Let's talk about babies

For the last five years of my life, something has been happening in the background.

You've heard a lot in this space about my journey through seminary and internship, and my first years of being a pastor. You've heard about my family and some of my vacations, my love for baseball and knitting, my thoughts on dialogue and division, and my crazy idealism for the world we live in. Recently, because I've been busy, you've mostly gotten lots and lots of sermon transcripts.

But behind all of this, for the last five years, Matt and I have been on a long journey to try to start a family.

It has been quite a journey. A journey that has included frustration and tears, losses and medical interventions, countless needle-stabs and blood draws, surgeries (major and minor), and through it all, enough peace in our hearts to keep stepping forward, one day at a time, without counting up our fears or losses or heartbreaks. Which is not to say that there weren't bad days (there were plenty), or that we had the strength or gumption to keep pressing ahead indefinitely (there comes a point when you have to start thinking about stopping, for the sake of your sanity).

I wouldn't wish this journey on anyone. And yet, as I have come to learn, this journey is so very common, and nobody really knows it.

There have been lots of blessings to come out of this journey that wouldn't have happened otherwise. I have made new friends and built new relationships with others who have struggled, just like we have. Friends of mine have come out of the woodwork to share with me their own stories of infertility and pregnancy loss. I have been forced to think - deeply! - about what I hope my life will look like, and what pieces of my body and soul I am willing to make vulnerable in order to pursue those hopes and dreams. I would venture a guess that Matt and I are closer and better because of all of this, and that our relationship is in a deeper place than we could ever have expected it to be after 8.5 years of marriage. I've been forced to be emotionally vulnerable (in a good way), and to learn to ask for/accept help (which I'm terrible at). Spiritually, I've run the gamut from praying fervently with hope to shouting at God in absolute anger. I've connected to Bible stories in far different ways, especially stories of barren women, but also stories of finding peace in trial, and finding kindred spirits in all those in the Bible who felt they had no other option but to cry out to God and put themselves out there, because they had no other choice.

But don't be mistaken. These beautiful and unforeseen blessings do not, in any way, make this path easier. They don't make this journey "better." They don't redeem the pain and frustration of spending so much time, money, and energy trying to accomplish something that should be simple; something that biology has been making happen since the start of the human race. Infertility and pregnancy loss are HARD.

As we crossed over into 2013, there were lots of transitions on the horizon. I had just accepted a new call, which meant leaving a church I loved in order to follow God's call to a new church that I was excited to love. Goodbyes and hellos are hard. Even (especially!) the good ones. Also, this new church was in a new town in a new state...putting me five hours from most of my family and from the Chicagoland that is a HUGE part of who I am. Moving is my least favorite thing ever, because it involves packing, and so there was plenty of stress on the horizon as I packed both our apartment and my office, and as we went house-hunting in Decorah, and as we tried to make the most of our last weeks in Chicago before moving.

During this time of crazy transitions, we also decided to take one more (last?) shot at a round of IVF. We'd done a few cycles before, and still had a couple embryos frozen, and we decided (with the encouragement and blessing of my doctor), to try one last round before we moved away (and out of his care).

My official start date here at First Lutheran was March 1. I preached my first sermon here on Sunday, March 3. I spent Monday and Tuesday of that week trying to get my office unpacked and set up. And then on Wednesday, we drove back to Chicago, because that Thursday was my embryo transfer (the culmination of a month-plus cycle of medications and monitoring). The timing of the cycle and the transfer was certainly not ideal. It was just another thing to add to all the madness of moving and starting a new job and closing on a house.

But for some crazy reason, the absolute wrong time turned out to be the absolute right time. And so two weeks after starting my new job, we found out that one of those little embryos had stuck around, and we were pregnant. Thrilling news, and terrifying. Because once you've experienced a loss, it takes a long time for you to actually believe that the pregnancy is going to last. Between then and now, there have been plenty of anxious days. Plenty of worry and wonder. Plenty of huge sighs of relief every time blood draws showed my hormone levels going up, and every time my doctor has been able to easily find a heartbeat at our monthly appointments.

It took us until week 13 to start telling close family and friends. It took us until week 16 to share the news with the congregation. And it took us until week 17 to go public. For as much as your head knows that, statistically, chances of loss after 13, 16, 17 weeks are incredibly low, your heart still worries that you will (continue to) be the exception to the rule, the person who keeps defying the odds in the wrong way.

But it's getting harder and harder to worry, and easier and easier to believe that THIS IS HAPPENING. FOR REAL. We crossed the 20-week mark over the weekend (halfway there!), and had our big mid-pregnancy ultrasound yesterday. And yes. There's a baby in there. A baby with arms and legs that move and kick, a baby with a little heart beating away in its chest, a baby with teensy toes and little lips, who is just starting to get big enough for me to feel it when it tumbles and flips and kicks.

I can't completely shake my fears that things still might go wrong, but I am also learning, day by day, how to really enjoy this good news. I'm learning how to let other people be happy for me. I'm learning how to settle in and act and feel like your everyday, average pregnant lady. And honestly, I keep feeling a huge sense of relief to know that the news is now out there for all to know. I feel like I've been keeping huge secret after huge secret for these last five years. For so many good reasons, we've kept this whole journey pretty quiet. But now that we've crossed over in time to be closer to birth than to conception, I am really happy, not only to be talking about a BABY!, but also to be a little more candid about the road we've traveled to get to this point.

Wow. Lots of words in this post. Makes sense. There's a lot that's been bottled up for a long time. Feels good to put it all out there. As a reward for wading through all of this, how about a picture? Enjoy!

20-week ultrasound! We chose not to learn hedgehog's gender - we are into surprises. Still plenty amazing to look at this picture and see an obvious baby! This is starting to feel real. Also, see the arm up by the face? Hedgehog did NOT want their picture taken. Haha!

Four. :)

Saturday Noon

And I'm still in my pj's.

In the spirit of lazy randomness, I'm sitting here watching the beginning of the Cubs/Sox game (go Cubs!), drinking leftover Thai iced coffee from dinner last night (Siam Noodle and Rice...YUM!), and trying to keep from worrying about either the fate of my fantasy baseball teams (Yes, teams. I have THREE. And they're all doing terribly.) or the fact that my internship stipend is not nearly enough money to get us through the summer.

In the spirit of randomness, I thought I'd share with you the fact that I'm late jumping on the last.fm bandwagon, but I'm glad I finally got with the program. There's tons of music there to listen to!

In the spirit of randomness, it's interesting to me that in a 24 hour span, I both read this article about banana economics and happened to watch this episode of Good Eats devoted to bananas (watch it: part 1 and part 2). I hated bananas for most of my childhood and adolescence. I didn't understand why anyone would want to eat something with that sort of mushy, sticky texture. I remember being on a mission trip to Colorado just after I graduated high school, and sitting around a big table eating breakfast before our workday. For no apparent reason I decided I wanted a banana. So I ate my first banana in many many years, and decided that I liked them. And so now I'm a banana-eater. Not terribly often, though - I tend to buy them, forget about them, and then feel too guilty to buy more of them since I have a habit of letting them go to waste.

In the spirit of randomness, let it also be known that I learned two important things about sharing yesterday: Matt and I are no good at sharing french fries, and we are no good at sharing umbrellas. The umbrella problem is obvious - he's tall, I'm short, if I hold it I smack him in the head, if he holds it, it doesn't cover me very well. But the french fry problem is much more compliated. We are distinctly different french fry eaters. I view french fries as an accompaniement - a tasty side, if you will, to be eaten alongside your hot dog/hamburger/etc. So I intend to eat my fries interspersed with the eating of the rest of my meal. Matt, on the other hand, values the hot freshness of a batch of french fries over their side dish quality, and so he eats all of his french fries first, before starting in on the rest of his meal, to ensure that he eats them at their hot, crispy best. Now, let it be known that I hate cold french fries, so I will never be so committed to my method that I let the fries get cold and gross. But warm crispy french fries are as good to me as hot crispy french fries. Anyway, we tried to share fries yesterday, but it's hard when I'm trying to conserve the fries so that I eat them throughout the meal and Matt is eating exclusively french fries at the start of his meal. It makes me obsessive and panicky to think that he might eat up all of the french fries while I'm eating other parts of my meal. So I think that we might have to rethink all of our plans to share french fries when we eat together...

Ok. That is QUITE enough randomness for one morning...err...afternoon. It's time for a shower and real clothes and then a trip downtown (we're in Chicago for the weekend) to take care of a few errands (and hopefully to enjoy some time just wandering the city).

Happy Saturday!

Holiday Re-cap (The Random Picture Version)

Well, here I am, on my third day back to work today after a wonderful week and a half of time away with family and friends for the holidays.

We spent Christmas with my side of the family - including my sister and her family who are living in Scotland for a few years - which meant that my parents' house was blissfully (and a bit chaotically) full of eleven people and five cats for a few days. We drove out to them Christmas Eve, after eleven o'clock worship, which put us in around 2 in the morning...hehe. Christmas morning, I got to worship at my home church and to sing with my family before coming home for our traditional Christmas morning breakfast (scrambled eggs, fried potato sausage, another kind of homemade sausage, cardimom bread, yule bread, rye bread, and lots and lots of coffee). We listened to music and leisurely opened presents, and spent the day relaxing together. It was lovely. On the 26th, we had a lazy sleep-in morning and a late breakfast before heading to downtown Chicago for our yearly visit to the Macy's (formerly Marshall Fields) Walnut Room Christmas tree.






















Afterwards, we stopped by to visit family friends from our church. The husband is a glass artist, and while we were there, we all got to work with him to make glass icicle ornaments - so much fun! My parents and younger sisters and I have done it before, but it was Matt's first time. It's amazing to be so hands-on - we get to help melt the glass and get to take full responsibility for twisting and pulling the glass into these ornaments. I love having a glass-blowing family friend... :)























On the 27th, Matt and I flew out to New Jersey for a week with his family. We brought Emme with us...which was interesting... She meowed the entire time that we were at the gate, but was quiet during the flight after takeoff. And then we brought her to Matt's house, where she decided that she was NOT interested in hanging out with Daisy, Matt's parents' black standard poodle. We never quite got the two of them to be friends, but we made great progress in at least getting them to tolerate each other.




























On the family side of things, we celebrated Christmas and spent time with Matt's grandmother before she flew to California (to visit more family!). We watched The Chronicles of Narnia with Matt's parents (for the first time...we don't watch a lot of movies...shame on us!) and played cards with Matt's sister and her almost-boyfriend. We went out to dinner with Matt's parents to celebrate our anniversary a few days early, and then spent the rest of the evening editing a Wikipedia article about earthworms and what they do in the winter, just because we could (yeah...don't ask.). We spent a lot of time trying to convince the cat to come downstairs and hang out with us (and the dog), and we at a lot of wonderful food. We celebrated our three-year anniversary by going out to dinner at a fabulous restaurant in Princeton called Sotto, and they by stopping into the Princeton Record Exchange for the second time that week to add to our ever-increasing library of CD's.

Matt and I also spent a lot of time with friends of ours. We spent three different evenings hanging out with different permutations of his high school friends, one of those evenings being New Year's Eve, and two of those evenings spent absorbed in the game Puerto Rico, which is perhaps the most complicated game I've ever played. Not difficult, really. Just lots of things to keep track of...and nearly impossible to explain to someone who hasn't played. We also spent time at Princeton Academy of the Sacred Heart, the school where Matt worked while we were living in Princeton, where we not only visited with faculty/staff friends, but also with two of our closest friends with whom we went to college and with whom I went to seminary. On our last evening, we drove up to New Brunswick to play pinochle and visit with two of our other closest friends...we played the longest game of pinochle ever (no one could seem to ever make their bid!) and ate delicious homemade chocolate-toffee bars.

We flew back to Chicago-land on Friday, spent the evening with all of the family plus Beth's boyfriend, and spent Saturday enjoying one last day of relaxation and family time (including me baking two king cakes for Sunday's Epiphany celebration here at church!). Look at all of us!






















Matt and I had a wonderful break and a blessed time with family and friends this Christmas. Matt commented that this was one of the best Christmases we've had, and I'd have to agree. I'm still trying to get myself back in a normal routine here in Rockford and back at Trinity...it's a slow recovery, admittedly, but I'm making some progress at getting things back on track and organized here. I'm at the end of my PhD applications (three down, one to go), in the midst of writing my 6-month evaluation (Really? I'm halfway done here? That's crazy.), and busy this week with rehearsals for Bach for the Sem. And so January hits the ground running...

So here's hoping that you all had a blessed Christmas and a happy New Year! Let's see what 2008 has in store for us!

Three!

One of those afternoons...

Isn't it sad that I'd rather stay late in my basement office here at church than go home to an empty apartment?

(Looking forward to a weekend in MN with Matt...)

What Kind of Day Has it Been?

You may or may not know that I am a huge Aaron Sorkin fan. "What Kind of Day Has it Been" has now been the title of the end of season one of all three of his TV shows: Sports Night, The West Wing, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

It also seems like a fitting title to the end of my "seminary season" and the start of my "pastor season." I start internship on Sunday, and have been bouncing back and forth between Chicago and Rockford this past week, moving things in, getting set up, and trying to fit in as much Matt time as possible before I am living full-time in Rockford (starting...tomorrow).

I'm back in Chicago tonight because I am singing at a funeral tomorrow morning, and a few of Matt's college friends who are passing through the area are staying with us tonight. They're in the living room, watching a movie. I started feeling a little cramped (our apartment is sort of small for five people to sit comfortably in front of the TV) and a little lonely, ironically. So I'm flopped on the bed here with a cat sleeping next to me who is clingy and definitely knows that something's been up this past week (though she has no idea that she's moving to Iowa).

I spent last night at the Rockford apartment by myself. I did well alone, at least for that one night, which gives me hope that being apart from Matt this time round will be better than my stint in Princeton, especially second semester middler year (the first semester we were married). I spent a comfortable evening knitting and flipping channels, and around 11, I even walked the half-block to the grocery store to buy some much-needed ice cream for the freezer (and my tummy!).

This morning, I went over to church, spent some time sorting out initial details with Pastor Hoffman and beginning the process of settling myself in this new position. I got my plethora of keys (but they're color-coded, so there's hope), met a number of people who were volunteering with VBS this week, and then went to lunch with Pastor Hoffman. We had some good conversation about all sorts of things related to church and church work and the nature of pastoral ministry. Trinity is going to be a very good place for me. I'm definitely getting excited about starting. Being away from Matt is still quite less-than-optimal, but at least we're making the sacrifice for a worthwhile internship experience.

I went back to to the apartment (it's great...I'll take some pictures this week to share), bummed around, took a nap, and then left for Chicago late afternoon/early evening.

The drive was quick until I reached city limits, and then it took me upwards of an hour to get from my exit off the expressway back to the apartment and to find a parking spot. In the midst of looking for a parking spot, I went to turn around in a driveway, pulled out of it very poorly, and dropped my front right wheel over the curb instead of rolling it nicely down the gentle slope of the driveway. The underside of my car made a very sad noise as it hit the curb, and it didn't take me more than 30 seconds of driving to realize that I broke my car. I'm not kidding. I think that whatever I hit under the car near the wheel affected the front-wheel drive capabilities of my car on the right side. That is to say, when I hit the gas pedal to accelerate from a stop, my car doesn't go anywhere unless the left wheel catches.

This makes me seriously sad.

My parents are coming out in the morning to take a look and help me get it to somewhere to get it fixed, so it will be all right, though I have to say that I feel some enormous guilt toward my car, as if it were something that could feel emotional pain...

As the night has progressed, I have gotten past some of the initial bad feelings about my car, but a new set of strange feelings has sprouted up in their place.

I'm here at what I consider to be home, but don't feel home at all. Perhaps some of it is the knowledge that all of my important things are living in Rockford. Perhaps some of it is the slightly-too-empty kitchen and the bare look of the bedroom now that some of their contents are living in Rockford. Some of it is the homeless feeling you get when you haven't stayed put for a while and when you are craving just being somewhere (no matter where!) for more than a day or two. This will obviously be solved when I go back to Rockford tomorrow and stay there for more than a night.

I can't say for sure that I'd rather be in Rockford than here right now, or that Rockford feels more like home than this apartment that I've lived in for almost a year, where my husband and my cat are. But last night proved to me that I can create a home and create a routine in that new place. I think that I'm getting weary of a series of "last nights" here in Chicago. The night before I started the move last weekend felt like the last night at home before leaving for college - the combination of anticipation and grief. Thursday night felt like that last night all over again - the night before I went up to Rockford with the last round of stuff, and the night before I went to Rockford alone overnight. Tonight again feels like that last night, except that while this is the real last night here in Chicago before my life picks up again in Rockford, I'm so tired of the "last nights" that I don't have any emotional energy to devote to this one. It's like when you're beginning the process of leaving a party, for example, and you say goodbye to somebody, and then get caught up with this that and the other, and twenty minutes later, you're really on your way out and run into that person to whom you've already said goodbye. You feel like you need to say goodbye again, to let them know it's for real this time, but it's a bit awkward, because you did the actual goodbye earlier...you know what I'm talking about.

Part of me feels like I don't live here anymore, as if I - like Matt's friends - am just visiting, just passing through for the night. As if this apartment is Matt's, and not ours. And I think I'm all right with that sentiment so long as I'm in Rockford, where I have a place that feels like mine and where I'm about to be part of a community and where I'm about to build a life (if only for a year). But here in this apartment in Chicago, where no one but me knows that the kitchen cabinets are half-empty and that my dresser drawers are nearly empty, I feel as if I don't belong. I'm missing that sense of home that I am always seeking (one of the themes of this blog), and so I'm feeling sort of empty.

So in answer to the question posed by the title of this post, it's been a deflating sort of day. The good part of this deflated feeling is that it means that I'm already having a positive enough experience in Rockford that I'm ready to be there and do this whole internship. The lousy part of this deflated feeling is that Chicago is in my blood, and there's no reason it shouldn't always feel like home, and it's troubling that I can't feel that sense of home right now. (And that I broke my car. Boo.)

But in another hour, I'll get to curl up in bed with the man I love, and debrief my day with him, and know that when I drive out to Rockford tomorrow, he'll be with me. In an hour, I'll get to leave behind all of these emotions for a night of sleep in a bed that definitely still feels like my bed, and to wake up in the morning in a guaranteed better mood. Sleep cures many ills, my friends...

Here we go again

Today is moving day for me. This is the fourth time I've moved into a new apartment in four years! Matt and I brought a bunch of stuff out to Rockford yesterday, to get a head start, but today is when my parents come with and when church people will be around to drop off things like bookshelves and a couch, and when the bed shows up. I won't be living there until later this upcoming week, but as of July 1, I am officially an intern!

I'm continuing my pattern of only being able to plan life one year at a time. When I graduated college, I wanted to be able to look 5+ years ahead and be able to envision where I'd be and what I'd be doing. Back then, it drove me crazy when I couldn't look that far ahead - I remember sitting with Matt on the Johns Hopkins' campus one evening during my second year in seminary, trying to plan out the next years: what I'd do when I graduated and how I'd bide the time until he'd finish his Ph.D...and then things changed. I had already moved all of my stuff down to Baltimore for the summer in order live with my husband for a few months - our first semester of being married, I was in Princeton, he was in Baltimre, and we were planning on doing the long-distance thing for that next schoolyear also (my last year in Princeton). But shortly after I got settled for the summer, he came to the realization that he didn't like his program and didn't want to continue it, and so at the end of the summer we moved EVERYTHING from the Baltimore apartment into CRW (PTS student housing) for my last year at Princeton. During that year, Matt applied to law schools in three cities that also had Lutheran seminaries, so it wasn't until May or so that we knew where we'd be heading for the upcoming schoolyear (my post-M.Div "Lutheran Year" that makes the ELCA love me so that they'll ordain me). Chicago it was.

And now, after another year, here I am, moving again. Here I am, having to live apart from Matt again. Here I am, unsure about what is in store for me post-internship. The nice thing, however, is that I have made peace with only planning ahead one year at a time, at least for the near future. I take comfort in knowing where I'm going to be tomorrow, and looking ahead at the next months, ready to face them instead of worrying about where they're leading. I'm all about planning a future, but I'm cool with talking in broad generalizations about the future instead of trying to get it all lined up right now. I know where I have to be today, and what I'm doing tomorrow, and for right now, that's all I need.

For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. (Jeremiah 29:11)

So...time to shower, pack up a few last-minute items, and head out to Rockford. Time for a new adventure. In the words of a particular band that I like,

"Just when you think you're in control,
just when you think you've got a hold,
just when you get on a roll,
here it goes, here it goes, here it goes again." (OK Go, "Here it Goes Again")

And just because I love the video for that song....well...it's always worth watching again, right? Enjoy!

Two Down

Happy Anniversary to Us! :)

Shout it from the Rooftops:

I love my husband!

He's boarding a plane right now, on his way to New Jersey a few days earlier than me to celebrate Christmas with his family. I join him on Sunday, but in the meantime, it is just Emme and me in a small apartment that suddenly feels very large.

But he left me chocolates and a sweet note on the coffee table for when I got home from work, and I can't explain it, but when I talked to him on the phone just a few minutes ago, I felt all warm and fuzzy and incredibly happy despite the fact that I don't like the prospect of being left behind for a few days.

Sorry for the mushiness.

I'm so sick of...

...being sick.

I've been battling some variety of a cold/flu/allergies for the last week and a half. I credit much of it to the fact that I am now working with children during the week. The elementary school atmosphere is terrible for germs.

But today, I woke up feeling optimistic. I didn't wake up with a headache, a sore throat, or even much of a stuffy nose - this is the first day since getting sick that I've woken up nearly symptom-free! And I went through the first half of my day feeling pretty good.

And then, around 3pm, I came down with a freak stomachache. And, weirdly enough, Matt came down with it about half an hour later. I know that we are bound to share illnesses with one another (thanks to things like sharing a bed, sharing a small apartment, our propensity to snuggle...), but it's a little weird to me that we'd come down with a new installment of sickness within half an hour of each other.

Definitely a night for a plain pasta dinner. Maybe with a stack of saltines for dessert.

Ick.

Jobs and Cats

I have a job! I am now working at the Univeristy of Chicago Lab School with their afterschool program. I spent my afternoon hanging out with a bunch of very cool third graders. Third graders are funny. They are still cute kids and they know it, but they also have figured out how to give adults some serious attitude. I'm sure that they will give me some interesting times throughout the year. But it's a great job. Playing on the playground, hanging out in art class, good times.

So now that I have a job and now that I'm making some money, one question necessarily follows:

Can we get a cat now??

I've been browsing petfinder and have a few favorites:

Missy Greyfriar
Tiger Lily
Sequoia
Drew

Has anyone out there adopted a cat from a shelter before? What's the etiquette on changing a cat's name? Because if we got a cat, we'd want to name it ourselves if we could. Even though girl cat names are hard to come by...we've come up with a bunch of good boy cat names (Grover, Moises, or Thorin, for example), but can't come up with anything good for a girl. We joke about naming her Lindy, which would be a good name if Matt hadn't suggested it as a way to name it after our friend John Lindquist. I like the kid, but naming a cat after him? I dunno. We've talked about trying to make Shea an asexual name, but who knows. We've talked about Francesca, after our favorite restaurant, but Matt wouldn't nickname her Frannie, even though I would. So we could use some other ideas. If anyone has any good girl cat names we haven't thought of, let me know.

Not that we're for sure getting a cat.

But I would very much like one...

At least we LOOK settled in!

Last night we had some family over for ice cream and hanging out. These were our first guests since we finished unpacking and setting everything up. Hosting made it feel a bit more real that we actually live here - that we have a home of our own that we can open to others! (Look at me with my nieces...aren't they adorable??)

Now we finally have some good pictures of our new apartment, as well as some great pictures of the move-out (I wasn't there to see it firsthand, but the pictures are still impressive...). Check out all of those pictures, as well as more pictures of last night's ice cream night, here.

Lady in Waiting

It's amazing how I'm living someplace so close to my hometown, and yet I feel so far away from a sense of "home."

Sunday night, Matt and I hauled all of the rest of our things up to our apartment - we are officially living here now, not just bouncing back and forth between here and my parents' house as we finished up summer jobs and things. This is Matt's first full week of classes, and it's my free week between the end of CPE and the start of my orientation.

On Monday, I relished the newness. I wandered to a few local businesses to try to find a job, took the train down to the law school, where I ate lunch with Matt, wandered State Street and drank some fabulous tea at Argo while he was at class, and then spent the afternoon with him at the library before we wandered State Street some more to find dinner. It was a day for me to feel excited about learning my way around the city - learning my way around our neighborhood and claiming places as my own.

Yesterday was equally as fulfilling. I got up and did lots of laundry, and then went on a two-store grocery shopping excursion, which helped me to feel empowered as I drove around and realized that I am really getting to know parts of our neighborhood. I caught a glimpse of what it will be like when we have really settled down in the area. After that, I spent the afternoon reading, talking to my mom, and waiting for the UPS guy to come with our DSL modem.

This morning, however, I woke up feeling a little sick, and all of the sudden, it stopped feeling like home. That's how it is when you feel sick. You need everything to feel perfect, comfortable, and worn in. I love our new apartment (I promise that I'll post a few pictures when we're all cleaned up around here!), and I really am looking forward to getting to know the area and turn it into home, but on a morning like this, I am craving something - anything - familiar and well-worn.

Part of the weirdness of this morning is the knowledge that I am sitting around while Matt is in the middle of class. And they aren't kidding: law school is stressful! He has so much work to do everyday. And so a lot of what I'm doing these days is waiting and staying out of the way so that he can get done what he needs to get done. And waiting until I begin my own classes.

I am simply a lady in waiting these days: waiting for school, waiting for Matt, waiting for the apartment to feel like home, waiting for the neighborhood to feel like home...

I ask God to grant me the patience that I need.

The Shift

About the time that I'm feeling as if I'm hitting my stride in CPE - that I'm feeling capable and caring and self-aware, I also realize that I have had to care less about everything I care about in real life.

Is this why my husband is asleep alone in bed right now while I haven't quite made it upstairs yet?

Alive...barely

It's been almost a month since my last post. I apologize, but the truth of the matter is that CPE is kicking my butt. I'm being shuffled between two hospitals, which gives me both a unique perspective and a terrible schedule that leaves me without a good sense of routine. I've experienced some intense anxiety, a consistent amount of normal stress, and definitely moments of joy and fulfillment. The range of emotion is itself exhausting, as is the normal strain of an 8.5 hour workday plus on-call hours. I think that I'm finally adjusting, but it's taken me until now, week four, to finally feel like I can actually do this. There have definitely been some giving-up sorts of feelings, but I have committed to pushing through, even though it's hard.

I did get a weekend away this past weekend, though. Matt and I drove to Des Moines to visit Steph and Beth for a couple days. We did some shopping, eating, went to an Iowa Cubs game (and saw Derrek Lee in a rehab start), and browsed Des Moines' big summer art show. It felt so good to get away - literally. And my sisters rock. Pictures:

Phase 1

The first stage of our move happens tomorrow!

The apartment is mostly packed up right now, with a special pile set aside to be stuffed into my car tomorrow morning. Tomorrow we begin the drive out to Chicago with the essentials for summer, to live with my parents while I do CPE (and to save money before Matt starts law school). The rest of our stuff will sit patiently in our apartment until the last weekend in July, when Matt will fly back out here, load up a moving truck with all of our furniture and boxes and everything, and drive with his parents back out to Chicago, where we will move ourselves right into our next apartment. Our home sweet home for the next three years or so.

I should be excited - by Sunday evening, I'll be back to that place that I call home. But honestly, I'm too stressed out to enjoy it yet. There are still enough unpacked odds and ends that I feel terrible about sending Matt back out here alone to finish up. (I'll still be doing CPE, so I don't have the time to help with the Princeton end of the move.) I'm paranoid that I've forgotten something essential for the summer, or that I'll forget to do something in the morning.

The morning plan: get up, shower, get dressed, load the car, clean out the refrigerator and the pantry, pack my computer up, drink some coffee, head out...

Moving is terrible. I hate the stress of the overwhelming nature of packing up your entire life. The truth is that everything in the apartment goes, so it's not as if I'm in danger of permanently leaving anything behind, but it feels that way.

Once I'm in the car tomorrow, I'll be fine. Once I'm in the car, I'm on my way home...

Subculture

Matt and I spent a particularly satisfying evening at Barnes and Noble tonight. While he sat across the table with a cup of ice-water, his own fork for ease of splitting a piece of cheesecake, and the latest collection of Get Fuzzy comic strips, I read fifty pages of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, a holdover from last summer's reading list. This book easily wormed its way into the handful of quirky and interesting books that I find particularly amusing; I have become a sucker for the particular subset of non-fiction that combines economics, sociology, psychology, and popular idiom with anecdotal narrative bits that, while particularizing experience, end up universalizing it. I'm talking about books like Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point (or Blink, as well, though I have not yet read it), or Stefan Fatsis's Word Freak, or Steven Levitt's Freakonomics, or Barbara Enrenreich's Nickel and Dimed.

At one point, a friend of Matt's thought it might be amazing fun to immerse herself in the subculture of serious ultimate frisbee - to get to know a choice handful of eccentric and dedicated players and to understand how the world of post-collegiate frisbee functions - and then to write a book in a similar fashion to that of Word Freak. I can't say that the basic concept doesn't interest me immensely: finding a particular subculture in which to immerse myself, meeting the most devoted of aficionados therein, experiencing the nitty gritty and perhaps unexpected details of such a life, and writing a book about it all. Bonus points to me if I can find some sort of socio-economic/psychological undercurrent to it all.

Matt and I ended up talking at length about one subculture of which I am a part that might produce the sorts of quirks and characters worthy of writing about: female fantasy baseball owners. Inspired by his reading of Fantasyland, a look at the extreme characters that emerge within the fantasy baseball world and the intense and intelligent way in which they play the game, it seemed to him like a feasible idea. I could certainly try to track down women who play, perhaps begin a league just for women, market it as an "expert" league, and see what sorts of women show up. I could figure out why women play, and how they play, and what sorts of backgrounds they come from. I could certainly end up finding statistical geniuses, strategy gurus, ritual eccentrics...

All of this makes me step back and take a look at the particular subcultures to which I belong, all of which could certainly be fodder for turning me back into a writer.

I am a knitter.
I am a lover of choral music, and a choir geek also.
I play fantasy baseball. I am a female who plays fantasy baseball.
I am a future pastor. I am a female future pastor.
I have worked in retail.
I have lived in Princeton.
I cook.
I keep a blog (well, a couple of them, to be exact).
I am a PTS alumni. I am a St. Olaf alumni.
I am a Chicago Cubs fan.

And there are so many more. We all belong to our own particular worlds within the larger world. We all belong to particular subsets of people. Isn't this at the root of the popular noun-turned-verb word "networking?" Our subcultures are our starting points. They are the places where we make friends, and the shared experiences that connect us to new people. Our subcultures influence the sorts of people we meet and the sort of people we are. They influence what we consider to be important and the influence the ways that we impact society. They give us value and help us to create value. Along with all of this come the psychological impact of being a part of a group, the economic impact of the way we make decisions based on our perceived return, the sociological and anthropological implications of human interaction, and the dynamic interaction and overlap between individual and shared experience.

Subcultures fascinate me. They make me want to write lots of books. They make me want to be a writer. And I suppose that if I become a writer for real, then that is yet another subculture to add to the list...one that I would be very proud to add.

On Relaxation

I have to admit that it took me the full week between the end of finals and graduation to settle into the concept of leisure time. For that entire week, I couldn't sit still for more than an hour at a time without wondering what else I should be doing, as if there were work to be done, or as if I was being lazy, ungrateful, and wasteful - as if there must be something that I should be doing that was actually productive and thus fulfilling. I went to the mall three days in a row for no reason other than to get up off the couch and leave the apartment. I was frustrated because I felt as if I had no sense of purpose.

But then Thursday happened - I had a meeting in the morning and then spent the rest of the day cleaning the apartment for my family's Friday morning arrival. The weekend was a blur: I only had my family around for three days, and in those three days I had to find time to enjoy them amidst baccalaureate, graduation, and a Mother's Day barbecue with Matt's family. The way that we solved the problem of having many appointments in a short visit was to make the special effort to stay in more than we went out when we weren't obligated to be anywhere - we made a point of sitting around and enjoying each other. I think that changed and helped me. I realized that there isn't necessarily any shame in allowing myself to relax, especially when it is a bounded indulgence. I finished classes, have these few weeks to relax, and then begin CPE the first weekend in June. (Sidenote: CPE = Clinical Pastoral Education, which is a summer-long hospital chaplaincy internship required for my eventual ordination.) Knowing that I'm not making a habit of being lazy, and knowing that relaxation is not the same as laziness, this week has been a mostly leisurely one, with just a hint of responsibility here and there to remind me that I'm still involved in the functioning of the world and that the world still has a hold on me and my life.

This is not to say that my relaxation has been profound or deep, however. This week has been filled with frivolity (though much-appreciated frivolity!). Matt and I are more than halfway through watching the first season of the West Wing on DVD, and I am enjoying it immensely. I think that it is a smart and well-thought out show, and that it is beautifully executed, even when the banter is a bit verbose. I've spent more hours than necessary sorting through graduation pictures and setting aside particular shots for use in an album, should I ever get around to making one. I just did the myspace thing today, something that I had been resisting, but something that has already turned out to be a fun way to reconnect with friends from high school and college. I spent two different afternoons this week hanging out with Matt at the after-school program at Princeton Academy of the Sacred Heart, which he directs. This meant refereeing heated games of four-square, playing on the swings while observing the construction of roads and bridges in the sandbox, making sure that the junior-kindergarteners get their turn shooting baskets with the third-graders, tossing a frisbee with the last kid whose dad was late, and watching our friend Jason get outnumbered in lopsided games of cops and robbers. Some parts of my week were more "worthwhile" than others, you see. But I have come to terms (at least for the moment) with the knowledge that enjoying my last days in this apartment before I have to pack it up, enjoying my last days in this part of the country, and enjoying the company of my husband while we still have time to curl up on the couch together to watch TV are not vices, but rather are necessary parts of renewing and reworking myself as I head into everything that the future will inevitably throw at me.

I am the Master!

In a matter of speaking, of course.

I am all graduated. A Master of Divinity, if you will. :) There's so much I could say that I don't know if there's anything I can say. The service was beautiful, I was able to enjoy it sitting by choir friends in the first row, the Princeton University Chapel is majestic and even moreso with lots of organ and brass music, I am honored to have won the Sacred Music prize, I didn't trip going up to receive my diploma, I smiled a lot, I took a lot of pictures...it was a wonderful way to mark the end of my seminary career, and it hasn't quite sunk in yet that I have this newfangled post-college degree!

So, that being said, here are a couple pictures so you can see how silly I look in those darn hats! (But Masters' hoods are very cool.) More pictures can be found here.