HeadSpace

have kids, will travel, part I

2012-01-05T16:04:00.000-07:00

Ive had a lot of people ask me about how on earth we manage to make epic, 2500-mile or more treks with a van that's fairly bursting at the seams with what I've affectionately termed "my huddled mass of humanity". It sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen to most people, apparently, and it tends to baffle them that we could possibly enjoy or even crave these kinds of adventures. I guess it's in the blood, at least to some degree. Christopher is related to the guy who chiseled out the Bozeman Trail through Montana to the goldfields of the Pacific Northwest (so if you ever saw my last name and asked, "You mean like Bozeman, Montana?", the answer is yes). And I am directly related to William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame who, well, pioneered the great American West (with no disrespect to the Native Indians--they didn't have to pioneer their own home, I guess). Somewhere in my DNA, my husband's DNA, and now doubly in the DNA of my children, is a hard-wired lust for adventure and westward movement. This explains a lot. Maybe.

But this post isn't about all that. This post is about the nuts and bolts of actually doing a real-live adventure, of living to tell the tale, and of somehow getting a really big kick out of it all. So I offer up my top 3 Teri's Travel Tips, while they're still fresh on my recently-traveled mind:

1. Plan your route carefully.
This seems like a no-brainer, but the fun is in the details. The longer your trip, the more diversions and distractions you're going to need in order to stave off boredom, fatigue, and mutiny. I like to have a couple of handy references at my command when charting a new journey. Google Maps tells me how far and how long and which route is best, and on my iPad, will even give me a couple of alternate routes, in case I'm feeling super-adventurous. I usually am.
Once the basic route is chosen, it's time to decide on where the best lodging can likely be found. For a family of epic proportions like mine, this can be a problem. We call around to every hotel in town sometimes, looking for someone who will take a family of 8, either in one room or two adjoining rooms. This can get pricey, but there's little alternative if tent-camping is out of the question. We've recently begun looking into AirBnB.com, where individuals rent out their extra rooms or entire houses on a nightly basis to whomever they please. Cool idea, and looks relatively safe.
The next part is the funagonizing one. You need to decide what sorts of attractions/sights you want to see during the course of your adventure. The fun is that you wouldn't believe how many cool things there are to see in this country, even on a short trip. Take a look at Roadside America for thousands of quirky attractions--paid and free--that you'd never know were right along your route. I also bust out my handy National Parks Passport map, which give me the low-down on where every National Parks Unit in America can be found. Every.single.park.unit has a Junior Ranger Program where your child(ren) can spend anywhere from an hour to a day learning about the ecology, history, anthropology, paleontology, and culture of some of our greatest landmarks. At the end of this little adventure, kids earn a shiny Junior Ranger badge and/or patch and a certificate (and often, a nifty pencil!) and are sworn in by an actual park ranger. Our kids have collected somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 of these little trophies, from South Padre Island to Yellowstone and everywhere in between. This is a *major* part of our travels, an always hotly-anticipated discovery when we begin trip-planning. Now, the agonizing part of this is that you'll inevitably have to say no to some of the exciting things you'll discover in the planning phase. This is a severe bummer, but at least it gives you 1)a deeper appreciation for where you're traveling and 2)a reason to return!

2. Snack-time is sacred.
Road-tripping in our family is the only time we really get to snack out, so this ends up being one of the most exciting aspects of travel for the kids. We try to keep it relatively healthy, with cheese sticks, yogurt-in-a-tube, carrot sticks, and whole wheat crackers. But I'm not gonna lie--we have our share of cookies, and chips, and--gasp!!--cheese in a can. There is no quicker way to make my children happy than to pull a can of Easy-Cheese out of the snack bag. It's like magic.
But the trick here is not just to snack non-stop. I bag up all sorts of goodies in little snack-sized ziploc baggies, and I only dole them out on certain occasions. One of those occasions is when the little sailors are getting mutinous (read:bored and tired) and have had it up to here with being crammed in an over-packed van with half a dozen siblings. When attitudes sour, it's time for something special. I also like to keep things exciting by doling out schnackies at certain way-points, like when we hit the 140-mile marker on the Interstate, or see the first roadsign for our destination town. So here are some of my all-time favorite road foods:
*Cheerios
*Teddy Grahams
*Austin Crackers (those little 6-packs of peanut-butter and cheese crackers)
*Easy-Cheese and Wheat Thins
*Cheese Sticks
*Yogurt in a squeeze tube
*Those neat little cartons of (very expensive) organic chocolate milk
*Dried fruit
*Nuts
*Tangerines (the smell of the peels helps to, you know, keep things fresh)
*Stainless Steel water bottles, filled with delicious iced-tea from home (we usually travel with 2 or 3 gallon coolers of home-brewed iced tea in a variety of flavors. During this last trip, I made a yummy concoction of rooibos and peach detox tea, which was not only aromatic and delish, but also completely caffeine-free and loaded with antioxidants and minerals).
*Prunes (inevitably, somebody gets plugged plumbing during a long trip. Prunes are a quick remedy!)

3. Save the cheerleader, save the world.
I view my role in a successful trip as several-fold. I am a driver, a navigator, the resident oral historian, the event planner, the food-banker, the referee...and the cheerleader. Kids on long trips need pep talks. A lot of them. Sometimes the only thing standing between a large family on the road and World War IV is that valiant, optimistic soul who can single-handedly fight off the doldrums with a rousing, morale-boosting chat. Kids need to know how much longer this leg of the trip will last, where is the next attraction, what is interesting to look at out the window, where you'll eat (and what), and what special something awaits them if they can just hang on to that last thread of gooditude. They need to know that they each play a crucial role in the success of this venture, and that without them pulling through, the expedition may well be doomed. Give them a sense of immediacy and urgency, as though it's life or death. Because psychologically, at least, it is.
Ahh, but how to save the cheerleader? What keeps Mommy from becoming the fire-breathing despot of the front seat? For me, it's several things. Good chocolate always, *always* accompanies me on any journey. This is completely non-negotiable. Convenience store chocolate is a craptastic substitute and should only be consumed in dire emergencies. Otherwise, stock up before the trip and make sure that you have control over the food bag. I also pack hoity-toity drinks that I can't purchase easily on the road. My recent fave is sparkling lemon water from Knudson's. The kids know that this is for Mommy only, and they don't even ask for it. I also reserve the right to purchase some new music of my choosing before or during the trip, and to bury my head in headphones for a little (or long) while to clear my head and drown out the noises of humanity coming from the back seats. Aromatherapy is a nice touch, too, and I travel with a few of my favorite essential oils. When the air gets thick in the cockpit, I drip a few drops onto a napkin or Kleenex and stick it in a vent, to disperse the scent all over the van. Or I just sniff it straight from the bottle, if I'm feeling naughty. You'd be amazed at how much sanity can be saved by just observing a few self-care and self-pampering rituals during travel!

So you have a foundation, at least, of how to make a successful trip. I'll be checking back in and posting more specifics about little necessities that help save the day on our voyages.
--Teri.

chasing the what-if

2011-10-04T00:33:00.000-06:00

The grass has grown long under my fingers since I last blogged, and I wish I could say that it has been the exciting life of this forest-dweller-come-lately that has kept me from it; in truth, it's been a lot of treading water and straining my chin upwards to keep that water out of my nose that's kept me sufficiently distracted to ignore my thought-life, or at least to keep it brain-bound.

But tonight I've managed to break curfew, and I have a backload of things banging around in my head and wanting to get out somehow. This probably means that the proceeding words will be heinously rambly.

So the idea that's captured me lately is the painful dichotomy I feel between sensing a need to develop a life of simple contentment in my current circumstances ("bloom where you're planted" and all that) and the deeper, more dangerous need to embrace without reservation the profound sense of discontent that has dogged me my entire life. Siddhartha would probably say that the answer lies somewhere in between, and maybe he'd be right. But that kind of thinking is way too temperate for a heart bursting at the seams with dreaming and plotting and what-iffing about futures imagined and hoped for, and so it feels like I either need to hunker down and discover the magic in a life of quiet contentment, or damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead with it already!

What I can't figure out is this: is it a base, soulish want I have, to be happy inside a deep unhappiness, or is it a higher, more spiritual thing I'm chasing after? Is it glorious or gluttonous to chase that discontent forever and pray I never catch it?
--Teri.

ch-ch-ch-changes

2011-05-25T16:39:00.000-06:00

ch-ch-ch-changes…
Posted on May 25, 2011 by Teri
I’m sitting in a Starbucks in the Springs right now, surrounded by…empty chairs. And a dude immersed in a newspaper. And another dude immersed in his laptop. And another dude immersed in…wait. There are no immersed women in here! Except me.

Glorious.

Ohdang. A lady just sat down next to me, and she looks friendly. No!!

So why am I here? That might not be a question any of you would have to ask yourselves, but I have to have a pretty good justification for doing this. I’m in between appointments today, and am taking some time, at long last, just to be by myself. Christopher’s working at home today and is watching the kids for me.

I pretty much quit 75% of my life this week, and decided to make the remaining 25%, 100% for the time being. I hit a wall a couple of weeks ago and finally, finally, f i n a l l y realized that I could not keep up the frenetic pace of family and professional life that I’ve been trying to juggle, adding a new ball here and there since Asa’s birth, and usually ending up dropping most of them. The fragile ball of my family life is always the first to drop, and it has cracked in several places. It’s time for some reparative work and also to hold that sacred circle close and not let it drop or be juggled any more. The kids couldn’t be happier, though they never would have said so before, thinking I was happier with them on the back burner. Wake-up call!!

So I resigned as both Secretary and member of our local doula association; I put the word out that I will no longer be actively seeking birth photography clients, or doula clients, and I also put in a request for an indefinite hiatus from my work as a trainer through Childbirth International.

Some of those ties were very sad to have to break, though I’m confident that I can pick this up when I am better suited to it, but the effect of all this freedom has been staggering. I suddenly found my love of cooking again. I read several chapters of a book that I actually *wanted* to read. I discovered how much my baby really needs to hold me, and how much my toddler wants to have conversations with me, to debate with me, and to help me with tasks I never would have let him attempt before. I found out that Ben isn’t the only boy of mine who desperately needs a good throw-down about 3 times a day, and that Isaac’s anger management problem is probably in large part due to a lack of discipline on my part. I learned that Gabe is suddenly growing up on me and losing that small boyish face and starting to look an awful lot like a blonde-haired, blue-eyed version of his MawMaw. How handsome!! I discovered that Bonnie is patiently waiting for so much from me, and I re-learned where each of my children are excelling, and where they are struggling. I found out about their hopes and dreams for a happier family, a fun summer, and a larger family vision. This shouldn’t be new to me, but I guess I just haven’t been listening. It’s a shame.

But it’s a shame I’m rectifying now, before it’s too late and these little balls bounce away from me for good, out of the circle of our family influence. So I think it’s worth the sacrifice, and I feel so much lighter and more free, even though I just took most of my life-dreams and put them away for another time. Some of them might die while they’re on the shelf, I don’t know. But I think I’m okay with that, and I think I can finally be awake enough now to stop missing the really great moments which, it turns out, are a lot closer to home than I let myself believe.

–Teri.

on comfort

2011-03-29T13:59:00.000-06:00

Last night I curled in my skin
Around you
And felt the long miles of memory
Stretched out behind us,
The bright ribboned highway of our passionate youth.

Your breath was soft,
Dressed like the universe,
And splendored into a thousand stars,
The galaxies of your dreaming in rhythm with God.

Each fiber of flesh,
Soft in the lull of sleep,
echoed faint with the catching of our vision--
The quiet smooth miracle of belonging.

--Teri.

all i never did

2011-03-07T17:33:00.000-07:00

September gave way to a winter far more bitter than I ever imagined it would be, tinged only by a small sweetness in knowing that a tiny autumn seed I planted may have germinated in some way.

I wrote back in September that I needed to find a way around the roadblock of my tongue, a cowardice lingering around my heart, almost impossible to overcome. I needed to tell my uncle, my childhood hero, how I loved him, and admired him, and was inspired by him. I wrote that I needed to do this, before all I couldn't tell him, became all I never did.

In this moment, I'm sitting at the deathbed of that same man, ticking off the hours as he loosens the grip on his body and prepares to cross the threshold into the Infinite. He's dying in front of me, 6 feet away from me, and all I couldn't say to him is becoming all I never did--right now, in this room.

I asked him to read my post about him when it was written, and today I'm praying that he did, that he somehow understood my love for him, and that he carries that knowledge in his heart as he readies for his departure.

Love has no expiration date, though opportunity often does.

--Teri.

where have all the athiests gone?

2011-02-09T20:31:00.000-07:00

I'm grappling with Death again, and it feels a little bit like he's winning at the moment.

I can look down at my hands and see death at work, the slow ebb of my youth leaving little lines and creases as it retreats. I can look in the mirror and see it in my eyes, a cynicism lingering there where optimism once was.

I worry about that sometimes.

So I'm putting it out to my friends, the ones who don't necessarily share my spirituality: What do you believe? And I'm having a hard time getting a response. I know I have plenty of friends and even some loved ones who are athiest, or at least agnostic, or existentialist, or Pagan, and I don't honestly know what you believe in terms of the human soul, of our permanence or transience, of what lies beyond, of what we're made of, spiritually-speaking. I know what I believe--the eternal nature of the soul, the permanent utopia where great ideas never go awry, the spark of the divine that lies within each of us.

Now what about the rest of you? I'm not asking for a debate, and I'm past the place in my life when I thought I knew it all. I don't want to change your mind or save your soul; I just want to know what you think.

--Teri.

good night

2011-01-14T22:45:00.001-07:00

I'm not filled with an abundance of flowery words or lofty ideas tonight; instead, I'm propped up in bed, having just updated my blog identity and given myself a bit of a cyber-facelift here, and I'm feeling rather comfortable. There's just a little chill in the bedroom air tonight, but under the deep brown comforter, my toes are warm against the peacefully resting legs of my husband, whose softish breathing is threatening to lull me into the realm of the sandman right along with him.

It's a good sort of night; the house has fallen silent, and the only movement lies in my fingertips and in the dreamings of my peaceful children down the hallway, tucked in their beds with their dearly loved blankets wrapped around each of them as though they were fine china plates wrapped carefully in their packing boxes.

I think I'll pack myself in for the night, as well, and wait for the movement of dreaming to carry me off, where maybe I'll find some flowery words hiding and waiting to get to my fingertips.

--Teri.

a note to our friends and loved ones

2010-12-25T00:28:00.002-07:00

Dearest Loved Ones,

We all start out these letters every year with that inevitable glance backwards over shoulders that have carried the burdens of the past 365 days, and we all wonder where that time went, now so much water under the bridge of memory. For us, the year has had a peculiar heft to it, and as we draw to the close of 2010, our shoulders still feel the gravity of some of those amazing memories.

We have gained and lost so much this year--March saw us birthing our sixth beautiful baby into the world, completing the circle of our family in a dramatic way, while June and September stole from us a beloved great-great-grandmother and great-grandfather. Autumn gave us the gift of a cherished new closeness to a brother and sister-in-law, while October marked the beginning of the grandest and riskiest adventure of our family's small history, when we moved out of our rented home in a search for the ultimate irony: the open road and a permanent home, all at the same time. Two months, two national borders, scores of national parks and landmarks, and seven states later, we're inching ever closer to that elusive dream of home, thoroughly worn by the excitement of all the fantastic places we've visited since we last left our door jamb in the last week of October. The next few days, crammed in just before the last day of this momentous year, should see us crossing a whole new door jamb, our 5 acres in the forest where we will, Lord willing, hang our hearts and our hats, and the hats of our children and our children's children and beyond.

This new place represents so much for our family; it is an old house where we can get our elbows greasy with remodeling and renovating; we will bring home our very first family dog, and we will have room for the boys to grow into the spectacular young men they are already becoming. It's a place for Bonnie's artistic skills to blossom, for us all to get our fingernails dirty and grow something, to maybe bring to fruition (literally and figuratively) our dream of having a sustainable mini-agriculture of our own, a not-so-urban homestead community to share with friends and family. It's a place to re-learn the precious skill of spreading our wings after so long being confined to small spaces not our own, a place to begin to repay all the oceans of hospitality that have been visited upon us by those dearest to us during our time of wandering. It's a place of roots. It's a place to finally come home to.

There has been a song running like a soundtrack in my mind for the past couple of months, since this journey started, really. It sums up so tidily all that we've experienced and what it means for our family, and I have played it many, many times during the dark parts of our journey when we've been reminded that adventures by necessity require peril, and disappointment, and sometimes failure thrown in with the excitement and awe and amazement. It's a song by Rob Thomas called Little Wonders, and the chorus still raises a lump in my throat: "Our lives are made in these small hours; these little wonders--these twists and turns of fate. Time falls away, but these small hours, these small hours still remain." There's another Rob Thomas song that always facetiously comes back to memory at those moments, too..."I'm not crazy, I'm just a little unwell, I know, right now you can't tell..." But maybe the most potent song of all running through the soundtrack of our family's conscious this past year is that ever-blowing spirit-wind that always brings change in ways we can never fully foresee and rarely understand. And while our shoulders have creaked under the weight of transformation from time to time, our feet have also gotten caught up in that irresistible dance, and we have felt lighter than ever in the middle of our great heaviness. I guess we've found our ultimate irony in more ways than one.

We want to thank each of you who have extended yourselves to care for our family in the middle of the crazy--you have fed us, or sheltered us, or given us encouragement, or been a friend to us, and we deeply love you and are so, so grateful. There is no way, really, that we can repay the love and grace we've been extended, so we try to content ourselves on the wise words of the apostle Paul, who penned, "Pay your debts as they come due. However, one debt you can never finish paying is the debt of love that you owe each other."

And we owe you big-time. Merry Christmas!

--The Bozeman Family
Christopher, Teri, Bonnie, Ben, Isaac, Gabriel, Elisha, & Asa.

empty underneath

2010-12-07T11:17:00.001-07:00

I'm tired.

I'm tired of bing puked on by the Spirit-Of-Christmas-Eternal.

Tired of having exactly 7.5 minutes to revel in the contrived fuzzy feelings of Thanksgiving before it's time to rush headlong into the next holiday.

Tired of the pressure to find-the-perfect-gift because that's somehow a measure of my love for the people in my life.

Tired of MeMeMeMeMeMe.

Tired of stocking stuffers and Black Friday and 3-story yard ornaments and the talking box in the living room telling me that everyone is happy and joyful and all robed in crimson ya-yas.

My family checked out of the Christmas crazies years ago, and every year, as the beehive of humanity lights up ever brighter with the frenzy of the season, I am more and more glad we did it. But I've been relatively quiet about it until now, and while I know that a lot of you will not be interested to hear what I have to say, somebody out there needs to be speaking out about what I saw when I began to take a peek behind the glittered veil of Christmastide.

Okay, so here's the challenge. Every scrap of advertising we all see from 2 months before Thanksgiving until the day after New Year's tells us all about the joy of the Christmas season, about how happy we all are while buying stuff and coveting stuff and making our Christmas lists and hosting parties and shopping shopping shopping. Are we really that happy? Is this really what it's all about this season? So think about these things the next time you're out:

*At the grocery store, all those people shopping for holiday foods for parties and gatherings...count how many people you see that look happy. How many smile? How many are in good moods? Are you?

*In the parking lot, how many people are giving up their front-row parking spots for little old ladies? How many people are smiling? How many people aren't in a mad rush? How many are enjoying the weather?

*At the department store, how polite is everyone? How polite are you? Are you feeling the love here?

*At the post office, how many people are happy and chatty while standing in line? How many look at you and smile?

Okay, so for some perspective.

*At the grocery store, how many people are scowling? In a mad rush? Frustrated with and yelling at the kids on whom they'll be lavishing hundreds of dollars of gifts in just a few days?

*In the parking lot, how happy does the Sally Army bell-ringer look as 3/4 of the people pass by without giving a donation? How many people are cutting each other off and cutting in for the best parking spot? How many people leave their baskets for someone else to deal with?

*In the department store, how many people are dragging their precious children along, exhausted and stressed to the hilt, to buy the *perfect gift* for someone else? How many cashiers look bored stiff and utterly apathetic?

*At the post office, how many people are standing, impatient and bored at the same time, overladen with gaudy packages to send off to people who will hate what they recieve and look for the first chance to take them back to the store?

*Finally, at home. How much time have you spent looking for that perfect gift? How much money did you spend, and did you even have it to spend, and if you did, was it really worth it? Will your family love you more because you bought them some pretty thing? Is that the best measure of your love?

We spend a lot of energy on this holiday. We spend a lot of time rationalizing that it's the season of joy and of giving and of spending time together.

How much of that joy would be left if the Christmas tree was empty underneath?

--Teri.

on the razor's edge

2010-09-24T00:38:00.001-06:00

I wrote yesterday: "I cut my toes walking the razor's edge between faith and wisdom." That thought has come back to me over and over in the past twenty-four hours, and I think maybe it's because that's what really defines my faith journey: a walk along the razor's edge.

Or maybe it's a walk along the river's edge.

In trying to make tangible this idea, a lyric from one of Dan Fogelberg's lesser-known songs keeps playing in my mind: "Lo que es de Dios? Lo que es de mio? Lo que es del rio?", which translates as, "What is God's? What is mine? What is the river's?"

When we are faced with walking into the Jordan, it's an all-or-nothing proposition. Either we stand there on the bank and watch our dreams and callings eddying and swirling and finally dissipating away, or we jump feet-first into the current, never looking back or considering all the shades of what-if that might have been suspended there in the air, displaced forever by the motion of our jumping.

But that finite moment, hanging in mid-air, is where I seem to be so often stuck. The words of another folk singer, Cheryl Wheeler, begin faintly to wend their way into my conscious: "And is it wise or lazy, holding tight to what you know? And is it brave or crazy, searching...?" I'm always searching that space, sniffing the air, calling out the subtle shades and examining them one by one, over and over, until I barely see the river at all. All that possibility, all that glorious, frightening, pregnant what-if, is always pushing me forward, holding me back, mesmerizing me with its always changing form reflected in the brilliant swirling dreamings of the river.

I've always said, "If you're going to dream, dream big." I recently revised that to say, "Dreaming is scary and dangerous, so if you're going to dream, dream big." I think I'm a part of a Bigger Dream, and I think I'm supposed to jump. But my toes are bleeding again because the river's edge just became the razor's edge, and I don't know how my big, scary, beautiful dream, alive with all the jubilant power of faith, squares with wisdom. But then rivers never were very square, were they? Only razors offer that kind of hard-edged certainty, and we bleed our frustration when we try too hard to walk that line.

It's almost a dream in itself, feeling my feet lifting lightly off of that painful edge and arching with sudden certainty, straining towards the current for everything they're worth. I suppose there's no going back now. All the what-ifs are disappearing behind me and I am discovering that I am de Dios, and de mio, and del rio, all at once.

--Teri.

all we couldn't speak

2010-09-09T00:14:00.000-06:00

I went "back home" last weekend for the funeral of my (step)grandfather, and wasn't surprised to see all the long-lost family members trickling through the doorway and standing in little huddles throughout my grandma's house. There were aunts and uncles and cousins and neices and nephews, brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers, and we all knew each other.

Sort of.

What surprised me was that the bottle-neck didn't start at the front door, even as all those people shuffled their way past the tight little entryway; it started on our tongues. I stood before two uncles of mine, brothers, whom I hadn't seen in a couple of years and hadn't spent appreciable time with, if ever, since my childhood. One I had memories with, one I didn't, but a casual observer would have thought that we were all strangers, searching for some spark with which to light the way of our dimly familiar relationships. That spark just didn't come in time, for most of us.

We stood there, drenched in the enormity of a loss that no one can really ever comprehend, grown by years of experience, worn by grief and triumph, having been transformed in our own ways by the events of our smallish lifetimes.

You'd think we'd have a thing or two to say about that.

But no. Even when we meet people we think about all the time, people who helped shape our view of the world, people who knew us well in our younger days, we fall silent and grope spastically for some meaningful thing to say. That hard eggshell doesn't even begin to crack with talk of the weather, or of the kids, or of our doing-fine-and-keeping-busyness. All of our career-talk and pleasantries bounce right off, and when the clock has ticked away on that small, precious hour of opportunity before we pass out of each other's lives again for God-knows-how-long-or-maybe-forever, all those words that couldn't come out stay bottled up, more potent and passionate and concentrated than ever before. That's how it is with me, at least.

So I couldn't look my uncle in the eye, or even shuffle my feet and cast a bashful downward glance, and let him know that I'm finding my voice as an artist, and that there were a few years when I was a child that his artist's voice made me aware that I might have one, too. I couldn't tell him that my oldest son might someday play the guitar like him, or that I cried the day that Dan Fogelberg died because I remembered my uncle singing "The Long Way" with my mother when I was barely old enough to understand the words, much less the meanings. I couldn't tell him that I saw the grief of grandpa Euel's death etched on his suddenly-serious face and that I understood the bond I saw there. I couldn't. I wish I could have. And I wish I could have told him that he's always held a special space in my heart where I keep my collection of heroes from over the years, all the formative faces, calloused hands and voices of wisdom that have helped me along the way.

I think I'm going to have to find a way to unstop that bottle-neck next time, at least slowly, before the chance is gone and all I couldn't speak becomes all I never did.

--Teri.

11 years today

2010-07-18T10:22:00.001-06:00

My son Ben asked me a few days ago about the worst physical pain I'd ever experienced. Of course, the first thing to my mind was his birth, where my epidural failed to kick in and relieve the pitocin-induced contractions that racked my body for hours.

But then I thought twice. It wasn't the labor or birth itself that was so excruciating, but the pain from the(mis)management afterwards that made me want to die, and then almost granted my wish.

Ben was born at 4:29 in the a.m., 9 lbs. 10 oz. of red, grunting, gorgeous boy. I hadn't anticipated having to do this birth with no pain medication, and I certainly wasn't prepared for the rush of endorphins that flooded my body and my heart as I held him, awash in love hormones. That sensation was so powerful that I didn't notice at first when the nurses started becoming alarmed at the amount of blood I was losing.

But I began to be more aware of the tumult brewing when they began to take turns palpating my uterus to get it to contract and stop the bleeding, and when each successive palpation was growing harder and harder until I, who never made waves back in those days, was gripping the bed rails, crying out and begging them to stop. If I could ever imagine what violent rape felt like, that was my moment. Or maybe I should say those were my hours. Because this went on, and on, and on, for what felt like a small epoch. My husband was in and out, visiting Ben in the nursery, and I needed him like I'd never needed him before or since. I don't think he was fully aware of the growing gravity in the room, and maybe I wasn't either.

The hours stretched on until the sun out my hospital room window was high in the sky, empty syringes of coagulant were safe in their little red biohazard box, and I lacked the strength to speak above a whisper. Seven and one-half hours had passed and I had lost nearly 2 units of blood, an amount I would look back on later and shudder at the thought of, when finally it was decided to take me into emergency exploratory surgery to find out what was going on. I maybe didn't realize the seriousness of my situation, despite my growing fear, until my father-in-law gathered my husband, still-baby daughter, mother-in-law, and brother around my bed to pray. My father-in-law is a strong, tender man, and I didn't expect his words to falter and tears to fall as he pleaded with God for my safety. Something in my head finally clicked and I realized, though weakly, that I could be dying. I think I was dying.

When I was wheeled down the hall and through the doors that meant my husband could no longer accompany me, I realized a split second too late that I hadn't told him goodbye, and this terrified me. What if I never came back? I hadn't said I loved him one last time. I hadn't kissed our daughter goodbye. I hadn't kissed our new son goodbye. I called after him, but my weak, whispering voice trailed off into nothing, swallowed even by the small sounds of wheels and feet on linoleum. I was terrified, and drifted off shortly afterwards into the anasthesia mask, with that one last image burned into my brain.

I woke, vaguely aware that I was alive, that the pain was gone, and with a heart flooded with gratitude at the surgeon who had discovered and repaired my torn cervix. My physical recovery felt so slow, with fever, blood transfusions, and a baby who never knew the peace of a non-emergent birth. I went home a few days later, completely unaware that a seed planted in that hospital bed as I lay bleeding would germinate just a couple of years later and blossom into life-change, awareness, and a determination never to birth in a hospital again.

Four home births later, I can be grateful for that experience. I can be grateful at my own fear, at my cowardice during parts of that ordeal, at my total lack of commitment to my body and even to the precious life that came into the world amidst such tumult. I think the reparative work is still being done, but today, we celebrate. We celebrate Ben's 11th birthday, we celebrate how he's beginning to reach upward into manhood, we celebrate how far he has come in his life.

But in a secret corner of my heart, I celebrate something different. I celebrate my own birth on that day, when a woman emerged from the heart of a girl, having touched reality for the very first time, bearing that scar forever but also gaining a world of strength because of it.

--Teri.

thoughts in the deep of night

2010-05-18T00:46:00.001-06:00

I've arrived here somehow, still oddly awake at an obscene hour and creeping up to the edges of thoughts that are too sleepy in the daytime to make themselves known. It's the time of night when the world finally gets surreal enough for my head to speak up and remind me that the goings-on up there involve more than the mechanics of my day-to-dayness, that there is a deep, quietly rippling moonlit pool there and a small me sitting at the edge, wanting to dive in and find out what's at the bottom.

Or maybe it's not really what lies at the bottom of that pool that draws me at all, but the sensation of swimming through it, the waters flowing through body and soul, undulating with the outward-moving memory of that first contact below the surface. Maybe it's the process, the impossible-to-describe feeling of getting back in touch with that part of my mind that needs the awareness of something beyond get-up-and-work-and-cook-and-breathe-and-teach-and-sleep, something warm with the aqueous promise of higher purpose and deeper meaning.

It's been weeks since my smaller self has sat at the brim of the moonlit pool in my mind, and it feels good tonight just to soak up the silence and dip my toes in again, swirling them around in introspection and wondering....
--Teri.

elisha's life on the run

2010-03-23T19:10:00.001-06:00

So I lost my kid yesterday. Oh, and I'm due to give birth this week. He's not quite 2 and somehow escaped my notice for, ohh, about 4 minutes while we were at a friend's new apartment with another friend and all of our children, 11 in all, 3 of which are precisely Elisha's size. He trucked his little self down the stairs, out the door, and down the street; most of that time we were frantically looking for him around the apartment, and then spread out towards the great mortifying outdoors. After about 45 seconds, we saw a lady down the street crouching down and it ocurred to us that maybe she had Elisha, so I sent Ben down the street to check while I waddled with all my might after him. Sure enough, this kind lady had intercepted my mischievous toddler in the middle of the road, heading towards God-knows-where, and her first impulse (instead of looking around to see 8 children and a herniated woman running around like maniacs) was to call the police.

Nice.

So now I had to talk to the police, tell them my name, why my child got away from me and, dread of dreads, my location. They sent a car around to scope out the situation, and the lady-cop who came in began asking me the probably-usual gauntlet of questions, like how he got out, how it was I didn't manage to notice this, et cetera, et cetera. What she said and what I heard were, naturally, two different things entirely, so my rough translation would go something like:
"Are you an imbecile? Can you not keep up with a 2-year-old?"
"I should probably haul you in now for child neglect."
"What, your children are running wild through the streets and you're PREGNANT again?!?"

After this, she left, and I searched high and low for some duct tape. Unable to find any, I merely became incredibly irritable for the remainder of the afternoon, questioning my basic competency not only as a mother but as a human being and a citizen of Earth, and suddenly craving something very, very sweet to take away the bitter taste of my run-in with the law.

--Teri.

under and over: the cycle of motivation and commitment in my third trimester.

2010-01-25T10:57:00.002-07:00

I really ought to be educating my children right now, but their bedroom floor is covered in biscuit crumbs and thousands of partially-sorted legos, and Elisha is trapped in his high chair in the middle of it all with a runny nose and sticky fingers...really, would you want to interfere with that kind of childhood utopia? Oh, and Gabe is bleeding from the knee.

I woke up with a sore throat this morning and so slept in for a bit and let the children do their own thing for awhile, and the resulting, uhm, harmony? is just a little more than I think I can tackle for the moment. So I'm escaping for a bit and writing down some random things for no particular reason. Isn't it good to know that these five precious lives are in such capable, responsible hands this morning?

Anyway, we have just about 8 weeks left of what is looking like our very last pregnancy. I imagine I'll always have conflicting feelings about ceasing to be a baby mill, but I've talked through it with my psychologically-astute husband and we've determined that 1)we're creatures of habit and have been in the baby-making business for so long that it's just going to take some adjusting to changing our pattern, 2) we're really good at this job (especially this morning, obviously!) and it's hard to mess with a good thing, like Oprah canceling her show after all this time, and 3) having kids has given us a false feeling of eternal youth, and making this our last kid is a stark admission that we're not spring chickens anymore. It's a lot to take in all at once, particularly with the wash of maternal hormones I've been high on for the last 11 years.

On the other hand, there are some strong motivations for not having any more kids, things like imagining having to spend our days in front of tv cameras on a reality show, the fear of being mistakenly called 'Mrs. Duggar' in the grocery store, and actually having been called a 'brood mare' in public at full volume. neigh. sigh. Oh, and the strongest motivator of all, of course, is the horrifying prospect of having to drive a white 10-passenger van (because white is the only color they come in, you know) for the next decade. That single thought is enough for me to line up 10 interviews with urologists for my husband this week! At least with six kids we can still cram ourselves into a Toyota Sienna, try not to breathe or fart on one another, and get ourselves from point A to point B legally.

So maybe it's denial, and maybe it's just my nature, but I've managed to completely over-commit myself for the next 8 weeks. None of this sitting-around-and-nesting-with-my-unborn-child business for me! Nope, before this is all said and done, I've managed to schedule:
*teaching a weekly childbirth education class for my kids plus 3 others
*hosting a weekly marriage class in our home every Wednesday night until Asa is at least a month old
*making a wedding cake for 200 people--in Pueblo
*helping my husband get ready to officiate that same wedding
*making Bonnie her annual dress for the father/daughter dance
*finishing the baby's quilt
*helping my local doula association with marketing materials and other such interestingness
*making a white chocolate castle for this year's chocolate contest (because I'm not going to let a little thing like 8 months of pregnant belly keep me from getting my dang ribbon this year!)
*Attending a post-secondary trauma workshop for birth professionals (hey, this could come in handy with all the post-secondary trauma I'm putting myself through with all the other stuff I have to do!)
*Oh, and somewhere in there, I expect to go into labor at just the wrong moment and have 10 or 11 pounds of baby to aid me in my adventures.

What is wrong with me?! And the worst part of it might be the fact that I just want to sit on the couch and bore my friends and relatives with incessant yammering on about all this! Well, the upshot, I guess, is that I've managed to inhale a few times now and might can trudge upstairs now and deal with what lies in the kids' bedroom.

Blood and crumbs, here I come!

--Teri.

on fear.

2010-01-19T22:15:00.002-07:00

"...yeah, but what is it, really, that's keeping me
From living a life that's true?
When the worries speak louder than wisdom,
It drowns out all the answers I knew.
So I'm tossed on the waves of that surface;
Still, the mystery's dark and deep,
With a much more frightening stillness...
Underneath."
--David Wilcox, Underneath

I've been ruminating again on the purposes of pain and fear in our souls, what roles they play and how to master them. I came to the conclusion years ago as I prepared to give birth to my fourth child that pain has a powerful effect on us when we let it; it makes us immeasurably stronger when faced with all of our courage, or it breaks us down and shows us how weak we can be when it's not. It has been a powerful lesson for me and remains incredibly important for me, especially as I prepare to birth my sixth child.

But what of fear?

It seems that fear is a different animal entirely, more elusive, more difficult to control, and more threatening, whether real or imagined. It takes bravery to stare down pain, but it takes something different, I think, to master fear.

I've always been intrigued by the apostle John's take on the subject: "Perfect love banishes fear".

Perfect love.

Banishes!

Fear.

It's a lot to take in, if we're honest. But if we look deep into the underneath, what it is that ultimately motivates us to get past the crippling fear we experience? When all we have is an incomplete equation and we're forced to find the answer or to fail, is it not a deeper love that rises to cast out that fear?

So then the question becomes personal: how do I develop that kind of love? I suppose it's a discipline of the heart and of the mind, one that chooses to say,
"I'm afraid for the people of Haiti...but I love them more and so will not do nothing."

"I'm scared to take this huge, life-altering step and I don't know what lies on the other side, but I love more than I fear, and so I will not be paralyzed."

"Life can be dangerous and painful and even cut short, but to live is to love, and so I will live fully."

And what a strange, beautiful paradox that love leads us to such vulnerability that we can be so affected by fear, and yet is so much stronger than the fear when we cultivate it and take the risk to find out if our love is really strong enough to banish the fear, underneath.

--Teri.

my funny micro-date

2010-01-11T10:44:00.000-07:00

About a mile from our house is a Pei Wei restaurant, and Christopher and I often take little dates there, leaving the kids at home for a bit so we can spend a little time together. The food is always good and hot, the floor is red, and you can eat as many fortune cookies as you want--and how sweet is that?

On Saturday, we escaped once again for our little micro-date at Pei Wei, and found it to be a super-busy afternoon, so we were scrunched in between 2 other couples at narrow tables along the back wall. No big deal. We had some things we needed to talk about, but nothing so heavy that it needed to be secretive, so we didn't mind it.

The two ladies to my left were talking about how much they loved Pei Wei, when suddenly one of them turned to me and said, "Do you two just LOVE this place?" We answered that yeah, we loved it, because it was so yummy but also close to home, etc etc. It came out that we had 5 kids at home, and then her eyes got wide as they came to rest on my rounded belly; she blurted out jocularly, "You're PREGANANT AGAIN?!?" At that point, half the restaurant turned completely around and stared at me. I waved, Miss America-style, and acknowledged that yes, we're pregnant again.

With the other diners still looking on, this flamboyant lady turned to Christopher now and said, still in an incredulously loud voice, "You IMPLANTED your SPERM in her SIX TIMES?!?" "You TURNED her into a BROOD MARE?!?" Christopher laughed and said something like, "Yup!" in a tone that landed somewhere between embarrassment and pride (mostly pride, as I later found out; when I asked him if he was horrified by that, he said, "Nope, with 6 kids, it's a little hard to deny!")

We went on to have a really fun and enlightening conversation with these two ladies and I even shared my shrimp with her. We talked about how she hated her one childbirth experience, how she hated mothering, how she wondered if we had fun with that many kids and whether I ever cry.

In the end, we didn't mind our date being interrupted or having the whole restaurant know that my husband is a stud (uhh, literally?!); it was a fun encounter and an unexpected twist to our day.

--Teri.

hearts aflame

2010-01-07T10:23:00.001-07:00

I accidently set fire to my children yesterday.

It was really a school day like most others, only I was more grumpy than usual (woe to the children!) and just going through the motions of teaching. On days such as these, I generally sit loftily and moodily in my teacher's chair, coldly barking commands from afar and expecting an atmosphere of silence and contemplation.

What I usually get instead is a reflection of my own inner thoughts: broody, sulky, disinterested kids. Oh, the lessons we teach.

So when the fire broke out yesterday, my first impulse was to extinguish it. It started quietly enough, with an obligatory science lesson about the ocean. Then it turned imperceptibly toward benthos, and a faint flicker was seen. Before I knew what was happening, four children with tongues of fire leaping in their little heads were crowded around a computer screen, hungrily researching the most nefarious-looking bottom sea dwellers, yard stick in hand, ready to measure every specimen for maximum impact.

Somewhere in the back of my persnickety mind, thoughts of moving on to a math lesson loosened their grip and began to fade away, finally and reluctantly surrendering themselves to the flames, and I was able to let the rest of my school day be consumed entirely, a warm glow replacing the coldness of my bad attitude.

Thank God for small miracles.

--Teri.

holy days

2009-12-21T09:58:00.001-07:00

We’ve spent much of the past year “chasing after the fleeting winds of youth, through forests of indecision”, as I wrote long ago in high school, way before I actually knew what that meant. It turns out there’s great fun to be had in trying to catch certain moments as they fly past, all giggling and breathless and fresh from the well-springs of young hearts alive with discovery; but then the task gets more difficult: trying to capture them for keeps, to preserve them as vibrant and bright and meaningful—that’s the real trick, isn’t it? And yet that’s where we manage to find some of our highest purpose, while wading through the messiness of life, of new jobs and new babies and new challenges that tempt us to become overwhelmed in the sheer inconstancy of it all.

And 2009 has certainly proven to be that kind of year: we’ve made major life decisions and changes, career shifts, and discovered that our passel of 5 children evidently was not complete, and now we expect our sixth sometime in late March of 2010. The children have grown, and changed, and are all finding ways to make their marks on the world already, even as we—as their parents—work to find ways to make our marks on their hearts, through the sacred days that are masked in the mundane.
We had the delight this year of trekking up to Yellowstone, one of the most fascinating and beautiful geological wonders on the entire planet. We were struck by the changing, moving nature of the earth in that place, how some places within the park can grow by several feet a year, while others recede, a terrestrial dance of balance. This is no sterile, stagnant monument for the ages; instead, it is the very picture of creative forces at work, forging their paths up through what, at first glance, seems to be impenetrable rock. The result is often chaotic and sometimes a little scary, but always beautiful and irresistibly thrilling.

We’ve found a great many parallels between our experiences in Yellowstone and those within our network of family and friends this year; the nature of our relationships is always changing—growing or receding or just changing form—and what we wind up with is always beautiful in ways we couldn’t have imagined. Late nights at the coffee house with a few good friends, an impromptu dinner with someone we just met, game night with cousins up in the mountains of Montana, even a frightening evening in an urgent care waiting room with the children huddled about; all of these experiences, though often unplanned, have been little expressions of a great Love bubbling below the surface of our lives, rising to break that surface and creating something surprising and Beautiful. These are the moments that we treasure and chase after, trying to capture them, like snapshots, for the scrapbooks of our hearts. And we thank God—and you, our precious friends and family—for the chance to experience the greatness of the small moments we’ve shared with you throughout the year. It is our prayer that we learn to let more of those moments happen with each of you, to look past the façade of our mundane everydayness and reach out for the Creative and the Beautiful, wanting and waiting to happen.

We pray you a coming year of fullness and grace and vision to take hold of what is truly important in the world, beyond dirty dishes and money and commitments and schedules, and all that threatens to cloud the sight, and into the real joy of capturing the great moments for all that they’re worth.

a hard lesson in gratitude

2009-11-20T11:46:00.001-07:00

We went in Tuesday to see our midwife and find out the sex of Baby #6; we were, well, shocked to find out that we're having yet another boy, especially after Bonnie and I took such delight in picking out all that pink quilt fabric and the pieces were already coming together. Bonnie began to cry during the ultrasound as soon as Jessica announced that he's a boy, and I've spent the remainder of the week in a state of mild befuddlement over what the cosmic plan is for my raising half the planet's testosterone in my own house. I told Bonnie that evening that, while I'm sad we don't get our little girl we've been waiting for, I can't help but be thankful for the gorgeous toes and fingers and ribs we see moving around on the ultrasound screen, obvious signs of a healthy, happy baby; so many people don't get healthy, whole babies. And yet, despite my preaching that perspective, I've felt a growing jealousy of every little girl I've seen all week, and I've felt a little resentful that we weren't getting our girl. We're 22 weeks along, by the way.

Enter the story of Shauna, my classmate from high school, who is 2 weeks behind me in her pregnancy. She was going in yesterday to find out the sex of her baby; I jokingly wrote on her Facebook page yesterday, "If you end up with a girl, wanna trade? I have 5 healthy boys to choose from!"

I'm glad Facebook has a delete button.

I confess that I stewed a little bit all afternoon yesterday, sure that Shauna would come home from her appointment and post to Facebook that she was having a girl, and being preemptively envious of her good fortune. But the afternoon waned on, and no word came. Then one of her sisters posted something alarming about praying for her sister, and then her other sister posted something similar. By this morning, the story was out that Shauna found out yesterday that she was having twin boys, and that she was in labor. There was twin-to-twin transfusion happening, and the excess fluid caused by this put her into labor; she was fully dilated by the time she felt a contraction. The boys, Luke and Josh, lived for 15 minutes last night, and then slipped away.

My sweet little healthy boy is kicking away in my belly as I type, and I have never been more grateful, or more shamed.

--Teri.

i cry at books.

2009-11-19T12:34:00.003-07:00

There's a long-standing tradition in my family of reading books aloud to each other; usually I'm the reader, and the rest of the family sits in wrapt attention while we live out in our collective mind the perils and adventures of real and imagined heroes and villains. Our latest literary escapade was Timothy Egan's newest work, The Big Burn. It's about the largest forest fire to ever sweep the United States which, on the surface, may not sound like the best topic for an entire book. But wrap that up with the personal stories of the men who fought it and survived or perished in the firestorm and the political underpinnings of the day, and you have an insanely nail-biting tale that had everyone from my five-year-old to a family friend begging for an excuse to have a chapter read to them. Whenever we had to pile into the van for an outing, the first question, before seatbelts, was, "Do you have the book?"

I possess no great skill in oral reading, but there's always something about having a story read aloud that people never outgrow. We've had weekend reading parties for years whenever the opportunity presented itself, usually looking something like what happens when a college frat house and a child's slumber party collide in our living room, big strapping guys draped over all the furniture next to kids-of-all-ages, lasting late into the night until everyone has lost the struggle to hold onto the last threads of consciousness and one more paragraph of whatever great story we're engaged in.

I'm never quite sure whether it's this unique synergy of generations of friends and family all tangled up in some exotic tale, or whether it's the story itself, but I often find myself struggling to continue on through the last few pages without a lump rising in my throat and warm tears obscuring the words on the last hallowed pages. By the final chapter of The Big Burn, I was a heap, almost sobbing while listening (my voice was out and Christopher had to finish off the last few pages for me) to the last breaths of lives that we'd become so enamored of during the past few weeks. My oldest son was surprised that tears were freely flowing down my cheeks, and he asked me why I was crying. What could I say? When it came down to trying to put that emotion into actual words, I came up short. What came to mind was, "How can I not?" I become so invested in the humble heroes of our epic tales, their struggles, victories, and losses, and the whole experience of reaching into a piece of literature and finding myself tugged by the hand from the other end, that it seems like a natural response in parting to shed a few tears and not want to say goodbye.

Maybe my son understands better than I do that it's never really a parting after all, but that the stories become a part of us as much as we become a part of them, and that they take up residence in our souls and color our view of the world, helping us become the heroes of our own stories.
--Teri.

duggaresque...part deux

2009-11-10T07:15:00.005-07:00

I'm always a little nervous when I find those rosy places in the blogosphere where nothing is ever messy and the world is just dang skippy all the time, and lest anyone get the wrong impression from my last post that my artsy little sweet-spot of a home is all peaches and smiles, I submit to you Duggaresque...Part Deux.

Have you ever visited a real art museum? Well, yeah, me neither, but let's pretend for a minute. The halls are lined with inspiring works of imagination from some of the great minds in the craft over the centuries. Statues stand, loftily and perfectly, somehow above the sometimes-chaotic crowd bustling around below. There are no boogers here. And no wet paint.

Okay, now then, for a bit of perspective, have you ever visited a children's museum? You go over to the super-trendy 'art station' to have the kids create something, only to find that some hungry little "artist" has already made off with the tips of every single broad-tipped marker in the building, probably having eaten them and chased them down with glue or tempera paint, and obviously the green glitter, which also seems to be completely empty. And what's this? Oh, how nice--fingerpaint in puddles on the floor, and now on your shoe, and somehow up your pant leg, and suddenly all over your hands and the diaper bag and the baby and your hair. Nice.

Maybe the scupture station is a little more well-organized, so you make tracks (literally--remember the paint on your shoe?) over in that direction, only to find that the glue-glutting kid from the first station found out the hard way that those items don't sit so well in the stomach and somehow the cleanup crew has missed his not-so-little technicolor masterpiece now oozing into the carpet, you know, for posterity to enjoy, since it's full of glue (ooh, and that pretty green glitter!) and rapidly becoming one with the floor. Maybe they'll give it a name and make it one of the permanent exhibits, if the administration hasn't set aside funds for new carpet in this sort of event. But we were talking sculpture, weren't we? Ahhhh, modeling clay. Since the manufactureres of this staple of childhood creativity haven't yet discovered a way of keeping the colors from 1)bleeding 2)mixing or 3)smearing all over every surface they touch, at least without making the whole compound so toxic that you need a decontamination shower after opening the package, you try your best to interest the kids in the gummy-lump of poop-brown clayglomerate before you. Somehow, the best you or they can manage to come up with resembles strongly a zoo display of wild animal scat (those little pellets are from African pygmy deer; that big lump? Supposed to be a giraffe, but doesn't that look just like Siberian wolf scat after its latest meal of boneless mouse wings?)

I think of the Duggar's little television-world home in kind of the same way as that art museum: we don't see the mess, only the masterpiece. Nevermind that Van Gogh got so frustrated that he whacked off his own ear (I'm sure Michelle Duggar never has those kinds of days); and you think that Jackson Pollack started out by slinging paint at his canvas? Anyone care to guess what happened if the great sculptors of antiquity suddenly found themselves with a one-armed Venus because of one wrong chisel blow? They'd stick it back on with wax mixed with some rock dust, pack it up quick and ship it away to the buyer, and pray that a sunny day didn't come along too soon! Isn't that a bit like the TLC show, where the snotty noses and puddles of vomit are somehow edited out, and we get to watch a polished, perfect family moving in unison and having-a-very-nice-day-every-day-of-the-week?

My house, on the other hand, is more like the children's museum on most days--we have a lot of fun and we make a lot of mess. Oh, sure, there are some great works of art here, but they're works in progress, and sometimes the chisel hits a little too hard, or sometimes not hard enough, and sometimes we have to pray that the wax will hold. I may not be tempted to cut my ears off, but you can bet that sometimes I want to pull my hair out! And sometimes I've been found guilty of slinging the paint like Pollack and leaving the world to wonder, "What was she thinking??" And on some days, the best I can manage to create feels and looks an aweful lot like a pile of crap.

But there are days, when I take a peek past the hallowed doors of the future imagined, into the day when my dripping, cracking, smearing works-of-art are finally completed, when I have lovingly applied the last brush strokes, smoothed the last surface on the alabaster man, carved my name into the heart of each one, and see a moment when I have offered up my best works to the world, ready to take their places in the hall of great masterpieces. No one will remember the children's museum days when we struggled to make sense of anything, when we all wondered how this art project would turn out, when we wanted to sling paint all over our hard work, and when tears and goobers were all part of the process.

On that day I'll stroll past in silence, admiring the beauty, and make one last track of fresh fingerpaint footprints down the hallway on my way past.

--Teri.

duggaresque

2009-11-01T19:18:00.005-07:00

As my belly begins to be a little more conspicuous lately as our sixth child gains a sizable standing (literally!) in our family , I'm getting more and more comments from mostly-well-intentioned people comparing our family to the (in)famous Duggar family of TLC renown. Somehow, now that we're standing on the lofty edge of 6 children, everyone we know (and most that we don't!) are tempted to throw a rope across that vast divide that separates our 6 children from the Duggar family's 19, and wait for us on the other side.

Like we're physically capable of raising 19 children without literally, figuratively, and in every other sense dropping dead (I'm flattered by the notion, really).

The critics of the Duggar family's jackpot of offspring complain that the family is too big, too white, too Christian, too organized, too delegated, too mid-western...the list goes on. There seems to be a never-ending stream of criticisms against a family who has chosen to go counter-culture and have a lot of children, receiving them as gifts, nondiscriminately and in their own time. And that pretty much scares the crap out of me.

We've decided to go counter-culture, too. Our kids don't mix with a ton of other children, we homeschool, we don't own a television, the kids have a lot of responsibility for their ages. We have about three times the culturally accepted number of children, and people are afraid we're not quitting. Some people wring their hands and worry that we're environmentally irresponsible, that we're rabidly over-populating the planet almost singlehandedly, that we're raising an army of homogenized, milky-white prosumers with a cultural appreciation for grilled-cheese-and-that's-about-it. They worry that maybe we don't recycle enough, that the kids will all grow up Republican, that they'll hate the arts and freak out when they hit sunlight.

But do I have to apologize now for being white, Christian, or mid-western? Do I have to apologize that I consider myself an artist's tool in the hands of the Great Artist, and that I consider my children to be masterpieces that I helped create? Last time I checked, my lily-whiteness wasn't on the menu of life-choices I was given, so I can't really back-pedal on that one. The mid-western thing might can be remedied, but still not really a reason to be apologetic. And as for my Christianity, while sometimes an embarrassment because of the knuckle-heads in our ranks (I include myself in this epithet at various times), I can't really apologize for that, either. Or won't, anyway.

So that leaves the kids. All. These. Kids. And I wouldn't dream of apologizing for these little jewels, their amazing uniqueness, the obviousness of their potential impact on a hurting world. One scathing commentary on the Duggar's children called the latest addition to the family a "mewling sewer rat". Really. Really?? Has that nay-sayer never held a little 'mewling rat' in his arms and fell in love in the most irrational and profound way possible? Has he never looked into the face of a little one and seen the future, fresh and undefiled? How could I possibly apologize for helping to raise my very own passel of little tomorrows? Heck, they may all grow up Republican, and we may not recycle enough, and there's at least one of my brood who has good reason to freak out when he hits sunlight (oh, the woeful whiteness!), but not only will these kids love the arts, they are the arts--little kinetic masterpieces in a world in need of colorful motion. I could no more apologize for my children than Michaelangelo could have apologized for the statue of David.

But we will try to recycle more.

--Teri.

soup du jour, a la teri.

2009-10-30T15:26:00.004-06:00

This may be the best soup I have ever created, and while my children say I should hoard the recipe as some kind of clandestine concoction, I'm sharing it, and I think you'll love me for it. Keep in mind that all amounts and processes are approximate, as I was all about the flow-of-gastronomical-consciousness on this one.

Sweet Potato Chowder with Bacon and Leeks

3 Tbsp. vegetable oil
1/2 lb. bacon, chopped
1 leek, sliced fairly thinly (1/4"ish)
1/4 c. white cooking wine
4-5 lg. sweet potatoes or yams
2-3 c. water
4 c. milk (whole milk is, like, yummy)
1 pt. heavy whipping cream
flour, mixed in water, to thicken (about 1/4-1/2 c. of flour)
salt & fresh ground pepper to taste
1/4 tsp fresh ground nutmeg
1 bunch green onions, chopped (or sliced, however you look at it)
1/4-1/2 c. tequila
1/2-1 c. romano cheese, grated

Okay, so you saute your bacon and leeks in the vegetable oil in a decently-sized soup pot, and throw in some white cooking wine. Cook over fairly med-highish heat until the yummy caramelly thing starts happening, then remove everything and throw it in a bowl for later.

Cube up your sweet potatoes, add that and the water back into the pot, and cook on high until the sweet potatoes start to be tender; add the milk and whipping cream, and bring it back to a simmer, then add in the flour/water mixture, salt and pepper and nutmeg. When that all starts to thicken up and bubble oh-so-deliciously, toss back in your bacon-n-leeks mixture and the green onions, and then throw in some tequila and let the alcohol cook off. Add the romano cheese, give it all one last good stir, and throw in some more tequila just for good measure. ;) Serve to the hungry masses, who have been drooling at the smells since the bacon first hit the pot.

Serves about 10 as a lunch soup or more for a course, of course.

my side of the mountain: in which i fail to climb a 14er

2009-09-28T08:53:00.003-06:00

I promised to post about our illustrious adventure up the slopes of Gray's Peak and Torrey's Peak in northern Colorado last weekend, or at least about the performance of my aforementioned cheap clothing layers.

On the climbing end of things, the story doesn't go so well; the kids mostly freaked out within the first quarter mile, we had some altitude sickness going on, and we turned around, the only people actually heading down the trail at 6 o'clock in the morning. Humiliating? Yeah, but you can always blame it on the kids, right?

Sunday morning, Christopher, Ben, and Isaac redoubled their efforts and started out on the trail once again, and this time made it all the way up Gray's Peak and down again--quite an accomplishment for all of them, but especially Ben and Isaac, Ben having now summited two 14ers in a month's time, and Isaac having successfully summited his first before his seventh birthday.

But I digress about all that. I'm here to talk about layers! We camped at about 11,000 feet in late September and somehow managed to not freeze--in fact, we stayed pretty comfortable most of the time! I attribute this to 1) a kick-butt sleeping bag 2) a little Coleman Black Cat tent heater and 3) our layers-on-the-cheap. Even the guys, who experienced cutting winds and even some snow at the top of Gray's, said that they stayed pretty comfortable on their trek, thanks to their Target layers, their Wal-Mart fleece gloves and headwraps, and their Smartwool socks. Apparantly, at 14,000 feet, those neat little air-activated hand warmers don't do much (no air up there?), so it was definately the clothing that did the trick.

Down at base camp, the remainder of the kids and I broke camp and packed everything up in the face of some pretty gnarly winds, but still managed to keep toasty in our wicking base layers, fleecy mid-layers, and wind-and water-resistant top layers. Of course, the hardest part is always crawling out of the warm sanctuary of the sleeping bag, but the shock was mostly absorbed by having good clothes to put on immediately, so we were happy campers.

Uhh, pardon the pun, but you knew that was coming, didn't you?

--Teri.

layers on the cheap

2009-09-15T22:06:00.002-06:00

When I started this blog, I promised to mix it up a little and include posts on all kinds of stuff. Lately, I've been drawn to the deeper waters, posting mostly on movies and my own mental muddiness, and I've realized that the deep waters are usually the coldest, and sometimes not the most friendly.

So I thought I'd write about clothes shopping, instead.

My family came up with the wonderful idea this summer to hike our first 14er (14,000-foot mountain, for those flatlanders among you), and then the summer suddenly just melted away. Now we find ourselves swirling about in the eddies of autumn and wondering if we can still pull it off, now that the weather will be significantly cooler, and I seem to be the only member of the family who actually has any concerns about not freezing to death. Hey, I attended a ladies' camping workshop at REI, and I know what's up! I know that it's a sheer miracle that mankind has managed to survive this long without wicking layers, and that, if you don't have your fleece in the middle, and water-and-wind-proof breathability on the outside, you're as good as dead. I know that you have to have Smartwool socks or your feet will die of hypothermia, and then frostbite, all at 45 degrees!

I also unfortunately know how much this thinking costs, and it hurts. I've been drooling over the *perfect* jacket at REI for a couple of weeks now that would set me back 200 smackaroos, and ruminating over the cost of layering up in true mountaineering style. It would probably be well over $1000, just for me. There are seven of us. And this is one mountain (maybe two) we're talking about. And 5 of us are growing, fast. Well, make that 7 of us, if you count my belly and its little inhabitant (which you really do have to take into account, especially when all these spiffy layers have to zip up over an expanding waistline).

So my natural inclination is to try and chinch, but not too much, because that's always disastrous--you do, after all, get what you pay for. I searched WallyWorld, Ross, REI's clearance rack, all the usual haunts, and came up pretty much empty-handed. But then I turned to Target, and was delighted to find a great variety of stuff: not only a wicking, long-sleeved base layer, but one that even has compression! Base layer pants that keep the moisture away from the skin; a mid-layer fleece jacket to add more insulation and moisture control; a water- and wind-resistant top layer jacket to round it all out. Now, I don't get the prestige of wearing around the REI or North Face or (gasp!) Arcteryx label, and I might not get quite the performance out of this gear that I would had I spent gads and gads of cash, but I can tell you that, for about $150, I got pretty much the entire shebang, plus some other camping gear and quite a bit of layering for a couple of the kids...not bad!

I'll let you know how this all works out after we get back from the weekend excursion up the long slope above timberline.
--Teri.

the boy in the striped pajamas

2009-09-11T09:51:00.001-06:00

Some films are like riding in a roller coaster: you pay your money, settle in, and you get some excitement and ya-yas.

Some films are like riding in your car: you know where you're going, you can predict a happy ending, you don't have to think too hard, everyone's happy.

Some films are like having triple bypass surgery in the back of a moving ambulance: you have no idea how it's going to turn out, it's scary, it's hard, it's bloody, and it's necessary.

We watched The Boy in the Striped Pajamas a few nights ago, naively thinking that a Holocaust story involving children might have a just-in-time happy ending. We forgot temporarily that the Holocaust itself didn't get to have one of those nice tidy endings, and for a few moments after the end credits began to roll, I felt sort of ripped off, like Hollywood had cheated us out of a good time with this realism nonsense.

How myopic I sometimes am.

--Teri.

underthinkers anonymous

2009-09-04T06:47:00.002-06:00

I think I finally got my fill of idiotic responses last night while trying to contribute a tidbit of perspective to someone's sentimental but not very well thought-out battle anthem for standardized healthcare in America. The original phrase went something like 'No one should die because they cannot afford healthcare, and no one should go broke because they get sick.' In other words, 'The government should pay for our healthcare, and the government should pay for our healthcare.' Which sounds nice. Really nice, especially for people who have health problems and are uninsured and are having a tough time paying for it. I get that. And I'll even qualify that by saying that my family constitutes a few of those 'millions of uninsured Americans' who can't afford 'decent' healthcare, and yeah, it's frustrating and insecure.

But really, at its core, that statement is oversimplified. People hear the siren song of free something-or-other and somehow forget that there is always a price to be paid. And the bigger the sugar cube we think we're getting, the bigger the pricetag. So I commented on this, that we need to remember that, for all the media hype about how wonderful universal healthcare is, I hear stories from our neighbors in the north that you have to be prepared to wait up to 2 years for things like major surgeries. Two years! That's a price to be paid. And I'm not even talking about the taxes, just the logistics.

So some other person wrote in with the stereotypical, "Wow, I guess these people want people to die and go broke! I thought the debate was a lot simpler than that!" Now, normally, I would calmly try to further elucidate my point, which I believe is valid to the discussion, but last night I just snapped instead, and whipped back, "Yep, I'm all into death and poverty, can't you tell? Good grief." Which is not a very diplomatic approach to a debate, to be sure, but really, how sad is it that people get so attached to what they underthink will be the cure-all for a bad situation that they cannot intelligently discuss factors they hadn't considered?

Now, I realize that some of you reading this may be proponents of Obama's healthcare plan, and for those of you that are, I can understand your reasons, and I respect that--a lot. I'm not presuming to hold a corner on the facts in this very heated debate, and I understand that there's a lot to consider. Maybe universal healthcare is a great idea, and maybe it's a terrible one. Maybe it's just so-so. Maybe it'll work, and maybe it won't, and maybe it will just sorta work. Our system as it stands is certainly broken and in need of major overhaul, so don't assume that what Obama says of conservatives is true, that we just want to keep things the way they are.

But please, please, oh, pretty please, whatever your leaning, don't underthink the issue and become the voices of a million clanging cymbals not saying anything at all. There will always be heated debate about every political, moral, and social issue there is, but that never, never, never makes one side stupid because they disagree or have something dissenting to factor into the conversation. Have we lost the ability for civil discourse entirely?

--Teri.

goya's ghosts

2009-08-20T08:46:00.002-06:00

It's not too often that I watch a film, and the first descriptor that comes to mind afterwards is "completely unnecessary", and the second is, " ridiculously superfluous", and the third is, "no, just ridiculous".

Netflix billed Goya's Ghosts as "the epic true story..." of Francisco Goya, the Spanish Inquisition, and the French Revolution. So we watched it, thinking we'd get a nice glimpse of a Spanish artist whose work was previously unknown to me, as well as a couple of intriguing events in Spain's history that I could use a little more information on. I really need to research movies before I watch them from now on.

The movie centers around Francisco Goya, the famous Spanish painter, and his connection to Ines, a young woman whose portrait he has painted and who is in deep trouble with the Spanish Inquisition for failing to nosh on a piece of pork at a dinner party. She is branded a Judaizer and a heretic, tortured, and thrown in prison for 15 years. Goya's role is to forget all about her for all that time and then try to help her at the end, the old 'too-little-too-late' thing. By this time, the French Revolution has reached Spain, a power struggle ensues, Ines is let out of prison and seeks the help of Goya to find the daughter she bore while in prison, etc. etc. The end of the film finds Ines pretty much insane, her ex-priest rapist dead, and Goya following lamely along as she walks with the death-cart along the streets of Madrid with somebody else's baby in her arms. Close curtain.

Okay, so what do you do at the end of an obtuse film like that? Why, you go to Wikipedia, that's what you do! You think, "This can't be the end of it--that's not even right!" You think, "Is this for real? What a weird story!" And so you begin to dig. And you find out that this movie is in fact bastardized historical fiction and bears no resemblence to any real events at all! You find out there was no Ines, no trouble with the Inquisition, no cross-mingling with the Revolution.

What you find out is that some sad little movie executive sat in the middle of his idea vacuum one day, when suddenly someone walked in with a preposterous idea for another Hollywood fricassee of history, and he just went for it. They must have figured that if they threw Natalie Portman in with all the no-name actors with schizophrenic Spanish accents, they'd have a sure thing on their hands.

I'll always maintain that the real victim of Y2K wasn't the tech industry at all--it was the movie industry. Evidently, on December 31, 1999, at 11:59 pm, Hollywood ran out of good movie ideas.
--Teri.

the tenuous threads of faith

2009-08-04T22:01:00.003-06:00

Ever so often (actually, much more often than I'm really comfortable with), I start a long and convoluted circle of thought about my faith. It starts out as a simple question what I actually believe. Then it gets a little deeper and into the less easily-answered questions about why I believe those things and what the rest of the world believes. Before I know it, I'm in up to my ear lobes in the mirey ponderances about the nature of faith itself in relation to my experience. And it gets very confusing, yet always draws me back ultimately to the very first question, and maybe this is why I start over and over again. It goes something like this:

"Okay, so why do I believe Christianity is all that, anyway?" (This leads to some preliminary and sometimes vague rumination on historicity, bibliographical evidence, the nature of man, et cetera. Okay, deeper we go now...)

"So what about Islam? Judaism? Hinduism? Taoism? Agnosticism? Aren't there some great Muslim apologists with air-tight cases for their faith?" (This gets more difficult to answer in my own headspace, but I can still track with some basic facts of history to provide some insight on the origins and underpinnings of these other religions. On to the murkies...)

"In my own experience, what has flavored my view of religion and of the nature of God?" (This is where I get hopelessly muddled in how my culture, my emotional wounds, my exposure to media, my geographical locale, my relationships, my education, my philosophical leanings, even the food I eat has influenced how I view faith and my relationship to God. At this point, I generally throw my intellectual hands up in dispair and figure that it's all impossible to parse out.)

And then I'm back at square one the next time, determined to someday complete (or break) that circle and get to the inside of what drives and informs this sometimes misunderstood faith of mine.

Was religion meant to be this hard-thought upon?

--Teri.

let the craving begin

2009-07-26T21:09:00.001-06:00

Sushi...for breakfast. (Hold the wasabi. No, wait. Gimme that wasabi! Ugh--I HATE wasabi! Where's the wasabi??)

McDouble in the afternoon (just one).

Cheese pizza for dinner.

Brownies.

Tartar sauce at bedtime.

Why does Starbucks close so dang early?

This was day one of the cravings. Pray for my husband.

--Teri.

thoughts from afar

2009-07-09T15:34:00.002-06:00

I dropped a bombshell on Facebook this afternoon, confessing that I've finally come to terms with the fact that I've been involved in a very intimate long distance relationship for a very, very long time.

We'll see if I get any turned heads.

Who is it? What is his name? Does Christopher know?? Well, yeah, Christopher knows. And I'm pretty sure he's happy for me. I talk about this relationship all the time with him, in fact, even when things feel a little rocky and I'm not sure that both sides of the relationship are working out.

It's not too hard to guess that my distal infatuation is with, in fact, the God of the universe. It just struck me finally this morning that my relationship with Him is so like a long-distance romantic relationship, always longing for more, never spending enough quality time together, worrying that something is wrong, interpreting and misinterpreting silences, always giddy over the next encounter.

Maybe this makes it a little easier to wrap my mind around the intangibility of my faith and the awkwardness of not having a sense of solid presence of God in my life all the time.
--Teri.

the two trees

2009-07-01T16:47:00.003-06:00

Just thinking on this poem by William Butler Yeats today...

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart;
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody;
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the winged sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For all things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the winged sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

--Teri.

the weight of the world

2009-06-23T08:26:00.002-06:00

Christopher and I were sitting in a bagel shop downtown the other morning, having shuffled our children off for the weekend so we could enjoy some alone time together, when our conversation came around to the weightier issues of the world and what we're supposed to do about them. It ocurred to me that, while the world is a mighty big place full of mighty big problems, it shouldn't really be that hard to 'spread the love', so to speak, and start making a dent in the suffering experienced around the world.

On our own, it's easy to think that our small contributions to humanity can't possibly make any difference. Christopher turned to me at one point in our conversation and queried me about whether we needed to be doing more about the homelessness problem in Colorado Springs, and it suddenly felt as if we were neglecting the needs of our fellow man completely. But I asked him, "What would it take for us to feel like we're doing enough?" And that question didn't have an easy answer until we began to consider how easy it would be to solve a great many problems if we all just did a little.

What if each of us supported just one other person in some way? What if, for each child in the United States who has been blessed with an economically stable home, there was a poor child in a third-world country being supported financially, educationally, spiritually, and medically? What if a family with enough sponsored a family without enough? What if a pregnant woman in the United States helped provide prenatal support for a pregnant woman in Afghanistan? What if a single adult in America sponsored a single adult in Haiti?

Then the weight of the world would be on all of our shoulders, where it belongs, where we carry each other, where we are carried by each other, and where we all carry the world forward.
--Teri.

confessions of a reluctant jesus freak

2009-06-17T07:58:00.002-06:00

Jesus lives in me. There-- I said it. That hurt.

I was challenged at church on Sunday morning to resist the urge to pandyfoot around my religion and to start being more up-front about what I believe. I didn't think that would be too much of a problem--until the speaker challenged the crowd to use the words. At that moment, a quote I learned in childhood popped into my head: "If you tell people you talk to God, they say you're religious. If you tell them that God talks to you, they say you're crazy." For me to say 'Jesus lives in me' is even crazier-sounding than 'God talks to me', and yet it's pretty much the core of my belief as a Jesus-freak.

So what does it mean?

Good question. Maybe I haven't spent enough time thinking about that. If we're talking about a manifestation of an actual spirit, that's awefully hard for me to get my head around. What's easier to think about is the essence of Jesus' teaching and ethos living on in my heart and mind. Then again, maybe I'm tempted to limit the power of the supernatural, and maybe there is some sort of mystical possession taking place. And I guess I'm okay with that, though it's a lot harder to explain and feels pretty woo-woo to write or speak about. I do know that when I have moments of extreme clarity or above-and-beyond patience or understanding, it doesn't feel like it comes from me, but Someone higher granting much-needed grace in the middle of my lack-of-wisdomness.

Maybe faith is like skin, strong and yet tenuous, and I've never felt completely comfortable within either one, but I've never been able to do without the essential nature of either one, either. So somewhere inside of my faith and inside of my skin, Jesus lives in some fashion, and I hope He understands the relationship better than I do and that He's comfortable here.
--Teri.

dreaming in reverse

2009-05-28T15:32:00.003-06:00

There are times when I guess my mind decompresses from the stress of the day by replaying its events, albeit bizarrely, in the form of my nightdreaming. I usually awaken the next morning somewhat confused, maybe even with some blurred lines between what was real and what was the dreaming, but ready to move on with the day.

Things have been changing a little lately.

Lately I'm sort of dreaming in reverse. Well, not reverse exactly. It's more like my mind has a backload of work that it has to process through, so my mind and my dreams are off-sync by about 4 days right now. In other words, last night I dreamed about the events of about 4 days ago; the night-before-last, I dreamed about what happened 5 days ago. I suspect that, because today was kind of boring (or at least low-key, because I was taught long ago that you're only 'bored' if you're 'boring'--ack!) I might catch up on 2 days' worth of dreaming and will have some really wild mashup of Tuesday and Wednesday. This might be a good thing, since life has been going by too quickly lately and I can't remember so well, at least when I'm waking, what happened that long ago.

It would really be cool if I not only caught up in my dreaming, but actually got ahead a little bit and started having contorted prophetic dreams about what was going to happen in the next couple of days. Maybe if I sit really still for about 48 hours, my mind will have a chance to catch up and show me some interesting things.

Then again, I might just have desperately long, dreadfully boring dreams about myself sitting, waiting. Hmm.
--Teri.

sacred sorrow

2009-05-14T10:02:00.002-06:00

i'm wrapped
folded
maybe tangled--
inside this warmth,
the quiet of a sacred brown sorrow;
dark like a dirty teardrop,
deeper than the dreaming.

--teri.

peace

2009-05-13T16:58:00.003-06:00

When faced with life-altering decisions, I always find myself expecting a lighted path, maybe some neon and flashers, pointing the way to the right choice. And I expect there to be an accompanying feeling of serenity that surrounds and imbues the decision, once made, with an aura of rightness.

I was faced with one of those decisions today, and I concentrated very hard in my mind to pick out the bright lights, recalling the psalmist David who once wrote, "You are a light to my path..." when reminding himself that God had a hand in this decision-making business. Ernest as I was, though, no illumination appeared. Instead, what I got was an image of me, on a bike, at a fork in the road, both paths obscured by deep fog. I pictured myself choosing the more exciting path to the right and sailing off into the fog, breathless and exhilirated, and then I pictured myself turning away from it and, suddenly on my feet, walking somberly into the fog on the left and into the less exciting but more stable decision.

Both paths carried with them unknown risks, unforeseen outcomes, hidden joys and sorrows. And I had no idea which one was the right path.

I finally chose the stable path into the unknown, and I think it was the right decision...for now. And now I'm wondering what peace feels like. If this is peace, it feels profound, like an amputation, only less painful in a way. It feels serious, like a prison sentence, but without the shame. And it feels hollow, like a little piece of my heart is gone, only without the ache. Maybe it's like the feeling of just having birthed a baby, when you realize that there's a huge part of you missing, only it's not missing at all, and you struggle to reconcile the bodily sensation of sudden vacancy to the spiritual feeling of overwhelming completion.

There weren't any attending angels holding lanterns over this foggy path I chose to tread today, but I think there was a peace, uneasy and awkward as it may be, and I think I can walk now into the shrouded unknown of a decision made and feel my footfalls landing softly on the quiet solid of my future.

--Teri.

3 days

2009-04-12T09:14:00.004-06:00

Life,
like a promise,
broken--
torn from history
Word from page
Living Water
conscripted to stone.

grey dawning,
bereft as night
forgotten Key
fog on the Road.

impossible Dream --
sickened hearts
aFlame!
Fire
consuming marrow
burning ashes
night--
overcome.

something wrong with good

2009-04-10T09:22:00.002-06:00

There's been a feeling creeping up the back of my mind for the last several years, lingering around that analytical part of my brain and tickling the bottoms of my sensibilities.

The feeling is this: Good Friday shouldn't be called 'Good' at all.

What was good about the leather and lead that took first flesh, then muscle, then tendon, then bone?
What good was there in thorny spikes invading that tender space between scalp and skull?
Was it good that a Man fell under the weight of His own death trap? Or that nails were driven through feet that had walked countless miles to give love and hands that had touched the untouchable?
What can we call good in the baseness of Roman soldiers who thought so little of killing that they played dice games while blood dripped?
What was good about that horrible day when the sky was a black funerary shroud and the earth convulsed in its grief?

I think they need to rename the day.

--Teri.

internal monologue of the elemental potato

2009-03-23T21:51:00.003-06:00

We went for our first bike ride of the season yesterday. It was my first time on a bike since giving birth, and ultimately, I've decided that childbirth is quite a bit easier for me than pedaling a bike downtown and back. The following constitutes the thoughts that coursed through my mind as my body coursed down the bike trail on the back of my dear bike, the Chartreuse Caboose (named thusly because it's green, and you know where a caboose is always located in a train):

Mile 1: This seat is harder than I remember. A lot harder. Why does my calorie-o-meter only say that I've only burned 5 calories? I'm sure it's at least 75. Must need a new battery.

Mile 2: Ahh, I'm settling in. I feel so alive! I was born to bike! I think I'll sign up for a century (a hundred-mile ride) this year, just to give myself a challenge for the summer. Why do they make bike saddles so hard, anyway? Guess they know what they're doing.

Mile 3: Why does my odometer say that I've only gone 3 miles? I'm sure it's at least 6. Really must need a new battery. Biking is not for sissies, but it's cool, because I'm all over it.

Mile 4: Did they do something to the trail to increase the incline since last summer? Is there something wrong with just making the whole thing flat?? This is getting tougher, but I'm so thankful to have a husband who pushes me farther than I think I can go. He's awesome. My butt hurts. What a cool cyclist I am.

Mile 5: Why does my calorie-o-meter only read 250 calories?? Haven't I burnt at least 1000? Who in their right mind would even consider signing up for a stupid century ride? That's suicide! This whole 'sometimes-the-path-is-paved-and-sometimes-it's-gravel' thing is really not funny. Not funny, City of Colorado Springs! Oh, and my butt hurts. Do you hear that, City of Colorado Springs?? My butt hurts!!

Mile 6: My butt hurts. My butt hurts. My butt hurts.

Mile 7: Ahh, on the way home now. What the heck--where did that hill come from? It was downhill just a minute ago!! Did we get lost??

Mile 8: Dang right, calorie-o-meter--you just keep climbing. What is the deal with my husband? Why does he always push me way farther than I can go? Insensitive rogue.

Mile 9: What is UP with the the swordfish and the bloated dummy, anyway?

Mile 10: Curse you, all you naturally athletic types! If one more hippy-dippy cyclist passes me and says, "Good morning! How are ya?!" or is biking and juggling at the same time, I'm going to give new meaning to the phrase 'the wheel spoke'!

Mile 11: Killll meeeee. KIIIILLLL MMMMEEEE. My butt will never be the same. It's going to be a black-and-blue horror in about two minutes. I'm going to look like a baboon all week! My sadistic husband is going to be hearing about this every 4 minutes for at least a month.

Mile 12: What's the point in even trying to get home? If I make it into the driveway, I'll just collapse there for a day or two, and they can haul my blackened carcass into the house and to the couch where it belongs.

Mile 12.1: Look, butt! We're home! We made it! Butt?? Speak to me, butt! I'm sorry, butt. We'll just stay on the couch from now on, I promise. Some people were made to bike, others were made to hold the furniture down. We'll stay right here on the couch and write nasty letters to bike saddle manufacturers. Until next time.

--Teri. And Teri's Butt.

ubiquitousness

2009-03-15T11:06:00.002-06:00

Every once in awhile I get a Providential reminder about humanity.

I forget sometimes that we're important, all of us. I go on my way, passing through my days like I hold the monopoly on soulful journeying, like I am special. And some days, the tables turn and I go through my days as though I'm just another cookie cut from a cosmic mold.

Thing is, I am special. And so are the 6.some-odd billion other divine sparks running around on this great ball. It's easy to slip into the not-so-clever lie that, because we are ubiquitous, we are therefore mundane. How can my story matter in the hugeness of life? How can yours? How can hers? The real question should be, "How can it not?" If we were not gifted with sentient souls, it might be easier to dismiss humanity as one more biological curiosity, though one could argue that we're all amazing just on the merits of our crazily complicated and unique biology alone.

But we each carry something much deeper and much higher than just the body, and it is because of this, if nothing else, that each story of each life bears such gravity and is so profoundly important. The old men in the parking lot yelling at each other over a dented car; the grumpy lady in the check-out line who couldn't get past being run into by a 5-year-old unsteadily wielding a cart; the orphan in Sudan dying of the same disease that took her parents; the Chinese miner who died along with 200 of his coworkers. We all matter.

It's a good idea to re-align our perspectives every once in awhile and refuse to be swallowed by the immensity of the importance of our humanity, don't you think?

--Teri.

there will be bored.

2009-03-01T08:23:00.002-07:00

I don't know how I got on this kick, but evidently I'm on it now and can't get off. I'm questing for the perfect movie, one that will challenge me, reaffirm my love for humanity, make me think about things a little differently, make me laugh and then cry and then laugh some more, and that will be, of course, completely off the beaten path of Hollywood films.

Where, oh where, can this movie be?

I watched There Will Be Blood the other night with my hubby, thinking we'd spend a cultured evening watching a somewhat avant-garde character sketch and come away feeling, you know, artsy. My little big brother Matt raves about this film, and I've come to appreciate his taste in cinema; it was he, after all, who turned me on to Serenity, Gattaca, and Stardust, mostly against my will but with no regrets. So I figured that if he said that Daniel Day-Lewis was masterful in this performance, than this must be a film worth watching. Maybe even the film.

That said, at the risk of insulting my sibling's sensibilities, I hated this film. I hated the creepy, disjointed soundtrack that never, ever, ever matched the action and left me constantly on edge, thinking that some horrible creature of the damned would soon be dredged up from the oily depths of the earth. I hated Daniel Day-Lewis' character, an ambiguous man whose wildly spinning moral compass left not only everyone in the movie but also everyone in the audience (this audience, anyway) feeling confused, perplexed, alienated, and more than a little freaked out. I hated the plot, if indeed there was one beyond a strange man getting stranger. I hated the title, which caused me to continually half-expect Clint Eastwood to appear on the scene with a couple of six-shooters and a bad mood. I hated the other characters, a bunch of truly weird charismatic Christian freako hypocrites with a demented take on everything from family to power to, well, everything. Mostly, though, I hated wasting a perfectly good Friday night waiting on a movie to redeem itself, only to come to the twisted, bitter end and realize that it was a completely non-redemptive film. On purpose. This film was like a French western in the style of Quinten Tarantino with elements of Stanley Kubrick thrown in for effect.

If there's something in this film that I'm missing, like dynamic character development, subtle plot twists, irony, some sense of transcendent conflict, even tragedy, please, please clue me in.
In the meantime, I guess I'll just keep looking for the perfect film.

--Teri.

the hitler i wanted to meet

2009-02-20T09:03:00.002-07:00

Hitler has been on my mind a lot lately. After all, who can erase from their imaginations that classic, horriblized face with the steely eyes and the iconic moustache? The world rightly remembers him as one of the worst scourges ever to be let loose upon humanity, though few stop to consider the causative circumstances in the young Adolph's life that led him to such a loss of self and ultimately to the megalithic horror we remember today. I think I would have liked to meet that young Adolph to better understand how a heart once touched by art and love became so barren and embittered.

Although common knowledge among historians, many laypeople don't realize that Hitler spent his childhood being beaten and terrorized by his bastard father (a mark of shame in his day and culture) and watching his beloved mother endure the same. He rebelled against his father by blowing off his schoolwork and so was considered failure, though he had been an excellent student and a leader earlier; later on, his mother--whom he evidently adored--died of cancer. Adolph developed a love of art and painting but was rejected from art school twice and redirected toward architecture, which he was interested in but lacked the formative education because of his earlier rebellion, and so that didn't work out, either. His life was plagued with failures and sadness.

Then Adolph fell in love. His niece Geli evidently captivated his heart, and though their relationship was unclear and strained, it is believed that they truly loved one another. She was found dead, shot through the head with Hitler's pistol, and this event marked a devastating change in his character and behavior; he became depressed and ever more violent and vitriolic. The rest is a grisly history ending in mass murder and eventually suicide.

I've no temptation to try and justify the atrocities spawned by Hitler's diabolical and twisted mind, or to over-simplify the causes of the ideology that proved fatal to millions. But perhaps it's a worthwhile exercise to think about the ways in which his family dynamic affected his heart, and to consider the connection between a wounded heart, a keen but unfulfilled mind, and a terrifying onslaught of violence. What would we think of Adolph as a child? What would we see in his youthful eyes that were already tortured and misunderstood? And what does that tell us about the importance of nurturing children and honoring the fragility of young spirits? The biggest question looming in my mind is what kind of intervention may have stemmed the tide of failure and brokenness and given hope to what looked like a doomed life. We've all heard stories of people who overcame horrible circumstances to live lives of joy and fulfillment, and stories of those who were overcome by those same circumstances and somehow drowned in the deluge, taking countless others down with them. What's the difference?
--Teri.

reign over me

2009-02-14T20:29:00.005-07:00

I hate Adam Sandler. I hate movies with copious foul language. I hate Pearl Jam. And I especially hate movies with obtuse endings where you never know if it's going to turn out okay or not.

But I loved Reign Over Me. It was one of the most difficult films I've watched in a very long time, probably even harder than Schindler's List was. It wasn't funny, it was raw, it hurt to watch it. The pain of a man who lost his family in the September 11th attacks was almost too much to watch; I felt voyeuristic sitting through Charlie's utter inability to wrap his mind around his profound loss, and something close to obscene bearing witness to his intricate choreography of avoidance and denial.

This film was an uncomfortably close brush with the messiness of life and loss and a coarse rumination on the endurance of love way out past the tattered fringes of sanity. It was a sobering reminder that even these few years later, there are still scores of people suffering in their various ways from the consequences of that horrible day in September. It was a reminder that I needed, I think.
--Teri.

happy birthday, charles

2009-02-09T20:13:00.002-07:00

As the world gears up for Darwin's birthday celebration, I'm finding myself niggled by the presuppositions of science in the past century or so and wishing that a civil discourse on the origins of life wasn't so difficult to achieve.

I have lost count of the number of times that any mention of intelligent design has provoked the heated and incredulous response, "Come on! Do you really believe that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago?!" Perhaps the better, fairer question would be, "Do you have any evidence to support that theory?" Is it possible that Darwinian evolution doesn't have the monopoly on good science, or that there may be evidence that contests or at least raises valid questions about the theory of evolution? Is it possible to discuss this evidence in a way that temporarily suspends the assumptions of biology and gives unbiased credence to both sides of the debate?

As an example, it's fairly well-known that the fossil beds of Montana have given up a T-rex skeleton, a femur of which appears to have red blood cells--marrow! Instead of challenging the notion that this tissue could possibly be as old as science assumes, the headlines read, "70 Million Year Old Bone Marrow Found!" If we're intellectually honest, is it really easier to suppose that blood cells could survive for 70 million years in the ground, than to raise the uncomfortable question of whether they're really that old?

Another issue that plagues my mind is the fact that biology was so unsophisticated in the 19th century, when it was assumed that, on a cellular level, structures were pretty simple and lacked the complexity of larger organisms. Darwin couldn't have imagined that, 200 years later, we'd be peering into the heart of the atom and being amazed to find still more levels of complexity and precision, something that likely wouldn't have fit well into the idea of macro-evolution. What will we find when we finally dismember a quark? My understanding here is vague at best and probably grossly under-informed at worst, but wasn't it Darwin's assertion that life arose out of simple structures and gradually became more sophisticated through selection, and that on a cellular level any organism would bear the imprint of its primitive self? As it turns out, pond scum is more complicated than we could possibly imagine, and the deeper we look, the more complicated it gets.

I realize that a good debate hardly ever changed anyone's mind, but I do believe that it's the spirit of informed, respectful dialogue that reveals the intellectual core of any system of thought. As much as I have a problem with half-cocked creationists dreaming up half-baked arguments to support their beliefs, I have an even bigger problem with self-assured Darwinian evolutionists smugly failing to ask honest questions. If one theory or the other is credible, it should be able to withstand the rigors of cross-examination, and I think it's only reasonable to assume there should be a reasonable discourse between the two.
--Teri.

voice

2009-02-04T14:13:00.003-07:00

There's been a vague thought trying to surface in my mind for maybe years now, and it's only now becoming clear enough for me to identify the fuzzy edges of it and begin to see it taking form enough to make its way to my fingertips. I've been putting off writing in any appreciable way for years because I was afraid I didn't have anything to say, hadn't found my voice yet, I thought. But now that I'm in the thick of life and have arrived at the uncomfortable reality of being a real live grown-up adult person thing, it strikes me that I'm really afraid of losing my voice. I guess this means it must be in there somewhere already, waiting patiently to get out, not wanting to go away in the maelstrom of children and work and school and life and humanity.

I find myself thinking about the consequences of global events in terms of what'll happen to my voice if I'm caught up in it all--if the economy tanks and my family loses everything, what will become of my voice? Will I lose my voice if I have more children and end up drowning in homeschooling for 15 more years? If we move to a third-world country and become missionaries, will there be a place for my voice there?

Part of my reason for diving into blogging at long last, I guess, is really to give voice to, well, my voice. Maybe I should start capitalizing that, or give it a name, if it's going to become a friend of mine. For now, I'd like to introduce you to my voice; it's still young and somewhat timid, but I hope that my voice and your voice find something in common and find a nice place to get to know one another here.
--Teri.

vox populi

2008-05-30T08:42:00.000-06:00

I've been following a few blogs for some time now, resisting the urge to create my own but relishing the thoughts pouring forth from some of my favorite minds. It seems as though everyone has a blog, thus my reticence in jumping on the proverbial bandwagon, but I just have so many thoughts crowding around in my head that want to get out! So I'm joining the fray and I hope that this blog will become a place of lively but genteel discussion on topics ranging from religion to childbirth to the arts, maybe even with a little politics thrown in!

Welcome, and may the blog begin.
--Teri.