Top 5 . Thanks, 2025.

Feeling less reflective than most years, my thoughts land on a very-zoomed-out version of 2025. If you're interested, they are as follows:

• My Mom died in February but I'm not leaving her there. I'm bringing her with me.

• A puzzle can be your best friend when your son is a Marine at the same table, going through bins from his whole life at home, and on the brink of leaving again. The perfect tool when you're trying to be present, but not too, and distracted from all of those feelings, but not too...

Probably the hardest year of marriage, yet. (The competition is tough when it spans over decades.) We were closer to divorcing than ever before. Spending our 23rd wedding anniversary apart when we could have spent it together was a pretty good sign of the times. Probably not ideal, but still best. 

And guess what? I think we're closer than ever before. (I say I think because I'm still a little afraid to ask him, so we're going with it.) Anyway, didn't see that coming!

That's the thing, isn't it? We can't see the good coming around the corner. Even when we're well into the turn. 

Another BIG lesson. Which reminds me - in case I haven't said it, and I know I haven't, Thanks, 2025. 

Top 5 Takeaways from 2025 

1. Don't run away just because you don't know how to stay. 

2. What is best is often a long way away from what is ideal. But that makes a lot of sense when you are way past ideal in the first place.

3. It bears repeating...We can't see the good coming around the corner. Even when we're well into the turn. 

4. Use yourself as an untapped resource. We can feel as if we're actually dying if someone else doesn't meet our needs. We're literally wired this way in infancy! In adulthood, we must learn that we won't actually die, we have what we need (or can get it) and we can always help/comfort ourselves. 

5. Prayer for Generosity: Dear Lord, teach me to be generous. Teach me to serve you as You deserve; to give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil and not to seek for rest; to labor and not ask for reward, save that of knowing I am doing your will. Amen.

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As for new beginnings, I propose thoughtful consideration of "Thus far..." or "This again?" 2025 saw me out with timely inspiration between my morning devotional and a Ricky Gervais comedy special. We run the gamut over here. 

2026 started similarly with mumbled conversation across rooms with our teenage son.

.... ... ... ... _______________10:00.

Did you say it's' only 10:00 or it's already 10:00? He answered "already" when pressed (but only because he didn't want to hear another lecture about wishing time away.)

Reminds me of a line in a book I read recently. Something like... Time - Nothing is more valuable nor regarded more cheaply. Preparation for Death by St. Ignatius, I think. Now that I think of it, I just might put that on my headstone.

Is 2026 going to be a thus far, this again, only, or already year? Probably D. All of the above.

God be with you and yours in 2026. Don't run away. We have what we need and there is endless good ahead...

One Room Away

I’m outlining a pink bunny in red embroidery thread.  It’s part of a quilt top I started making for my niece when she was born.  A year ago.  I hope it doesn’t become her wedding present.  

One room away, Predator vs. Alien is on the TV, and the rest of my household is discussing saliva made out of acid.

Seasons are changing.  In this one, I can no longer count on everyone being at the dinner table and day trips are catch as catch can.  We have work and workouts, band and birthday parties, and school is just around the corner.  Graduation dates are creeping onto real-life calendars and you can’t help but wish you could freeze time.  

But, the time you do have is, well…interesting.  

You eat together, watch highlights of the latest kickboxing video, and get fruit stickers on your arm from the boy eating an apple next to you.  You tickle their backs when they lay on your lap, but they don’t want to sew and you sure don’t want to watch what’s on TV.  

So, you enjoy their presence from a room away, and you think about…

Yesterday’s conversations, the passage of time, and daily tragedies that we survive, but cannot fix - all while trying to make sure your tears don’t fall on your sewing project because water makes the pattern disappear.  

Sometimes, you just plain stumble on a metaphor.

My mind became a gathering place for the people on my heart.  They didn’t seem to mind that they’d never met and the furniture was old.    

A friend suffered another stroke.  Mom is too young for a nursing home.  An aging child cares for an aging parent, both wondering if they can survive the arrangement.  An elderly widower has plenty of money, but no companion nor ability to drive.  No, he’s never heard of Uber.  Who is he?

I feel the weight of each one more than I care to.  Maybe.  But, especially because discomfort always gives way to hunting solutions, and I can’t find any.  It seems I am close enough to feel their pain, but too far away to offer any real comfort.  

Maybe it would be different if you weren’t just one person in one place.  Maybe there is no such thing as lasting comfort.  Maybe comfort only exists when it is fresh and given again and again and again.  And maybe it just feels better to write it all out, and hope that what you’ve written can comfort someone other than yourself. 

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” 2 Cor:3-4

Road Trip

We are on the road to Kansas to visit family.  We haven’t made his trip in a year.  Not together, anyway.  Normally, we would have been twice since the last time - Fourth of July and Thanksgiving.  But, COVID... and fear that gathering could kill our most vulnerable.  So, please don’t come home in July.  Or September.  Or November.

Vaccinations have been had and a year is well, way too long.  

So, here we are. On I-35.  Party of five.  A party of five, which now consists of four legal drivers (with parents in the car) and a baby who turns twelve tomorrow.  A new permit and an old permit-almost-license, as soon as the driving test is knocked out, because why would you be able to do it the same day as the written portion?

Time is picking up speed.  Even literally.  Today is the first day of Daylight Savings Time.  “Spring Forward’.  Yep, that’s what we’re doin’.  The clocks still say the old time, but we know the truth.  

These trips are going to be harder to come by.  We’re in the “sweet spot”, as a dear friend with a bigger and older family than mine likes to remind me.  Drivers and employees have more responsibilities and no paid time off.  Boys become men (like they should), and their Mom trades in her minivan for a truck because she was never the minivan type, anyway.  

I don’t know where they are going or what they will be, but I do know they won’t be home or all sprawled out in this minivan, like they are Right Now.  

Say cheese.

Thanksgiving Ramblings

A friend asked last week about why I hadn’t written lately, and was hoping everything was okay.  Everything is okay.  I do a weekly video for my work, now, so all of my thoughts and creative energy have been funneled into that.  I showed her the link on our Facebook page, in case she was interested.  

This friend is also Native American and a caregiver for one of our patients.  I asked if she celebrated Thanksgiving, as I asked our patient about their Thanksgiving traditions.  She said she cooks the food, but doesn’t participate.  For her, and her ancestors, our Thanksgiving is a day of mourning.  There were no pilgrims and no Squanto.  Just death and injustice.  

I was not surprised that she didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but have never had the opportunity to hear this perspective firsthand.  Have you?

I’m pretty sure I wore a pilgrim hat made out of construction paper when I was in elementary school and I am also pretty sure I have pictures of my children wearing the same.  

I wanted to say I’m sorry, but it seemed too little and too hollow.

It is a little disorienting to lay an idea held for a lifetime on a kitchen table, out of which are borne many, many wonderful gatherings and memories, next to another idea to which it is diametrically opposed and feels instinctively “truer” than the one you’ve been espousing.

I continued to think on this the rest of the day and brought it to my own dinner table that night for discussion.  My husband replied without hesitation.  “History is written by the victors.”  

Ugh.  I really am sorry.

It is mind boggling how these things co-exist.  Or not.  If you are a Native American, “Thanksgiving” is built on a lie.  If you are like me, Thanksgiving just is, and you are grateful for it, just like the name implies, and it is not (or has not been until now) mixed with a tincture of sadness for another version of how it came to be.   

And yet, things that don’t go together at all, occupy the same space at the same time, all of the time.  Like singing a prayer of Thanksgiving to a host of friends missing their spouses, listening to old voice recordings of boys learning to speak while they tower over you and watch you cry at the memory of it, and hearing your husband’s deceased grandmother's voice, wish her daughter a Happy Thanksgiving “wherever you are”.  And that was just yesterday. 

But time just keeps moving forward, and mornings come and little boys lay on your lap and you want to freeze time, but you know you can’t.  So, you just admire the complexity of veins running through his growing body and look at your new Christmas cactus blooming days before Thanksgiving, and realize that life is simple and complicated and time can be a friend if you make good use of it. 

Becoming Secondary

Sometimes, there is a downside to working in hospice and it is different than what you might think.  It's not too much death or dying, but a hyper-awareness of time in my normal every-day living.

Nothing brings this home more than when I'm trying to track down my percussionist in the orbit of high school marching band when I can't get him on the phone.

Does that seem like a weird set of circumstances to bring the old sand-filled hourglass center stage?

I'm hoping I can explain, and figure it out for myself at the same time...

I get to meet people in the evening of life on a routine basis.  Very often, they've become secondary to the people in their lives for whom they were primary for a good long while.  Spouses and kids, mostly.  They were wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, and their best years were the same years I'm living now.  But, their people slowly moved on.  They were moved from the center of their lives to the periphery, and became someone to check in on, rather than someone to be included and enjoyed.

My eyes are wide open to this shift.  I'm becoming aware of the people in my life who may feel like they've been dropped in a secondary slot, permanently.  I am still primary for my children because I can drive and grocery shop and facilitate everything that is important to them.  But, I am inching my way to the periphery and every time I'm holding my phone and there is no answer on the other end, I know.

An unscheduled weekend rolls in and feels like a blessing and a curse because time together is so important.  But, finding more than two people who want to do the same thing is a chore and getting all five to agree is nearly impossible.

So, we compromise. 

At the river, a couple of us fished down the bank a little ways, I sat on an uncomfortable rock until my butt hurt and then filled a trash bag with other people's trash, while someone else threw rocks at spiders the size of grapefruits, hoping to pass a few minutes while noting, "this is the-most-redneck-vacation."  It seemed like the best bonding moment was our unanimous relief to be back home, savoring the memory that we created.  Mainly, that we didn't want to go back there any time soon.  No discussion needed.
 
Sunday kept us altogether for breakfast and Mass, but separate for the rest due to attractions that couldn't be resisted and commitments that needed to be kept.  But, fortunately for me, my plans included sitting poolside and holding a baby for a couple of hours which seemed to slow time a bit.  Gratefully.

Unless I am hitting Sonic at Happy Hour, there are few things my boys are interested in joining me for, and doing things as a family is, well, usually a compromise for most of us.  So, I sit on the futon as long as anyone will sit by me, deliver pigs in a blanket to a fort in the woods, change my schedule to steal a lunch date at Subway, and go to the skate park when it's almost dark because "they have lights, you know".

I know I am becoming secondary.  Just in little moments for now, but they are coming more frequently and I know they will keep coming, as they should.  Occasionally, someone will notice a little tear and recognize that I'm not okay and while I'm trying to find the words to explain, they decide they didn't really want an explanation, anyway.  And I'm relieved, because I couldn't really explain it, anyway.

Day After Day, Week After Week, Month After Month, Year After Year...

I finished a book today that I bought four years ago for my husband.  It was recommended by a beloved priest then, and again last week by my spiritual director.  

It reminded me of something I used to know and how it inspired me when I learned of it, and motivated me to practice it consciously, at least for a little while.

The vision of the kingdom, the call of Christ to labor and suffer with him, has overtones of a great and noble crusade - yet we must each of us translate that vision and retain that spirit in the routine, humdrum events of every day...one day at a time, frustrated and perhaps discouraged, each twenty-four hours filled with as many defeats and frustrations as victories, each hour made up of sixty minutes of humdrum things and little people busy and concerned about many other things, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year...

...Each day, every day of our lives, God presents to us the people and opportunities upon which he expects us to act.  He expects no more of us, but he will accept nothing less of us; and we fail in our promise and commitment if we do not see in the situations of every moment of every day as his divine will...

I simply cannot be reminded of this enough.  Brother Lawrence in the The Practice of the Presence of God and Fr. Jean Pierre de Caussade in Abandonment to Divine Providence have been two great teachers for me on the subject.  But, I read them so long ago, and had forgotten, again.  So, thank you, Fr. Walter Ciszek for reminding me, yet again, to celebrate the sacrament of the present moment!  

Wrapping up Memorial weekend and kicking off a summer with boys ushers in a lot of memorable moments...

Like trying to build a hobbit house under a trampoline

Hanging out with friends and explosives

Launching a cardboard paratrooper from a rooftop

Shooting an AR-15

Fishing, again.

And finding a little beauty in a fungus for me, in the middle of all this boy stuff

And these are just from the last two days.  But, I know there are exponentially more unphotographed and unrecognized moments than photographed and fully present ones.  That's okay.  It will always be that way.  But, the gap doesn't have to retain its seismic features.  I can close it, little by little.  Not by taking more pictures, but by being present and remembering, believing that the details are the expressed work of God.  

This is not easy, but for me, very worthwhile.  If I can work to believe that God is at work in my life (because, sometimes it is work), all of the moments that come to us, come with their own sense of peace and joy.  People, places, inconveniences, and drastic changes in the plan can be received with new energy and acceptance when considered as the will of God, hand-delivered.  

Lord, I believe.  Help my unbelief!  

Mark 9:24

   

Living Someone Else's Dream

It's the first full day of summer, and I need to capture the feeling that it holds for me, before it changes.  It reminds me of when I was pregnant with my first child and everyone kept telling me I wouldn't remember what life before children was like, after I had children.  They were right.  It would never be the same again.

For the first time, a summer stretched out before me seems like a tremendous gift.  I've always looked forward to summers and all that they hold, but saw them less as a gift and something that simply was.  But, things are different now.  I'm standing at the brink of starting a new career and becoming a student again after fifteen years.  I may not have many or even one more non-working summer ahead.  I've also spent two days a week for the last nine weeks in the hospital doing my chaplain internship, mostly in the ER and day surgery, and I'm looking through a new set of glasses.

These glasses reveal the gifts of my life more than ever before.  My family has our health and we have time to spend together.  We get to choose what we want to do next.  Our only limitations are money and a lack of imagination.  Our biggest cross is boredom.  We did not just lose a baby who died in the middle of the night.  We are not bound by a chemotherapy or dialysis schedule.  We do not have to scour labels for gluten, or fear diabetic coma because we had cake and ice cream at a birthday party.  We do not struggle with chronic pain or anxiety.  We are not suffering from homelessness, hunger, loneliness, or addiction.  We don't have gall stones, kidney stones, or infections of any kind.  We aren't burdened by the sadness that comes from watching someone you love fight to live.  We have everything we want, and nothing that we don't want.  Who can say that?

We were at my niece's high school graduation a couple of nights ago, and one of the students said he wanted to join the Marines and have a family when he got out.  I leaned over to my husband and whispered, "You are living someone else's dream."  He half-jokingly said, "That's a big responsibility."  But, I've been thinking about that.  Our whole life is someone else's dream.  Other people dream about when all of their children were young.  When everyone was healthy.  When everyone was alive.  When everyone was happy.  When everyone had time to spend together.  These days of mine are the "good 'ol days" of their's.

Living someone else's dream is a big responsibility.  It is quite possible that other people would die (or give anything) to have what we have.  Our responsibility is to appreciate what we have, and try to stay present.    In the midst of chaos, fighting, ingratitude, and boredom, I am tempted to wish these moments away.  To look forward to another, more peaceful time.  To escape.  Is it just me, or is it funny to think that we may be escaping back to these very moments that we feel so desperate to leave?

We have the privilege of knowing a 93-year-old woman.  We took her to church for a couple of years, but her health is failing, so I've been looking in on her a little more often.  She appreciates my visits tremendously, but gently chastises me about needing to be home with my family.  The last time, she told me that "Families don't last forever" and I need to be spending my time with them.  When she said that, she caught me off-guard; I felt a little shock wave go out from my heart through the rest of my body.  Is it possible my family won't last forever, or at least until I die?  Is it possible that something could happen that would change the way we relate to each other forever?   Yes.  It is possible.  And I am a better woman, wife, sister, daughter, and mother when I force myself to sit in the uncomfortable place where this question lives.  Just for a little while. 

My 93-year-old friend knows this.  She is the last living among her siblings, and many of them were younger than her.  For a long time, she has wondered why the Lord allowed her to survive them all.  She raised six children whom she did not bear.  Her husband's first wife died in a plane accident.  The youngest child was 3-years-old when their Mom died.    Her memories of living in a family like mine are but a distant memory, so she urges me to be present and live family life well, while I still can.

*If we bump into each other this summer, and I seem to have lost the wonder and appreciation of the gifts of time and family, please gently remind me and I'll do the same for you.

Dear God of the Summertime,

Thank you.  Thank you for days upon days on the calendar that are wide open to encounter your love through creatures and creation.  Thank you for the gift of health.  Thank you for the gift of time.  Thank you for the gift of family.  Lord, please be very near to those whose only experience of these gifts is their desire for them.  For us, whom you've blessed beyond measure, give us the grace to give from the abundance you've bestowed.  Help us to live in a way that honors the responsibility we have, while we're living someone else's dream.  Please bless and accompany all who are suffering in body, mind, or spirit.  Amen.