing against the pavement and my parts aren’t flopping around, I like walking because I feel like I belong to life again. That I’m part of it. My street looks totally different on foot than it does from my car. The trees are gigantic, and the houses too really. The colors are brighter, and the details richer, like I’ve been living my life in Google Maps but never in street view before. It’s sort of pre-winter in my car right now, but on the street it’s totally still fall.

Also? People are nicer to me when I’m on foot. I get a lot of glares when I’m in my car. Sometimes honking. Yes, I am that driver, the one who was looking down when the light turned green because it never turns green that fast. The one who pulled out in front of you but was really sorry because I didn’t actually mean to, the one you thought was being rude by demanding the right of way in the parking lot recently but who actually just didn’t notice we were both pulling out of our parking spaces at the same time.

I’ve actually been stressing over this phenomenon lately, wondering, “Am I getting worse at driving?” And then I started noticing glares ALL OVER THE PLACE from inside a hundred different cars toward a variety of drivers that weren’t me, and I’ve decided the problem is part my distraction and part People Are Grouchy. You don’t get this so much on foot. It’s mostly nod-and-smile, let me get out of your way, Isn’t it Beautiful Out?, and Oh Hey Fancy Meeting You Here Again Only Now We’re Each Going The Other Way.

Anne Blythe once said that she was never so afraid of darkness than when she tried to push it out with a light. She felt embraced by nature in the dark, but once she put herself in the path cast by lantern light, she could only wonder what might be lurking outside it. It’s the same when we turn on the lights in our homes and suddenly can’t see out, though we know anything outside can certainly see in. I use my car to escape the world sometimes. I like to feel alone inside its quiet. But when I walk, I’m not shutting anything out, and it all feels so much friendlier.

It’s a wholly different, delightfully visceral, breath of literal fresh air, and it’s soul food. I think I’ll keep it up.

I felt certain much of my teen and pre-teen angst would have been settled if life would just tell me already: Would I get to marry him? Or more often, the questions were immediate, “Would I pass the test?” “Would I get the speech out without fainting?” “Would I fail completely in the fitness test in gym?”

Then, once I got the guy, I didn’t want to know the future at all. I didn’t want anyone to tell me what might happen next. I didn’t want to know if there was trouble ahead. I didn’t even want to know if there was fortune. It was nicer to just live, making plans and having hope without any certainty to mar the process.

With children, I can’t help thinking of the future. I took this picture of Jake helping me paint the hallway and already it looks like an ancient memory, back when you were little and I was young. When we’d ripped up the carpet but hadn’t installed something new. When you were with me, almost every minute, because you were still too little to constantly be leaving. Every happy moment with my children feels immediately as nostalgic as it is present. Kind of like Christmas. I always feel a little sad at Christmas as if even as it happens, it’s already gone.

My children walk into school each morning, and I ache. Their entire educational career flashes through my mind, and before I’ve left the drop-off lane I’m hugging them in their caps and gowns – they’re taller than me now – and I’m desperately trying not to cry, not to be one of those mothers, not to embarrass them because I’m afraid that will take away from how very proud I am. When I watch 5th and 6th grade football on Saturdays, it’s actually Friday night six years from now. He is a junior in high school and his brother a senior, and they’re almost fully men, and it’s the most thrilling, wonderful, exhilarating pain. Thankfully – and I don’t know what I would do without this – when I pick them up at 3, time with them stretches slow and lazy ahead of me. It doesn’t seem to be racing so forcefully toward separation after all.

In the end – apart from the desperate want-to of my younger years and the desperate avoidance of later and the nostalgic ache of now, I live in a sort of balance about the future. I don’t want to know it exactly. But I like to imagine it. I think about how short it might be, and then the stress inside today doesn’t matter so much. I think about how long it might be, and then the stress inside today seems fleeting.

Most of the time, it’s just nice to know Tomorrowland is there.

I’ve had the strangest feeling lately as if I’m almost nostalgic for the AWFUL that was this last November through February. And I think that’s possible because it wasn’t all awful. In fact, everything pleasant or good in that time I felt to my very core, because the bigger picture was so unpleasant and un-good. And the other thing I might be nostalgic for is the focus.

When someone is in a crisis like that, if it helps you to find one reason to not ache all over for them until you’re miserable, just know that at least they don’t care if it’s Monday. They’re probably not worried about the errands they used to need to run or how they can fit in laundry, bill-paying, and the gym. It’s pretty much the crisis, tying knots and hanging on. That kind of focus has its perks.

But it sort of carries over. I notice I’m pretty single-minded these days. That’s one way I’ve been shaped. It’s not so much that I can’t multi-task anymore, though there have been times when I felt pretty sure chemo zapped that particular capability, it’s more that I don’t wanna. I have no desire to try and do several things at once. I don’t usually even think about several things at once.

And it’s not that I’m not driven. I still have all the same goals. I still try to Will Smith every day. But instead of thinking about the innumerable things I might need to do next or could be doing instead, I just do the one thing, and I give it all of me. In the words of an article I read once on motherhood and working and the many hats we wear,

You are one person, indivisible.

I really like that. If I haven’t blogged much lately, it’s just because I was being indivisible somewhere else. Sometimes, all I did was gaze at the Beautiful pictured here and thank God for bright red Maples, and fall.

But someone in my house doesn’t look on a new school year with quite such poetic optimism. He’s stressed. He’s moving to a different school building this year and a multi-classroom, multi-teacher format. But none of that is even the problem. It’s deeper, more consistent things that trouble him I think. He prefers home, prefers environments with fewer people, less potential for embarrassment or peer pressure… or embarrassment. He likes knowing exactly what’s expected of him at any given moment, and the first days of school can be kind of vague on that. He likes the friends he’s used to, the routine he’s already mastered, SUMMER.

It’s so hard to watch, these emotions. It’s so hard to hear that he faces them every year, every Monday after spring break, in fact, but has never really told me so before. There’s so little I can do to ease the pain – time and getting used to the new routine are about the only thing that will help. Even he knows this.

I think it helped him tonight that I had finally quit crying over the price of school supplies and was enjoying organizing them instead. I think it helped him that I’ve stopped complaining that their summer is over so soon. But it’s hard that I can’t just do those first few days for him. If there was any way I could, if I could adjust to the new routine, wear it in like a brand new pair of jeans, so that by the time he slipped it on, it just fit. If I could.

I so.

Would.

Image source – Etsy.

With it he’s gotten me to fix his video game when I really didn’t want to. He’s had swigs of my Diet Coke when I didn’t really want to share. We’ve watched his choice in movies. It’s not lost on me yet, so you should fully expect to see him cruising down Baltimore in my Intrepid soon, probably flinging spending money out the windows because he just can’t use it all.

My question is, do you think this would have any effect on the weather? The smolder? Because it’s so cold. My living room’s developed rheumatism, it creaks and sighs and can barely wrap itself around me anymore to keep out all the lingering winter. Rainy like April, but cold like early March.

I stepped out in it today, the cold seeping in like rain puddles seeping through the holes in a too-thin pair of boots. And I pictured the calendar, trying to calculate whether or not the world had any right to be so cold and miserable still when we so desperately wanted some spring.

And that made me think about all the things we wait for all the time. The things we want but don’t quite have, the things we wish for, the things we’re working toward. And sometimes it seems like we just can’t wait anymore, we can’t possibly recur again and mentally survive it, we can’t face sickness in one more family member, sadness in any of our friends, another day of rain. And then we do. It’s not like we have any choice. We have to face them, we have to wait. But it does feel pretty good to realize that you can. And to realize maybe you can even endure it without losing hope for tomorrow.

I may fold before a 5-year-old with an uncanny imitation of a character from Tangled. But I get all that from a rainy day in the time it takes me to walk from the house to the car. Win some. Lose some. And for goodness’ sake, hang in there.

And in my week-of-quotes, this post kinda has two in it, because the title is one. Beautiful, inspiring Steven Curtis Chapman wrote those words. (Beautiful, inspiring Ruth passed them on to me). If you don’t know Steven Curtis Chapman, you need to know that his adopted daughter was killed in an accident. The CD Ruth gave me was written out of that pain and out of the hope he clings to that we can heal to a point in this life and – better still – there’s eternity to come.

I knew I would love Spring is Coming the moment I saw the song list on the back cover. This is a truth I cling to every year and every time life feels like winter whether it is or not.

The first time I really felt this was the winter after my niece Claire lost her twin sister Ellery only nine hours after they’d entered the world. This was a hard reality for me. I’d never doubted that despite the trouble Felicity had with her pregnancy, everything would be fine. Because everything until then kinda always had been. This was the first time life faced me and said, “Yea, most people figure this out sooner. But I can knock your feet right out from under you. And then kick.”

I sort of embraced the sadness that came after Ellery died. I let it be. I cried when I felt like it, and I felt confused when I felt like it, and I felt stunned when I felt like it. But deep down, I kept thinking. Spring is coming. We’re never going to forget Ellery. But this pain that’s cold and hard like winter, it will change.

And it did. I still cry about Ellery – see this letter from her sister and join me, won’t you? But I also feel so grateful for that deep down, unforgettable lesson about spring. Steven Curtis Chapman wrote the latest song that speaks to this conviction, but Nichole Nordeman wrote the first. And this is how she said it. “Even now in death, you open doors for life to enter…”

That’s my favorite line. Even in death, you open doors for life to enter. So much hope in that description of winter and all the life that’s waiting just below the surface, all the life that’s just about to burst. The verse for spring goes on to say:

And everything that’s new has bravely surfaced / Teaching us to breathe

And what was frozen through is newly purposed / Turning all things green

So it is with you / And how you make me new

With every season’s change

And so it will be / As you are recreating me

Summer, autumn, winter

Spring

I was so happy this week when I stumbled out of an I-just-went-through-chemo-oh-my-god stupor to actually turn on the television one night and find The Critics Choice Awards. Strangely, considering my obsession, it wasn’t until last year that I discovered you can learn a lot about awards season if you watch all the awards shows and not just the Golden Globes and Oscars. Watch them all, and you can totally win the ballot game. It was during the Critics Choice that I saw a commercial for the Golden Globes and realized they would be on THAT SUNDAY. In my world, that was a close one.

So there I sat Sunday night, happily nested in front of my beautiful t.v., facing three full hours of beautiful people and the art form they love. Oh the happiness.

It pretty much delivered too, though I am very non-critical of these things as a general rule anyway. It would be hard to disappoint me, I’m just sayin. I took notes, and here’s a list of what made me the happiest during those happy three hours.

Anne Hathaway – Hands down, my favorite person to look at this time. I saw Angelina Jolie’s shoulder-padded dress first and said ew and oh darn, I knew those would come back. But then I saw Ms. Hathaway, and I was mesmerized. I thought she looked beautiful and happy – it’s very hard to win best-dressed lists at these things with your hair down and she DID it – and then she said that she felt that way during the red carpet session (toning it down to, “I feel….very nice….in this dress”) and I loved her for appreciating the dress she was in, the moment she was in, the life she was living. (Click her name for pics of both shoulder pad looks and HERE for one of my other faves, Emma Stone).

GLEE – This show lost a lot of people I know and love because it pushes appropriateness boundaries too often. But “the characters periodically burst into song and dance about the stage”, and this I love. So I enjoyed all its wins last night. Especially Kurt. When he accepted his award, all I could think was that sometimes we could all learn a lot from Hollywood about how to love. This industry is full of people whose personalities and lifestyles range from artsy to unique to controversial. Despite the accolades we give the industry as a whole, its members are sometimes people who know exactly what it means to be outside instead of in. They like to express this in their films. And when those films get noticed, they feel they’ve done something – maybe even changed the world like they always wished they could. This inspires me, someone who kind of wishes that too.

The Social Network – This movie wins the award for Best Example of How Awards Season Will Convince Me to Watch Something if Word-of-Mouth Didn’t. I’m renting it from Netflix this WEEK.

The Snark – Oh my, Ricky Gervais is mouthy. I actually enjoyed the way he came right out of the gate with meanness since I felt he was too toned down last year to be all that funny. But I really loved when someone finally called him out. Robert Downey, Jr., and I quote: “Aside from the fact that it’s been hugely mean-spirited with mildly sinister undertones, I’d say the vibe of the show has been pretty good so far, wouldn’t you?”

Brad and Angelina – I can’t help it. They’re beautiful together. It cut to commercial one time and the camera held on them as Angelina fixed his bow tie, their faces so close together. It was sweet. And then it panned on them a couple other times, and she leaned against his shoulder. Lately I totally believe her that she belongs first to her children and to him and second to Hollywood. She also always seems appropriately grateful for the fortune that is her salary and her job. And I appreciate that.

Michael Douglas – This is the reason I didn’t think about cancer for only almost three hours. Michael Douglas was the last presenter, and the audience was of course highly supportive and grateful to see him there and healthy. After the applause, he said, “There’s gotta be a better way to get a standing ovation.” And Michael and I deeply related.

**Note – this pic is from the Oscars two years ago. I couldn’t find a shiny Golden Globes pic from this year that I could use without stealing it. ;)