As I have mentioned in a previous blog, the recent hail storm almost wiped out my entire garden in a five minute fell swoop. It is very discouraging after all the hard work of planting and weeding and preparing the soil.  The sore back and stiff butt coming from physical labor that you haven’t done since last year (well that’s just my pathetic little experience).   We’ve had watering restrictions for the last month and so saving water from showers and rain to water plants has become my MO.  It’s much more work.  I felt like I was Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie, going to the well everyday to lug water back for the animals and the farm.   But I did it because I spent too much money on my dream secret garden, once again, to just watch it die.  It’s my summer project. And has been for many summers.  I needed it.  It’s my emotional crutch and therapy all in one.   Then to have it almost entirely wiped out?  And there is nothing much one can do about it.  We can’t control the weather. I mean I guess I could just give up and never plant a garden ever again.  Because it can be emotionally exhausting.  And physically exhausting.  Did I mention expensive?  Gardening is not for wimps. But, oh the joys.
The south side of the barn in our backyard was protected from the hail so I still have one barn wall of prolific green growth that’s thriving.  So I will focus on that.  I am going to replant a few things and move a few things around to fill in the dead gaps.  I will cut some things back to see if they will grow again.  I’ll keep watering and weeding and running out every morning to see what’s happening.  I’ve deadheaded all the dead heads.  I bought a couple more rose bushes to fill in the spaces.  Perennials not annuals. And I will not give up.

Just as a second stroke almost took me out at the end of May.  Well,  it didn’t almost take me out but it did undo much of the emotional and mental work I had done over the last two years. Strokes play with your mind.  Your fears.  Your health.  Your well being. Your confidence. Because strokes are scary even when they are minor.  I am totally grateful that this one was not as bad as the first, but I had just put to bed all those fears.  And decided that the first stroke was ancient history and I was moving forward with confidence and health.  And then wham!  I’m driving down a one way street the wrong way because I had lost my right peripheral vision. It came back in a few hours but not until I’d had another ambulance ride to the hospital and an overnight stay and another MRI and another CT scan and evidence of more brain damage. They wouldn’t let me drive for a month.  Why?  because they thought I might have another?  and kill someone?  Not a confidence builder.
But I can’t live there.  I can’t live in fear.  So I must pick myself up and replant a few things.  Dead head a few things.  Keep watering and weeding. And keep doing what has to be done to optimize my health.  Physical and mental. It’s like I was on the south side of the barn.  The darn thing kinda  missed the best part of me.  Thank you Lord.  I still have much to be grateful for.

The last day of work (for the summer – I work at a school), my boss, friend, co-worker had her staff over for a delightful end of the year dinner. Then I spent the next two days getting ready for an Anniversary party I was hosting on the weekend.  My sister from Mississauga arrived and we headed out to my aunt’s cottage on a gorgeous quaint lake in BC.  The weather was ….meh.  We had a couple of lovely hot days.  We walked twice a day with the dog and watched movies by night – they have a cinema room.  Laid on the dock once the sun and heat finally decided to show their face and burnt my feet to a crisp.  This was slow living for sure.  We headed back to the city to join the rest of my visiting family for a few days and did the stampede and shopped the malls, did a couple of pancake breakfasts and watched a few more movies.  One might think that was slow living.  But it really wasn’t.  What I am doing now, after all the guests have left and the travelling is done….this is slow living.  And slow living is what I plan to do for the rest of the summer.

I find it interesting that people say ‘ don’t go on Instagram.  It will make you depressed as you compare your life to all those other phony lives that look perfect but aren’t happening.’   I go on Instagram to review all my old posts and stories and end up feeling grateful that this is my life.  No, I don’t post all the gory details like my violent episode with food poisoning this past weekend, but I do post the lovely and the memorable and the joys and these are events and people and happenings that are real in my life.  I don’t spend too much time staging things.  Maybe that’s just the MO of people at my stage of life.

I look at my story highlights and reels and posts that end up reminding me that this IS my life.  All these things actually happened and are exactly as I post them and I am so blessed by it all.  Blessed that this is the life I get to live.  It actually does look pretty good. It encourages me.  It reminds me I have so much to be grateful for on days when I’m not really feeling it.  I post the lovely today – as it happens –  so I can go back and look at it on a tough, not so lovely day.

Decorating is one of my passions.  I love to garden.  I’m enthralled by flowers and their growth and their cycles.  I continue to use my creative abilities to make lovely things and I like to share them in order to inspire someone else to do the same.  I’m in my happy place in the kitchen baking or cooking. When it come to Christmas, well I think I own it. I don’t post me doing laundry or ironing.  Or me cleaning the dog poop out of the dog run.  Or coloring my grey roots.

I am just an ordinary person.  An ordinary woman.  An ordinary wife.  An ordinary mom. With an ordinary life.    Doing quite ordinary things in my own creative way.  I am a sucker for schmaltz.  What can I say?

I do get ideas off Instagram for ways to improve my life and myself.  I get inspired by spiritual posts.  Have a good laugh at hilarious posts.  Enjoy and get tips from the gardening posts.  I think I can see right through the phony lifestyles of the rich and famous (not all of them) and I just don’t follow those people. I follow people on Instagram that inspire me and make me happy.  That’s all.  I find it quite an encouraging distraction and pastime.

That’s just my experience.  I like to use the Internet and technology for good and not for evil.  It’s all in how you apply it. Viva la Instagram.

I’m at Costco buying toilet paper.  My daughter is on an airplane headed for the South of France to do flowers for a wedding. Wait – what?  How did a daughter I raised in modesty and poverty end up with this lifestyle?  Where did she get this gumption?  This moxie?  These opportunities? She dropped out of grade 12 math for Pete sake. I thought she’d be cleaning houses for the rest of her life. Oh wait….that was my fate. Doing dishes.  Doing laundry. Cleaning bathrooms. Ad nauseum.

Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life – well, valuable, but small – and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around?

From the time I was old enough to conceptualize what I wanted my adult life to look like it always involved marriage and motherhood.  I assume this means that I liked what I saw in my own dysfunctional family.   I didn’t know we were dysfunctional at the time.  I thought we were normal and everyone else was weird.  But I digress…

I wanted marriage and motherhood (in that order) above all else.  I thought of going to design school for a split second.  I thought of becoming a pilot for a split second.  I thought of being an architect for a split second.  And a doctor for a millisecond.  My math ability would never have facilitated the latter two.  But I never for once wavered on Motherhood.

Pregnancy was not kind to me.  I basically turned into an alien blimp so I wasn’t keen on going through that too many times but when our first two efforts produced a boy and then a girl.  I was done.

Motherhood did not disappoint.  Well….sometimes it did. Well… a lot of times it did. You mothers know what I’m talking about. But in the big picture, it did not.  I’ve had the time of my life with these two kids.  Truly.  My life is so much bigger and richer because of them. Even if everything goes south from here on in, I have the past and it was grand. I know children are a gift from God  but I like to think I kind of had something to do with who they’ve turned out to be.  I’ll take ownership of the not so good so I can take ownership of the very good. I was just able to do so many things that I didn’t have the pleasure or opportunity to do when I was a kid, all in the name of motherhood. And who these kids have turned out to be has been a total pleasant surprise. I have no problem whatsoever saying “these are my kids”.  More pride than is probably healthy flows through my veins.

And all the sacrifices and things I have done for them I have done out of pure love (as pure as I can muster this side of eternity).  I have never done anything expecting reciprocation.  OK…that’s a lie.  I did expect reciprocation sometimes and was disappointed when I didn’t get it.  But then I go do the same thing again…out of love.  I’ve never really seen motherhood as a responsibility although it is very much that but more something I really wanted to do and really wanted to do well.  So I keep doing and sacrificing because I can’t help myself. And if some of my choices as a mother are wrong then I guess I’m a bad parent.  I’ll own that.  But if I’m loving my kids the wrong way then I guess…..I’m wrong,   But I’m still having the time of my life with them.  And on this Mother’s Day I’d just like to acknowledge that I wouldn’t change a thing.  Ok…there are a few things I would change. I mean who doesn’t make mistakes?  But I love being a Mother.  This doesn’t mean I don’t want to be spoiled on Mother’s Day kids.  Its good for your character.

I’ve been feeling great lately.  Compared to how I felt the previous two years, I feel like “I’m back”.  I’ve got energy and motivation to do things (still looking for the motivation to workout as much as I need to) but that will come.  Baby steps.  Speaking of steps, I’ve been hitting 10,000 a day more regularly than I was.  My PT sister says, the status quo is now 15,000 steps a day but hello?  If I’m having a hard time getting 10,000 then I think that is where I should start for now. I digress….as I do so often when I write.
But I’m thanking the Lord that I’ve got my mojo back. I thought maybe it was gone forever.  It feels so good to accomplish things and not have to have a long winter’s nap or a couple of days of doing nothing to recover.  My doctor sent me for some blood tests back in February and when the results came back it appeared my AC1 numbers had crossed the line.  Right then, I told myself ‘ I’m going to do something about this’.  I am NOT taking any more meds for anything else.  I’m trying to get off the ones I’m on.  So I immediately changed the way I eat and committed to losing a certain number of pounds.  AND I am almost positive that is why I am feeling so good.  It’s amazing when you put good fuel into your body, how good you can start feeling and how quickly. And by taking your health into your own hands.  I have reached a plateau with the weight loss but I am feeling great and it will come.

But I am not here to preach about eating well.  I’m not a dietician or a doctor or a fitness expert.  I am just a regular person trying to be well.  I got sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. Interestingly enough, the story of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda kept coming to me last year. Jesus asked him, more than once, “Do you want to get well?”  And the lame man was probably thinking….well what do you think?  Of course I do.  And I felt like Jesus was asking me that question too.  Especially on my flight back from Toronto last August when I had shooting pain radiating down my right leg the entire flight.  I was internally crying out to the Lord to give me relief, at least for the duration of the flight. (By way of history, I’d been having that sciatica pain since before I went to London in May, as I was in pain both ways on that trip.)    I heard in my spirit, the words “Do you want to get well”.  And like the lame man, I’m thinking, of course I do.  Why do you think I’m asking?  Begging.   It was in that moment that I realized that I was going to have to partner with the Lord in my healing.  He wasn’t going to just wave His magic wand and take away all the self inflicted pain of poor lifestyle choices.  What can I say?  I am a slow learner.  It wasn’t until February that I finally had a light bulb moment.

I love how the Lord takes care of us.  He doesn’t let us get away with much but He brings us to a place of surrender and obedience and He has this clever way of making us think it was our choice.  Well, actually, it IS our choice.  But He brings us to that place where we actually WANT to make that choice. And that’s the beauty of it.   And that’s where we need to be.  And once we’ve made the choice He helps us stay the course.  I love that too.

And I love feeling like I can do things…get things done.  Be creative. Clean the house (let me tell you,  you’d have been appalled at how low my cleaning standards had taken a dive.  I thought the fam was going to stage an intervention).  How ugly I was willing to leave the house and be seen in public. ( That one even alarmed me).  How lazy.  How uninterested.  Skipping church.  Not walking.  Even losing my interest in cooking and baking and entertaining…  The cornerstone of my existence.

But I’m back.  I mean as much as someone at 66 can be back.  LOL  I’m interested and engaged and I can feel motivation and energy welling up inside.  I’m in my groove.  Thank you Lord.  “Though I walk thru the valley of the shadow of death, tho art with me…

My child, you are anxious about many things. This should not be. It grieves me to see you stressing and striving and eating crumbs from the ground when I have prepared a table of the finest food for you (in the presence of your enemies). I would prefer for you to sit by my feet and learn from me. Get to know me and trust my plans for you. My plans for you are not to harm you but to prosper you and give you a future and a hope. Did you not scribble in your journal at the beginning of this year that your re-soul-ution would be to seek first my kingdom and watch all other things be added unto you? Am I the first thing you think about when you open your eyes in the morning and the last thing you think about when you close them at night? Why do you think this is not the case?

I understand (and can see) that you are struggling. I can see that you have begun to surrender to your circumstances instead of trusting what you know about me. I know you are dealing with several overwhelming situations that have stolen hope and joy from you. You’ve begun to believe that it’s all up to you and if you don’t fix these circumstances then nothing will change. That’s one thing about you, my daughter, you are very self-sufficient, to your own detriment. You have listened to the lie that it’s all up to you. Many people wouldn’t even attempt to do, fix or tackle what you think you can do all on your own. This is a stumbling block for you. It overrides your trusting me as your first instinct. Then you get exhausted because of your striving. You get overwhelmed because you feel all the outcomes rest on your weak and caving human shoulders. I have invited all you who are weary and heavy burdened to come to me and I will give you rest.

It’s time to contend for the promises I have freely given you and take back what is rightfully yours. Have I not said I would never leave or forsake you? Have I not reminded you that my grace is sufficient for you and that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus? I love you just the way you are and I love you with an everlasting love. Have I not promised that you will see my goodness “in the land of the living?” I also promised goodness and mercy all the days of your life. And I WILL be faithful to complete all the good works I started in you and your life. You are never alone in this shaky world and I am ALL you need. I love spending time with you. I’m never too busy to listen.

I know your heart. Man looks at the outside but I look at the heart. I can see in your heart a genuine desire to serve me, obey me and trust me. I can see there is gratitude in your heart as well but you are having difficulty keeping your eyes on me. You let the distractions of the world and the lies of your enemy get to you. It’s the plight of mankind. I know it’s extremely difficult to live in this fallen world and not succumb to its pollution and warped values. That’s what I’m here for. That’s why you chose me in the first place. I’ve given you everything you need for life and godliness. It’s yours! Just take it.

When the world is going mad all around you, trust in my promises to find the peace and hope and rest your soul desires. Don’t shut me out. Don’t try to fix everything on your own. I’m here for you.

I love you my daughter… if you, being evil, know how to give good gifts, how much more so do I, as your Heavenly Father?