Messy Monday:Teeth Marks, Home Decor, and Rewards

This is my third Messy Monday post and it is likely to be just barely still Monday when I finish it. It's been a heck of a week. Not bad or good depending on your definition of those terms, but for sure MESSY!

Teeth Marks:  I grew up in Southern California on a hillside with tons of field mice. One year my Barbie case housed my Barbie, her accessories, and a large family of mice. We didn't find out until after the smell and the holes revealed their invasion of Barbie's space.

When I found this, in our garage, I had a flashback to my childhood Barbie case/nest. I'm not going to lie, I gagged a little.

Battling anxiety daily, I find this disturbing. Who knows when those nasty critters will invade?

Seriously though, freaking about what COULD happen before it does or doesn't is just a ridiculous waste of time and energy (see below for another example of ridiculousness), or that's what my counselor Bob says...

Home Decor: I love having a table with decorations on it for the current season (looking at this picture it looks like a sea anemone has taken up residence-but it's a beautiful handmade wooden bowl with fake mums).

I am currently re-working my business model and clarifying what I do for people when I meet with them. This re-working is happening in my head, electronically, in spiral notebooks and now all over my dining room table. I love Donald Miller's StoryBrand system, but like everything else I do, it's MESSY.

Is anyone else out there decorating for an emergency? If anyone in our house or visiting needs to run out the door, we are prepared for just about anything. The cleats, boots, sneakers and goggles are all within easy reach. Up until a week ago there was a gift bag full of tampons and a recycled bag full of corning ware. We've decided to start scaling back on our emergency supplies, I mean decorations...

Reward: #1 (Unintentional ridiculous time waster)

One of our favorite foods is Hatch Chiles grown in New Mexico. According to Pinterest, anyone can roast, steam/cool, peel, seed, and eat them. I bought some thinking I could do that! The smell of roasting them was super yummy and I felt excited and motivated to bust out some awesome flavors! Then, I cover them and let them steam as they cool. YIKES! 

Not only are they ugly looking floppy things but, if you don't have gloves and have to use plastic bags on your hands to remove skin, seeds, stems, and the veiny stuff inside, they are a total pain the butt! I did it, but honestly, they are on a plate in the back of the fridge in a baggie because I have no idea if they turned out like anything good or not. Reward of tasty roasted chilies squished and shredded like the skin of the peppers! This was a slimy, messy, annoying experience. I don't recommend it, unless you have gloves and are extremely motivated.  

Reward #2
My reward this week for surviving our man-cubs teen years was an apple fritter and a couple episodes of Jane the Virgin (the reason for my affection for this show is for another time). But, the reason for the apple fritter, I will explain.

Once you have escaped the toddler years and your cubs become school age, you can peacefully nibble on the donut of your choice without begging, pleading, crying, wailing and reminders you have to S-H-A-R-E. I did buy my cubs their own donut but they always wanted some of mine. Now, I buy the donut after they are deposited at school. I buy one. To eat with my HOT coffee. It is a rare delight worth indulging from time to time.

Being an overweight woman, buying a donut comes with a GIANT bucket size serving of shame. This is nonsense, but still embedded in my being. This will be another blog at some point. I wanted to mention it in case you feel it too.

Reward #3 

Finishing books. Man-cubs in bed. My Love sleeping/snoring beside me. Grab one from the stack of started-not-yet-finished and get it done! But this one. It bit me at the end. The challenge he threw down torqued me more than any books I've read or listened to in a while. A different kind of bucket list. I won't ruin his do-something-with-what-you've-learned punchline but, damnit. I can't stop thinking about it. I finished the book, but he "STARTed SOMETHING" in me that I have to finish now. Sigh. I'll write about that too. Meanwhile, get your own copy. 

Most of my Messy Monday points this week were about the tension I feel about unanswered stuff:

Will the mice come in the house? 

Will this new business model help me help more people? 

Will anyone in my family need to run from the house grabbing cleats and googles at the same time? 

Will I ever stop believing Pinterest has my best interests in mind?

Will the shame of buying a donut ever go away?

Will I have the guts to follow through on the challenge at the end of this book?

This week's blog is about messy stuff, not relationships. But, in my experience, learning how not to freak out at the messy stuff, helps you practice for not freaking out as badly when relationships get messy. 

COMPLETE yet?

I love Fridays. It's actually my favorite day of the week. It's always been like this. It didn't matter if I worked, went to school, stayed home, Friday is my favorite!

Here is my Five Minute Friday writing for this week.

The word this week is COMPLETE.

START:

This made me laugh. Talk about COMPLETE instructions.

What instructions are you following? I want to be me. COMPLETEly me. A natural born people pleaser, I have discovered more this year, when my ability to perform to any kind of "standard" I might set for myself or anyone else might try to set for me, I fail. COMPLETEly.

I'm not the me I used to recognize easily in the mirror. A couple of years ago I saw this in a store window and I bought it. It's a recycled bag. It still speaks to me. There is nothing wrong with being regular. I like regular, but for me to be COMPLETE it's gotta be like this:

I'm embracing the messy (see Messy Monday posts) of life with both arms wide open. Finding balance pressing in to the challenges of life then giving myself space to rest then getting back "out there" finally makes me feel COMPLETE.

"Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and COMPLETE, not lacking anything." (James 1:4)

No further instructions needed.

If you haven't found your COMPLETE yet. Not to worry. You will.

If you need help. Let me know.

STOP.

Messy Monday: My Happy Place, Master Bedroom, Wife-ing, and My Newest Hero

The Car Wash. It smells of rainbows and happiness. My family laughs at me when I say I'm going to My Happy Place. I can't see anything, hear anything or do much of anything in this magical sudsy swishy world. It scrubs the bug guts, road residue, and general driving dirt of my pretty white truck. Some day I will have to write about my awesomely nicknamed Mighty White. She sounds super mighty with her new louder muffler!

I was taught years ago that the first room to be cleaned in my house should be the Master Bedroom. I completely agree, but don't do it all the time. Do you always do everything you've been taught? If so, don't judge me... 

The reason your supposed to do it - to treat your "together" space as sacred. It should be free of clutter, distractions and stress. The reason I don't do it all the time - it's the place that I am safest to fall apart, be messy and procrastinate in a way that is relatively harmless.  

My "Desk"

Bed Pillow Staging Area with fuzzy friends

Pillows staged, fuzzy friends put upright, and tidiness established (in this corner).

I mostly love being a wife. My husband, he is my world. I've learned to love him in ways I never imagined I could love, forgiven in ways I never realized I needed to forgive, and worked harder alongside him than I never knew I'd need to.
We remain a work in progress and if I dedicated an entire year of Messy Mondays to our marriage I might scratch the surface of the massive messiness we have navigated together. We are hot-headed, strong-willed, and even have opposing favorite football teams (Broncos vs. Cowboys). We live loud, pray hard, and laugh a lot.

The things I do to love him well:
Choosing to keep my mouth shut, wait patiently for God to move in areas I have no control over, and live with him in such a way that I don't break the masterpiece (him) being built alongside me.

Forgiving in ways I never realized I'd need to forgive means:
I have to forgive him and myself for not being who I thought we should be. The first 10 years of our marriage I spent trying to change him into whoever I thought I should have for my husband (like I knew?!). The next 10 I spent trying to convince him (more myself) that we were going to survive raising kids together with very different family histories and perspectives. This past 7 years, I've focused on forgiving myself and him for past wounds, ridiculous fights, and the pain of not meeting each other's expectations in big ways and small.

For us, marriage is really messy work. This means:
Giving each other the space to grow, become, and expand horizons while not losing the connection in our marriage. When we are in sync, all is well, peaceful and encouraging. When we are out of sync, life is painful, overwhelming and discouraging. When we are at peace with each other and not wrestling with God over the circumstances we are facing, there is a core level peace that feels clean, tidy even - until it's not.

When we see things from opposite angles, find opposing solutions to perceived or real problems, and for me, when the slimy goo of fear pushes in like a sludgy wave of doubt over my own capabilities, strife happens. It squeezes with a vice-like grip choking my faith in us to come out of it on the other side. This is when we do the intense, stinky, gritty work of being married. We take a breath, remind each other (we take turns on this, somehow) we are on the same team and talk (or yell - just keeping it real here) until we find the common ground - what is best for our family.

We only work this hard to be married because we both firmly believe its worth doing. We also have a great counselor for when we get stuck in deep muck and can't find the high ground. We have learned to share our disasters as needed with others to encourage them to hang on and do the work, because it truly is worth the effort. The picture below is a pose we have been striking since we first got together almost 28 years ago. Looking at this picture alone might make you think we've dialed in the whole marriage thing. Ha! Nope! We just aren't going to quit working (shoveling, mopping, scrubbing...) on it.

This is me. No makeup because, like I said in Friday's post, I deal with anxiety and menopause. Preparing to go to a very fancy wedding (for people I love - I wish that made it easier) kept me dripping and hot flashing all afternoon. Also, our oldest son was going to his first Homecoming Dance and I was going to be at the wedding, not using my telephoto lens to capture every last detail of this big "First". The eyes shut picture my Love snapped makes me laugh because he caught a moment when I just didn't want to be seen. I closed my eyes. See me? Nope, because I can't see you - just like a baby playing peek-a-boo, right?!

Then, I look at my Big Boy. He's becoming a man. His growing, voice-cracking, facial hair sprouting self makes me hold my breath sometimes. Did we teach him enough? Will he be able to figure it out on his own, all these new situations and events he's facing? Will his educational and life challenges hold him back or compel him to push forward? Parenting him is super messy because he's the oldest - the one who becomes the test subject for all parenting experiments and ideas. I have no idea what's next for him.

I do know this. I love him and he loves me. He's a promise from God fulfilled, in the flesh. The goofy, loud, opinionated, Geico commercial quoting man-cub standing next to me is becoming my newest hero.