November

 America,

It's the day after Halloween. Welcome to November. I hope it brings you a heart full of gratitude and thanksgiving. 

I for one, am feeling pretty thankful today. One of my children has been navigating the effects of Covid for over six months. She has something called Covid induced Arthritis. Before Covid, she was driving herself full force towards being a prima ballerina. She had her eyes on New York and she was rapidly advancing in that direction. Her Covid illness was relatively mild. She had no energy, was very weak, but overall it wasn't as intense as it was for some of us. 

Her body did not rebound. Her joints would randomly swell to twice their size. She lost all endurance. She was in an enormous amount of physical pain every time she danced or exerted energy. Overnight, a virus took ballet away from her. 

Doctor's appointments, tests, and physical therapy ensued. The team was honest with her about what they knew: We've seen this in a few kids. We have very little data about the future. The only two patients we have treated have thus far and they have not recovered or made any progress. We drove onward with a positive outlook, and clarity about the type of personality that dances for five hours a day... she was going to work. That's what she thrives on.

Today she got the clearance to begin ballet again. Today we called her instructor and set up private lessons. One day a week, no more than 20 minutes, isn't much for someone who was previously so driven, but it's something! Seeing my daughter's face light up at the prospect of doing what she loves is priceless. 

We honestly believe that Covid showed her that He has better plans for her than what she imagined. We don't know if she'll ever get back to where she was before she got sick, but we do know that this week she gets to begin again. That's pretty darn exciting.

What's something that you're looking forward to beginning again this week?

Happy Monday!

Resignation

 America,

Today I am emerging out of a haze of toxicity and venom. Today I am deep cleaning my house after being out sick from my job for two days. It's the happiest I've been in months. The best sleep I've had in ages. That's telling...

Today I'm preparing to launch myself out of the abusive relationship that pays me a salary. I'm immersing myself in the safety and comfort of my marriage, the joy of my children, and the immense anxiety of the massive question of what is my next chapter? Maybe you're in the midst of a transformation too. Maybe you're wondering who you are and what you want out of life, just like me, and I'm here to tell you dive in. 

Today I'm smiling because my best friend celebrated my walking away, rather than shaming me for "giving up," a very real set of thoughts that have plagued my brain about this decision. She reminded me that this is abusive, I have been miserable, and I don't need to be there. Today I'm so thankful that I don't need to work there...

Today I'm sipping on coffee, and feeling light because I'm unchaining myself from possession. I'm hoping again, planning again, dreaming again, writing again. Today I haven't run my fingers through my hair and pulled out strands by the handfuls. Today I showered because I wanted to, and enjoyed the flow of water and the joy that I'm walking away.

Today, I talked to my husband, the way we used to, just because. Today I'm baking pumpkin bread, thinking about what I want to make for dinner, and smiling because I'm doing laundry. Today I have written my resignation letter, and am diving in to whatever is next. My eyes are wide shut, but my heart is chock full of anticipation because I know that whatever comes is going to be so much better than this. 

America, I hope you have not lost sight of your value and if you have, I hope your soul gets a breath of life poured in to it today.

Happy Friday!

CSM Gagnon

It's been 10 days since you left this world. Ten days your wife and children have grieved your absence. Ten days that this jokester, this gal who always has something to say, has been silent. Someone asked me to write a few words about you and I was struck by my inability to do it. I was rendered silent by my inability to define what it is that you and your wife mean to me. I still struggle to speak about you in past tense.

On Sunday, I went to Mass angry. I hope that you can relate to occasionally carrying a heavy bag of emotions to our Savior. When Father held up the Body of Christ, the image of you seeing it all in front of you, in real time, in heaven, rendered me speechless. It was crystal clear. And I sobbed. I sobbed so heavy and so hard. I sobbed because I was so happy for you to be there. I sobbed because I am so sad that your family has to miss you. I sobbed because I can only imagine the experience, and wait for my own. I sobbed because I found myself pouring out requests. Pray for Matthew. Pray for me to be faithful. Pray for Love. Pray for my Dad...

You asked me why he was better and you were dying, once. I remember standing in the hallway after CWOC. You were pacing back and forth and we ended up talking. I love our talks. What a treat it was to hear what was going through your mind. Anyway, on Sunday, I suppose that I understood why you had to go first: so you could pray for us. I find bizarre comfort in the knowledge that you understand that better than us all.

My dear friend, you and your bride are our family. You are our great friends. You welcomed us in this vast universe that is the military and you sheltered us with laughs, wisdom, advice, encouragement, support. I will miss seeing your Ranger hat and pin. I will miss your laugh. I will miss how you never stopped asking questions, no matter how silly you thought they sounded. I will miss how you made everyone who encountered you feel simultaneously like the most awesome person in the room, and driven to be a better version of themselves. I will miss how you made my son feel ever so slightly a part of the organization for which is holds such high regard. I will miss you teasing me about being embarrassed to kiss my husband at the giving of the peace in Mass (and I will think of you laughing in heaven each time it comes). I will miss going to lunch and talking about everything under the sun. I will miss how desperately you sought to understand God's Love and Mercy in all moments. I will miss your honesty about your faults with me, and your drive to be better. I will miss teasing you about running when you should be resting. I will miss the expression of awe and wonder our Savior brought over you with each new discovery.

Thank you for allowing me and my family to be a part of your life. Thank you for sharing a tiny piece of your big heart with us all. You will never be forgotten. I know I join so many others when I say: I look forward to seeing you again, in the physical presence of our King.

Fragile and whole

I am like an egg. If you don't touch me, I look whole, tough, complete. If you pick me up I don't disintegrate in your hands. I hold myself together and I keep myself complete. But if you squeeze too hard I break, and he is the only human on this planet who knows the exact amount of pressure before I crack.

He is like my carton. He protects me, he holds me, he shelters me. In his embrace I relax in to myself and I can disintegrate, I can crumble, I can be raw and exposed and open. I can fumble over words, I can over exaggerate my strengths and he still sees me as I am.

Car Rides

He sat behind me in the car. He usually sits on the passenger side so that he can converse and chat and discuss the sea of thoughts that flow through his brain and then gauge my reactions to them. Sometimes I wonder if he needs to see my attention as well as feel and hear it. But today, on this sorrowful day, he sat behind me. The only glimpses I could catch were the fish eyed lens images of my minivan camera. He couldn't see me.

We rode in near silence for the entire car ride. Our thoughts and emotions were drowned out by the sounds of Hamilton playing through the speakers. I cried for hours. Through those tears I was grateful that he couldn't watch me.

When I was young I wanted no children. Then, due to the enormous dilate of spending time with two amazing boys, I was persuaded to want only boys. If I was to have children, I wanted boys. When Chief and I married, and I was pregnant, I hoped and prayed for a son. Girls were emotional and messy and eye rollers, I explained to God. Boys were fun and active and hilarious. ::side note:: Girls are fantastic! I was an idiot ::end side note::

God saw fit to give me only one boy. One boy, who from the beginning of his existence had to fight to survive. His placenta was bleeding out from week seven of our high order multiple pregnancy, until two weeks before delivery. I was placed on strict bed rest. We were told this child, our only son, would probably die in utero. If he made it to birth, he'd probably die then. If he didn't die, he'd surely never walk or talk or sing or dance or do any of the magnificent things that he does so miraculously every day. The bed rest was more to keep me alive, not him. Strange to think of these things now...

His brain is surrounded by curly cues. One of our NICU nurses said "OH Sugar! He's been kissed all around his head by angels!" She had this way of saying words like "sugar!" and "Sweety" and "Honey" that didn't annoy me. To this day, those words still echo emotions of comfort in the midst of the NICU nightmare, but I digress...

RP was my genes. It is my DNA, my broken code of eye information that I never knew I carried. The diagnosis hit me like a sucker punch. It was the first thing I didn't ever fear for him. It was the one scenario I never imagined. It blindsided me. It still does.

I begged God for a son, so that I could curse him to a life without sight. And in true me fashion, this RP is like nothing else... it's aggressive, and dominating. It's destroying with a speed that his doctor doesn't understand and struggles to grasp. Today she said "Something else must be going on with his eyes..." What the hell am I supposed to make of that? I begged God for a son, I craved after a son, and He in his Love, or His sorrow, offered me one. He said I will only give you one of what you beg me for, because I know your heart can't handle two. My one with broken eyes.

These appointments are a result of my begging heart. This loss stems from my genes. I gave it to him. There's no avoiding the realities.  The sorrow is mine to hold. I carry this sickness, hidden inside of me. It is masked by enough healthy retinal cells... it is buried underneath the other cells that are doing double duty for the faulty ones.

It's strange to have so much to say and yet no desire to say it. It's haunting, in a sense, because the conversation doesn't involve you, my children. It's a conversation between me and God. An understanding of the mercy of no. A grasping of the hurt that is, and the protection from the hurts that could have come. It's nearly impossible to define, the grace in the gore. I would rip out my eyes and give them to you if they would be helpful. I would divide my cells, my core, my body in half if that would somehow change what you were destined to be. But that's pointless. Your journey is your own. Your loss is your own, and its might and its glory and its sorrow is its own process for you.

I just break, every time you do. I break every time you stub your toe. I break every time you run in to doors, or walls, or things that you don't see. I want to save you from what I have given you. I want to erase this reality from your body, because you have overcome so much, and I wish you didn't have to overcome more.

You are more amazing and fantastic than you will ever know. You light up in a room in a way that you will never see. You are funny, charismatic, charming, with the brains of a genius. You have a joy that can't be defined, and yet you're vulnerable and human. You can't stand the concept of injustice and you don't hold grudges. If losing your sight is to be your Achilles Heel, then so be it. You bring sight to my darkened mind every day.

Yet, today you sat behind me in the van, quiet. You looked out the window and I shed more tears than I care to recount. Together we faced down this giant sorrow. You faced yours, and I faced mine. Together we made it through, and together we both noticeably exhaled as we walked out. It was like we couldn't breathe, and then, suddenly we could again.

silence

These are not my people, I am not of this group. It's a feeling that has been prevalent in my life. It is exceptionally difficult to find one's "people." They are a unique sort and it's impossible how to define who they are, but I know them when I meet them.

I feel isolated and alone. I feel bored and restless.

In our society, these feelings often generate conversations about hobbies, or depression and counselling. In my personal opinion, I am thankful for them. Solitude is not something to fear, and there is much to learn from silence.

My life is on the cusp (or in the infancy stages) of great change. I know that this year will bring tremendous loss, new experiences, and unspeakable challenges. I know that I will grieve. I know that I will celebrate. I know I will cry. I've already cried. I've also sat wrapped up in a blanket in my grandfather's chair, completely silent... devoid of the ability to put words to emotions. Unable to cry. Unable to cheer. Just present.

Peppered in with the silence is laughter. I am learning that joy can be abundant even in the midst of the dark night of the soul. I am learning what Love looks like, without the emotional camp highs and lows. I am learning what Loving God looks like, through a faithful, steadfast lens. I am learning what worship looks like, what prayer looks like, what relationship looks like, in silence.

My childlike mind craves the noise. My heart hungers and lusts after the emotional experiences. St. John of the Cross explains it so perfectly, much better than I. Learning to Love with a heart that craves passion, is a beautiful torment of the soul.

I know I am moving through darkness to dawn.

Answers

America,

He asked him to sacrifice his child. It's a horrible, ugly, agonizing thought. Who would ask that of a parent? Who would ask someone to give away their only son?

It's a thought too painful to fathom. Yet it is something that I understand for the first time in my life in a more tangible way than ever before. He asked me to sacrifice my child. He asked me to give up minutes, moments, snuggles, memories, experiences, etc. He asked me to lay it all down and turn around and walk away, and to find peace in His plan. His plan that I couldn't understand, and I couldn't grasp, but I knew was better than what I could hope for.

In the biblical narrative of what God asked of Abraham and Sara, we don't read about the tears. We don't read about the emotional agony behind the steps of trusting God. We don't read about the sleepless nights or the emotional exhaustion. We only read about the actions of faith. His faith was credited to him as righteousness.

My son was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa. As a result of this my only son is going blind. For some unknown reason, his vision is disappearing very rapidly (a reality that surprises his opthalmologists). In a period of 9 months, he went from no longer needing to see an opthalmologist to being legally blind at night and having lost a significant portion of his peripheral vision. In the past three months, his field of vision has continued to decline at an alarming rate and he can no longer see the color purple.

I am a homeschooling parent. How does one homeschool a child who can not see? I'm not so naive to think I can figure everything out on a whim, and my son is so smart! He deserves the best possible education he can get. Because of this, and a LOT of narrative in between that I won't bore you with here, we had no option but to look at a residential school for the blind.

I can go on and on about the hurdles that had to be overcome in regards to this residential school. I can't tell you how intensely I sobbed when the door was even opened to him. I cried so hard I couldn't even breathe, and I think my sister's (who was on the other end of the phone) quiet tears and prayers and hugs from miles and miles away, helped me to get myself back together so I could leave my room and keep on parenting that day.

There have been months and weeks of gathering medical records, evaluations, documents, and then the final "test" of summer camp (this was a camp connected with the school, where they would evaluate my son's ability to attend). If you're unsure about my emotional state, click back to my previous post. You'll see that I was a complete mess. Sacrifices, even ones taken with complete faith, are not without agony. Let me say that again. I had to lay down my dream of everything for my son. I had to let go of what I hoped would be, let go of homeschooling him, and pendulum swing to the opposite end of homeschooling, and grasp an empty bed, an empty room, an empty chair at the dinner table, and more for my ten year old child. I had to let all of this go, and walk.by.faith.

He came home from camp and we were torn about what to do. We decided to trust in God's plan, made known to us by whether or not he was accepted in to the school. If he was accepted, he would go. If not, that was our sign that something else was in store.

It's amazing to me how devoid of agony things can appear, when we are no longer waiting for answers. I'm incapable of sharing with you how broken my heart was. I can't even begin to say the oceans of tears I have cried. The idea of my son's empty bed... even now sends me into sobs.

My spiritual director advised me to pray a novena. For my non-Catholic readers, a novena is a specific prayer prayed in increments of nine. It could be nine times in a row, or over nine days, or some other multiple of nine. I am on day six of that novena. The school called me today to give us the news. My son was accepted. But...

For the sake of comic relief, I could let that "but" linger here. I could write about how my dog is currently pestering me for attention, or my children are asking me about eight thousand variations that they would like to add to their dinner. But I'm sure you'd like to know what the "but" was. Yes? No?

The "but" is that we have to be resident's of a state that we are not resident's of. The school reached out to the state's board of education to see if there was a possibility to waive that requirement with my son. This is a testament to the passion for helping visually impaired children that this school has. Their support, encouragement, and helpfulness goes beyond what I could have ever hoped for or imagined. They even went so far as to call the nearest military installation to see if it would be possible to have my soldier transferred there so that my son could attend (or to see if there was anything else that could be done). Unfortunately, there is not. The door is wide open for my son's attendance, if and when, we sell our house and move. So basically? He can't go. At least not in a few weeks when school begins.

I wish I could tell you the joy I feel over the clear answer. I am so excited to see what God has in store for my son and our family this year. The waiting is over, the answer has come. I was asked to be willing to let him go. I was challenged to examine Whom I really trusted. I was forced to put my money where my mouth was, and in this moment, I have been spared the agony of having to actually do it. We went all the way, as far as we could go. The door has closed, at least for now.

In the past couple of weeks, we have been blessed with options for continuing to homeschool my son.
At summer camp, we met another family who homeschools their visually impaired child. The school recommended several adaptive technological devices to continue my son's education at home (they knew that there was a chance he might be unable to attend. They created a packet of resources and recommendations that are specific to each child they evaluated at camp. Just another way that they are amazing!).

Today, we have a lot of decisions to make about what's ahead. Today, I don't know what tomorrow will look like. Today, I am so so thankful that the waiting is over and the answer is here. Today, I can't even begin to define the joy of knowing that in a few weeks I don't have to drop off my child and drive home without him.

I'll take it.