Joanne Heim

Mother's Day update

(Wednesday afternoon)

Thank you for all of your kind comments and encouraging words on my last post about marking mother's day in a new way for this new season in which I am now living. I read and treasured each one. Thank you.

A few of you have asked how the day went, so I wanted to post a quick update while it is still fresh and before we head to Utah  on Friday.

I slept well on Saturday night and woke up excited for the day on Sunday morning. I told God first thing (and every time I sort of woke up in the night) that I really hadn't a clue about how to order the day, but that it was his to do with as he pleased. A good start.

I skipped my morning mocha and had some hot tea and sat at the table with Mom and Dad while they ate breakfast. After a shower (the very best part of the morning!), Mom and Dad left for church and I got comfy on the couch with my Bible, the journals I keep for the kids, a good pen--Bic crystal, naturally!--and my Maddie-dog.

I talked to God for a while while Maddie listened attentively. (I pray out loud when I'm alone and I also talk to Maddie a lot, so she doesn't always know the difference!) I prayed for everything I could think of---end of the year stuff at school, graduation, friendships, health, future plans, safety, their relationships with God. Mostly I prayed for God's will to be done in their lives. For them to remember all they were taught and know about him and to love him and seek him.

I read the journals I have kept over the years and remembered so many wonderful memories. And I wrote each of them a long letter, pouring out my heart and all I was feeling on that day.

I read a bunch of psalms, did my Sunday school lesson, reviewed the first week of the Psalm 23 study I will be teaching again this summer, and prayed a bunch more. 

I drank many more mugs of hot tea, turned on the fire, and loved on Maddie.

I ignored my hunger, tried not to think about the cookies in the pantry, and prayed for each of my Sunday school kids.

I asked God to show me how to be a mom in this season how to love my kids well from a physical and emotional distance, and thanked him for all of the good times and years I had with them. 

Mom and Dad came home from church after running some errands and I spent some time just resting on my bed and hoping to nap (I am a TERRIBLE napper, no matter how tired I am or how hard I try to fall asleep.) I sat outside with Mom while she planted some red geraniums in pots for the front patio; I sniff and sniffed the air since a neighbor was barbecuing hamburgers outside and  IT SMELLED SO GOOD!

I made a scrambled egg on toast for dinner and it was almost the yummiest thing I've ever eaten.

All in all, it was a great day and left me with a sense of peace and calm and contentment that has remained with me  all week.

I  love you all very much!

Joanne

 

Marking Mother's Day

(Saturday afternoon)

Mother's Day is hard for me. Two years ago was as bad as it gets since it was my first one not being with my children. I had just moved in with Mom and Dad and spent the day feeling sad and sorry for myself and doing the ugly cry for most of the day. Last year, I endured and survived. 

Up until a few days ago, I had planned to do the endurance and survival thing again, but I have a new plan now. 

I've been thinking and praying about how best to mark  (it's not really about celebrating anymore) days like Mother's Day and the kids' birthdays since we are not spending them together and doing nothing just feels like faking i or ignoring it. Endurance works to a certain extent, but it's a grit-my-teeth-and-get-through-it-while-watching-the-clock kind of a thing, so I've been praying about a way to mark these kinds of days in a better fashion. 

I pray a lot in the shower--it's a time each morning when I lay it all out before God, giving him the pieces of my day and my heart and stepping back to let him arrange it all as he will.

The other morning, I feel like he picked them all up and laid them into  place in a new pattern for me to pursue.

It felt specifically like a way to mark their birthdays at first, but then he said,  "Why wait until August? Why don't you start on Mother's Day and get a jump on it now?" So here goes.

I will be staying home from church tomorrow to spend the day alone with God in a day of fasting and praying for my kids. No food, no electronics-- just me and him, a lot of water, my Bible and the journals I started for each of the the kids when they were babies. Journals in which I've written them letters on birthdays, first days of school, really good days and really hard days too.

So I will pray and read and write... 

...and I'll probably cry some too, which will be good even though I'd rather not. The drugs I was on for so many years shut down my emotions for the most part, but I've been weaned off almost all of them since moving  in with Mom and Dad. My anti-depressant has been the last one to go, but as of this week, I'm down to only a quarter  of the dose I've been on for years! With that decrease, my emotions should start to return to be a bit more normal. (I have been happy and even sad, but tears have been really rare, and we all need some here and there, so this feels like a good thing to me.

In other news you may have seen on Facebook, we took our newish camper out for a couple of days last week to try it all out--it is great! And we are heading to Utah at the end of the week to go to Moab for a week or more. The weather there is in the 80s these days, so I am ready for that for sure! In late August, we will be taking a longer trip to the Pacific Northwest and down the Oregon coast, which should be great fun. We will stop in Spokane on the way to Seattle, and I'm excited to visit Whitworth.  I haven't been back since the summer after graduation, and I'm ready to see how much the university has changed!

My neurologist recommended me for driving evaluation and training, so I hope to be driving later this summer early fall too!

I am going to teach Bible study for six weeks this summer for our church. Mom and I will host it here and I'll be teaching the Psalm 23 study I wrote and taught for Mission Community Church in 2010 in Arizona. I am excited about it,  but a little bit nervous too. I'm certainly not the same girl I was then, but God reminded me this morning that he IS exactly the  same God and since he'll be doing the heavy lifting on it, it will all be okay!

That's all the biggest news here...

I hope you are doing well and the flowers are blooming in your neck of the woods!(It's rained here a lot today and our tulips are red and the golf course out back is super green!)

With love to you, my friends,

Joanne