I’m actively posting graduation pictures of my one and only beloved (begotten?) daughter and I have near-constant flashes of school drop-offs in my head. The most challenging ones were in middle school.

So here is my gratitude list for those who helped us through every era and every episode of childrearing. 

• To those who heard me at my absolute worst, ie, when my middle schooler refused to get out of the car and go to school. Or when she refused to stand up (on E Street, at amusement parks, at the zoo–look, it happened a lot) I was HOT. I said things. Unpretty, ungracious things. You heard me and responded with love and guess what? WE DID IT. We survived. No, scratch that… WE THRIVED.
• To those who came and took my kid to school on some mornings. Okay, that was Dad. Thank you, Dad. You and mom and grandma and grandpa deserve so much more than mere words but that’s all I’ve got at present.
• To those who literally put my kid in a bathtub and bathed her. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. May your mansions in heaven be filled with every kind of delicious baked good and coffee that never runs out.
• To those who hugged my kid and loved her. To those who hugged me and loved me.
• To those who took my credit and insurance cards, those who scheduled appointments, those who dealt with canceled appointments and the rare completely-forgot–about-it appointments. Bless you. But even more to those who walked into counseling offices and counseled us, to those who walked into medical offices and gave high fives and cheered her on. You deserve all the stars in the sky for your care for us.
• To those who taught. Oh, our dear teachers. Some of you were only okay but some of you were the most stellar people on planet earth. To those who gave tough love. To those who bandaged knees and gave tylenol and provided kotex. To those who listened and reasoned and still persevered and taught new things. I see you and I am you and we needed you at every single turn for the past however many years it took to earn a high school diploma. Some of you have been around that IEP table with us for years and I thank you for your longevity and ability to really see my girl.
• To those who simply received this fabulous kid and believed in her from day one. To those who saw her light and didn’t demand she become someone else. To those who encouraged her writing and sculpting and drawing and horseback riding and love of every single animal on God’s green earth. Thank you for the opportunities you’ve given her to grow.
• To the aunts and uncles who cheered her on. Biological, adopted, and honorary. 

Memories are drifting in and out of my mind while I get ready to host a party to celebrate this moment. You are all a part of our journey and I’m grateful times a thousand for you.

I know it’s okay to cry.

And still I don’t want to.

I miss my community.

God filled in the hole a teeny bit today, with a request that didn’t come from me. I felt like I had been holding my breath for two years now and today was a slight exhale.

Sometimes love looks like friends who feel like family, a warm fireplace, an orange cat, and the willingness to physically and emotionally be laid bare in front of one another. 

I keep feeling the urge to cling to what is good.

1. Friends and their fireplace

2. A pan of cinnamon rolls

3. My dog on a luggage tag

Cling to what is good.

Right before I got body slammed by a virus or two (but hey, not Covid!) I took this little sweetie shopping for some winter clothes. It was a blast.

If you’ve been reading along for years then you know that infertility is a huge, and hugely unwelcomed, part of our story. We’ve tried all manner of ways to have more kids and yet at some point had to offer a simple “thank you” to God for our beautiful only child. But as I look at Kezzie’s precious face in the image above, I rejoice that the hard reality of infertility didn’t win the day. Babies continue to be born, fostered, and adopted. I find myself wandering the aisles of Super Target delighting in picking out teeny items for them. I praise God that Alicia knew I’d love to take her daughter out shopping for some winter gear. Kids legs? I mean, they just keep stretching, don’t they? In the face of huge life changes, I’m grateful this growing kid and I got to take a little shopping trip together. She delighted in picking out hoodies in colors she loved and I delighted in watching her.

Our stories aren’t over as long as we have breath in our lungs. Medical diagnoses and setbacks don’t mean your life is forever crushed. Academic and occupational failures don’t meet you won’t ever see light again in your future. Mistakes and sins of epic proportions don’t mean redemption isn’t coming in days ahead. Buckets of negative pregnancy tests don’t get to have the final word. Each day I spend loving on my friends’ kids, and each time I kiss a boo-boo at school or help a first grader learn to sound out words, I feel the joy of grace flood over me.

The best recent addition to Christmas traditions in our home is, hands-down, the girlfriend stocking.

Maralee and I have been exchanging stockings for a few years. We picked up these bright and playful pink stockings from Target one year and decided to fill it up for each other. It’s always fun and special to see what we’ve picked out for one another.

This year my stocking is, apparently, overflowing and I’m having a hard time waiting until Christmas morning!

(Sidenote: I also bought some chocolate items to throw in my own stocking and guess what? Those treats didn’t survive 24 hours in my possession. I busted into them almost immediately. Good thing I’ve got a this pink stocking waiting for me.)

Christmas elves stopped by last night and this afternoon bearing treats that have warmed up our hearts this year.

Be a Christmas elf.

Getting to see this sweet family in the middle of Covid isolation was such a treat for me! It’s a special joy to see these little girls grow and develop personalities and preferences. Thanks for spending some time in the autumn sun with me, Alex and Kat!

Flexible. Observant. Questioner. Big things come in little packages. A blessing. A mini me to her mama. A little sister. A big sister.

Precious.

Loved.

I skipped right past the onesie with “Mommy’s Little Sweetie” on the front. Onesie shopping is, apparently, like shopping for the perfect Hallmark card for whatever occasion you’re celebrating. One size truly does not fit all when you’re a foster parent.

I know from experience.

Years ago we brought home our first foster baby—a precious African American daughter—straight from the hospital. We stopped at a grocery store to get the right type of formula, and due to generous friends I did not have to pick out onesies. We had what we needed. The onesie this time is for a friend, and I felt a profound need to celebrate the homecoming of this little girl who may not stay at my friend’s house for long.

Fostering is some weird wacky stuff. It involves a thousand different emotions.

I want so badly to celebrate this baby girl because she is a HUMAN who is new on this earth. I remember exactly nothing from my own birth, but I know what happened: I was loved and wanted by my biological mom and my biological dad and my biological big brother whose footsteps I’ve followed in since the day I came home. I never considered my first car ride home as an incredible blessing until I peeked into the world of foster care. No doubt bio mamas and daddies love their children, but the reality is that not everyone is equipped to care for an infant’s needs. Sometimes one’s age or goals prevent them from parenting. Other times the ability to safely love and tend is masked by drugs or alcohol and long days of bad decisions, little family support, and hard obstacles. Regardless of the reason, not every child goes home with a family who rejoices in them.

Which is why I’m so proud of my friends who are loving children within foster care. And it’s why I am delighted to be able to pick out girlie onesies (OMG, the cuteness nearly bowled me over), and little teeny socks, and headbands to go on the curls on her precious baby noggin. Let’s CELEBRATE this child! She’s human. She’s beautiful. And she is SO LOVED ALREADY.

I wish everyone could feel that level of joy when they arrive in a home for the first time. This baby will come home to two parents willing to love her as long as she’s with them. She’ll arrive and greet a biological sibling who she crazily and beautifully resembles. She’ll be touched and fed and diapered by a whole crew of big foster brothers and sisters who have cheered her arrival long before she was born. What an amazing thing.

The hope of a foster parent is not in possession.

It is not in doing the right things and making all the connections.

It is not in being the better mother and father, in loving the most, in providing better than another person.

No, the hope of a foster parent is found in treating other human beings with dignity and compassion because God made them. God has made man and woman in his image and cherishes each and every person. If God loves people like that, who are we to do anything different?

Fellow foster families, keep on keeping on. We love you and we’re proud of you.

To God be the glory.

Last week I had a few hellish nights surrounding a much-anticipated trip with my girlfriend. If you hang in there with me for a sec I’m going to swing this conversation back around to the hot take culture we’re experiencing right now, particularly on social media. But the trip… oh the trip! I love to travel. I dream about traveling and I am instantly inspired by looking out a plane window or a car window onto new-to-me surroundings. Give me 75mph on a rural highway in Nebraska or a flight to Florida high above the clouds, the experience alone makes me giddy. I also have this other thing—and it’s a brain problem—and it’s called anxiety. My travel anxiety is further complicated by the very nature of type 1 diabetes, which demands I prepare for all contingencies in order to… well… in order to stay alive. Type 1 is a jerk like that.

So while I was tremendously excited to ditch town for a few days, my brain was freaking out a little. Or a lot really. I rolled over in bed the night before we left home and thought blearily, “Is today the day I get on a plane?” and after that I was wide awake. When you wake up at night and can’t sleep you play all kinds of games to try to either fall asleep or, at the very least, rest your body. It was only 3:00am, so I tried to be cool but I really was getting more amped up as each hour passed. Enter type 1 diabetes and before long my body started burning ketones.

Ketones are chemicals that build up when your body starts to burn fat for energy. Sounds good until you read a bit more and learn that in T1 diabetics a build-up of ketones can lead to Diabetic Ketoacidosis (DKA) which, if left untreated, can lead to a coma or death. I’ve had DKA before and it was tremendously scary. I’ll do anything to avoid it, which is why, when my body started producing ketones—likely due to stress—in the early morning hours before I boarded a plane, I got more stressed. I also started tending to myself. Gone was the carefree and excited feeling of getting to travel, and present was the need to pound liquids, deal with nausea without actually vomiting, dose insulin to flush the ketones, and try to eat a few carbs to give myself something else to burn. This was not my first rodeo. I struggled to eat; my toast tasted like cardboard in my scared, dry mouth. I struggled to drink and ran to a gas station for a sugar-free Powerade. I pounded the sidewalks out front in 19 degree weather in order to get the blood flowing and do something with my energy. All the while I kept checking for ketones (aka peed on a stick), kept pricking my finger for my glucose, and managed to pack up my 9th grader and wish her a good day. Yes, I did feel like throwing up while driving her to school but I was determined to send her off. It’s amazing what a little determination will do. When I got into Maralee’s minivan for the drive to the airport I looked like death. Already really pale, I was a ghostly shade of pale at that point. I caught her up to speed and suggested that if I wasn’t clear of ketones by the time we hit the airport she should drop me at the hospital and go on her way without me. (I’m certain she wasn’t excited about that option, for many reasons.) My protocol for self-treatment worked beautifully, however, and though I was way behind on sleep, I righted the ship and had zero ketones a hour later. We got on the plane, I crashed in a nap, and we landed to start our adventures. This story was essentially repeated two more times over the course of our four nights away. Two more nights of anxiety, illness, and stress. Two more days with hard crashes into morning naps. And yet, we made loads of memories. So really, I won!

I write all this down to say that my body is unique. I have type 1 diabetes and a few other doozies in the autoimmune department, and until Maralee was witness to every little blood sugar and insulin pump and ketone issue for five days straight, I didn’t think about how much energy it takes to simply live. That’s my life with diabetes. It requires nitty-gritty, hands-on babysitting day in, day out.

People in newstories, people in your newsfeed, friends, enemies, whoever… their needs are unique as well. Before you issue your hot take online—and by that I mean your opinion—take a minute and consider, what do I really know about their story? Am I the best person to comment on their needs? If not, how can I say something encouraging and true rather than critical?

Some of you in the midwest may have heard a KETV news story about a little girl in Iowa who fell asleep on a bus recently. The bus driver didn’t walk back to make sure all children were unloaded and the little one’s morning bus ride went from a 30 minute routine to an hour and 10 minutes. She spent an extra 40 minutes riding the bus. That’s not the worst thing for the average kid, but for this child it was a very bad thing. This little one has a rare form of diabetes where she swings from low glucoses to high ones without any warning. I think I read that she can’t take any insulin without dropping dangerously low.

What I witnessed on Facebook was a surprising number of commenters who were angry with the girl’s mother for raising a stink about her daughter being left on the bus. Without reading the article, without listening to the story, they commented and judged her. They assumed this child was an average child without any special needs. And even when the mother—a single mom, as it turned out, with epilepsy and no husband and no family support close by—began to defend herself in the comment section, people were still terribly rude.

Yes, online commenting is notoriously nasty. But it doesn’t have to be. And it’s not just Facebook, it’s everywhere. I cannot stand being on Twitter because I feel like people are just punching each other there. If I guard my Instagram account it’s a relatively nice place to be. But I’m not content with this and I want to talk about it. WE ARE ALL UNIQUE AND YOU DON’T KNOW EVERY STORY.

Even on my diabetes support groups, which are often a really cozy and encouraging space on the internet, I’m finding folks who simply go for the hot take. Instead of perhaps supporting a person’s desire to stockpile some meds or pantry items in case this coronavirus spreads to the US, they are harping on **fellow* diabetics saying this virus is no different from the flu. And yet, they don’t know which T1 also has RA and is on meds which suppress her immune system (raising my hand). Autoimmune issues tend to run in packs, but even if that wasn’t so, which T1s are also on dialysis? Which ones are caring for elderly parents with lung problems? Which ones have survived cancer and have depressed immune systems? I could go on and on.

The truth is, your judgement is hurtful and your judgement is unwelcome.

Before you type, stop for a minute and ask yourself, why am I writing this? How might the original poster interpret my comment? If there’s a chance it could be perceived as hurtful, perhaps I should hold off. And if it’s something that needs to be said, should I take this to a private venue?

I’ve been thinking about that mom in Iowa and I’ve wanted to contact her to share a bit of love. Her life sounds hard. Imagine having epilepsy and then having a medical tricky child who you have to put on a bus each day to get to school. Imagine the fear of wondering if she might drop too low or shoot so high she needs to be hospitalized or worse, dies. Imagine trusting the bus driver to do his job and then he, for whatever reason, messes up. Imagine all the worries of a normal parent and than multiply those by a hundred, or by a thousand.

Honestly, I don’t know what to do about my issues with anxiety and travel. I’ve spent several summers in therapy with different therapists working on the issue and yet, here I am after a particularly bad (yet marvelously wonderful) trip. I survived it, but I’m not going to travel again until I have some more solutions. Therapy, better drugs, whatever; I’m game for whatever works. What I do know is that I’ll keep pressing on towards hope because I truly truly love traveling and I want to see the world. We figure out how to do what we love to do, even when it’s not convenient or simple. All I’m asking for today is a bit more grace, a bit more patience… and a heart and typing fingers that give up the hot take in order to truly see another human behind the screen.

I knew she wasn’t pursuing chemotherapy, but I prayed many times for miraculous healing. Due to my own issues, I was not particularly hopeful, but I asked God for it nonetheless. When her health took a turn for the worse I felt desperate to talk with her face-to-face. I couldn’t stand to ask questions without some nuance to my voice and without being able to look into her eyes. I finally found Karen near the front doors of church and grabbed her before she left the building. I can’t even recall exactly what I asked. It wasn’t, “so you’re going to die?!” But the understanding was the same: she was not pursuing treatment this time. I looked in her eyes and understood we were going to lose her.

I took my cues from Karen, and though I felt despondent over this news, I did not fall apart. She was not falling apart—she was living! The information sat sadly in my soul, however. This spark of a woman—not easily bowled over by life’s problems or problem people—wouldn’t last much longer.

Something strange happens with a terrible cancer diagnosis, a terrible cancer fight, and it’s that you have something of a deadline. Either the one bearing cancer will die or the cancer will die—only one emerges from the battle.

In our small group from church we’ve had two beloved women dealing with cancer at the same time. One was dealt a first-time diagnosis and the other, Karen, was facing it for the third time. We buckled down in our basement on Tuesday nights, never knowing whether the evening would bring tears, great fears, or simply deep sharing as usual. It was hard. There were nights that were difficult with an intensity I’ve rarely felt, nights where we prayed and cried and laid hands on each other and prayed again and carried these cancer fears to the Lord, not knowing what the outcome would be. At times it showed great bravery to even show up. And yet we still laughed downstairs on the comfy basement couches, with candles burning, hot coffee warming our hands. We prayed together. And in the midst of cancer, we rejoiced together too as we witnessed the pregnant, growing bellies of two of our number. New life emerged and we celebrated. Other lives struggled. And one life slowly began to be extinguished.

It was only at the very end that Karen’s great internal light diminished. That woman had one of the toughest, most tenacious spirits I’ve seen. She’s the greeter. The weeder of the garden. The drink maker and server. The one with suggestions and solutions. The one riding her bike to my house far south. The one working even as she grew sicker. The one climbing mountains with zero body fat. The one praying for her girls’ trip with her daughter. The one expressing devotion to her man, after all they’ve come through. She was a fire, burning bright and hot with boldness. And then she was no more.

Back when I finally looked in her eyes for understanding that her death was coming, I wanted to say something to her and never took the chance to do it. I wanted to tell her to wait for me. I wanted to let her know that I’d be coming after her and that I was a little nervous about death and would she wait and watch for me when I arrived in glory? I never asked. Never told her that I felt reassured knowing she’d be there with a smile when I showed up. It seemed silly because I understand the truth, and that is that the comfort of seeing Jesus will quell all anxieties that day. I won’t be nervous anymore. And yet, Karen. Karen will indeed be there, and I look forward to seeing her wink at me—just like the very last interaction I had with her—when I at last set foot in heaven.

Today she is free of cancer, sin, heartache, and tears and she stands in glory. I miss my sister but I will see her again. To God be the glory.

Note: this piece was written the evening of Karen’s memorial service in early November 2019. I sat on it for months before sharing it first with Kevin. I wanted his permission to share these thoughts publicly. I could’ve kept this to myself, but why? For what reason? No, instead I’ll post this as I miss my friend and I’ll enjoy remembering the special person she was. I’ve posted two images that feel so VERY Karen to me. First, she was always taking care of us at church events in a behind-the-scenes manner. You can’t even see her face, and she would’ve been fine with that. In the second shot she’s there, in this special group of women who truly loved one another, and she’s cheering on the bride-to-be. Again, a very Karen thing to do.