Here in my house, pity parties are not allowed to last the night. Sure, it’s okay sometimes to sit with your glass of wine and your bag ‘o chocolate and moan because you’re doing it on your own again, or because you’re little family won’t be complete at Christmas, or because not one child will have dad home for their birthday this year….. but then you pick your bloated, wine filled ass off that couch and you pull yourself together. Life moves on. And sometimes pulling yourself together just involves enough energy for yoga pants and wiping the grime from the toilet before someone thinks there’s a frat house using your bathroom. But it’s still progress. In my house, we move forward because experience has taught me nothing gets better if you’re waiting for the ideal moment to try. So last month I decided we wouldn’t be sitting on our butt waiting for community to magically appear and make this 4th deployment easier. We were going to make community. Inspired by Sarah Smiley and her book, we started our Invitations Deployment Project. So we set out. A few rules we made: 1. Our Sunday dinner guests might be people we know, but they had to be new to our table. We have great friends. These had to be new friends. 2. Our Sunday meals needed to be drama free. I promised to make something all would eat (which is a feat in a house with 2 picky eaters and an autistic child with Selective Eating Disorder) but in return, all had to agree to put it in their mouths. 3. Our Sunday best went on the table. Whether we had a young…
So I spent time I didn’t have today watching sappy reunion videos on YouTube. I got linked to one on facebook and that led to another of course and like some kind of sick addiction, I kept clicking those buttons like somehow I had both the time and the hydration to spare. But as I sat afterwards, I thought back to the conversation I have had with many people about Internet reality. Have you seen the website It’s Like They Know Us? If you haven’t, go there now.It will open a new window, go ahead. Hilarious, right? Because while having a baby is beautiful and wonderful in many senses, it is also horrible, messy and sometimes terribly, terribly painful. So is everything in life. Everything. And so the reason we lash out at things like unrealistic photos of women in white pants on their periods playing on beige carpeting with perfectly clean toddlers is that it hide the messy. Not just the literal mess, because holy crap this is what my son looked like the last time we were in public. But perfect Internet photos also hide the other mess. The real mess. Stock mom and newborn photos hide what 72 hours of labour, more stitches in places you cant see that anyone should have, a terrified husband and a baby in the NICU when you haven’t even had time to sleep. Ripping your stitches walking to the incubator at 2 am and hiding your exhausted tears in the breast pump room so the nurses won’t see because you’re afraid they’ll think you can’t cut it. And stock couple photos hide the 8am screaming matches, dirty looks and those times when you were…
So this week, I was inspired. Having read before about Sarah Smiley’s book “Dinner with the Smileys“, I was intrigued about the idea of inviting community members to join us for dinner or adventure during my husband’s current deployment. Our last posting and the deployments we endured at it were made bearable by the people we knew. The community that supported us. And while there are people here who have welcomed us so wonderfully, it is a much quieter place. Our home is not the open door of activity it had been when we were living in our old community. But who’s fault was that? Dh has big shoes to fill and we would never replace him. He couldn’t be replaced. He is their dad, invincible and bigger than life in their eyes. As it should be. He adores them and they adore him. Nothing will ever change that. But there is a chance here to fill his temporary absence in my kid’s lives with the wisdom, support and encouragement of their community. So the kids and I brainstormed. We had an opportunity here to learn about our community and grow in our relationships in it. There was a chance to learn, about occupations, about people, about supporting each other and making connections. And since even here on this blog I’ve written about filling those empty chairs with the people around you looking to fill one, it was time to step up. With dad away, we have many months of time that we could be intentional about inviting people from our commmunity to join us. Who would we start with? So we made…
*Disclaimer: the dates of these events and information of this post, including the date of publication, has been changed or delayed for security purposes* Today I felt the change in my face when you told me. We were at the gym and you grabbed me on a quick second, I know you’d been waiting all day and this was the first time I had seen you since the morning. You said ‘I’m going‘ and my eyes blinked and hardened. I swallowed and I know my entire expression changed. It changed to be expressionless, that was the entire design and my superpower. The ability to remove expression and emotion and take in what I needed to hear without drama or fear. I have a lot of practice with it. * Today as I walked out of my evening class my phone confirmed what I already knew. We were going down this road for the 4th time. I stared at it a while. Someone behind me asked where you were. They joked with me about how eager you were to get out and do your job. I smiled and agreed that it was who you were, I joked that you were pretty lucky that I loved you enough to put up with it. I was laughing when I got in the car. When I pulled out of the parking lot I was already crying. But only until I pulled onto our street so the kids wouldn’t see. * Today you prepared your uniform for the changes you would need while you are gone. We went for coffee and I made you a list of what I need done before you left. It’s all business of home improvements, Powers of Attorney and snow shovels. This…
