Mending Babies’ Broken Hearts

Dear God,
Why are people so cruel to one another?  Why do children bully one another, calling names and breaking tiny hearts?  Lord, how do we teach our kids to be kind to everyone, even those who hurt us and yet, teach them they don’t have to be a doormat?

Patiently Urgently Waiting for an Answer,
Andrea

As you can tell by my request for heavenly guidance, my kids had a run in today with children who were being mean on the bus.  When the door opened this afternoon, my “Hello!” was met with uncontrollable sobbing from Elizabeth.  I rushed to see what was the matter and Joseph stood there, looking shell-shocked.  I asked what had happened, fully expecting to hear that they had punched one another or something coming in the door.  Instead, Joe’s eyes filled with tears as he explained to me that a kid on the bus called Elizabeth a “big fat stupid elf” and then proceeded to call Joe ”Mr.  Know-it-All”.  My heart simultanously sank and jumped into my throat.  I’d been there before and prayed that my kids wouldn’t know the pain of being bullied in any way.  But, in this world, I guess that’s a pipe dream.

We called the principal who handled the situation well, speaking to the other kids’ (who are 5th graders) parents.  It seems that Joe told on the boy for eating on the bus and in anger, the other kid called him and his sister names.  It’s a pretty standard kid way to react, but it still burned me because the words he used were the perfect weapons for my kids.

Anyone who  knows Elizabeth knows that she is a loving, wonderful, kind, funny, smart, beautiful girl.  But she doesn’t feel smart and she is very aware of her little paunch.  I blame myself and all my weight issues.  She sees me struggle and has some of the same reactions to food that I do.  She eats when she is bored, she enjoys sweets too much.  Over the past year we have made an effort on making healthy choices and it’s paying off.  She and the rest of us are making much healthier choices and that’s good.  But did this create body image issues for her?  I don’t know.

Joseph is a smart cookie.  And I’m not bragging, he really is gifted.  This seems to set him apart from other kids mostly because of his personality.  He isn’t a kid with a lot of close friends.  He’s nice, but seems to have a hard time connecting with people.  He’s been teased before at school and has pushed through those situations (in a couple of cases we intervened).  While he knows he’s smart, he lacks social skills.  One thing he does is correct people if they are wrong about something.  It’s awesome he knows so much about the world, but he hasn’t learned yet that knowing the right answer and making sure everyone else knows the answer isn’t always welcome.  It’s a confusing message because on one hand they are encouraged to help one another in class, but if he is too smart, then he’s annoying.  Ugh.

The point of this background info is so you understand how hurtful those particular words were for my kids.  My children are not perfect.  Elizabeth is pudgy, Joseph can be a know-it-all, but we are dealing with those issues, positively as a family.  I don’t need a punk ass fifth grader berating my kids. 

After my heart found it’s correct place in my body, my next reaction was rage.  I remember being picked on.  I remember being followed home from school on my birthday while two girls trailed behind me calling me Fat.  I remember being called fat in gym class and on the playground.  I remember being called four-eyes and ugly and at 34 years-old those very hurtful words still stick with me.  I don’t want that for Elizabeth and Joseph.

At bedtime we had a serious talk with the kids, first telling them that unless someone on the bus is hurting or teasing another child they need to mind their own business.  If someone is eating cookies on the bus, then let the driver worry about them, the Anglin kids need not be involved.  Second, we talked about the importance of praying for people who have hurt you.  When I started praying for the kids who teased me in middle school it stopped.  I didn’t become BFFs with them, but they left me alone.  We talked about how sometimes people are hurting and they take their hurt out on others.  We should pray for their hurt to go away.  The kids seemed skeptical at first, but decided to do it. 

This is such a parenting dilemma.  The line between turning the other cheek and turning into a doormat is fine indeed.  It’s my prayer that we are teaching them the right things.

The loss of a friend

One of my best friends passed away yesterday.  She was like a second mother to me.  She started off being my co-worker, then my boss and over the eight plus years I worked at the Red Cross our friendship blossomed into one of the deepest, most important relationships of my life.  My own mother, who also knew Cindy, wholeheartly approved of my additional mama.  Cindy and her sweet husband don’t have any kids of their own but along the way they adopted a few of us including their niece and nephew, and many of their friend’s children.

She passed away Thanksgiving morning.  It was such a bittersweet moment.  On one hand, I thanked God for relieving her of her pain and suffering because there was so much of that.  On the other hand I’ve been sobbing angry and awful tears for a woman who left this world much too early.  Maybe the tears are for myself and her other adopted babies and the hundreds (no exaggeration here) of her friends and most of all for her husband and family. 

Here’s what I know.  The earth is a much dimmer, colder place without her.  But in heaven, they are being dazzled by her smile, the warmness of her hugs and I am sure that whatever heavenly garb she is given, she’s already had them add a feather-boa lining, sequins and rhinestones.  She’s making heaven an even more fabulous and fashionable place.

What gets you fired up?

What makes you angry?  What unsettles you to the point that you can’t sit back and do nothing?  This is a question our pastor asked yesterday at church.   While there are a host of social injustices that boil my blood, the one issue I see as the root of many societal ills is poverty.  I detest poverty.  My dad once said that “the greatest crime in America you can commit is being poor”.  I think he’s on to something.  I admit that many of the poor in America have more than the poor in other nations, but poverty is poverty no matter where you live. 

Poverty in America means someone has an automatic disadvantage in life.  Can they pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Horatio Alger-style?  Sometimes.  But more often than not poverty lives hand in hand with lack of hope and without hope, people won’t see past the poverty to better days. 

What happens when people don’t have hope and live in poverty?  Crime goes up.  Education isn’t valued.  Families break apart.  Sickness and disease creep in to previously healthy bodies.  Sometimes, apathy sets in – why care if you don’t believe things will change?  Why care if you have no hope?

So how do we help give back hope?    Here’s where I think it starts…LOVE.  Love your neighbor.  Not just Bob and Judy next door to you, but John and Paula at the homeless shelter.  Chris in prison.  Jessica at the battered women’s shelter.  Emily at the maternity home.  Jack, your former co-worker who was laid off the last round.  Love the people for whom it might not be comfortable to love.  Go out of your comfort zone to comfort someone in need, to show them love and to help give them hope.

Are we forgetting to be thankful?

A friend posted a question on Facebook yesterday asking, “Where did thanksgiving go? Are we not thankful anymore?”.  Wow.  I think it’s a great question!  Are we thankful anymore?  It seems like being thankful has given way to being gluttonous and not just on Thanksgiving either, but all holidays.  I can’t think of one holiday we have that hasn’t been over-commercialized. 

Thanksgiving has morphed from a time in which we gather with our loved ones to be thankful for our nation and for our freedom and for each other into a day dedicated to stress, football and fights over when to start and where to go.  In fact, Black Friday has eclipsed Thanksgiving in the minds of many.  Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Black Friday, but it’s all a little ridiculous.

Christmas has been over-the-top commercially for decades now.  No longer do children make a list of their favorite things and make secret wishes for Santa in hopes they will get just one of the things they want.  Now, mountains of toys are expected and often given. 

This year we aren’t able to buy presents for everyone in our families, only our kids.  And this really bums me out!  I love gift giving but I have to remind myself that it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of life.  I would rather shower someone with love than with tangible gifts.

I invite everyone to take a step back to simpler times.  It’s hard that it often takes a nationwide financial crisis to get people to remember what they love about the holidays and often, it means the company and friendship and love of their family and friends.  Scale back.  Simplify.  Be thankful.  And Happy Holidays!

My Smart Kids

We just finished parent teacher conferences and guess what?  MY KIDS ROCK.  They are smart (ahead of the curve in many ways), good team players, funny, helpful, kind and considerate children.  Is there really any better compliment for a parent than to hear those attributes applied to your children?  I think not.

Of course, I am biased.  I think my kids are awesome.  But it’s nice when others confirm your thoughts!  I think I am most proud of their compassion and kindness they show to others.  Reading, writing and arithmetic are difficult to teach, but teaching kids to love others when we are all inherently selfish, that’s really hard! 

So to the village of people supporting us, family, friends and church, I say THANK YOU!  You are helping us mold some great little people who will grow up to be great adults.

“P’s are boring, P’s are boring…”

And thus begins my daughter’s hatred of homework.  Usually, it takes a kid until third grade when the math gets harder that the whining and stalling begins.  But Elizabeth, she’s an early adopter of homework hate.  Tonight she was sitting down to practice writing her letter P’s, both upper and lowercase and out of her tiny mouth came a mantra of malicious mumblings about mathematics.

“P’s are boring, P’s are boring, P’s are boring, P’s are boring, P’s are boring, P’s are boring…” she sadly sung.  And her work showed her disdain.  Her P’s were terrible!  They were all over the place, in the middle of the lines, below the lines, huge, small, teeny tiny, P’s that looked like D’s, you name it, she had it.  Except for a correctly written P of course.  I looked over and saw her whipping through the assignment, writing P’s faster than Anna Nicole Smith’s doctors wrote prescriptions!  “Slow down!” I said.  “Work slowly so you can form the letters correctly.”    She sighed at me so I erased her ill-formed letters and made her re-do it.  She wasn’t happy but she re-did them to a satisfactory level. 

Pray for us folks, I think I just got a glimpse of our future and it has an attitude.

Blog Block.

Hi friends! If anyone even still reads this anymore, I want to let you know that I am, in fact, still alive and well and still intend on blogging.  I’ve been blog blocked for a while now.  Mostly because I haven’t had anything interesting to say and what I have had to say probably shouldn’t be shared on a blog.  Here’s the low-down.

Still loving being at home.  I enjoy cooking and having time to get things done and that spending time with the kids thing, yeah, that rocks too.

It’s definitely been hard to adjust to our new budget but we’re doing really well.  It’s hard prioritizing what needs to be bought first.  Things for the kids are no-brainers.  New shoes needed?  Check.  Jeans with no holes?  Check.  But new things for me or Kolin, well, that’s a different story.

One of the best things about the new budget and staying home is that my kids are starting to recognize the value of a dollar.  Both of them had birthday money to spend and some fun money from their Grandpa.  We went to the store and they realized quickly they need to weigh their options and account for taxes. Now, when I ask “what do you want for dinner?”, they ask for homemade food, not McDonald’s.  Slowly but surely they are becoming smarter consumers and that is awesome!

Well, that’s all I can crank out right now.  Check back soon.  I will try to update more often!

Out with the Old, In with the New

My life for the past several months has been all about change.  I’ve changed my job from a career woman to stay at home mom.  I’ve changed my lifestyle from one that involved spending nearly $800 a month on dining out (yes, this is embarrassing to reveal) to one a lifestyle that has us spending less, saving more and making better financial decisions with only one income.  Yesterday I embarked on a new change.  I was baptized.

Now anyone who knows me well knows that I was first baptized when I was 16.  I attended a Baptist church at the time and I had always grown up “Christian” knowing about God and Jesus.  But when I was 16 I decided to proclaim my faith and be baptized.  It was a nice ceremony.  My entire family was there because my cousins and brother, as well as me, were baptized. One of my best friends was there with her mother.  It was nice.

So why did I get baptized again?  Well, I have to say that after 18 years, I’ve had some different and challenging life experiences.  I got married, had two children, and experienced heartache, sorrow and disappointment that I allowed to wedge between me and God.  I was Christian in name only and barely that.  I didn’t know what I believed anymore.  I certainly didn’t have a personal relationship with God and many years I wasn’t “on speaking terms” with Him (I totally stole that phrase from someone on Facebook).  I felt as far away from God as I ever had.  Was I still “a good person”?  Well, I didn’t kill anyone, I didn’t cheat or steal, or dishonor my parents or my husband or anything like that, but was I “good”?  No.   I held on to anger, resentment, selfishness and disappointment and doing that, will rot your soul. 

Then the Greensburg tornado happened.  I went there as part of disaster relief response and met a woman who would help change my life.  She was the Methodist minister’s wife and she was awesome.  Her house was literally split in half.  Her daughter wasn’t home at the time and she and her husband and son took shelter in their basement.  For about a month before the tornado she had been doing a Bible study and had been learning verses related to God’s protection of people and His love for us and giving your worries over to Him.  She told me that as she and her family coward to the violent winds, they prayed, aloud, for God to help and protect them.  After the storm, she prayed for God to help their family through the process of picking up the pieces of their lives that had been scattered about the tiny town.  She told me that they would be all right because God was here to help them.  Her faith stirred me.

I began looking for a church for my family soon after that and settled in at Gracepoint, wooed by the funny, “Church Doesn’t Suck” billboards.  Once there my faith and my children’s faith began to grow exponentially!  I see my children becoming new, better people.  More kind.  More loving.  More compassionate.

In myself, I have seen and felt a tremendous change.  I am admitting something here I’ve never admitted before.  Before my relationship with God became real and Christ became the center of my life again, I would do nice things always in the hope that I would get a kudo or pat on the back. It makes me nauseous to write that.  But it’s true.  In the past two years I have learned to let go of that need to be selfish and have my ego stroked.  I am a new creation.  To commemorate my newfound feelings of rising from the muck and mud, I got a tattoo of a lotus flower on my back.  It’s a visual reminder to me about my faith and how far I’ve come.  But there needed to be more, which gets me back, FINALLY, to baptism.

My baptism is my declaration to everyone, including all my social media friends, that I am a follower of Jesus and because of that, I am a new person!  The shreds of the old, selfish Andrea sluffed off when I rose up out of the water yesterday.  A spiritual and symbolic awakening, a much needed, cathartic action for myself and my God.

So that’s me.  That’s my story or my “testimony” if you will.  I wasn’t strung out on drugs or alcohol.  I didn’t grow up in poverty or surrounded by gang violence.  My parents are divorced but not bitterly.   But my conversion feels just as relevant, whole and complete as someone with a more visible life change.  The change I’ve experienced the past two years is nothing short of remarkable and I am grateful to God for it.

Testing, Testing, 123

It’s amazing how much your financial situation can improve when you give up one income.  Since I’ve quit work, we’ve managed to save more money, pay more bills off and overall, not feel deprived.  We were pretty impressed with ourselves.  Then, it happened.

First, Kolin was in a wreck and it destroyed his ugly, but mechanically perfect little car.  We found a replacement car and paid with it with our insurance money and a very small loan from the bank.  But we’ve been having some problems with that car now.  We are taking it in next week to see what is wrong with it.  Hopefully it will be cheap and easy to fix!

Then, yesterday our dryer died.  Ugh.  It  just died.  We replaced the washer about a year ago and overall had the set over 11 years.  But  dang.  When it rains, sometimes it pours.

But this is only a test and I plan to pass it.  I believe it really is better for my family for me to be home.  Our house is cleaner our laundry is done (when the dryer works!) and our meals are home-cooked and delicious (mostly, hey, I’m still learning!).  Most of all, the stress and tension that used to fill our home has been seriously reduced.  I am happier and as the saying goes, “if momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy”.  So we are all doing well and I don’t plan on allowing anything to mess this up for us.

This is a test of the emergency faith system, this is only a test.

What I am Learning at Home

I have been staying home now for about a month and here are some things I’ve learned about myself, my children and life in general.

• My kids can fight about anything, even imaginary things. FACT: they fought in the car because Joe wouldn’t give Elizabeth back the imaginary cat she was petting. When I made him “give” it back to her, he “handed” it back and then said a few minutes later, “I STILL have the cat” as he stroked some imaginary feline’s head and back.  Seriously kids?  Yep. Seriously.
• Laundry can be conqured. Sure it’s a daily battle, but the war can, and has been won.
• People have asked me if I miss work yet.  My answer is No.  I certainly miss seeing my co-workers every day, but I don’t miss the stress and the pace. I am still very much enjoying being with the kids.  Even if they fight over invisible cats.
• I can cook more than spaghetti.  I have now tackled recipes such as beef stroganoff, fajitas and stuffed bell peppers to name a few.  I am trolling my Betty Crocker cookbook daily for inspiration.  I do enjoy it and usually have the kids right beside me, helping where possible.  One day they will need to cook for me and while I enjoy spaghetti, I’d like variety.
• After having eaten at home for long enough, when you do finally have McDonald’s, you realize how much everything there has the same aftertaste and it isn’t a good thing.
• Enough is simply enough.  By this I mean, I don’t need new this and new that.  I am content and it feels WONDERFUL.  When I worked I always found myself wanting more and more and now that I am home and we are pinching pennies, I am content with what I have. I have also taken to repurposing items and that feels good too. 
• It is possible to fall in love with your family all over again.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved them, but I didn’t appreciate how much they mean to me.  I took them for granted.  Now, all those little secrets Elizabeth shares with me are that much more precious.  Joe’s elaborate stories and explanation of processes (natural and industrial) bring a smile to my face because I take more time to listen.  Kolin’s snuggling up to me when he gets home so we can have some personal conversation without kid interruption reminds me of why I married him.

These are a few of my lessons learned.  I hope to bring more soon.