grace enough

It’s Friday, April 10. I’m looking out my living room’s big picture window at smallish snowflakes. The spruce across the street have a dusting on the branches, and the ground is, of course, still covered in white as it has been since October. The overcast sky along and the bright white flakes makes the whole world appear grayscale, which, though it sounds depressing, is actually soothing.

In Kindred Mom Zoom meetings every week, one of the things we do real quickly at the beginning is check our numbers. The last month as we’ve looked at the stats for our newsletter, the open rate isn’t awesome and the unsubscribes are trickling in. Our content is solid, but people aren’t reading.

I’m not reading, either. I have 347 emails come in every day from school—zoom meeting reminders and assignments and enrichment activities and logistics and updates from the superintendent—and only one of my four is in “real” school. I get daily texts from DHSS telling me how many new cases there are and in which communities, along with hospitalizations and deaths. Every company I’ve ever given my address to is sending me emails about their COVID-19 strategies, which change regularly as mandates shift, prompting new flurries of emails. Influencers are sending me awesome deals on this e-course, but hurry! don’t miss it! You won’t see prices this low again! Any newsletter I’m subscribed to (including the one I am involved with producing) is sending me super helpful ideas to cope with sheltering in place and curated links to free content to keep my horde of hooligans busy and articles explaining why everything is so freaking hard. (It’s grief. Fight or flight response. Anxiety. All the things.) Social media is flooded with (admittedly funny) memes and rants and complaints and conspiracy theories and just a general record of what is going down in the world right now.

I can’t.

I’m tired. My already-sensitive brain has been overloaded for years now and a disruption in routine, health concerns, and economic worries are compounding the problem. I could keep myself busy twenty-four hours a day just reading the text accompanying all the helpful free content on the web right now. I can’t even quite wrap my head around the time consuming that free content would cost.

I need quiet.

You too?

I’m tempted now to send you to Headspace or to a helpful resting practice I found, but wouldn’t that just be adding to the noise?

So instead, I’ll briefly record my current moment of peace in hopes it helps you recognize similar moments in your world. Feel free to just close this tab now and stare out the window for a sec.

Snow is falling. My feet are cold. I keepe typing random Es at the ende of words, like I’m olde timey or somethinge. I put on makeup and a cute shirt to do a podcast recording at seven this morning because I want desperately to feel like a person today. But also, I’m wearing my workout clothes because that’s what’s coming next and I refuse to put on a full outfit complete with a bra and real pants in order to record audio and then change out of them to work out. I realize this is inconsistent. The heater just kicked on. My husband made himself coffee, then disappeared back to our room. In a minute he’ll sit beside me and we’ll work together on our sorta-matching apple laptops. Our kids are still in bed. The big girls’ room is reading in the massive and complicated multi-room fort they made with their beds and blankets last night (after they should have been sleeping) and the little kids’ room is listening to Sir Bernard, which is an musical kids’ audio drama. (I have no idea what order those adjectives should be in. I think this is close to right.) I am as grateful as I’ve ever been that we have rules about what they should do if they wake up before “get up time.”

I hope you find pockets of quiet today that take you by surprise. I hope you recognize them as the gifts they are. I hope they point you to the Giver of good gifts.

So remember in late January when everybody was all, “it’s January 74th” because it just felt so long? Hahahaha… We had no idea how long a month could be. I realized the other day during a rare quiet moment (I left the house and sat in my car in the parking lot of a gas station) that I no longer quite think in complete sentences unless I’m writing or talking. There’s so much noise in my house, online, and in my head.

I was having a hard time coming up with words to say here when Emily Freeman’s monthly newsletter ended up in my inbox and she shared a look back at this wild month in three parts:

• a moment of joy
• something that surprised me
• something I want to leave behind as I head into April

I can probably manage this. But I’m going to rearrange to leave you with the fun part.

something that surprised me

Well, I mean, March. But that’s everyone. I started a writing project early this month. This in itself is a surprise to me—it’s not a big project, but it’s bigger than a blog post and I’ve long told people who’ve mentioned me and book-writing in the same sentence that I barely have enough [semi-] coherent words to write a 1000-word post. Anyhow. It’s a different kind of writing than I’ve done before and a bigger project and just generally intimidating to me, so kinda put it off for a minute. But right at the beginning of March I finally decided, “You know, I’m just going to do it. I don’t have to do much, but I need to at least start something.” and within a week or two I was roughly a third through the rough draft of the whole dang thing. Didn’t see it coming. It’s not easy, per se, but the words come every time I’m faithful to show up to do the work. (I haven’t done any of this in the last two weeks, so it’s still roughly a third done, but still.)

one thing I’m hoping to leave behind as I make my way into April

When the first case of COVID-19 in Alaska was announced roughly the same hour as the school district decided to close, I started following all the things pretty closely. Every day right around five, I’d hit the dhss website, be irritated at the lack of news, google “covid-19 alaska,” weed through the stuff about Alaska Airlines and the things from the Fairbanks Daily News Minor which won’t let me read unless I subscribe (which I won’t), read the remaining useful articles coming from Anchorage and the local TV news channels, go back and refresh DHSS, look at the CDC’s map of the spread which is maddeningly behind, do math regarding the rate of growth of cases both in the US and Alaska, etc. This is madness. And even if I do need to get all the info from all the places I can find it, five o’clock is literally the worst possible time. From 5:00-6:30 pm has been witching hour (hour and a half) since we’ve had kids. Five is when the kids really seem run out of the ability to regulate well and six thirty is when Andrew gets home so we can do the dinner/bedtime shuffle. Me sitting on my laptop compulsively hitting refresh on sites that will only give me stressful news about which I can do nothing is profoundly counterproductive.

I have prefered news sources (that generally link original documents and transcripts, so I feel good about reliability) which I check regularly. I’m happy with exactly this level of news. If I want to do a deeper dive, the sources are available, but generally I just get the highlights in a way that doesn’t completely overwhelm me, and that’s plenty. I am signed up for texts from Alaska’s DHSS, so I get a message a few minutes past five most days with whatever the case and body count is (this sounds so cold and crass, but those really are the details I get) along with any new health mandates.

This is enough. And it doesn’t eat my attention and stress me out during the most difficult ninety minutes of my day.

a moment of joy

This past Saturday, Andrew set up the trampoline. Note: the snow is still up to the bounce mat (I had to google “what is the floor of a trampoline called”) so this may be a bit premature, but we have to burn their energy somehow.

He sent the older two out to play, but the younger two needed to clean up the toys they’d been playing with before heading out. Brian picked up the blocks and got his gear on and left. Lilly was dragging her feet—she would rather never go outside without a “gwonup”—and was putting Duplos in the bin as slowly as she could manage.

Suddenly, shrieks erupted. Brian’s one of our screamers and evidently somebody did something he didn’t like and he LET US KNOW. (We could still see him bouncing, so he wasn’t majorly injured.) Lill immediately kicked cleanup into high gear and started frantically yelling, “It’s okay, Boyboy! I’m coming! I’ll be right there!” Now, it was a balmy twenty degrees out, so all our doors were closed and even if they hadn’t been, Brian’s shrieks would certainly have drowned out Lilly’s panicked maternal reassurances. She got the Duplos put away in record time, dressed like a marshmallow, and waddled out to the back as fast as her clunky boots would let her.

I love how much she loves her “Boyboy.”

And there we have it. I’d love to hear the rundown of March from you, if you’d like to share.

“So tell me about your friends at church.”

We were talking about community and what I wanted to study at L’Abri and this question should be pretty straightforward, but instead, I burst into tears. I couldn’t answer the question, not because my church isn’t full of hundreds of amazing people, but I realized I had really great community… like ten years ago. And then we started having babies and Sunday is not my best look and a huge percentage of the people I was doing life with moved away in the time since and I didn’t notice because I still talk to them all the time, they’re just not physically at church with me. Then a little bit after Lilly was born, we were in a place as a family where we could probably manage a small group again, and we found a really great one. Love them. But… that one disappeared, too, sort of suddenly, traumatically. I still love them, but the people we did tons of stuff with day in and day out are gone.

So I look around myself and realize I’ve basically spent a decade distracted from pursuing community, so I relied on the one I had which is no longer local. And I didn’t put it together until she asked the question.

Now I have community, even locally. There are people I call (text) when I’m in a pickle or just want to share something goofy my kids just did or need to vent. But that circle doesn’t intersect much with the church I attend.

I left for L’Abri fully intending to wrestle the ideas of community within the church to. the. ground. Instead, I read some poetry and some Flannery O’Conner and generally worked my way through a stack of books I’d been meaning to read and they happened to have on hand (thousands and thousands of books in that gorgeous library, so it’s not such a huge coincidence) and eventually found some applicable books, but nothing got wrestled to the ground. What I did learn from the experience was from the actual L’Abri community (a dozenish people with whom I worked, ate, and conversed for a week): I crave this. I’ve been missing it.

I flew last weekend to California and met most of the Kindred Mom team. We brainstormed and planned and worshiped and prayed. More than that, we laughed until our abs were sore. We shared stories of our actual lives and we shared actual life. There were two ladies there I’d met once or twice, three I’d never met before. One of those I’d only interacted with briefly on Voxer (voice messaging app) earlier in the month. But the community was real. The love was legit. Unified by a common Lord, shared purpose, and overlapping passions kickstarted our kinship in a way I don’t remember experiencing before.

So back in Fairbanks Sunday morning, I look around and see the people I do life with. I made most of them from scratch in my belly. This is not how community should be done, and the fault is largely mine.

I clearly can do community, I’m just not great at doing it Sunday morning. My homework, then, is twofold:

I need to press in. It’s on me to reach out, regardless of my state on Sundays. It’s time to be intentional about it. I’m not sure what this is going to look like, actually, but I’m about to find out.

I need to lower the bar. I’m an introvert, so I would rather go soul-deep than surface-level. Actually, I’d rather do a lot of things than go surface-level. Waterboarding comes to mind. But that’s not how everyone else functions (though some do!) and it’s definitely what’s expected culturally. Apparently if you dive too deep too fast sometimes you scare people. Who knew? Anyway. I need to suck it up and up my small-talk game rather than hoping to magically bump into others who really want to talk about deep stuff.

Mostly, there’s a lot of grace. I’ve been doing my level best here, and I need help from Jesus to press in and make connections when I’m with my church family, and I trust Him to do that.

Well, my hope had been to write early every week and post every Thursday, but… here it is midmorning on Thursday at the end of the second month and I don’t have any words to say.

That’s a lie.

I have all the words to say, but nothing coherent. Here’s what I’ve been doing the last week and a half:

I went on a trip with a friend to celebrate freedom and safety at the end of a relationship characterized by neither. We had great food and great fun and generally enjoyed ourselves.

I went down to join five of the other six Kindred Mom teammates in California. We laughed and cried and laughed until we cried. Three of them I had never met face-to-face, but the kinship was deep and immediate. I love them and I’m excited to share purpose and passion and projects with them.

In between the two, I published last week’s piece, and worked on graciously handling the heat I knew was coming. (Sharing was a matter of obedience rather than desire—political conversations make me tired, but they’re important.) That has continued through now.

I came home to my family Monday night, spent Tuesday doing previously planned activities, then getting a rather violent stomach bug. (Likely food I ate Tuesday morning.) Yesterday was spent nervously trying to consume liquids, and today I’m home with the gnarly dehydration headache I expected yesterday.

I have words to say about community and politics and church and marriage and kinship and illness. But the aforementioned headache coupled with the variety of things swirling in my aching head means today’s post is… this. Will try again next week.

Hey, everyone! It’s that time again—my post is up at Kindred Mom. Feel free to click here for the whole thing or read on for a teaser…

“What do we do with Jenna?” I asked my husband on a spontaneous evening walk.

I’ve been homeschooling the oldest since 2016 when she entered kindergarten and her sister was in pre-k. That year went poorly (I started it with a 6-week-old, a 1-year-old, and some Very Intense Curriculum), but we’ve found our rhythm in the years since. 

Lately, she and I are butting heads. While she’s definitely an introvert, she’s the most extroverted of the introverts in our house: she has social needs that I’m simply not cut out to meet. Also, there’s conflict with her 17-months-younger sister Katherine, who has long been my big, physical reactor. At small provocations, she yells, hits, kicks, and throws things. When she gets wound up, I often hold her to protect her, me, and her siblings for half an hour or more. (I refer to this as “disciplinary cuddle time.” She is not amused.) Jenna doesn’t only want my attention; she wants her siblings’ as well, and she frequently gets it by needling Katherine, resulting in a full disruption of everybody’s day. 

We’ve been kicking around the idea of sending her to public school for a little while—we have to change something, and this may help. We live two blocks from the elementary school she would attend, but I hesitate—quitting homeschool feels like defeat. Maybe I’m not good at this and should just give up? Maybe I should stay the course and keep trying? I know this is a privileged choice—keep my kid home or send her to the great public school down the road. These are two decent options. So why does this all feel so heavy?

“I can’t make this decision,” I tell Andrew as we mosey toward home. “It’s too personal and too fraught for me to have any objectivity. I need you to just decide.”

“Okay,” he responds, having listened to me obsess for months, thus being well aware of the pros and cons of each option. “Let’s try public school.”

We start the school year in August with much fear and trepidation. I worry she won’t be ready for the sheer amount of stimulation a classroom entails. I worry her teacher won’t approve of my choice to homeschool her until now and will judge her behavior as she adjusts to a new environment. I worry kids will be mean, or she’ll fall into some soul-deadening pursuit of “cool.” I worry her relationships with me and her siblings will drift apart as she spends hours away from us each day. I worry that I am worrying too much and she’ll pick it up and worry more than she already does.

It works. My worry effectively prevents each of those things from happening. Her teacher is kind and encouraging and very chill. Jenna regularly jabbers on when she gets home about all her friends (an improbable number of whom are named Noah) and the fun she’s had. 

Actually, the biggest struggle comes after the second day. Mrs. Friedrich pulls me aside at pick-up: “Jenna’s having a hard time being quiet when she needs to be listening. I keep reminding her, but she’s still a chatterbox.” She is making friends too enthusiastically. We address the whole “no, really, you have to listen to the teacher and talk to your classmates at appropriate times and volume” and now she’s thriving, both personally and academically.

The biggest wins haven’t been solely Jenna’s, though…

Click here to read the rest.

In the hours and days that followed the first birth I shot, I *tried* not to tell everyone I came across, but with only moderate success. I got a lot of responses that mirrored my excitement and a few hesitant “Uh… Oh? How did that go for you?” replies.

And then I remembered that birth photography is relatively new as a profession and not something that makes sense to everyone. So I thought I’d take today to tell you why this is something I’m fired up about.

my birth

When I was not quite 10, my mom had my baby brother in her bedroom and birth became just a normal thing women did. I knew there were medical conditions that would warrant a hospital, but birth didn’t seem like an emergency on its own.

When I was expecting miss Lilly, I was pretty sure she’d be my last. I wanted to normalize birth for my older girls, but they were 4 and 5 at the time. Given that I can barely handle having my husband around through, I did not see having a couple preschoolers touching me and calling for my attention throughout labor and birth as a viable option. So I called Sarah Lewis, whose work I’d admired for years, to document it, in hopes that having images of me giving birth would demystify it for my kids a little. Additionally, my births are basically the most badass moments of my life, and I wanted to have a way to remember that, since I’m hardly present enough to take mental notes.

but then…

I didn’t know how that decision would impact me. Looking through the images, I saw parts of the process I straight up didn’t know about, despite having done it four times. I was able to see the way Andrew looked at me throughout the labor. Somehow Sarah captured me as lovely throughout the whole messy, excruciating process.

The last several years, I’ve pondered over why I’m so drawn to birth photography as an art form. I’ve been following several accounts for years, and when I finally got a camera that could manage it late this summer, Sarah was one of the first people I told. I knew she was getting out of birth photography for practical reasons, and I mentioned how bummed I was that I wouldn’t be able to learn it from her. “There’s still time!” she texted back.

some theology

As I’ve considered the appeal of this niche of photography, I realized that my reasons for loving it and wanting to do it have a lot more to do with theology than expected.

There’s been a war on women since the garden. Then when God put a curse on the serpent and promised his demise through Eve, I imagine it further pissed him off. There she was, an image bearer of his Enemy, and through woman he was going to be crushed? Oh, HELL no. Actual Hell no.

So I look through history and see the battle. There’s objectification, either through pornography (in the broadest sense) or insane modesty demanded by men who hold us responsible for their lust and sin.  There’s the devaluing of women in many cultures through millennia—we’ve been treated as chattel, our bodies valued only for the production of heirs or a workforce, our voices unrecognized in courts. Currently where I live, there’s a pervasive culture of assault and consumption that spurred the #metoo movement. There’s the patriarchy and pay inequity and both the denigration and idolization of motherhood and marriage, both inside and outside the Church.

This is war.

And one of the ways it shows up is birth.

I have heard several women say “I’m not one of those pretty birthers.” Or “I wish I were cute when I was giving birth like the women in those birth photos.”

Here’s this moment when a woman is at her most stunningly amazing. She’s mirroring her Creator in a way that’s unique and especially God-like—she is bearing life for heaven’s sake. (Actual Heaven’s sake.) And we’ve been conditioned to see it as generally terrifying and ugly and messy, even shameful, and “all that matters is a healthy baby.” NO. The baby does matter, obviously. But, whatever level of health the baby has, YOU ALSO MATTER. The very act of giving birth has value all by itself. It’s not the only thing, or even the best thing, but it is decidedly a valuable thing.

So, birth photography.

If I can show a few women how incredible they are during this time they feel less-than-lovely, like their bodies have become something they don’t recognize, it feels like reclaimed ground. It feels like beating back the darkness.

And that’s why I do this. I’m not into photography for the guaranteed bill-paying clients— seniors, weddings, families, classic newborn photography—not that they don’t matter, but there are plenty of photographers to do them. Birth photography isn’t always an easy sell and the hours suck. But I love it the most because it matters. It matters to mamas like me, who desperately want to know that their messy, vulnerable, terrifying offerings can somehow reflect Glory. In this one small geographical area, for a small number of women, maybe I can show them how they already do.