A work in progress

Concrete burdens

2009-01-09T15:34:00.000-08:00

This post is copied and pasted from something else I have just written elsewhere. These few paragraphs I thought deserved a wider audience. And thought they would fit in well with this blog.

I can only explain with imagery I think. It feels as though, at the beginning of December I was finally allowing myself to stand up straight and tall, for the first time in a very long time, and then a piece of concrete was suddenly placed on my head, bending my back over and threatening to push me down and crush me. I staggered around, spread my feet out more solidly and began to stand up again. Then another piece of concrete was added to the pile, making me stagger once more and this time it was harder to stand. Over the past three weeks I feel as though that has been happening over and over again. I can see myself in my mind's eye, struggling under the weight of all these grey, rough pieces of concrete. Some are huge and heavy and some are small and lighter, but all add to the overall weight. Each time another one is added, it takes me a while to find my balance and my feet, and as soon as I find it, it seems the next one arrives. It is a very vivid picture in my mind.

Now I know that in the eyes of a lot of Christians, the next step in the imagery should be that I beg God for help and he comes along and takes all of the concrete off me and bears it himself. And I leap and sing and run around joyfully, happy to be free of the heavy burdens.

However, I'm not sure it is actually as simple as that. If God just takes all the burdens off me, what do I learn? How then will I be able to get alongside hurting people in the future and really understand what they are going through? I believe I have to carry these burdens - but that what actually happens when I ask God for help - or when I cling to my piece of knitted cloak so tightly in a prayer without words - He strengthens my legs and helps me to stand under the burdens and carry them a little more easily.

It hurts. It hurts a LOT. It is very, very hard. But I am not alone, I know that. I have wonderful friends and I have the constant presence of God, who is always there holding me even when I'm looking the other way and think I have let go.

New Year New Start?

2009-01-02T04:13:00.000-08:00

It's been a while. I did intend to keep up this blog far more regularly, but a bit of stuff happened at home and I lost the incentive and motivation.

December in particular was fairly horrendous in a few ways. Christmas was a lovely cosy respite, in which it was agreed troubles wouldn't be talked about, but with the coming of the new year, I am aware I am in for a rocky ride. My husband has been diagnosed with a long term chronic depressive illness, after a very bad patch indeed for him which ended in a trip to the out of hours GP service and a referral to a Psychiatric SHO (which I had to fight for and I'm so glad I did).

Other stuff happened which turned my world completely upside down and I still feel as though I am going through a washing machine and at times, a mangle.

I don't think I ever clung on to the edge of God's cloak so tightly before. I felt as though I was flying through darkness holding on for dear life and being quite sure I was about to let go. One Saturday morning in December after a particularly difficult evening the night before, I did let go. Lost hope completely for a short while, but found shortly afterwards, later that day, that God really is a faithful rock and he caught me and held me tight and gave me hope again.

This January is one in which a lot of things will be starting. Things which give me hope for the future and hope for my marriage. But it is also rather terrifying. I'm going to hear things I really don't want to hear, and probably will have to say things I will prefer not to say.

Having my husband diagnosed has explained an awful lot about our marriage over the last 14 years, and our relationship before we married too. It probably explains a fair bit of my extremely low self esteem. When the person you love more than anyone else is constantly and consistently disappointed in you, because of the way he is wired, it is very difficult indeed to believe you are actually worth anything to anyone. Never matching up to expectations, always missing the mark in every way possible.

Having spent the past few months building myself up, bit by bit, learning to trust people and opening up to new friends who have become incredibly special, starting this blog as a leap of faith to attempt to prove to myself I can do things I don't think I can, December did a good job of knocking me right back down again. And the last couple of days in particular I have felt myself curling up into a tiny ball inside and wanting to hide away in a corner so nobody can see me and judge me for being utterly rubbish and worthless and crap.

This morning I woke up feeling as though I was about to let go of the edge of God's cloak again. Not being able to see any hope and so very frightened of what the next few days will bring, let alone the next year.

This post is my challenge to that feeling. I am not a worthless piece of poo under anybody else's shoe. I AM an attractive, articulate, capable woman. I AM worth loving. I AM a good mother and I AM a good homemaker. If I say that enough times I might start to believe it.

Because rationally I know all those things are true. Just in my heart I don't trust them because of the way I have always missed the mark in so many ways for reasons that actually have very little to do with the way I am and a lot to do with the depressive illness my husband has suffered from for longer than I have known him.

Oh, and during December something else happened. I started wearing make up again for the first time in about twelve years. And I dyed my hair dark red. Which I said I would never do, in a previous post on this blog. But I absolutely love the results. I am changing. I am worth it. I am.

No new year's resolutions. I can't see past today right now, never mind make resolutions for the whole year. But I do intend to post to this blog a lot more often. It might be absolute gibberish and probably won't be the sort of 'inspired' posts I intended the blog for, but I do want to talk somewhere about the way I am changing and continuing to change, through the (hopefully) refining fire I'm walking through right now.

I can't really say Happy New Year at the moment. But I can say Happy New Day, or Happy New Hour. That is how I am living - from day to day and from hour to hour. One day at a time life can change, a bit at a time.

God is a hand knitter

2008-10-25T04:29:00.000-07:00

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb Psalm 139 verse 13

I love Psalm 139. I always have. For me it just embodies the way I see God - as a loving father and creator who knows his children better than they know themselves, and took a lot of time over making them exactly how he planned them to be. On a personal level, as an adopted baby who technically, I imagine was an 'accident', I love the idea that in God's eyes I was anything but an accident, but am someone who he took time over creating, and knew who I would be, before my birth mother even knew I was on the way.

One of the labels I give myself is 'knitter'. I am a knitter; I've always enjoyed it, but until more recently I was an occasional knitter, throwing myself into it for a month or two and then abandoning it for years at a time. For the past three years though, I have been a constant knitter, finally learning the joy of finishing projects and getting use out of them, and revelling in the actual activity. I love the calming rhythm of the needles; the feel of the wool between my fingers; the look of the colours and the texture of the material as it grows from my own handiwork.

The sense of achievement when I complete something that I can actually use on a day to day basis is immense. Or seeing other members of my family wearing the items I have knitted for them.

Knitting is therapeutic, calming, engaging, practical and terribly good for the self esteem - looking at something beautiful and thinking 'I made that!'

God 'knit us together' in our mother's wombs. I've been pondering this phrase the past week or so. Knitting is such a slow, measured process; rather at odds with the idea of mass manufacture which the making of all these humans every day would appear to be. Surely if God is knitting all the unborn babies, then he must need to do it quickly, using machines like the noisy fast ones in my dad's sock factory when I was growing up. (Yes, it runs in the family; my dad was a sock knitter by trade!!) Mass production.

But we all know that humans are not mass produced. Even identical twins have different fingerprints. We are all so different; physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally. No one of us is exactly the same as another. When I knit a pair of socks, while I am using exactly the same pattern and exactly the same yarn for each sock, they are never entirely identical. I am a member of a knitting and crochet website called 'Ravelry', and on there you can look at pages and pages of people's own knitting projects; all following the same pattern but every item is different in some way. This cannot be said for a trip into M&S where there are racks of identical garments, taken from a machine production line.

God knits us all from the basic 'human' pattern. But every person that he knits is different in some way. As he is outside space and time, in a way we can never understand, I believe that he takes the same amount of care and 'time' and pleasure in the knitting of every single individual. It blows my mind. Does it blow yours too?

Why I chose pink for this blog

2008-10-23T11:33:00.000-07:00

I have always had trouble expressing the more 'feminine' side of my personality. I have no idea why, but something in my has rebelled for a long time against 'girly things'. I think I am rebelling against women's magazines and their not-very-subtle propaganda to make women think we need to be perfect in every way.

I don't have a skin care regime. I don't cleanse, tone and moisturise - I wash my face with a flannel and warm water every morning. I never wear make up at all - apart from lipstick almost every day. Stuff like foundation has never touched my skin and I don't intend to start down that road now!

I wash my hair with whatever shampoo is on offer this week, or the cheapest supermarket brand. I don't style it, just blow dry it with a simple hairdryer and a brush. I rarely wear skirts, preferring trousers for comfort and practicality. I have had pierced ears for many years, but only wear earrings when I remember.

In my early teens I was a girly girl. I read 'Girl' magazine and absorbed all the fashion information and the make up tips. I wore a lot of pink (cerise was in back then, in a BIG way!), and skirts, and enjoyed the whole 'girl' experience.

I'm not altogether sure when that changed. Certainly by the time I was in sixth form I was in jeans and paisley shirts almost constantly. And there wasn't really much of the girly girl side of me left at all when I went to university. I've been wondering why, the past few days. Maybe it was because I wasn't in the popular crowd, or in any crowd, particularly. I was one of those who hovered around on the edge of several groups, never quite fitting in to any of them. I didn't really have a group of close female friends at a time when most girls are going shopping together, doing each other's hair and make up, etc. etc.

So by the time I grew up, got married, had children, I had left my feminine clothes, make up and girly-type-things side well and truly behind. For years now I have proclaimed my hatred of shopping, of clothes, of make up, of... well anything like that really. And I do still believe that women's magazines in general are rather evil, pressuring women into thinking they need things that they don't.

But over the past week or so I have wondered whether I have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. I have felt an utter frump, with no sense of style at all, and no idea where to start getting clothes that fit, that match, that do me justice. I have wondered whether it might not be fun to start experimenting with eye make up again. I even very briefly considered dyeing my hair (something I have never ever done) - but that is not going to happen because I happen to love the colour of my hair and don't want to change that at all!

I went shopping at the beginning of the week, taking with me a good friend who Knows About Clothes. And I came away with the beginnings of a 'capsule wardrobe' which I am very pleased with indeed. I went back the next day all by myself and bought a couple more items, feeling more confident and happy about the whole process than I have for many years.

I am embracing my 'girly' side. And it feels good, and exciting.

Even two weeks ago I would have steered clear of pink as a background to any blog I had anything to do with. But do you know what? I quite like pink. And I am a girl, after all. It is time I learnt just what that meant and enjoyed the consequences!

A new blog

2008-10-22T14:25:00.000-07:00

If you are reading this then you have been quite impressively clever in stealthing out my new blog, which I am not advertising yet, while I get the hang of it and decide exactly how I'm going to use it.

Um, hello.

I have a livejournal in which I make posts day to day about my life, but I have been feeling the need for somewhere to be a little more reflective; a space in which to practise writing out the jumbled thoughts that jostle around in my mind. The thoughts which I think I am unable to articulate.

I'm on a journey, as we all are. A journey through life, and one in which I am a work in progress. Nothing is fixed. I am not the same as I was three or four years ago, and I hope I will have grown and changed further in the next few years.

Recently I have been thinking about the need to strip away all the prejudices I carry about myself; both things I just seem to believe, and things that have been said to me over the years. I need to find out exactly who I really am under all the 'labels' - wife, mother, daughter, sister, Christian, Methodist, knitter, tea drinker, to name but a few.

One of my perceptions of myself is my belief that I am no good at writing, or speaking, the important things in my head. I believe my opinions count for very little, and that others always say everything far better than I ever could, so I should just sit back and let them do so.

This blog is my challenge to that perception. I am setting out to prove myself wrong! I am going to see what happens when I let the words in my head come out of my fingers and onto a laptop screen. If it is utter rubbish, well then at least I tried! I'm rather hoping, though, that I might find some things out about myself that I never managed to discover before.

The whole of life is a learning curve, and some points are a steeper curve than others. The last few weeks have been quite a steep curve for me and I am going to run with that, embrace the new, and see where I end up.