I’m still actively blaming winter for the unyielding tiredness that’s been upon me recently. Sleeping in, napping at weird hours, drooling on our new couch. Weariness has been the wet blanket on my back for weeks now, one that I can only hope will be discarded once the groundhog is proven correct and spring actually shows up.  Until then, I’ve decided to be nice to myself, a difficult goal for a Type-A control freak whose every day can easily devolve into a series of tasks to be accomplished rather than moments to be lived.  Self-kindness is an act of vigilance for me: not beating myself up about crappy runs and extra cupcakes and immersion in the Travel Channel.  Lingering over coffee, pulling the sheets up around my neck for five more minutes, moving at a pace that doesn’t match that of the Road Runner, not going all Tiger Mom on my own ass.

The Psalmist wrote of “moments of refreshment,” and what winter lacks in sunshine it provides in opportunity: the ability to slow down, while everyone else is huddled inside by the fire and can’t see, and be still.  To remember how it feels to stop performing, to not worry about my tan, to not participate in summer’s Parade of Flesh and Weight Comparisons.  To settle into my own skin for awhile and remember that after years of pulling and stretching and trying, it actually fits just right already.  Being at home in my own life was, for so long, an unreached destination. Now it is a point easily taken for granted, tossed aside for games of Keeping Up with the Joneses (or, God forbid, the Kardashians) if I don’t remind myself of the truth: that what really matters can’t be quantified or acquired or summarized in a status update.  It must be tended to and gazed upon and lifted up in thanksgiving.  But that’s just me–I’m not a natural at gratitude.

Growing up, the head of our household was not an Asian mother, but its close second–a conservative Republican father.  Rightly valued were the virtues of hard work and achievement, and were it not for the support of my parents I’d likely be on the reality show circuit right now, praying for a shot at the next Bachelor. I still believe in the American dream and the parts of it that are currently losing favor, like personal responsibility and tenacity to the point of discomfort.  But it’s possible I take this to extremes (like I do…oh, everything else in life).  The other night, I was discussing my work schedule with The Husband.  I explained to him that after a lifetime (twenty-something years) of schooling and studying and testing, I had worked hard enough to take a break.  It was time I settled into my place on Easy Street–as in, call me when the maid finishes up, the yard is mowed, and the dishes are put away.  You can reach me at the spa.  Every day.  While buried in them, I believed that years of three-hour biology labs and dental board exams were my ticket to a life of luxury.  Maybe some light tennis. But much like Social Security, that dream doesn’t always deliver.  There is always work to be done: dinner to be cooked, stains to be scrubbed, teeth to be filled. And only when I stop seeing it as work will my resentment abate and joy take its place. Only then will I focus less on TH’s coaster-less glass and more on the fact that he always does the dishes when I make dinner.  Or that he’s slaving away over our taxes (another asterisk-laden part of the American Dream) while I watch Samantha Brown traipse around Scotland.

The rest that I observe for myself pales in comparison to that provided for me. As TH’s role has expanded from friend to BF to life partner, my eyes have been opened to what a provider looks like–how he cares for me unfailingly and with enough of a sense of humor to put up with my metronomic moods and still want to take me to lunch.  Then there’s the one this all points to, the one whose invisible nature challenges my faith in a way I often don’t realize until he reveals it–the sense that because I can’t see what he’s doing, he must be taking it easy up there.  The fear that because he’s not submitting a monthly report, he must not really be my advocate.  Then I walk to the front of the gym that doubles as a sanctuary on Sunday and take the bread and the cup, offered by a pastor who knows my name: “Christ’s body and blood, given for Stephanie.”  And I know where my true rest will always be found.

“It’s not fair,” she said to me over a plate of calamari, and I had to agree.  My mind drifted back to all the times I’ve thought that in my life.  Too many to count.  All the times The Dad told me that while I was growing up, the wisdom imparted by someone who’s lived long enough to know: life’s not fair. But that doesn’t soften the blow, does it?

We went back and forth, naming all the celebrities who have recently and accidentally become pregnant.  As if a penis is something they just tripped and fell on top of while they were living in a world without contraception.  And then we went back and forth, naming all the friends who have recently discovered their difficulty at achieving what is so accidentally easy for others.  All the wondering, the What Ifs and Is It Something I Dids.  All the needles and exams and tests and waiting rooms and charts reviewed and bad news given.  All the hope trampled and money spent.  “Slow Death of a Lifelong Dream” has no insurance reimbursement code.

This world has way too many examples, prepackaged and readily available, of injustice.  Of loss and pain.  Infertility just happens to be one that has surrounded me lately, in phone calls and emails and secondhand stories and prayer requests. Its shadow looms especially large at my door when I wonder what my own future holds, knowing that for all the ones I love who have known loss–whether through constantly negative tests or through a positive one that melts away like it never happened–why shouldn’t it happen to me?  Why shouldn’t so many things happen to me?

And wouldn’t I have just a bevy of resources to deal with it!  Lover of words that I am, aren’t there just so many waiting to provide comfort for such an occasion?  “Sometimes he calms the storm, and sometimes he calms his child.”  “When he closes a door, he opens a window.”  What about the storms whose rage can’t match my own?  Or the doors and windows that have been battened down for so long they’re sealed shut?  And then, whether it’s through the clouds or underneath the door or just beyond lids that are being gently pried open by love’s refusal to leave, the light breaks through and I realize that were it not for the debris of my own plans, scattered about when everything fell apart, all I would have is cliches.  Words without meaning.  And that is not what I have.

As The Husband and I took our seats on Sunday, we were surrounded by people we barely know but with whose stories we have become familiar because of the vulnerability of true community.  Because of doors and windows–not of opportunity that are opened by a god of cliches–but the ones to the soul that are opened by a God who refuses to deal in anything less than love that will not let me go.

Even when it looks like a complete bleeding mess.

I looked around at these people, the couple two rows ahead of us who have endured surgery after surgery to no avail, who are surrounded by other people’s children.  And they are singing to a God who has not said Yes to their deepest prayer.  I gazed at the child in front of me, who stared me down as I entertained him with faces until I had to stop, and then he turned away in boredom.  I thought about how much like children we all are, demanding God dance for us and play the music we like.  Expecting him to keep the deal we made for the life we wanted, while the whole time he already made a deal–not with us, but for us.  “You broke the deal,” we say with our silence.  “I broke Me,” the response.

Because what if the songs are whispers of a tune too beautiful for our ears?  What if there is a bigger narrative at play than the one we have written?  What if there is something truer than our deepest misery, our most searing loss?  What would that look like?  Would it have any right to look like what we imagined?

I remember how TK always put it, in the only kind of words that ever stick with me during the storm.  The question Sam asks Gandalf: “Is everything sad going to come untrue?”  And that the answer is a resounding yes, though it won’t happen this side of eternity.

I plan to stick around for that–not just because I have questions, but because I believe there are answers.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,

I cannot close my heart to thee;

I trace the rainbow through the rain,

And feel the promise is not vain,

That morn shall tearless be.

Yesterday afternoon, The Husband and I visited with The Niece so that The Brother-in-Law could go for a run (with The Sis on a work trip and he being Mr. Mom, I feared he might just keep running).  While I was holding her, that little ball of fat let out a man-sized grunt–a new method of communication to be added to the coo–and her face transformed into a tomato. The grunt and the redness were so intense that I called TH over, sure that she was in pain and wondering if infants can get kidney stones.  His response: “Whoa.  She’s taking a major dump.” Sure enough, a diaper check minutes later confirmed his observation and I was left wiping her clean of the closest brush she’s ever had with evil.  Cut to dinner that night with the other Bro-in-Law, the Sis-in-Law, and the Nephews Tres.  The little one (name escapes me) has just learned and mastered the use of the word mine. I was struck by how much changes between two and nineteen months, how much humanity enters in and stakes its claim on a personality.  And by how early we all begin to look at the world around us with a sense of ownership.  Mine.

What scars I’ve inflicted upon myself by holding the various components of my life in a death-grip over the years, sure that the future depended on my planning it and carrying it out!  Thankfully, God specializes in redemption and plastic surgery or I would be nothing but a walking wound.  Had I managed to hold down the deck chairs on that Titanic, I would be standing in the midst of my own life as a stranger, wondering how things had gotten to this point.  Wondering who that man was and why we ended up together, wondering what New York was like this time of year, wondering why I felt the need to get words out but had no voice to convey them.

Instead, I stand in the middle of our new house, its innards immodestly on display due to a diligent contractor.  I see the perfectly white and oval tub, my future oasis, set in an unfinished wooden framework.  And because of whose I am and how far I’ve come (and not for nothing, how long it took to get here), I suffer no disorientation among these pipes and wires and floorboards. Funny how what you believe, and a finally-realized track record of being well-loved, can allow you to look at a gut job and see a home.

This future dwelling of ours has been stripped to its foundations but not demolished, and I can’t help but feel a kinship with it as I notice our similar histories and the fact that we’re both still standing. When I left Birmingham for New York, beaten down and broken, I figured I was about to be remade.  I certainly felt demolished, and wondered when Me 2.0 would begin.  But I had only been exposed, for my personal Contractor does not specialize in demo but in the graceful art of uncovering what was planted there in the first place, hidden beneath years of self-preservation techniques and defense mechanisms.  There was something worthwhile in the framework, even though I couldn’t see it, because he put it there.

A little C.S. Lewis on the matter:

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace.

Prior to taking a look at what our contractor was doing–which involved grabbing a flashlight and climbing across broken floorboards to bravely stand in the mess–I had no idea of the intricate handiwork required for a house to function properly.  This is the beginning of wisdom, I’ve come to realize: admitting how little I know, even (especially) about myself.  Because until I yield the designation of Expert to the one who owns it, I will walk as a stranger in my own life.  And everything that runs counter to my plan will look like demolition.

Instead, I walk among the floorboards with the one whose laugh and vision match mine, who looks at my mess and sees a home. And I can see now how all the twists and turns and strange connections and odd pieces have fit together to create something that makes sense–something that, though sure to be knocked about, will stand.

If you saw the face of God and love would you change?  —Tracy Chapman

The scene: last Thursday, 6 pm, our kitchen.  Bowl full of dried out cookie dough on the counter.  The characters: me, dumping the ruined dough in the sink with a guttural, roof-shaking sigh spiked with some unflattering language.  The Husband, telling me that it would be okay, that we would survive without cookies.  My response: “No, we won’t.”

And the Oscar for best melodramatic performance by a jackass goes to…this guy.

I never cease to be shocked by how little it takes to make me fall apart.  On this occasion, for instance, I had worked until 1 pm then came home and took a rare long nap.  After a workout, I had nothing in front of me but a night in and a batch of cookies to make–not for hungry orphans, but just so that TH and I could eat them.  Then I forgot to keep the flour and sugar mixtures separate and all hell broke loose.  I tossed bowls in the sink and threw the mixer against the cabinet.  I stomped around a two-by-two foot area.  I breathed heavily.  I acted like a child.

This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for so many things: a new life, a new home, contractors, modern medicine.  But most of all I’m thankful for my husband, who is the greatest gift I never earned.

I remember a night shortly after we met, when we were sharing cheese fries at a diner.  I told him the story of The Worst Thing I Ever Did, and he listened.  I finished my story and he was still there.  I went to the bathroom and came back and he was still there.  My jaded thought was, “Hmm.  This guy must have some pretty wicked secrets himself.”  And you know what?  Three years later, I have yet to find any.  When the voice at the drive-thru asks for his order, he says hello and asks how they’re doing.  When he gets cut off in traffic, he mentions nothing about the driver carrying out a personal agenda to ruin his day.  He believes there is more than one side to every story.  He greets the people he passes on the sidewalk.  His first order of business at our new house is to replace all the broken locks so we’ll be safe.

He puts up with me.

Look, I’m not trying to beat myself down here.  Because of my faith, I know–and I mean, know–my worth as a person is infinite and I am loved beyond what I can imagine.  All I’m saying is, to see the same grace that played out on a tree two thousand years ago being played out daily in my marriage is…humbling.  And I hope I never close my eyes to it.  The fact is that something(One) brought the two of us together for a purpose, and now there’s no way either of us can be whom we were made to be without the other.  Which is an awesome responsibility and one I’m thankful that I believe is true because it means I am also designed to contribute to this relationship in ways that, standing over a bowl of ruined dough, may elude me but are no less real.

On Sunday I heard a man speak about a time in his life when he reached a dead end and was “broken enough to be open.”  I thought of That Bad Period in My Life and how it brought me to the same place–broken and finally open.  Open to have nothing of my own effort left to hold onto.  Open to the reality that I was no longer the Perfect Girl I had always tried to be–in fact, further from her than I had ever thought possible.  Open to the truth that in the middle of the big fat gross mess I had made of things, I was loved beyond what I had ever known until I got to that mess.  And now I am standing in the daily reflection of the ultimate truth that the ugliest stuff I am and I’ve done was never my destiny.

So on Thursday night, faced with the indulgent idea of pouting and crying just a little bit more in the face of The Husband’s unconditional, non-cookie-requiring love, I took a moment.  Disney filmmakers and I have something in common, and that is our belief that two-dimensional characters representing All Good and All Evil have grown tiresome and unrealistic.  BUT: I know that while there may not be little red men with pitchforks behind every corner, there is a destructive force–that even runs through me when I let it–that is bent on every Cookie Dough Debacle being my ultimate defeat.  The end of my faith in something better.  The end of my hope in redemption.  This is war, and I may only be armed with a wooden spoon and a hand mixer but I am showing up ready to fight–knowing that I can make the hell out of some Keurig coffee and a bed, that I always remember to bring the shopping list, and that sometimes I can even calmly rinse the bowls and start over on the cookies.  I am who I am because I am loved.  And might I just say, that was the best batch of cookies I ever made.