Do you remember in elementary school how the hallways outside of the cool teacher’s classrooms always had those bulletin boards that were decorated to the nines with catchy phrases, puns about learning, and art made from a color wheel of construction paper? My favorite ones were always the ones for Spring. Christmas ones usually had Santa- who I wasn’t allowed to believe in- or made me feel a kind of ache in the pit of my stomach- something like wanting what you know you cannot have. I knew that after the break, I would be one of the only kids not wearing new clothes, new shoes, with new puffy stickers on everything. Our Christmas would consist of whatever my grandparents gave us, which was always wonderful, and whatever the non-profits of Spokane would dole out. Usually, this meant one board game, two toys, a stuffed animal, and occasionally a gently used winter coat. Children with names like Angie, Veronica, and Stephanie- they loved the Christmas bulletin boards.

The Autumn bulletin boards stirred up a kind of ennui that I lacked a name for. Something about how they were so beautiful, with their red and brown and yellow leaves cascading down to the right, but always involving the word Fall, made me feel that we were about to descend into something I had no control over. I was a big fan of the earthtones, but already reeling from powerlessness by the time I ended third grade.

The Spring bulletin boards were the boards for me. Vibrantly filled with two kinds of pink, a yellow, a purple, light blues, and three shades of green. One teacher even made a paper slinky out of gray construction paper, positioned it unfurling, and said in all caps, Spring Has Sprung! I was amazed at her wittiness. So much so that I found ways to work the phrase into my conversations, as if I had come up with it. Little me, just plagiarizing away.

I didn’t even try to stop my amazement over all things Spring. There was something so hopeful about a new start. About the sun shining warmly and gently nudging the earth awake after a long winter’s nap. Green shoots reaching through the darkest earth to change the landscape, tender buds forming on trees that a month before seemed barren, desolate, risking early morning frost and untamed winds.

As an adult, I know that this season of awakening is where the real work happens. Where hardiness is built. This place of dirt caked hands and sowing something small into days we have not wandered into yet- placing seeds in the ground for a season that we can’t see but trust is coming, that’s where the magic happens. Summer is where you taste the sweetness of the strawberries, where raspberries redden on the vine, where sun-warmed huckleberries make mountains smell like cotton candy. But without the act of sowing there is no reaping. It is perhaps why I love gardening.

Gardening is mothering.

It is a labor of love, a place where sweat and soil mix. Where silence is sacred. Where you never have enough tools going in.

One in which the ultimate control is outside of your hands, but you till the soil anyway. You feed even the dirtiest bits the best nutrients available knowing that it will affect what you are raising. Your carrots may turn out uneven, your cauliflower may resemble your mother in law’s face, and your cucumbers might give you indigestion- but you grew them, and so you love them.

Your garden might not get the likes and comments of the neighbors, the ones with the magazine worthy Instagram posts- who’s tomatoes are ethereal, and their dahlias headed for Harvard. You know who I’m talking about- the women we forget are human, who we can’t envision crying in the shower or picking up after their husbands careless discarding of tennis shoes and their feelings.

Life has a funny way of leveling the field. Some greenhouses are nicer than others, but we are all toiling. All begging what we’ve sown to grow and keep growing. All watching our weather apps to see if there is one more threat to what we hold dear, imagining there is anything in our power that we can do to outsmart nature.

We become experts, philosophers. We settle the debate in our minds between nature vs. nurture. We blame ourselves when things are not growing like we hoped they would. It must be something we did wrong- overwatering, under watering, lack of shade, or sun hours, what were we even thinking?

We blame the soil for our friends when it is their own harvest that is rebelling. Their time for reaping is coming, it’s just a season, hold on, we say, you’ll see. Grace is easy to give away, and almost too expensive to keep.

We keep pruning.

Each day brings more sun and opportunity, a gift. And also one day closer to what we dread and anticipate. The time to trust that the roots will hold, to see what has become of our little seedlings. We pull, we whisper encouragements, as we nudge them from their resting place, hoping we have given them enough. We remember our joy at their first sprouting, how we cheered at their changes on the safety of the vine, how we dusted the dirt left from the storm off of them, how we stood half asleep and exhausted but still watered them. The early morning runs to Home Depot to get supportive netting- we did not let their fruit fall on our watch, when they tried to cast off their sweetness we grounded them. Soon it will be time.

New beginnings do not come without another season ending. The frailty of being human means that we occupy one space at a time, we are always closing one door before we explore the freedom of the next room. We never know what books are on the shelves, what chapters will trip us up, or what the view will be from the armchair.

We are still waiting. Not knowing what the bulletin boards will say around the next corner. We only know that it is Spring, it is time to sow good and useful things. To practice letting go of what once filled the palms of our hands. To ready ourselves for the work of doing our part and trusting that things will turn out. We don’t let ourselves worry about summer fires or hotter than hot days. We turn our head upward, feel the sun on our face, we breathe in and out- shakily at first, then steady- until something in our chest releases.

We do heal. We do move forward. We do not stay, with our hearts and feet stuck in the mud of another’s doing. Maybe for a while, but not forever.

The night may be dark, but the sun will rise. You will laugh again. You will smile- all the way from your hairline to your toenails.

You will feel joy.

Will bathe in the oil of gladness.

You will shower regularly and wash off every lie that has been spoken against you. Will stand in awe in your bathroom as every word of Less Than flows down the drain, mixing with bubbles and hot water.

You will remain.

You will find some random Tuesday that your heart has begun to beat again. That feeling of not being able to catch your breath will leave, you will inhale and exhale in its place.

I know that right now, it feels impossible. That hope feels worse than lost, it feels dangerous. You have the courage to believe. You just maybe forgot it.

You might be tired of looking into the mirror and seeing what was injured, betrayed, cheated. You might be in the place where you forgot your real name. Could have heard so many words be weaponized against you, that you believe them when they gaslight you. Wonder if you are in fact the crazy one.

You aren’t. I know it.

I know that it hurt you. That unkept promises ache and leave longing. That shame creeps under every door that is slammed, tries to cover you with regret like a blanket under an August sun.

I know that you hung your worth like a millstone around a sinking relationship. That you have sunk down with it, can no longer see it.

Trust me, it’s there.

Your worth is not something that can be discarded. Not a sweater to be taken off and put back on after seasons change. Your worth is not negotiable. It is steadfast. Unwavering.

More sure than the foundations of the earth is this truth- You. Are. Loved.

You are lovely and loved, and so very worth loving.

I’m so sorry they didn’t. So sorry they failed. This chapter isn’t over and neither is your story. This, brave heart, is the beginning of the reckoning. The part where you rise like a phoenix from the ashes. Where you walk out of the furnace expected to overtake you- where you show up and glow up, without the smell of smoke.

You are not going to spend the rest of your life grieving. Will not bow at an altar of what could have been or worship the idol of If Only.

You will get up.

You will move on.

Don’t go looking backwards for who you once were. That iteration of you is no longer. Shake the dust from your shoes, even if it looks like you are the one dirtying the floors. You are not the same person you were before. The weight of this has built you into something stronger.

While you cannot go back and change it, you will learn as you put foot after foot forward.

There is another side to the process of healing. More waiting for you after all of this reeling. This not a forever place. This is not all that there is.

Lift up your head.

There is more.

Even if you can’t see it just yet.

There is goodness and mercy. Healing that won’t end. You won’t always feel like a walking wound.

Hold on.

You will be so glad you did.

So I’m reading this book and it’s affecting me like EMDR therapy. Let me pause right there, because some of you are unaware of EMDR therapy and some of you might be like, this girl is in therapy? She must be crazy. Well, actually, no this girl is not crazy- this girl has chosen to be a generational trauma breaker, a generational curse incinerator, an abuse over comer, and an all-around lack, poverty, settling for less than, ender.

And that requires processing.

That takes a lot of hard work and dedication.

It means looking into not only what was done to you and how you responded, but what was done to your parents and grandparents, and finding the patterns. It requires changing thought processes and building self worth so that you can realize that you were settling. It means not just glazing over surfaces and maintaining a veneer of outside smiles when it’s what people are asking for. It takes delving deeper into the painful parts. Remembering the darkest days and nights, walking through the jagged terrain of what you never wanted talk about. The part of you that feels broken and scarred. The chapters you leave off the internet and don’t mention at first. Like, the stuff you make jokes about to your closest friends, but they aren’t laughing and tear up instead, and only then do you realize how unjust what he did to you was.

That requires some therapy.

And lots of courage.

So I’m reading this book about the connection between food and intimacy. And I’m reading about how people overeat or under eat or otherwise abuse themselves with food. It talks about the how’s and why’s that cause us as children to turn to what we have control over, which isn’t much. Which is usually just food.

Food is a terrible substitute for love. But it doesn’t hit us, or tell us it wishes we were never born. Food doesn’t yell at each other on Christmas or leave you at the store.

As adults we carry whatever relationship we’ve developed between ourselves and food as our go-to. We mindlessly reenact our childhood trauma by either unhealthy restricting or shamefully plying ourselves with food. If we were neglected, we tend to withhold nutrition. We might not bruise ourselves, but we eat until our stomachs hurt. We reserve fun activities and health for others who we view as more deserving. We stay on the couch where shame has told us we belong. We are Rapunzel in a tower of own construction. Basically, we eat what we think we are worth. The whole time dreaming of a life we tell ourselves we would have if only we could stop obsessing about what we consume.

If I was thin, men would want me. Good men, not ones who want to hurt and control me. If I was skinny, I would have 5 best friends to share my life with. We would definitely travel internationally and not get carsick. If I reach my goals on weight watchers, I would automatically get a raise at work and have professional success. People would want to listen to me.

My children would see every sacrifice I’ve ever made for them, and think I’m beautiful, and respect me, if only I could lose X amount of pounds…

So we go on a thousand diets, trying to change the part we are willing to call broken. Not realizing that losing weight or gaining muscle definition still leaves us human. We’re hungry, and still vulnerable. Only now we don’t have the phantom life of Someday to believe in. So now we’re still hurting, and disillusioned.

Is this depressing? Bear with me. (There’s hope, I promise.)

It could be because last quarter I wrote an eleven page research paper on the link between adult obesity and child abuse. Well, the link between adverse childhood experiences and disordered eating over the lifetime, specifically. The evidence from hundreds of thousands of participants strongly suggests that the bigger the person the bigger the trauma. The more someone is snickered at in Winco, the more likely they were horridly abused as a child. And, the larger the person, the higher the odds that they are now in an abusive marriage.

Let that sink in.

As humans we are very good at recycling.

Maybe before we make suggestions like “they should just stop eating”, we realize it’s not that easy. If overcoming years of unhealthy thinking and addiction was simple, your husband wouldn’t be cheating on you with the internet. Just saying.

We’re all just out here running amok. Trying to fill voids with what will never be enough.

So maybe we have some grace for each other. Maybe we hold doors and smile at strangers. We do the hard work of refining through therapy. We surrender throughout the week instead of just Sunday. We keep reading the books that challenge our thinking. We have the conversations that humble us and reveal negative cognitions we are believing. We build each other up. Encouragement is free and still affordable in this economy.

We start being kind to ourselves. We mine our history for what was missing, and we give ourselves permission to be truly loved even in the waiting. We call out what was wrong and unlock our own freedom. We use our voice to speak the truth over ourselves and others. We keep going. Even when it’s hard. Even when it’s lonely. We take every thought captive, replace lies and patterns, cognitions unserving.

We hold onto the truth like an anchor. You deserve to be loved. No matter what the scale says. You deserved to be loved and safe as a child. And you are worth being loved and safe even now. Even while you’re healing. Even while you’re unpacking.

As I sit down to write this, the sky is just starting to lighten. It’s still that weird hazy grey that looks different by the second. I can see orange sherbet creeping over the neighbor’s fence line, tinged with a yellow halo, and I know that it will look like actual morning by the time I type another sentence or two.

When I climbed back in bed a couple of minutes ago, my bedroom was almost completely dark. Now I can make out shapes and reflections in the mirror that stands propped from the floor to almost the ceiling. Vivid dreams are still untangling themselves from reality. For instance, I dreamt that I had tried the OliPop I purchased yesterday (my first) and hadn’t loved it, but I can see it now, untouched, unopened, on my bedside table in the light of my laptop. Whether or not I like it still remains to be seen.

The darkest day is over. This keeps replaying through my mind, like a line from a kids show that gets stuck in your thoughts on loop. The darkest day is over. It gets lighter and lighter from here.

And while I’m celebrating that fact, it’s tempered by the knowledge that it will get darkest dark again.

I’ve heard a lot of predictions for the coming year, heard even more opinions. Have watched as my social media feed fills with memes about walking into 2024 not expecting anything. Have seen the reels saying that everything that needed to be shaken already was, and I have to tell you that I don’t agree. I think we are still in the middle of labor pains and dilating.

I will tell you something, which is that I won’t be cowering my way into 2024. I won’t be bowing to idols or settling for golden calves. I will be drawing near.

If you want to find me, don’t look for me crying on the floor or shaking in fear. I’m not that girl anymore. I have seen too much faithfulness to go back there. My children and I will be walking with heads held high, still working on ourselves, still working out forgiveness, still separating who and what we are from what was done to us.

But don’t mistake that work for weakness. Don’t mess it up in your mind that because we have known grief we are still under it. Do not confuse learning to approach life from a place of rest as being knocked out. We are still fighting. Only our healing is more evident. Our strength is more visible. And we are getting ready for our comeuppance. We are hands open and ready for our restitution.

2024 will have more shaking. I already know it, because we need it. Nobody develops character while getting their own way and living the life of their dreams for a full year. No tree learned to stand firm without wind testing its strength and having to spread its roots deeper into the darkness than was comfortable for it, trusting that even though it couldn’t see anything, something was holding it in place. The last few years have tested us and left us shaken, but they have also left us held and strengthened.

Like muscles aching from the ripping and coming back to together stronger, we have learned how to keep moving forward through the storms. My children and I have seen that no matter what comes there is always more fighting for us than against us.

We have been affected by the struggle but have found the well to be deeper than the drought.

Haven’t we all? As prices increase and driver’s patience and rule following has decreased, we have learned how to deep breathe and remain calm. We stopped venting to our passengers or the empty air around us and realized that the person who just cut us off or ran the red light can’t hear us- we can’t change them, we can only change ourselves. We loosened our grip on the steering wheel.

We cut out a lot of the junk that we were buying. We started actually budgeting. We came face to face with our idols of control, comfort, jealousy. We wrestled with God. We wrestled with ourselves. We felt our hearts break and rebuild again and again. We saw goodness and mercy. We felt gratitude when we were sure there was nothing left. And sure enough, grace walked into the room and filled it for us, to the brim.

I won’t be walking through the new year like a 6′ 8″ adolescent, still unsure and rearranging my body into a walking apology. Head forward, back rolled out, like a human question mark. I will not be ducking through doorways. Am done apologizing for how much space I take up.

As surely as I live, I have seen the goodness of God.

Whatever this coming year holds, I know that I will be held. I may not understand what happens, but I don’t have to. The hallmark of the year will not be whether or not I succeed in keeping a list of goals and expectations, it only matters that I keep my focus.

My heart is fixed, even as it’s being healed.

I keep waking up between 3 and 4 in the morning, even though I could be sleeping in. My workday alarms are set to start at 4:45, so it might not seem that much earlier, but it feels like lot as I try to make sense of the hazy darkness. Sometimes there has been a dream that good or otherwise casts a shadow over my commute. Other days, it’s just me biding my last moments of warmth and comfort before a run-walk to the master bathroom.

Darkness is a curious thing. It seems to hush the world outside my windows in a way that is far ruder than the gentle shushing of snow. If snow is the rhythmic sway of a mother, tender pats and embracing, lullabies written of sing song-y whispers, sh sh sh-sh sh sh… then darkness feels like a too heavy blanket. I find myself desperate to kick a leg out from under it, maybe two, and tuck an arm over its edge so that it cannot creep up and make me feel consumed.

Last night was the tree lighting ceremony in Millwood, WA. I had told my children we could attend, as we drove by a sign advertising it some sunny afternoon weeks ago. Before it had snowed. Before I spent 4 1/2 days passing kidney stones. Before I realized that I have finals and a ten-page paper to write this weekend that I haven’t started. When I thought our house would be decorated by now in ways that make Martha Stewart jealous. I hadn’t accounted for the fact that my children are human and all aged 10-18, with battles of their own between hormones, developing brains, and interpersonal communication.

And then that little thing on the calendar got pushed out of my brain and off of my very full plate.

But not my daughter’s. The child who sees a neurologist for cognitive delays and memory problems said at exactly 5:04pm, on the heels of a very hard day, “Mama, what time do we go see the tree lights tonight?” Not a word had been said about it in the days before or since the drive-by promise, but she remembered. Her siblings rallied. Well, some of them. “Yes! What time, what time? Do I have time to take a shower and do makeup?” The living room became abuzz with questions and possibility. And I who had just finally sat down to study, realized I would have to stand back up.

A promise is a promise, and a person is only as good as their word. Things change and can be negotiated before the event, of course, but if you don’t intend to follow through at our house it’s better to remain quiet. I had spoken up.

Within 35 minutes the children were dressed warmly, my yoga pants had been set longingly aside for clothes meant for public consumption, hair and makeup were pretty roughly applied, the snow was brushed off the car, windshields scraped, and car not yet warm we drove on questionable roads to where the people are.

We drank hot chocolate that burned our hands and tongues, ate frosted cookies, sang off-key with strangers. We watched children we don’t know perform highland dances, competed for which one of us had the most snow in their inappropriate shoe of choice, and yelled a countdown with Santa like it was New Year’s Eve. And suddenly the tree that was so dark and silent was overcome with light and the sound of cheering. We hugged each other and smiled, eyes focused on the thing ahead of us. We did not speak for a minute. We didn’t need to.

I don’t know how much of my story you’ve been following. How much you know about me or this season. My children and I have spent the last several years healing. A process that I had thought would be by now completed. We have seen signs and wonders. We have seen mountains move and be shaken. We have like Lazarus been called out from the grave, after what felt like too long of waiting.

It’s not that I had forgotten what has been done for us. It’s that my heart feels weary from so much having to be done. God and people have been so good and kind. We have been lavished in love, bathed with encouraging words and truth spoken over us.

The problem has been the focus of my eyes. It is hard to find the faithfulness of God when you are looking at empty hands. When you feel overwhelmed by the wind and waves of lack. And I have been craving a God of milquetoast and predictability. I want things to be ordered and neat. A world where everyone has more than they need, where tidiness reigns supreme. That has not been my life.

My life has looked a lot more like roadside wildflowers, unruly and unexpected. Beautiful in a different way than an organized English garden. Where dirt and debris are spun from tires onto petals, and stalks learn to bear the weight of the wind to hold up the flower’s head. My children and I have had to find strength that we never knew we had, and never wanted to need.

I wanted God to fit in a smartly wrapped box under my Christmas tree. I find instead that I am offered an entire Nativity scene. Not just the sweet baby in the manger, but the postpartum mother who had real feelings, the fumbling first time father/stepfather to the King of Kings. The dirt and hay, the smell of animal sweat and excrement. The angels and star, and shepherds sore afraid. I know them, they are my people, I spent years trembling in fear. I too had to choose to run towards the source of light or away, had to scoop up my lambs, leaving none of them behind.

We have seen goodwill toward men, are holding our breath for the rest.

Great joy.

Peace on Earth.

We are waiting.

Last night we bore witness to the light shining in the darkness, and the darkness could not overtake it. We remembered that even the heaviest blankets can have holes cut clean through to let the light in. That even the darkest night is illuminated by stars shining light years away. Constant even as we are turning.

So we continue to gather. We keep our word. We hold close and shush, swaying, steady. Though our shoes fill with snow melting just under the bridge where our toes connect. We stand firm. We fill our hands with the day’s work and raise them in surrender. We tend the sheep. We mother. And we set our eyes on the things in front of us, above us, knowing that the darkness won’t last forever.

We grip tightly and begin to countdown.

Ten,

Nine,

Eight,

Seven,

Six,

Five,

Do you feel it?

Hope is coming.