Speaking into the void
"The Premonition" (digital photomanipulation), Michael Vincent ManaloThere's a gulf between them and I, created by the detritus flooding out of my soul after years of being locked inside. Sometimes you hide in a cave so deep that you have nowhere else to throw your garbage, so you live with it. The door has been guarded by the armed guards of fear and shame and no one gets past them alive.They say self-hatred is as old as sin. You can tell me not to feel it, but I'll just put it in hiding again. It's like a lifelong addiction that has consumed you: you don't see any way out because you've been surrounded for so long.Can yo...
Source: Turquoise Gates - August 23, 2013 Category: Cancer Tags: hiding depression blogs being real questions without answers uncertainty writing Source Type: blogs
Memories of nightmares
My mama always sighs when the sunshine beams out from all around a cloud. Tonight it was a cool lemon yellow, the shadows all lavender and gray. I was bone tired, lazily listening to the children's chatter about their day, their art projects, watching the fields go by: corn 5 feet tall in the low ones, then a rusty sun burnt patch of soybeans, more corn, but this only up to my knee. The wind bounced off the mustardy corn tassels, almost like thousands of invisible fairies running across them. We were belting out "Jesse's Girl" to the classic rock station, and it was the fourth song I remembered. In a row. My thoughts caugh...
Source: Turquoise Gates - August 21, 2013 Category: Cancer Tags: thoughts emotions Pain nightmares insomnia observations PTSD memory aching waiting Source Type: blogs
Sometimes it all works out
There are some moments in your life you are pretty sure you can't get back. No do-overs, right? Just when you're sure the joy of that missed moment has escaped you forever, and you give up on healing and agree to making do - sometimes something magical happens right in that space. Sometimes, right in the middle of life's mess, everything goes into slow motion, and you think to yourself, "I think this is what it feels when it goes right." Tonight, in the midst of one of the most uncertain moments of my fledgling mothering career, I got to take a moment back.And this story, friends, is how sometimes your trepidation turns in...
Source: Turquoise Gates - August 19, 2013 Category: Cancer Tags: motherhood hilarity education the talk being real family children Source Type: blogs
Night light
Moonset, 3 a.m.If you keep the shutter open long enough, there is enough light in the darkest night to show us what our eyes alone cannot see. Time alone unveils the images of nightscapes as with time alone night passes into day.Light dawns in the darkness for the upright.(Ps. 112:4a) (Source: Turquoise Gates)
Source: Turquoise Gates - August 18, 2013 Category: Cancer Tags: photography darkness hope Source Type: blogs
Can you get over the hump in a friendship slump?
The kids in the back seat are staging a conversational attack on public school when she piped up, in a soft voice, "I might actually make a friend." She paused, "I used to want lots of friends, but now I think I'd be happy even with just one." My heart fluttered, thudded, then sank. I remember that feeling. I had it so strong when I was a kid. Just one friend who really wanted you around. Just one whose mother hadn't forced them into playing with you.You could hear it in the tone of your mother's voice as she answered the brand new cordless phone out on the stone stoop when evening was already starting to cool, sinking kin...
Source: Turquoise Gates - August 15, 2013 Category: Cancer Tags: social anxiety homeschool education decisions mothering fail friendship loss of friendships questions failure Source Type: blogs
To the chipped, the broken, the flawed, the hiders and seekers
Humans can't freehand a perfect line. Tiny imperfections are the signature of all our work. Asymmetries, glitches in patterns, the aging, drying ink or paint leaving too faint a mark or too rough a texture in spots.The timber was fluid, dancer-like, like all long, slim timbers, straight but swaying. The post borne of her is rugged, rough, scarred stiffness bearing the pock marks of human hands tieing strings too tight, the horse's weight at the end slowly sawing a slash through brittle skin. Only in the hands of us and the other living things do things go so crooked. Chance alone did not get us here. And this means there m...
Source: Turquoise Gates - August 14, 2013 Category: Cancer Tags: vulnerable hiding choices receiving Grace imperfection humanity scars shame consequences Source Type: blogs
Everyday miracles: A day in the life of a special needs mom
Patience is passion tamed. (Lyman Abbott)My third daughter was born on a Monday, after a long and exhausting labor. Her appearance was a little shocking: she had large olive-colored eyes and a rug of dark blond hair sticking straight out from her head."Monday's child is fair of face." Yes, she was a little beauty and drew admiring remarks from many strangers as an infant. You could tell just by looking at her that she had a mind of her own - from the very day of her birth. As soon as I saw her, I thought there was something special about this baby. For three years, I marveled at her tenacity, her passion, and her precociou...
Source: Turquoise Gates - August 12, 2013 Category: Cancer Tags: vaccine related encephalitis special needs mothering homeschool 1000 gifts learning Source Type: blogs
Walking in fog with both eyes open: Facing temptation armed and dangerous
“We were never meant to be completely fulfilled; We were meant to taste it, to long for it, and to grow toward it... The secret to living life as it was meant to be is... to befriend our yearning instead of avoiding it, to live into our longing rather than trying to resolve it, to enter the spaciousness of our emptiness instead of trying to fill it up.” (Gerald May, The Awakened Heart)It was just last week that I sat on the porch with my mom in the pre-dawn and watched the fog rolling into our valley. Fog is a lonely weather, slowly, stealthily surrounding us with the mystery of mist instead of the flesh and blood, sol...
Source: Turquoise Gates - August 9, 2013 Category: Cancer Tags: choices loneliness decisions God's Word everyday miracles faith crisis temptation Source Type: blogs
Forgiving the past one moment at a time
I've cried countless tears about our story, how you're woven into mine and I into yours and the threads cannot be teased out from each other. In China they say that a red cord runs through us, those of us destined for each other's lives, a cord that we all hold part of inside. Mine has frayed edges where I've tried to pull it out. For once I truly believed you were all better off without me.When your eyes have been trained for hate every time they look in the mirror, you forget that someone had to train you to see yourself this way. I remember when I look at the photos of my childhood. I vaguely remember seeing a lovely se...
Source: Turquoise Gates - August 2, 2013 Category: Cancer Tags: living in the moment affirmation wise mind story family loving yourself mindfulness Source Type: blogs
Dreams unwished
I pressed my nose against your fluffcareful not to breathe in or disturbthe thousand points of whitehopea dream for each oneSix years old in a field of wisheshopes and dreamsinnocentthinking somedaythey'd all come trueSo I blew and blewcascade of joy in tiny spearswhirling in a child's breathtoward a new lifeand a thousandnew yellow babiesAnd now I leave the spears in placethe seeds unsownbecause dreams rarely come trueit's a waste of breath to blowand you're beautifuljust the way you areand I am tryingto be beautiful toojust where I've been planted. (Source: Turquoise Gates)
Source: Turquoise Gates - July 31, 2013 Category: Cancer Tags: dreams childhood innocence lost living Jesus trying Source Type: blogs
Upside down and backwards
Do you ever look down and see the stars beneath your feet? Do you ever look up and see your feet? Does your world ever get that confused?Sometimes I think I look for alien landscapes through my camera lens because they seem the most familiar. Living the charmed life in a first world country, with husband, house, and (okay a few more than the requisite 1.5 kids and a dog) children and pets. How could I possibly be confused about who I am and where I'm supposed to be?Life does not follow the charted line like a map. It's a poem in the midst of it's writing, a novel without an ending, a movie whose whole plot will be forever ...
Source: Turquoise Gates - July 30, 2013 Category: Cancer Tags: confusion awkwardness not fitting in loneliness identity Source Type: blogs
A living memory
The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside us while we live. (Norman Cousins)Do you remember those hazy humid dreams of childhood summers? Have you forgotten the schemes and dreams you plotted along life's timeline when you were 7? Do you remember pinky promises and cross your heart and hope to die, all those pacts we made with other little people to become something, do something, before we got old.My childhood dreams come alive with the smell of horse hair and the huff of a mare's breath on a hot summer day; the prickle of hay on skin and how it smelled like warm sunshine bottled up. My dreams at night w...
Source: Turquoise Gates - July 29, 2013 Category: Cancer Tags: dreams childhood living in the moment happiness soul audit being content horses childlike faith memory Source Type: blogs
An untrained pastor is NOT a therapist
The very first time I ever sliced through flesh, I was sure that I would die. I was sure I would carry it out. I was sure I wanted to. I was 19, a nursing student, struggling to develop my own morals and beliefs, in a crisis, at a crossroads. After I slashed with the only available sharp object, ineffectually, I limped to the emergency room, where a physician examined my wounds and said, "I won't stitch these. So you wanted attention, now you're going to get it. Because what you chose is big red scars." I still carry the scars, finally flesh-toned after a decade of red, like slippery obstacles I've traversed.I went to chur...
Source: Turquoise Gates - July 26, 2013 Category: Cancer Tags: invalidation spiritual abuse counseling crisis church pain brokenness memory suicide Source Type: blogs
Mermaids
She is older than I was when the darkness dragged me down. She is so much wiser. Sweeter, more adventurous. Were those things stolen from me, too?The questions I would ask are drowned in the twilight ringing with laughter from the pool. I feel it - 7 years old - and I act it, splashing, diving, doing headstands underwater. Showing Amy how to breaststroke and kick turn.If you are one, like me, with the hyperactive thoughts, if your thoughts cascade over your head as full and powerful and rushing as a waterfall...drown them. Find something that shuts them out. Find something that makes you SO happy, you are literally soaking...
Source: Turquoise Gates - July 25, 2013 Category: Cancer Tags: living in the moment child abuse mothering with PTSD sexual abuse DBT mindfulness borderline personality disorder Source Type: blogs
Next to me
You and me, baby, we're stuck like glue. We learned from the best: now married 40 years, held in better times and worse, through fat years and lean ones, in illness and health, pledged as long as they both shall live. And walking down the aisle at their baby's wedding? That same open smile between your mom's dimples, and the same look of contentment on your dad. Can we make do that? 'Til death do us part?You're as loyal a person as I've ever met. You stick things through - and not with resignation, as if bearing me up is a task, but with ethic and love. The extra housework, the extra time spent alone with your kids, the co...
Source: Turquoise Gates - July 24, 2013 Category: Cancer Tags: trusting yourself romance letters to Aaron a husbands love loyalty marriage letters Source Type: blogs
