Tag: personal

Posted in musings

anger

Posted on by kristinabean

Anger is quite a useful emotion.

When I’m angry, I can stop feeling sad, anxious, apprehensive, melancholy, stressed, guilty, inadequate, or uncomfortable – the anger drives all other emotions out before it like a scouring wind.

If my husband is tired and stressed about school and the kids, it can be hard for me to simply be present with him as he’s feeling that dissatisfaction and frustration; his emotions make me uncomfortable, on the one hand, and on the other, I’m jealous of the time he has with the kids. Simply being angry at him – for having the emotions that I dislike, and for not appreciating what he has right now that I wish I could have – is far easier than being with him and supporting him. It’s less complex and more comfortable.

The same principle applies with my kids, my coworkers, the situations and instruments I deal with at work, and even myself. The intricate web of emotion created by daily life is confusing and uncomfortable for me, and getting angry gives me an emotion I can understand while pushing away all the other emotions that are so hard to handle.

Unfortunately, of course, this kind of irrational and unjust anger is incredibly damaging to my relationships with people. It’s not great for a marriage when a wife gets angry every time her husband has an emotion that’s not positive! And it doesn’t result in a secure and happy childhood when a mother flips out at her children, inconsistently and impulsively, for normal childish behaviors. I know this, so I try to control my anger. It might be the easiest emotion, my default emotional response, but it isn’t the emotion that I want to characterize my relationships at home or at work.

My primary strategies these days are two-fold: a preventative strand, that works on creating margin in my life so that I can better handle uncomfortable emotions; and a crisis management strand, that gives me ways to pause the anger response pathway and hopefully step out of it. Prevention involves things like regular prayer, consistent time in the Word, and sufficient sleep and time outside. Crisis management looks like counting to ten when I feel my anger rising, or offering up quick and instant prayers for peace or grace (written/memorized prayers are really helpful here, but sometimes just a wordless prayer – a silent plea to heaven, eyes raised, soul yearning – is all I can lift up in the moment).

What are some of your tactics for keeping anger from running (and ruining) your life?

Posted in musings

stifled prayer

Posted on by kristinabean

 

I live my life with a wall around my heart.

It’s not that I don’t love people, or care about people – I just don’t want people to know my weaknesses. I don’t want to admit those weaknesses to myself.

When hard things happen, whether it’s a chronic struggle like mental illness in a loved one or working while my husband gets more time at home with the babies, or an acute problem like a sick baby or a lost iPod, my brain immediately starts calculating all the different options I have. All the ways I could respond to the problem, all the potential outcomes, all the strategies and decisions and backup plans. I want to be the strong and competent woman, who meets life with confidence and grace, and never lets her head fall under the waves.

And I bring that attitude with me before God.

I keep that wall up even when I pray. Walls tend not to be easily assembled and disassembled, after all.

Limerick has been dealing with a high fever since early Saturday afternoon and I didn’t think to pray about it until tonight (Sunday night). I was just so wrapped up in nursing him, taking his temperature, giving him fever reducers, making him comfortable, and wondering what was making him sick to think about it. The plans, the automatic response of confidence and control, took over. I didn’t doubt my ability to take care of him well, so I didn’t feel the need strongly enough to pray about it. Do you hear how strange that sounds? I believe in a God who can heal the dying, and I believe that He cares about every detail of life, and instead of taking my sick baby to Him I try to handle it all on my own?

My worry, my need to be strong and take care of the people I love, prevents me from doing what they need most: interceding for them to God, lifting them up to Jesus. My desire to keep things under control and handle situations calmly and competently interferes with what ought to be my first line of response.

Soften my heart, Lord, and tear down my pride. Let me come to You humbly at all times and in everything, not only when the need is too great for my own strength and intelligence; let me put my fears to rest trusting in Your providence. Loose my tongue and gentle my heart, that I might lift the needs of the world to You instead of trying to fix them on my own.

Posted in musings

orange blossoms in the spring

Posted on by kristinabean

The orange blossoms are beginning to open.

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The scent of them in the air – spicy, sweet, alluring, richly complex yet somewhat warm and light – is one of my favorite things in the whole world. I can’t think of another smell quite so wonderful (although the smells of yeast bread rising and new babies snuggling come pretty close).

In the sunshine, in the middle of the day, in the backyard or kitchen just feet away from our tree, the smell makes me want to bask in the sunlight, dance with my boys, overflow with hugs and kind words – it elevates the positive, surrounds me with energy, fills my heart with simple joy.

In the twilight, caught on the edge of the cooling breezes, it makes me think of balconied rooms hung with muted orange, lit with candles, where a woman awaits her lover as the curtains rustle over the open window. It is the seductive, entrancing scent of the blossom that hints at love as it breathes in on the wind.

(I told my husband these thoughts and his eyebrows shot pretty far up… he brings me back to earth pretty quickly sometimes 🙂 )

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The bees are loving the blossoms as well. Our tree has more blossoms than any other tree I’ve seen around town, so there isn’t much out there to draw the bees away from us yet. But so far they ignore the babies, and the babies notice them just enough to say “bumblebee! buzz buzz buzz” and then move on 🙂 Hopefully we’ll make it through the spring without any stings! If not, I suppose bee stings are a part of life.

What is blooming near you all?

Posted in family life, musings

unplanned babies (the blessing of limerick)

Posted on by kristinabean

After Rondel was born, we struggled a lot with the transition from “couple” to “family.” I had PPD for months, my husband was exhausted from being up with a sleepless baby and trying to encourage a miserable wife, and Rondel was becoming anxious and easily overstimulated. We were all on edge and our margins were just about the lowest they’ve ever been. And so, clearly, we thought it was the worst imaginable time to have another baby.

Although at that time I didn’t quite grasp the theology of the body that informs the purpose and ethical applications of sex, I had an instinctual dislike of contraceptives, for various reasons: I didn’t like having to take a pill everyday with hormones that were going to influence far more than just my reproductive system, barrier methods felt awkward and incomplete, like we weren’t actually coming together in the one flesh of marriage, and we obviously weren’t at a point to consider permanent sterilization as a means of contraception. So we were charting and tracking and being really careful – and then we found out we were pregnant, just 7 months after Rondel was born.

It wasn’t our plan at all. Looking back at the charts, it makes no biological sense that we got pregnant when we did.

But you know the beauty of it? Because it wasn’t our plan, because we were walking through the tension of stewarding our resources well while remaining open to God’s plan for new life, we were relieved of the constant fear that we’d made a mistake every time that things were difficult. This baby wasn’t our choice – he was God’s choice, and God is someone we can trust.

And as the months went by, we saw the profound good that Limerick brought to our family: the pregnancy hormones that snapped me out of PPD, the reevaluations of my lifestyle and parenting choices that made me a gentler and less anxious mother, the small and vulnerable baby that showed Rondel how to care for someone weaker and more needy than himself, the bold and mischievous toddler who is helping Rondel learn to share, negotiate, and adapt even as he learns those things himself.

If we had made it about our plan and our wisdom and our choices, Limerick wouldn’t be here, bringing his incredible blessing into our family – and that is a huge reason why, now, I would not choose to contracept or sterilize. Who knows what other unforeseen good God wants to bring into our lives? Why would I want to close myself off to that blessing, just because I cannot picture it clearly in my mind now?

Posted in family life

gently night-weaning

Posted on by kristinabean

For various reasons, the time has come to begin night-weaning Limerick. He still co-sleeps, in a sidecar crib, and has always nursed to sleep. It was the path of least resistance for so long… but now, 15 months later, it has become a sleep crutch that prevents him from resettling when he wakes briefly during the night and thus wakes me about every two hours all night long. And the older he gets, the more difficult it seems to be for him to drift off while nursing, because he wants to engage and interact with me the whole time!

However, while I was convinced of the need for night-weaning, I was also convinced that I didn’t want the process to be one of prolonged or solitary crying. If he was going to cry, I was going to be there with him; if he was inconsolable and clearly not settling on his own, I was going to slow the process down and go at the pace he was able to handle. So I brainstormed some ideas for a new routine, and explained everything to Limerick a few times before implementing them, so that he wouldn’t be taken off guard when we did something new at bedtime.

“First we’ll nurse with the light on,” I told him, “and we’ll snuggle and talk about the day and pray together. Then, after you’ve had some milk, I’ll lie you down with your head on the pillow in your crib, tuck your bunny in next to you, pull the blanket over you, give you your bottle of water, and turn off the light. I will lie here right next to you and sing you a lullaby, and you can go to sleep.”

Why these steps?

First, the time of nursing and talking gives us a chance to connect at the end of the day, without any other people or distractions around, which is particularly important on days that I’m gone at work for hours. I want him to know that his bedtime isn’t just a task for me to accomplish, but a special time of calm and quiet for us to share. Also, he is still young enough that I want him to keep nursing, even though I can’t physically deal with the nursing all night long!

Second, the little details of the bedtime routine help to provide continuity and consistency from one night to the next, without making things too long or complex. The pillow helps keep his head elevated when he’s congested and the bottle of water gives him something to suck if he wants or a drink if he’s thirsty still after nursing (since my supply is getting pretty low, and it’s dry here in Arizona!)

Turning the light off after nursing helps to separate nursing from sleeping, so he doesn’t roll back to me for “kikis” after I try to situate him in the crib. This was a mistake I had been making on previous attempts!

Finally, Limerick loves music, and he seems to be far calmer physically when he has something to do with his mind – like listen to the words and melodies of songs. So the lullabies (whatever I happen to remember or make up) help him to relax, which in turn helps him to fall asleep.

As we were going through the routine, I narrated each thing that we were doing, reminding him of what we’d said earlier, until I ended by singing some old lullabies. His breathing slowed. His body relaxed. His hand holding the half-empty bottle dropped to his side. And I slid off the bed and went downstairs.

This was just the first night of the new routine. We’ve now had four nights of the new pattern, and in addition to falling asleep without the incessant nursing that was driving me crazy, he seems to be sleeping for longer stretches as well! Considering he is also teething right now, I’m quite surprised at how well this is going. Night 3 was a bit rough for him, and we ended up nursing a little bit more after the lights were off to help him calm back down, but he did eventually go to sleep on his own without crying alone or feeling like he was abandoned or unheard (it’s amazing how much calmer he got just from me saying, “You are really upset right now, huh?”). I’ve even been able to put him back down after a night waking in this way, which I didn’t expect to be able to do for a few weeks still! So there is hope, fellow gentle parents with poor sleepers 🙂 We can take care of ourselves and our babies in ways that won’t leave either of us resentful, bitter, or hurt.

Posted in family life, phfr

{pretty, happy, funny, real} – random pieces of life

Posted on by kristinabean

The ladies at Like Mother, Like Daughter were encouraging this week’s {phfr} to be about desk space, since an organized and clean desk is such a great jump start for productivity and clear thinking. Unfortunately, my desk is in a very dimly lit room and I didn’t have opportunity during the daylight hours to try to take a picture of it! So in the spirit of the link-up I cleaned and organized the horrible mess that was my desk and then enjoyed getting some HOA work done on the newly-emptied surface. It really does make a difference, having it clean!

{pretty}

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We are in the height of citrus season here in the low desert, and my parents have quite a few trees, so on Monday afternoon we took some time to make orange marmalade, candied orange peels, and candied grapefruit peels. The jars in the picture above are of the orange syrup left over from boiling the peels – the flavor is quite strong and sweet and makes a good addition to different types of drinks. I think it would be good with just some sparkling water but my mom has an old-fashioned in mind 🙂 She’s not as much of a lightweight when it comes to alcohol as I am!

{happy}

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Our garden has really become a play space. On Tuesday I watched my nephew and niece for a couple hours and they had a great time exploring the dirt and plants in the garden; I’m not sure who slipped this little construction crate under the cilantro, though! It looks like a little elfin summerhouse to me – I can just imagine the little people frolicking in the dappled green light under the leaves, and resting for the night in their hideaway.

{funny}

Because the weather has been so unseasonably warm, our little orange tree has begun budding already. Its branches are beginning to encroach rather significantly into the yard, but it had been trimmed ruthlessly and ignorantly before we bought the house and suffered a lot of sunburn as a result, so we’re giving it a few years to heal before we try to trim it again. So, some of the branches are at just the right height for Limerick to explore, and he’s been quite intrigued by the new flower buds. In fact, he’ll stand at the tree, oblivious to the world, picking all the flower buds off, saying “flower bud!” each time and then dropping them on the ground or into a cup. Some of the fruits (flowers?) of his labor he then put on the edge of the raised bed garden, for no reason known outside of his own small head…

{real}

If I had gotten a “before” picture of my desk, that would have been my {real} picture for the week! I had pre-Christmas decorations, old mail, HOA papers, the remnants of a Christmas craft, some chocolate and essential oils, and some items destined for Goodwill, all piled up on a table no more than 30″ square. Even the “after” picture could be {real}, though, tucked away as the desk is by my husband’s school desk, his weights and bench, the vacuum, and a couple large bookshelves… all of our random things seem to have ended up in the same place, which is also the only way to get into the backyard, so there’s always a bit of chaos going on. But it is cleaner than it was, and that makes me happy 🙂

Go check out the rest of the link-up!

Posted in musings

breathe

Posted on by kristinabean

Breathe in, breathe out.

Running down the hill towards the station, I see the light rail doors close 5ft in front of my face, and they don’t reopen even when I push the button outside. Time lost, time with my babies at home – my frustration rises.

Breathe in, breathe out.

A client at work sends our group an insulting, misogynistic email that takes my breath away with its rudeness. I don’t write the emails, but in my head I think of all the ways I wish I could respond in the sudden rush of anger.

Breathe in, breathe out.

The software I have to use to interface with the machines at work is unwieldy and glitchy; trying for the third time to accomplish a tedious task, I close my eyes and count to ten to keep myself from yelling at the computer.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Let the anger fade.

My temper flares up so quickly at these relatively trivial things. I only lost ten minutes waiting for the train; caustic words from a single encounter soon lose their sting. Am I going to let that anger linger, let it seep into my home with me and taint the time we have together?

Breathe in, breathe out.

I can commit the anger to God, if I can’t let it go on my own; I can release myself into His peace when my own inner peace is in tatters; I can prepare my heart to greet my family with joy when I come home.

Posted in musings

when mental illness touches a relationship

Posted on by kristinabean

How do you find the balance between reaching out to help someone in need, someone tortured by their own mind, and distancing yourself from someone who could hurt you either emotionally or physically? How do you determine when to maintain or deepen the relationship and when to sever ties or let time and distance weaken the bonds of former friendship?

On the one hand, you want to say never – never give up, never stop trying, never abandon someone to their inner demons, with a hand to pull them back out of the abyss. You remember who that person is, in their essence, the person you love, the person you would die for, who you never want to lose, and you want that person to come back through the darkness and cobwebs into the fullness of life.

On the other hand, when you see people you love hurt by narcissistic partners, addicted parents, or paranoid friends, you want to tell them to free themselves from the relationship and its accompanying pain. When a coworker’s mother plays her siblings against her and sabotages her relationships with the rest of her family, you want to tell her to just cut those ties and build a new life for herself. When your friend’s sister-in-law overdoses for the last time, you feel almost guiltily glad in the freedom her husband now has in her absence.

And when you know that deep inside you those same demons may be lurking, how do you keep the people you love safe from the hurt you might cause them? When you know that depression might steal from your husband the wife who can face down life’s struggles with him, or from your children the joyful, energetic, patient mother they deserve, is it right to marry and bear children at all? When you know that the voices in your head are luring you to the edge but you can’t make them shut up, when you’re afraid that at any moment you might snap into a self-absorbed burst of energy and plans or spiral into a suicidal darkness of tears and anger and emptiness, how do you protect the people who love you? The ones who keep holding on to that relationship even when it hurts them? They deserve so much more than you can give them.

I’m not going to give up on the people I love, when they need me most and are most difficult to love, and I hope they never give up on me. It is in relationship, in love that endures, that we can find healing and hope, if we seek it – in risking, in failing, in being forgiven and trying again.

Posted in family life

a listening story

Posted on by kristinabean

I often struggle with stepping back and accepting other people’s emotions, to simply listen and seek to understand, because I tend to take their emotions personally and become defensive. As a result of this sense of personal involvement, strong or negative emotions in other people make me incredibly uncomfortable, and my default response is anger and anxiety.

While learning about child development and respectful parenting has helped me a lot with distancing my emotional state from my children’s emotions (without distancing myself from them), it’s still a huge challenge for me with adults, especially in my family. So when I have even a small success – when I can remember that their emotions are not a personal attack before letting loose with angry words or falling into a panicky state – it is pretty exciting!

Yesterday my husband seemed to be upset; he was silent, morose, and sharp. My unthinking response was to wonder what I had done wrong to make him upset, and then to be angry at him for being upset about things that he hadn’t established expectations for (like our schedule for the afternoon, which I thought might be the cause of his stress or irritation). So I was avoiding him, not talking to him, not making eye contact, etc. – all the things I do to keep myself from saying something in anger. But as we sat in the car together I suddenly thought, yelling at him or prodding him to talk about things isn’t going to help me find out what’s wrong or make him feel better. It’s just going to bring us both down and make us angrier. I remembered all those parenting blogs that said, over and over again, to simply observe and offer presence. So all I said was, “it seems like you’re really upset about something.” I tried to say it in a way that would let him know he didn’t have to provide any information – I wanted to be non-confrontational and non-interrogative (not sure how that worked haha).

Maybe it was just because he saw that I wasn’t going to be mad at him, but he then opened up and told me all the things that were worrying him (none of which were about me, showing me just how unreasonable my initial reaction was), with a depth of connection that wouldn’t have been possible if he’d been saying things just to get me to leave him alone or stop being angry.

So I am now an even bigger fan of respectful parenting! This posture of respectful listening – of noticing negative emotion in the people I love without letting it unravel me or hurt our relationship – is something I want to cultivate more and more, now that I see how it benefits my adult relationships as well as my relationship with my kids. And it helps me stay far more relaxed and positive myself, which is never a bad thing.

Posted in family life, musings

why I’m not cut out to be a parent (and neither are you)

Posted on by kristinabean

I’ve heard many people say to me that they just aren’t cut out to be a parent, or that they aren’t ready to be a parent. I’ve thought it many times myself, especially on particularly trying days! And while I used to try to convince people that they could handle being a parent (with the corollary that they should be open to life), I think I’m changing my mind. They’re not cut out to be parents. I have two kids, and I’m not cut out to be a parent either.

How did I come to this conclusion, you ask? I took stock one evening of all the things that being a parent was requiring of me:

Love: my babies need me to love them consistently, unconditionally, and more than I love myself. You try doing that when your nose is runny, your head hurts, and you just want to take a shower and a nap, while the kids still need to be fed, changed, and cared for. Love feels easy when you’re watching those babies sleep and your heart is melting, but sometimes the self-denial required is significantly beyond my ability.

Joy: adding insult to injury, being a parent means that I can’t simply feed and dress my kids with an underlying attitude of resentment, anger, or bitterness. For them to feel loved, they need to know that I enjoy being with them. Unfortunately, small children are not always innately enjoyable. My joy, therefore, has to come from something other than them (and, incidentally, what a burden it would be for a child to know that their parent’s joy and happiness was in their small and inexperienced hands!), which means I have to either be one of those irritatingly cheerful people who always seem to be happy, or that I have to find some source of authentic joy outside of myself. On my own, I don’t have the joy needed to be a great parent.

Peace: when my two-year-old is whining at supersonically high frequencies for a never-ending litany of reasons and my one-year-old is climbing on top of everything in sight (including my head and the two-year-old’s plate of half-eaten food), it is not humanly possible to keep myself from being irritated and annoyed (at least not for me!). I will lose my cool, at least once every day. Probably more than that on the days I don’t get out of the chaos by going to work, honestly. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve prayed for peace and asked Mary (one of whose titles is the Queen of Peace) to pray for me to have peace as well.

Patience: this one needs no explanation. Everyone knows you have to have patience with a toddler – and everyone knows that they don’t have as much patience as said toddler demands of them every day.

Kindness: because the tone of my voice matters. My body language matters. The extra activities and snuggles and treats we enjoy together, for no reason at all, matter. The little kindnesses I can do, the general demeanor of kindness and caring I can maintain, convey to my children that they matter – to me, to the family, to the community, and ultimately to God.

Goodness: as a parent, I’m my babies’ model of who God is and what basic moral standards are. My righteousness or lack thereof informs their developing consciences. So hmm, maybe my self-absorption, sloth, lack of compassion, and pride are things I should work on if I really want to ace this parenting thing…

Faithfulness: as every parent knows, one of the hardest parts of the gig is that there are seldom any breaks. The job is 24/7 for years – and two of the requirements is consistency and commitment. I can’t just take off for a year to develop different interests or explore a different side of myself; I’m in this for life. I think this is one of the biggest reasons why people in this culture don’t feel ready for parenthood! We are frightened of commitment – because it ties us down, but also because we’re afraid we’ll fail.

Gentleness: I’m trying to raise my children with courtesy and respect – to model for them the character I want them to have as adults. So when my temper flares, I can’t let it out with a smack or a yell. Maybe I can vent later to my husband or my journal; maybe I’ll just have to talk myself down from that emotional cliff. Most days I try to work at prevention, by being gentle and patient with myself and my boys so the anger doesn’t have an opening. But there are still times when I speak harshly and move roughly, my anger overcoming my kindness, abrasively damaging my connection with my children instead of building it up, and from what I read and hear and see, I’m far from alone.

Self-Control: ok, we all have that stash of chocolate we hide in the pantry and don’t share with the kids. We all have our favorite TV shows or books that we binge on to get our heads out of our reality. But as a parent, we have to be able to hold ourselves together as long as our kids need us. If our baby wakes up in the middle of our time alone in the evening, we still have to respond with kindness and love. The thoughts and desires we have need to come second to our responsibilities – and I’m not saying to take care of ourselves, but even with adequate self-care that can be pretty hard sometimes!

Hmm, does that list look familiar to you? That’s right – it’s the fruit of the spirit (from Galatians 5). No wonder I don’t feel ready for parenthood, or cut out to be a parent: I’m not. That fruit has not reached maturity in my life yet. Parenthood, to put it briefly, demands holiness. Holiness is not something I can live out, no matter how much I try; my old sinful tendencies still need to be put off and set aside. My prayer is that parenthood will at least hasten the process of sanctification in my life, as the refining fire or sculpting chisel in God’s hand.