Disappointment

(Preamble:  note that this post is NOT reflective of any new news.  Next MRI results are end of next week, everything else is still status quo.)

Heavy and weary.  We are oh so heavy and weary.  Our lives are ripe with disappointment and loss.  For 2 and a-half years we’ve wrestled these trying days…..and there’s no end in sight.

Ha.  I write these words and realize the irony: thank God there is not an “end” in sight; but oh God how we need you to be able to keep stepping one foot in front of the other.

I’m remembering those early days with the twins.  I’ve sugar coated the difficulty of being a twin-mom, a twin-parent.  Oh yes, I’ve shared my struggles, but there’s a reason there’s camaraderie amongst parents of multiples: Because you don’t realize you don’t have an inkling of what its like until you’ve lived it.  We have close friends who had twins 2 years before us.  I had NO IDEA what they were going through though I watched their lives play out. 

It is so *%#!ing hard.

One day in those early-ish months (who knows exactly when it was because the craziness all blurs) we were at church.  We went to church every week even with those twins.  Inevitably Ryan and I would both end up in the lobby rocking, carrying, soothing, (nursing) a screaming baby.  Our hands tied.  The effort of going feeling entirely futile, (and yet out of habit week after week we repeated this…) The particular day I think of Ryan left “his” baby with a lady at the welcome desk and left church to go for a walk.  He was literally on verge of going crazy.  He told me on that walk he felt like walking out into traffic and letting himself get hit by a truck.  Then he told me that his choice was either that or to turn around and come back in to the building and keep on keeping on with being a father in an overwhelming situation.

The twins upheaved our lives.  I knew Ryan didn’t “do well” with little babies; but as we talked about having a second child, in my self-capable perspective I figured I could manage the baby until Ryan was capable of engaging more (as he had proven he was so good at as Rayna became a toddler).  Ha.  Could I manage 2 babies by myself? Ha.  (But oh how I tried….to my detriment I still tried.)
And there disappeared my ideals of traipsing around, jet-setting for visits, with my lovely preschooler and a baby in tow.  You can hardly leave your house, never mind your city, with 2 babies!

Then toddlerhood began to loom on the horizon, I was moving beyond a period of anxiety and life began to **maybe?** (please!?!) be looking UP for our family.

Ha!

It’s like we were holding the crystal ball of our future, desperate to see sunnier skies when the ball dropped and shattered into a wreckage of pieces.

CANCER.

 Numb disbelief gave way to a gut-punch of sorrow.

 Grief.

Loss.
Disappointment. 

And now our lives look like nothing we expected. 

My future evaporated.  Yet the present is still so present and pressing, and challenging, and demanding. 

Our hopes and dreams are in purgatory.

We are do-ers.  Oh we do not sit still.  We squeeze every drop of goodness out of our lives.  That’s who we are.  Is that who we are?

Certainty became anger, denial, fear, apathy. 

It became uncertainty. 

Who are we, now?

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 This is my open book today.  This is real life. I feel this needs to be seen; because, it’s not what we experience or what life throws at us, it’s how we choose to respond.

My life is shaped by how I choose to respond!

(this is what Ryan and I teach our children.  We use our real-life examples.  You better believe I have good replies for “that’s not fair”.)

In our family we choose optimism, we choose joy, we choose hope, we choose love.  The darkness comes.  And it is heavy.  And it is thick.  And it is weighty.  And it is trying.  And it is ripe and rotten.  And it makes us want to give up.  We are not “practiced” or “superior” or “what-ever” (that’s an eloquent word, right?) that we do not experience and feel these things!!!  Oh we feel them!

But:  

 Our church is discussing “hazards” that can trip you up in life (1).  They trip you up so you’re not able to squeeze all goodness out of life that is there to bless us.  This week the sermon was on disappointment.  Disappointment is real.  It is good to feel the feelings that come our way.  BUT it is NOT good to get stuck in these feelings.  So while this sermon gave a name to the weight of these past years it also reminded that disappointment does not have the final say.  

Habakkuk 3

¹⁷ Though the fig tree does not bud
    and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
    and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
    and no cattle in the stalls,
¹⁸ yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
    I will be joyful in God my Savior.

¹⁹ The Sovereign Lord is my strength;
    he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
    he enables me to tread on the heights.

  

In everything we are given a choice.  Our family decides to make the most of that choice.  We choose the Joy of the Lord.

1. http://www.firstave.org/listen

http://www.firstave.org/listen