Thoughts on love, hate, and who really wins in war.

When the blahs happen two weeks a month, it’s not just depression… Also, update on my slow productivity mission, what I did this week in my business (hint: knitting pattern update), and some sad news about my grandmother.

Mae Renfroe lost her second-eldest son, Clayton, in a quadding accident in April of 2017 at the age of fourteen. Mae and I both hope you will be encouraged by her story.

My mission to get my weight under control, plus the release of the Just Plain Gloves Knitting Pattern and an announcement about some of my short fiction.

Over and over again, I have seen how what we believe to be true about ourselves, we make true about ourselves. And there's nothing that anyone else can say to change that self-image unless we want to change it.

Two years later, we are still completely humbled when we consider the massive wave of support we received when Levi died. I am convinced that the support of our community through that first difficult year had a good deal to do with the progress we made in our healing. Yes, the work of grief must be done on an individual basis. But knowing that we were never alone had a significant impact on how brave we were in approaching that work.

This week, I have been resetting physically and mentally, including my current writing project. Plus, a quick knitting update.

A day at a time, the log jam is loosening and the ideas are flowing. The sun is coming back, energy is returning, and I am pulling myself blinking from the retreat of hibernation. For my own mental and emotional health, this year needs to be less about driving myself and more about reducing commitments, taking care of myself, and finding my passion again. It needs to be about healing.

"It's your road, and yours alone. Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you." - Rumi

In a way, every day, every moment sine June 3, 2015 has been a "first" in this first year since I went from being merely a parent of four boys or an adoptive parent to a bereaved parent. Every day, there are things that trigger my tears. Some of them are quite small and seemingly insignificant--but even something that might seem small to others can leave my heart weighed down by stones too heavy to lift for most of the day.

Are you trapped in the tarry black hole of dwelling on loss? Are you jumping trains trying to hide from it? Or are you figuring out how to keep moving forward with loss as your travelling companion? How to avoid a train wreck on your road to healing, and your dreams.

There is no "one-time thing" when it comes to grief.

"Death isn't the end, it's a beginning." - Jennifer Love Hewitt

Dear Levi...

I can't tell you how many things this year I wish you could have done with us,  or the things I wanted to show you. I can't tell you how many times I wanted to hold you close or hear your laugh. I can't tell you how broken I feel without you here.

I learned so much from being your mama. And by God's grace, I am learning still,

As a reader, I always thought that the ending was the goal. And it is. But it never occurred to me that it was the well-written middle that actually got me there as inevitably as a cart on a roller coaster track.

If only life had someone writing me out of my "swampy middles."