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This is a post about a childhood unplugged, but here we are meeting on the computer.

We learn that we shouldn’t spend too much time on computers from information that Google gives us.

Ironic.

Social media is a tricky thing – connecting and overstepping, glossing the messy parts, and laying us bare to thousands of souls we don’t even know.

But his hair smells like the sun and dirt. And you can’t see how I failed and how I soared in just one day of motherhood. This is real life, and we are passing notes in class. A pretty blog is a note with the glitter pens and folded just so. Except this time instead of trying to make sure the teacher doesn’t catch us, we must beware we don’t get all caught up in algorithms and popularity parties, and all the feelings that can come from slick screens and rising or falling numbers.

Because these little ones of ours know how to be unplugged, and we forget and plug them and ourselves back in. All it takes is not paying the cable bill and the option no longer stands. But I would miss you if you let your internet connection go.

Thank you for reading though. It helps to know that I can send little words off into space and we can hold hands through the country and the world and say, “Yes I know. The mothering is hard, and the mothering is beautiful. And I am here too.”

But most of all his hair smells like the sun and dirt, and his shoulders hang just so as his back twirls up in an every growing dance. Have you seen how their feet tread the ground like it is hallowed?

Just stop and look. I promise, it’s miracle.

More unplugged images coming to you this May via screens of lovely artists – www.childhoodunplugged.com

 

As I kneel in the woods, there are spots of blood. It is happening all over again.

I had been running into this vacation full of joy, full of life. Now I turn and walk back to the car slowly, my husband’s hand in mine. We wonder together if this new child will be the third to fall from my womb.

We had felt the searing pain of losing our full-term son during birth and holding him stillborn, cold, and quiet. Then we had known the shock of a routine ultrasound showing that another son’s heart had grown silent at sixteen weeks. And now we would fly back across the country to find that our first daughter would never be more than a flicker here on earth.

This was the loss no one knew about. This was the loss that was too much.

I had already grieved, and I had hoped. I had journeyed through waves, and found some solid ground, but the thing about pregnancy loss is that if you are building a family, it may strike again and again. And where is God in that reality? I know that one in four of each of you reading this post will walk this path, and all of you love someone who has.

I had two young sons at home when I lost my third son to stillbirth. I loved those boys with all my heart, but I was convinced I was the mother who had failed the most. My child had grown nine months, healthy and ripe within, and I could not even bring him into the world. My body had failed, and my mind was not safe. Lying in that hospital bed, I breathed a prayer, “Lord carry me through this. Somehow help me.” I was too broken for theology, I just needed my Father.

He answered me. Women began to send emails and Facebook messages. They would come up to me after church services and at friends’ houses to tell me of their precious little ones in heaven and their own journeys through grief.

When God felt silent and the world grew dark, the Psalms and other women’s words became my lifeline.

I read and we gathered for coffee, and since then I have held others and wept their hard tears with them, pressing books and scriptures into their hands.

Now there is a powerful and tender voice that I wish I would have had beside me when I was first navigating grief. Adriel Booker is a member of this sisterhood that none of us ever asks to be part of, and she is sharing her heart in the book Grace like Scarlett.

Adriel writes of grief as an ocean and invites us to dive deep where we can meet the God who loves us not in-spite of our brokenness, but IN our loss. She weaves together her own stories of miscarriage with honest looks at doubt, the theology of suffering, and the hope we have in Christ. She reminds us that no matter how many times we have experienced loss…

“Grief is not linear, you can’t work your way through the stages, crossing them off a list as you go. In my experience, it feels more circular, like going around and around the same mountain… since grief is not linear, we don’t have to be panicked by the seeming repetition.”

I wish I would have had her words as I knelt in the woods, circling back to grief again, treading down a path I never wanted to retrace.

Now I hold three sons and a daughter here on earth. Pure joy, and still the days are fraught with ups and downs. Real life is often just circling around that same mountain. And I know when the next time of loss and pain comes, I will not only revisit tears and questions, I will also revisit the time when God envelops like a cloud. The time when the mourners are comforted and the brokenhearted are held so very close.

. . .

Grace like Scarlett by Adriel Booker releases on May 1, 2018, and you can pre-order now to receive some very special gifts! Adriel created a journaling guide to help women process through and share their own stories of loss and hope. She is also offering a set of beautiful scripture coloring pages and an audio series for navigating milestones after miscarriage.

I am personally purchasing several copies for myself and to give to friends who have experienced pregnancy or infant loss. I am so thankful that I will have this resource in the future to help me love on mamas as they mourn and celebrate their little ones in heaven.

You can learn all about the book here, and order it here.

There’s not a way to kiss when you’re afraid it might be the last time.

There’s no way to tie it all up pretty – all the passion and pain, hurt and happiness – in one goodbye embrace. Except to just look at each other and know that underneath and shooting up through it all, you love each other.

You love each other and that is that. It’s why you walk hand in hand through everything life throws.

There are no words for that, just the eyes.

Eyes that watched his own drown tears, an arm wrapped round each child, and finally his brown camouflage body disappearing into a bus so white and nondescript you could never imagine it could cut a family right in two.

Nine months, the middle east, and no guarantees.

These military farewells feel inconceivable, but aren’t they actually the real life we are always living? There are never guarantees, we just forget amidst the grocery stores, carpool schedules, and carefully laid plans.

Even us, who have had a child ripped from our arms – we fear and we also forget.

Every year on Joshua’s birthday we let loose balloons, one for each year he has been gone.

Every year as those balloons drift through the clouds irretrievable, I want to claw my way into the sky and pull them back to me. They are a reminder that for now my child is beyond my reach, and that doesn’t feel okay.

A week ago as my husband rode away for an overseas deployment I wanted to run down the street screaming. I wanted to bang on the bus window and tell them all we had made a mistake. This was not our life.

I wanted to reach him and pull his body back to mine. That white bus felt like white balloons drifting purposeful to where I could not be.

But me who is normally anything but contained, stood quietly as the bus driver carried men and women, fathers, mothers, brothers, daughters down the street and out of sight. A balloon growing to a speck and then there is just blue.

A police officer’s wife messaged me later that day, saying that she knows the ache of waiting, wondering, IF and WHEN her husband will return home. Because our men go into the dark and dangerous places, and they try their best to keep us all safe, to give home to a few more and a few more.

And now I’m driving to sports practices, doing all the parenting, living our normal and feeling anything but. Praying for my heart to receive strength when I cannot.

Honestly, I don’t want if and when to be my life, but we’re all living in this IF and WHEN aren’t we?

Maybe anything that reminds us of that is blessing.

Us standing here – one foot in time, one in eternity – grasping for balloons and busses and trying to figure out how to give one more really good kiss that says everything we cannot.

*p.s. Thank God for the people who get up at 5am to feed your kids donuts while they say goodbye to their Dad

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  • Dorina Gilmore-Young - Achingly beautiful as always, friend. Praying over you and your kids as you surrender your hearts again to the “if and when.” Grateful you are writing your journey!ReplyCancel

    • sharon - Thank you friend, that means so much to me! Women like you set such an example of strength and tenderness that I really cling to in these times xoxoReplyCancel

  • Barbara Keene - Hi Sharon,
    I am a volunteer with Boots In The House. Please check out Boots on FB. They are in their Care Packages For Heroes Military Appreciation 2018 Campaign. They send great care packages to remote and hostile locations. If you would like to nominate your husband, please contact them. They will be accepting nominations very soon. Packing party is the May 5&6 at Bass Pro Shops in Mesa AZ. The packages will be shipped the week of May 6. It’s a great group who works very hard to support our deployed troops. My son is a Marine and I have a nephew in the Army. My nephew is deployed now. It’s tough on his family . I pray for your husband and all our troops safety and the time to go by fast for you. You have a beautiful family.
    BARBARA.ReplyCancel

  • Meghan Weyerbacher - My heart twists as I read this, and my heart goes out to you. The photos and words are lovely. In some ways I probably don’t know where you are, but in some I do. We were a military fam too, went through a couple deployments. Stories help us be a tad stronger I think. It is never easier though. Thank you for sharing this. What a gorgeous family. Prayers too. xoxoReplyCancel

    • sharon - Yes to all of this, thank you for sharing your heart and sending prayers! xoxoReplyCancel

 

There was a commercial during the Super Bowl (which is all I watch on Super Bowl Sunday. Well, that and This is Us)… This commercial said that a lot of car advertisements say exciting things and show fancy things. It said all those commercials with the shiny vehicles and stirring music were called “manifestos.” Then this commercial just showed a car (I think maybe it was a Jeep) doing what it does – driving off down a rugged road into a forest, and said “This is our manifesto.”

Well, this is my manifesto.

This is what we do during a special season, and I’m so thankful for it all. That is all for today.

 

“I’m looking past our faults from those scattered days. And fancying redemption.”

I sat in the In n Out drive-through, letting the music roll over me. *

He would be home in a few hours. Him piloting an airplane across the ocean and planning to touch down right in front of us, the first time we would see each other in four months. He had been in Europe, eating croissants and serving our country. I had been at home with all the kids, just trying to keep it together.

And I had. I had more than kept it together. Thriving in the silence of my own soul, my sons and daughter and I had been everything to each other.

We had missed the man of the house, but God had carried us, and now he was coming back. The months had turned to hours. All I had to do was wait and the clock would whirl away the last few minutes until he stood before me. I wasn’t sure what I would see.

Waiting for cheeseburgers and fries, I let out a prayer like pent up breath, a question, “God can we be good together? I just don’t know if him and I can be good together.”

Years pile up the missteps, and resentment blankets everything til you can’t see the one you promised to love and honor, til you can’t even feel yourself.

We had come far, treading patterns the best we knew how until they scraped rough hewn paths through each other’s hearts. We didn’t need to hear where the fight would go anymore, frustrated words rolled like water down the path of least resistance.

I know well the feeling of his work hardened skin against my hand. We are no longer strangers, remembering instead each angry word and quick injustice we have done each other.

I was “fancying redemption”, but even for all the love we held I didn’t know if it was possible. Maybe we were just the sum of all our years. Maybe I could only ever find easy happiness in oblivion, the swallowing up of a stranger’s arms.

We had pledged to have and to hold, so I would walk bound to this man, and he to me for as long as life held its lease. But could the scattered days be gathered up and the patterns rearranged? Could we be good together beyond the easy days? Was fancying redemption just a silly dream?

The clock unwound. I curled my hair, and put on lipstick. And then we marched – dresses pressed, the boys combed and buttoned, holding signs to welcome their Dad. We marched right out on that tarmac, flat as a plate, a cement-stretching aisle. And we stood while jets raced overhead and stood sentry all around us. We stood faces lifted to the clouds until his headlights pricked the sky, two bright eyes drawing close until the wait was no more. He broke space with the weight of his presence and slid down the air with the heavy propeller whir drumming in our ears until wheels rolled to a stop. Landed safe.

Men in green motioned to us, and we walked quick, expectant, and shy around the side of the plane. Then there he was, green flight suit reaching up to the smile I had first fallen in love with.

There he was, that stranger I had talked long with after our college workdays and fantasized of his arms round me. The stranger to whom I had made ridiculous promises I could never keep in a tiny white church before we knew how easily we could break and be broken. The stranger I lay down trembling before on our wedding night, becoming naked before him for the rest of our lives.

As he half jumped down the little ladder from his cockpit to wrap arms around his sons, scoop his daughter up, and kiss me, I knew I didn’t know a fraction of the depths of him.

There with the sky our chapel, and his smile breaking open all I wanted to forget and was afraid to hope for – there I knew I loved him and that we could be good.

Because why not? He had flown an ocean back to me, and our days lay ahead. Why not believe the best, forget the rest and slip my dress off in the dark of our room, naked with him a stranger once again?

We held each other as if it was the first night, because four months coming home will remind you that nothing beats life’s whisper that “There is still time.”

And each time since then we have stepped into the embrace of the only one we will know, into the arms of another that we cannot presume to ever fully know.

Because it takes seeing each other like you haven’t every day for the past fifteen years, to know what you have.

And because grace forgets well-worn paths of hurt and fear. Grace breathes the life of mystery and possibility. Grace says I know you have hurt me and I you, but have we even really met the deepest parts of us? Grace lies down naked before my husband like me never met and invites him to be my closest friend.

. . .

*the song Illuminate by the Hunts – it’s so worth three minutes of your day

– Images were created by the amazing Dorka Hegedus. I cannot express what a treasure these images are to us, capturing so much of what we have lived and felt in this military lifestyle. She is a true professional and artist, shooting in a documentary style that let us experience the precious moments of this homecoming without interruption while also capturing portraits that I will hold dear for the rest of my life. As a photographer I have had many experiences in the photography world, and I can emphatically say that if you never experience Dorka creating images of you then you are missing out on something very special.

 

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  • hili - i absolutely loved the bw edits . did you edit them yourself ?
    but then I saw the colored version , and its different , so much more life in it. love them both .ReplyCancel

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