About lauramckillipwood

Mom, wife, writer... pretty busy!

What’s Your Goliath?

Posted on October 7, 2014 by lauramckillipwood

Bring it on!

The Story

I left my father early that morning, carrying a load of grain, bread, and cheese for my brothers. My stomach fluttered with excitement at the prospect of being among all of those fighting men, armed and ready for battle. All of my life, I’d dreamed of fighting the Philistines, of being part of our great army blessed by God! I arrived at the camp just in time–just as the soldiers were lining up for battle. Finding the keeper of the supplies, I left my donkey and his burden and hurried to find my brothers in the ranks.

I had barely greeted them when I heard the voice. It boomed out over the ranks, echoed off the hillsides. I craned my neck to see him. Anyone with a voice like that had to be big! I was not disappointed. He stood in front of his army, covered with bronze from head to toe and carrying a spear as big as a weaver’s rod. Its iron point alone weighed as much as a young sheep, yet he handled it with ease.

“Why are you lining up for battle? Choose a man to come and fight me…if you have any men that is!” His laugh rang out. “If he kills me, we will all be your subjects.” I heard his mocking tone.

“Why are you all just standing there?” I turned to my brothers. “Someone go and fight him!”

My oldest brother furrowed his brow. “Boy, go home to Dad. You don’t understand this situation. We can’t fight that giant of a man!”

“What are you talking about? I’ve killed bears almost as big as him. God is on our side. What’s an arrogant man compared to the Creator of everything?”

He shook his head. “Go back to your sheep,” he scorned. “You just came down here to poke your nose in our business and watch a battle!” He spun on his heel and walked away.

I turned to the other men, but they all averted their eyes, angry and embarrassed. One man put his hand on my shoulder.

“Come with me,” he said. I hurried after him to a tent in the back of the encampment. Guards surrounded it. Strong hands pushed me through the opening. As my eyes adjusted to the dark interior, I heard a man talking in low tones to the one who had brought me. He turned toward me, and I saw that it was the king himself!

“You think you can defeat that giant?” he demanded. I swallowed hard, cleared my throat.

“I have been tending my father’s sheep most of my life. Sometimes a bear or a lion comes and carries away one of them. I pursue it, fight it with my hands, and kill it to rescue the sheep. If God can save me from a bear or a lion, he will save me from this Philistine!” At that moment, I knew it would be true. I knew God would save me, would save his people.

To my surprise, Saul agreed to let me try, even gave me his weapons and armor, but I felt heavy and uncomfortable. I chose to go out to face the giant as myself, not pretending to be a grown warrior. As we walked toward the field where I knew the giant waited, we crossed a stream. I stopped and chose my weapons: five stones. I put them in my pouch, rubbing my fingers across their smooth surfaces. In my other hand I held my sling.

Traditional Sunday school picture to complement the story

The giant and his shield bearer approached as we stepped forward. I saw him stop, and a look of derision crossed his face. He threw back his great, bronze-covered head and laughed.

“Have they sent a little puppy to fight me?” He cursed me by his gods. “Come on over so I can feed you to the birds today!”

“You come at me with a sword and spear and javelin,” I called out. My voice sounded loud and strong. That man was no match for my God. “I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you defied. This day the Lord will hand you over to me, and I will strike you down and cut off your head! Today the birds will eat your flesh!” I felt the stones in my pouch. “Today all the world will know there is a God in Israel. Everyone here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves. The battle is the Lord’s and he will give you into our hands!”

His face turned dark, and he rushed toward me. I ran toward him as well, pulling a stone from my pouch. As I had done hundreds of times, practicing in the fields with the sheep and even protecting them from bears and lions, I placed the stone in the sling. With one fluid motion, I swung it, released the stone, and watched as it sailed through the air and sank into the giant’s forehead. He toppled forward, falling face down onto the ground. His shield bearer dropped his shield and ran. I hurried forward. Without a moment’s hesitation, I grabbed Goliath’s own sword, pulled it from its scabbard, and cut off his head with it!

Now grab the sword and off with the head!

My fellow Israelites flooded around me, yelling at the victory, and chased the fleeing Philistines. That day the dead Philistines were strewn all along the road to Gath and Ekron.

The king’s man found me again in the crowd and brought me to Saul’s tent once more.

“Whose son are you, young man?” he asked me.

“I am the son of your servant, Jesse of Bethlehem,” I answered. I saw a man approach from behind the king, carrying something heavy and bulky. Saul turned to him, motioning him to come closer.

“I believe these are yours,” he smiled, presenting the Philistine’s weapons. “I will remember you, son of Jesse.”

The Application

I wrote that for the class I’m taking, and I had so much fun imagining the scene, wondering about what David must have thought. I can still close my eyes and see that dusty field, a hill on each end, with fighting men assembled and a loud and scary voice paralyzing the army with fear.

I have always liked to write. As long as I can remember, I’ve been intrigued with words and stories and how people put words together in specific ways that make their stories come to life. Even as a child, before I could read, I made picture books with scrap paper my grandpa brought home from work, binding them together with bright red yarn. Words make sense to me. I love telling stories, either in written form or aloud, and I work hard every day in the office to shut my mouth so I won’t drive my coworkers insane with the funny things I think of to tell them (If you work with me, just allow the rest of the world to think I am successful at this endeavor, ok?!).

Today I listened to a speaker talk about how we need to find our core identity and let God work in that, using us in the way that he’s made us to be used. He said a lot of great stuff that I hope I remember, but one of the things that stuck in my mind dealt with how people resist changing. They resist stepping into the unpredictable to become awesome and instead stay with what is predictable, where they are just ok. They like the security of the predictable, even when they have a nagging feeling that it’s not really what they were created for, not where God can use them in great ways.

I think that’s a little like David and Goliath. David had a choice that day on the battlefield. He was young, untrained. Absolutely nobody expected anything from him. They definitely did not expect him to step forward and fight the giant that had seasoned warriors shaking in their sandals! He had the choice to stand in the safe predictable-ness of the crowd and be just ok or to step forward into the unpredictable awesomeness that God had planned for him. One little stone stood between him and God’s will, and he chose to step out.

What is your Goliath today? What’s blocking the road to what God has in store for you? I ask only because I’m willing to share my own roadblocks. My Goliath comes in fear of letting go and forgiving people who have hurt me in the past. My Goliath comes in fear that I won’t be good enough, that my writing, which I think may be part of what God wants to use in some way, will stink, that people will read it and think, “Whoa! Better stick with your day job, honey!” My Goliath comes in fear of not measuring up, of stepping out on faith and trying to forgive or trying to love more or trying something that leaves me vulnerable and then falling flat on my face and making a mess of it all.

What Goliath is standing on your battlefield today? Are you ready to reach down and pick up that smooth stone God put just within your reach?

The Elah Valley, where the story took place.

What If People Talked About Soft Drinks the Way They Talk About Coffee

Posted on September 21, 2014 by lauramckillipwood

I’m visiting my sister in Hawaii this week. Yes, I know. It’s a hard job, but someone has to do it. You know, beaches, beautiful sunsets, warm weather. We ate dinner outside last night, and no mosquitoes attacked us, no prairie wind blew our dinner off the table, and we did not even have on jackets.

How interesting that the beautiful lamp silhouette appears just in front of the sun.

But I hate to unload my troubles on you.

Besides the heavenly surroundings, I get to be with my sister. Until this trip, I hadn’t seen her since she and her husband moved away from the midwest about three or four years ago. It seems like a lot longer than that, since my kids were just little things when they left and now they’re getting ready for being teenagers, but I guess it was just a few years ago.

At the beach, in case you didn’t notice.

I’m blessed with a good relationship with my sister, which is interesting to me because I can’t say I’ve had the very best relationship with the rest of my family all of these years. My sister and I never really argue about stuff. We did some when we were little, and I remember an epic battle when we were teenagers. It had to do with a fan that she kept pointing at me, even though I said I didn’t want it pointing at me and moved it away every time she moved it toward me. (I only fight over really important stuff like that.) Full of rage, I saw her impossibly large, 80’s-teased-out, curly hair and impulsively grabbed a handful of it and pulled. She rose from the couch in painful indignation and ripped out half my bangs. I mean, I heard those babies screaming as their follicles left my head.

At that moment, I knew that I had made a terrible mistake. Although she is younger than I am, my sister has always been a force to be reckoned with physically. I have always been able to reason my way to winning just about every argument, but if it ever comes to a knock-down-drag-out with her, I am destined to lose, lose, lose. And in a way that I will probably never forget. Like the time she punched me in the stomach and knocked the breath out of me or the time she grabbed both of my arms and wrestled me to the ground. Yep, I think twice before I tangle with her physically, especially now that she’s a personal trainer and I’m an overweight, middle-aged mom who would rather sit at her computer than run a mile.

That last big fight over the fan ended with her chasing me to my parents’ room and me waking them up to beg for protection, which is what I usually did, being the tattletale oldest who could probably make anything look like the other’s fault (sorry, Emily!).

So we get along pretty well and have come to the comfortable place where we don’t really bring up things that I can verbally bash her in or things that she can send me to the ER about. Instead, we like to make fun of things. That was one of the things we were both looking forward to doing when I came here, and I yesterday we started the fun.

It was morning, and I saw their coffeemaker and told her how I have thought about getting a Keurig machine. I don’t really drink enough coffee to make a full pot of it, so it seems like a waste of time to get out all of the stuff to make coffee. Seems like it would be easier just to pop one of those little thingies into the machine and make one cup. She said she didn’t drink coffee, and I said I don’t like coffee, but I drink it because if I don’t drink it I’m going to want to drink Mt. Dew.

There, I said it. In the morning, first thing, I will pour a cup of super-healthy Mt. Dew if I can. Before I even think about it, I will grab that 2 liter and swallow down enough calories for a meal. Now that I’m on a health kick and at least trying not to consume a week’s worth of calories in one cup, I’ve cut back on Mt. Dew and all soft drinks. Instead I drink a little bit of coffee in the morning, just so I can have something different and not boring, like water.

The bad thing is that at work people make coffee because they like the caffeine, and I really do not want the caffeine. I would rather have decaf, and I would love it if I could find caffeine-free Mt. Dew in the stores. Unfortunately, it is as rare as a snowball on the Hawaiin beach.

This led to our discussion: what if people talked about soft drinks the way they talk about coffee. Every morning, I read my newsfeed and find all kinds of memes about coffee and how people can’t live without it. When you put it in a different context, you can see how strange it is. What if the newsfeed were clogged with memes about drinking soft drinks early in the morning?

It seems odd to me that so many places offer free coffee now. Churches hand it out, my daughter’s orthodontist supplies it, our bank gives it to customers. Why is coffee such an acceptable thing to hand to people, but nobody offers a free Coke to every person who enters. Now that the Keurig machine has made it easier to make a single cup, it seems even more places offer it, but don’t tell me it’s because it’s cheaper than a soft drink. Those little Keurig things cost money, too.

Well, anyway, we had a good laugh over it, and now I’m wondering what more we can laugh about while I’m here. Maybe the teenagers posing like porn stars in their bikinis on the beach?

A Big Waste of Time

Posted on September 12, 2014 by lauramckillipwood

Yesterday morning I listened to a sermon by a veteran preacher. In it, he encouraged the audience to focus on what is important in life and not to settle for mediocrity.

“I can’t help but think of how many great things I may have missed because I was preoccupied with lesser things.”

That struck home with me because even at that very moment, when I sat in a room listening to an eloquent speaker open up truths from the Word of God, I also thought about what texts I might have gotten during the praise time or what someone else around me might have been tweeting about the sermon. My mind wandered to what I’d eat for lunch and what my kids were doing at school. I kept bringing my train of thought back to the sermon, back to what he was saying because I didn’t want to lose sight of the diamonds in life while focusing on the gravel at my feet.

So I left thinking I’ll do it! I’ll put away my cell phone when my kids are around. I’ll engage with people and really listen. I’ll care about things that God cares about and put the rest in perspective. Yep! That’s what I’ll do starting now! As it turns out, that is much easier to think than to do.

After a long day at work and a busy night caring for sick kids, making dinner, doing housework, I sat down in the quiet house where everyone slept except me. I wanted to write a little, but instead I did The Bad Thing.

I looked at Facebook.

I’m not going to rant against Facebook because I happen to love Facebook. However, I’m not dumb enough to think that Facebook doesn’t steal my life away, one status at a time. This time was no exception. I started looking at a thread on a Facebook crochet group I like. One of the group’s members started writing all kinds of stuff on there that I would consider bitter, hateful, and downright mean. She decided that one of the other members was trying to con innocent people also in the group, and she took it upon herself to start a harsh and condemning thread about that other member. Publicly.

I watched the thread fill up with people spewing hateful things about this person that they did not even know, and I just felt disgusted. So I chimed in and reminded people to mind their words and pay attention to how they treated one another.

Big mistake. They turned on me. The crocheters became violent, hook-weilding gladiators, intent on ridding the world of all that is good and decent under the guise of exposing a “con artist” and self-righteously criticizing those who reminded them of civility. I watched it unfold in disbelief, made a few comments, and then attempted to extract myself from the conversation. I looked at the clock and saw that the lesser things had stolen quite a bit time from the great things.

Isn’t this how it goes, though? We make a decision to change something, to do something better than we’ve been doing it, and before we know it, we’re back doing the same old thing we’ve always done. Just now, I sat down to type while the kids played quietly and independently in the other room, but as soon as I got a good start, one after the other called for me, asked for help, for lunch, for paint, for exacto knives (?!). I, writing about taking time for what’s important, told them that I was busy and couldn’t they do some of this on their own (except for the exacto knives!). I put off the great, the relationship with my kids, to focus on the lesser, my beautiful blog.

So here’s what I’m going to do to make sure I focus on some of the really important things this week. I consulted my kids for advice on this, since they are the ones who often get put off when I’m working on something less important. Here are their suggestions:

1. “Spend more time thinking” (Emma, 8 years old). Think about God and what he wants me to do instead of what I want to do. Interesting that this was the immediate response since this is also what a lot of experts suggest for relaxation. Stop and think. Spend time meditating/praying/thinking. Hannah (12 years old) added, “Analyze the things you think are important and compare that with what you know God thinks is important.”

2. “Not playing on your phone a whole bunch” (Emma). I was hoping that one wouldn’t come up. I mean, I hoped maybe no one noticed that they saw the top of my head more than my eyes since I look down on my phone a lot while we’re together. I decided to move the Facebook app on my phone so that I don’t see it and its demanding notifications every time I pick up my phone. Less of a reminder, less of a temptation…right?

3. “Use the extra time to do things you say you don’t have time for when you’re using time doing unimportant things” (Alex, 11 years old). In other words, stop saying I don’t have time to read or crochet because I do. Maybe when I see all of the fun things I get to do when I’m not checking my work email or texting someone who can probably wait an hour or so to hear from me, I’ll decide the sacrifice is worth it.

Now that I’ve publicly committed myself to them, you can hold me to them. But, oh my goodness, be nice to me about them! No more Facebook crazy!

Like Riding a Bike

Posted on August 31, 2014 by lauramckillipwood

Today I did something I haven’t done in a long time. I rode a bike.

I did not ride this kind, and I did not end up on my face. So all in all, a good experience.

My bike sat discarded in the garage through the births of three kids and a lot of sleepless nights that produced days when bike riding was the last thing on my mind. I taught my own children to ride, but I have never been much of a rider myself, so I never rode it. In fact, I think the last time I rode a bike was the summer after my oldest was born. I can’t remember any bike riding after that.

Once in a while the kids ask me to ride with them, and I say something like “I don’t really like to ride. I’ll walk, and I’ll meet you at the park (or wherever).” They’re old enough to do that now. Before I could let them go ahead, I sat outside with a book or the phone and watched them ride up and down the street in front of our house. Today I decided to join them.

I don’t know what got into me. Why did I decide this was a good day for me to break my 12-year bike-riding moratorium? Whatever the reason, I found myself pumping up the tires on my husband’s bike (mine has squeaky brakes, and, believe me, I don’t want to draw any more attention to the middle-aged me wobbling down the street than necessary). I got on confidently. I mean, why not? I don’t have any skinned-up-my-whole-body stories to tell. I took off down the driveway. It went faster than I expected. A lot faster. I tried to put on the brakes, but I realized I reverted back to the bike riding I learned as a five-year-old…when there were brakes on the pedals. I felt a moment of panic as a tree approached and I veered around it while frantically groping for the brakes. Somehow I managed to stop slowly enough that I didn’t hurtle forward over the handlebars.

What my girls saw when I got on the bike today.

What my girls thought of me when I got on the bike today.

As my heartbeat returned to normal, I heard the girls behind me. They weren’t laughing, thank goodness. Instead they were worrying. “Do you think we should do this? Maybe she’s not ready,” one of them said. “It’s been a long time. I’m not sure she really knows how to ride one,” the other one answered.

“We’re not going until you ride down the hill and back up,” my oldest called out to me from the driveway.

“What do you mean? I’m fine. Shut the door and let’s go!” I answered.

“Uumm…I’m not so sure. The ride up the hill is pretty hard.” Now keep in mind this hill is barely visible. I’m not kidding. We live in Nebraska, people. It’s not the Rocky Mountains. I rode back up to them, convincing them I was ready.

Here’s some of what I heard on the way:

“She’s still back there, Hannah. She’s ok!” (after turning to check on me).

“What would happen if Mom fell and skinned her knee really bad? Would she cry?” LIKE I WASN’T EVEN THERE!!!

“She’d probably get mad and make us leave her alone!” What am I, a mother bear?! ROAR! Sadly, they’re probably right.

So what did I learn from the bike riding experience? For one, the old saying is true. You don’t forget how to ride a bike! I was a little nervous riding with children around me. Children who tend to cut in front of me and make me think I was going to hit them and maybe do something like run over them. But I’m pretty glad I did it.

Second, I probably should do more things that I’ve written off in the last decade. My kids have been my excuse for not bike riding, not travelling, not working out, not doing more stuff like that. For a long time, they really were too young to do much with, and for a long time I mourned losing those things that I would have done if there were no kids. Then somewhere along the way I started kinda liking not doing a lot of different stuff and fell into a habit of doing the same things all of the time. They’re older now. Maybe it’s time to branch out.

Hopefully, it won’t come to this.

Third, they’re going to take really great care of me when I get old. I always wondered if they’d just let me wander off down the interstate in my nightgown in February, but apparently they are pretty good mother hens. Maybe we’ve done something right. Whew! It’s about time we saw some fruit of all these years of labor!

I’ve been sitting in the library writing this. I just heard the librarian say that the library closes in fifteen minutes.

Does this mean I have to ride home?!

I Was a Cemetery Telemarketer

Posted on August 23, 2014 by lauramckillipwood

This looks all too familiar.

I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life. I had a traditional library job in high school. I spent hours shelving and organizing books. Hated every minute of it. The only thing good about it was the hours. I only worked 4-6 a week, so I spent a very small amount of time in there. I should have liked it. I thought I would because I love books. I just don’t like that super-quiet atmosphere with repetitive tasks, and, honestly, the people I worked with were a little odd. I went back to that library a few years ago, about 20 years after I quit, and I understood why I didn’t like working there. It wasn’t one of those fun libraries where kids play and enjoy the books and story time and all. It was one of those libraries where, when your cell phone rings because you accidentally forgot to turn it off, the entire place turns and shushes you. No thanks!

Maybe if my library looked like this one at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, I would have enjoyed it more.

So I decided one summer during college to do away with the boredom. I got a job in a cemetery. Row after row of graves has got to be more exciting than a library, right? I came home for the summer and spent a couple of weeks looking for a job. Any job. I had no luck until a desperate employer jumped at the chance to get a naive, poverty-stricken college person in its grasp.

Not really the cemetery where I spent my free time that summer. I’m not including pictures of that one, mostly because I did not care to take any!

My job was telemarketing. That in and of itself is weird. When I tell people I was a telemarketer for a cemetery, they look at me like I’m nuts. What was I telemarketing? This particular funeral home/cemetery offered a free burial space to every person. That’s right. Free for the taking. They really did give it to people, too. There was a catch, however, since there’s no such thing as a free lunch…or a free cemetery plot. They sent a representative/salesperson to the house to deliver the deed to the property, and that person tried to sell more. Who doesn’t want a plot next to them for their wife or husband or cat? And if they’re getting a free plot, don’t they want to buy a headstone as well?

I worked in the evening. You know, the time when most people are sitting down to eat their dinner or watch their favorite tv shows because that’s the prime time for telemarketers to strike. I had a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers. These came from some mysterious giant telemarketing phone book and were listed not alphabetically, like most phone books, but in numerical order. Because of this, we could see where numbers were skipped. We knew they were left out for a reason: the owners of the numbers had requested that their numbers be unlisted.

I see some Cyrillic writing, but I didn’t take this in Ukraine.

That’s right! These were the days before Do Not Call Lists. Bet you always wondered how telemarketers got your number when you had an unlisted number, didn’t you? Now you know. We were a tricky lot because we went down those lists and wrote down the ones that were skipped and called those, too! Yep, we were those people.

I can still remember the first part of the pitch. “Good evening! This is Laura. I’m calling from [insert cemetery name] to tell you that you have been chosen to receive a free burial space. Do you own your own burial spot?” Intense pause filled with anxiety for me because this is where the gentleman or lady of the house reacted to my ridiculous question. There were a few different answers that seemed to surface often.

1. The person politely said, “No thank you,” with uncertainty and enough of a pause to allow me to jump in and continue with my spiel…which I don’t remember because this happened so few times that I did not bother to memorize it.

2. The person slammed the phone down, possibly cursing at me.

Scary cemetery! No way I’d work in THIS one!

3. The person began a tirade that elicited such comments as, “Oh, I’m sorry, sir! I did not mean to interrupt your dinner. Have a good evening,” and ended with me slamming the phone down, possibly silently cursing him.

4. The person said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Mr. Jones is not here. He died last week. We’re still cleaning out his house and haven’t had the phone disconnected.” This happened too often to be true.

I worked with two other women. One was about my age, and that was her real job. For me, it was just a summer job, but for her that was it. She spent every evening there, and that’s how she bought her Maybelline cosmetics and her hair products. She was nice enough, but she was quite a bit bigger than me and tougher than me, and I tried not to make her mad. She got mad at people a lot and told us all about it every night.

The other woman was a lot older than me, or at least I thought so. She was probably only like 29, but she had already been married and divorced. She had another job during the day and just worked there because after her divorce she had no money and no social life. I liked her, but I also felt a little sorry for her because…cemetery!

Sometimes weird things happened when I called people. Once I went through the whole thing and the person just stayed on the line. She didn’t hang up and was polite. The longer I talked, the more excited I got. Maybe this person would actually want a salesperson to visit her and deliver the deed. However, I began to feel ill at ease when I asked the person if she would like the representative to visit and silence ensued. Then the voice said tentatively, “Laurie?” I knew that voice! That voice belonged to none other than my own mother! I had called my own mother accidentally because she had just moved and her new number had not yet been listed. She was one of those people with unlisted numbers, and I didn’t recognize it!

Imagine lugging a bunch of these around in your car all summer! Fun times!

The cemetery wasn’t my only job, though. I had a second job that summer. This was a long time ago, remember? At that time, everyone needed phone books because they didn’t have internet and smart phones to look up numbers for them. In addition to the cemetery job, I had been recruited by a woman I knew from church to deliver phone books out in the country around my house. She assumed that since I had grown up in that area of the countryside I knew the roads, their names, their numbers. The other people working for her had trouble delivering to those addresses, so she loaded my very old, very hard-to-drive car down with heavy phone books and handed me the list of impossible-to-find addresses. I had just learned to drive a stick shift car, and this old car took most of my strength to shift. I spent every morning wandering lost down country lanes frantically looking for unknown addresses. When I finally found a house, I would carry the phone book up to the door and leave it somewhere they’d find it. Most of the time, I never even saw anyone.

The weirdest thing that happened that summer occurred when the cemetery job and the phone book job intersected. I delivered phone books to homes along a route every morning one week, and somehow in the evenings got the same exact list of addresses and phone numbers to call! I wanted so desperately to tell the rude people I called, “Oh, hey! If you want your phone book, check your back door. I left it on the back step this morning when I delivered it to your house!”

I sometimes think about that job now. It feels like a dream. I never worked there again or even went there again after I quit at the end of the summer. I went back to college and every summer after that went to Ukraine to work. I never had to hunt another summer job, thank goodness, because I never really liked the cemetery all that much. I’m glad I did it, though. It makes for an interesting story!

Anybody else have weird jobs before? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

I Was the Perfect Mother

Posted on August 18, 2014 by lauramckillipwood

Reassurance from a little artist.

I remember when I was a perfect mother. Man, those were good days! Days when I could go in a restaurant and smugly watch moms struggle to get their kids to eat. Days when I could walk down the mall and feel superior when I saw mothers try to cope with their children’s tantrums. Too bad everything changed. I suddenly lost my mothering skills on the day that my first daughter entered the world.

Before my oldest’s birth, I remember talking to a coworker who had teenage children. I told her that I would stay home after the baby was born but might do freelance work or try to do something from home “after things went back to normal”. I so distinctly remember her laugh. Somewhere between incredulous and mocking. She said, “Things will never go back to normal.”

How hard could it be? I asked myself. I graduated from college with honors. I lived overseas and navigated a completely new country in a language I did not know at all at first. I lived on my own and learned to manage a home in a place that had an unreliable electricity and water supply and required that everything be made from scratch with food I sometimes walked a mile or more to buy and lug home. Children couldn’t be harder than that, right?

Wrong! How incredibly naive I was. Children have been waaaaaay harder than that. All of those things I did before I married and had children still contained one element that mothering does not and never will: the ability to live for myself. Sure, I said I lived for God, and I did to some extent. I was a missionary, after all. But I never learned self-sacrifice in the concrete, day-by-day, unavoidable way I have since having children.

I visited my former roommate in Ukraine a few years ago. She somehow looked almost exactly like she did when we lived in that apartment building behind us 15 years ago. How could that happen?!

Roommates, 15 years later. How is it that she looks the same?!

As a single woman, I had roommates. With each one, elements of my personality emerged. Some of those elements showed me areas that God wanted me to change. I worked on those, changed some things to make life with the roommates more pleasant. I thought I had it together. Then I got married, and before long I realized there were a lot more rough edges to my personality that I hadn’t yet smoothed down. The more into marriage we got, the more of those rough edges we found.

Then motherhood hit. We thought Hey, we’ve been married a couple of years. We’re ready to have a baby! Now I ask myself if anyone is ever ready to have a baby. There must be women out there who take motherhood in stride. It seems Facebook is full of them. They love all of the fingerpainting and chaos and mess, and when their children scream in public it’s just downright cute to them. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m one of them.

I realized that when my daughter was a few hours old. I was trying to learn to breastfeed her, not doing well, really, and I found myself irritated. This didn’t bode well. How could I be irritated with a baby who had only been breathing the air on this planet for a few hours? And that was just the beginning of the rest of my life.

This littlest one is so silly!

For me, the story of raising children has been one of learning to give up myself and yet not wanting to surrender. I know, I know, we have to keep some things for ourselves and carve out our own hobbies (hence this blog and a lot of crocheted items I’ve produced over the years). However, it’s really not possible to live for myself now that I have children. The moment I sit down to rest, I’m called on for something. The clothes I love often disappear to reappear in my oldest girl’s closet. I haven’t cooked a meal that I really liked for years, but I sure have cooked a lot of meals. I’d like to say that I have happily turned over my selfishness and have become this great mom who sacrifices it all for her children, but I don’t think I have. I still struggle.

Once in a while, my kids complain about each other to me. They tell me things that basically amount to them being in the midst of the same kind of struggle with their siblings. Selfishness vs. surrender. I tell them that anytime a person is in an intense relationship with another person there will be that struggle. It’s part of being in a family, and it’s good for us. If we live in a social vacuum, we won’t feel that tension between getting our own way and giving someone else what they need or want. We will sail along, having everything the way we want it. But we will also forfeit the good things that come with practicing self-sacrifice: the ability to see and sometimes meet another person’s needs, the desire to please God by surrendering to him instead of seeking just our own pleasure, the love and warmth of belonging to a family or close relationship of some sort. The results are worth every bit of sacrifice.

Is it still called a selfie if you’re taking a picture of an entire family?

Maybe that’s where God is working. Can I tell myself that? That point where my desires and their needs intersect sparks a fire that can refine us all and make us more of what God wants us to become. Now the key for me involves realizing that and surrendering to it. Stopping the fighting and pushing against it and letting God intervene and guide.

How hard can that be, right?

Easier said than done.

Things I’d Never Say If I Didn’t Have Kids

Posted on August 13, 2014 by lauramckillipwood

You said WHAT?!

There are just some things I never dreamed I’d say until I had kids. I mean, some words should never come out of a sane and culturally-appropriate person’s mouth (see #1). Some phrases sound completely ridiculous when spoken to anyone but a three-year-old, and when I hear myself saying them I just hope no one heard me…or wish someone were here to laugh with me about them if they did! So, in honor of the start of the school year, I present you with a list of some of the things I have said over the years to my children.

1. Do not put that toilet brush in your mouth again.

2. I prefer to use the bathroom without people in the room with me/talking to me/sitting on my lap.

3. Please stop picking a hole in my hand.

4. We all wear clothes when we leave the house.

5. Do not stand on top of a table next to a second-floor, open window while wearing socks.

6. When something is in the trash, it needs to stay there and should never be removed and placed in your mouth.

7. I can’t wait for school to start.

8. Which restaurants have kids eat free tonight?

9. Shorts must be longer than your underwear if you’re wearing them in public.

10. When your father is sleeping, do not jump on his stomach.

11. Let’s buy a hermit crab!

Don’t ask me embarrassing questions like that ever again!

12. Did you just poop?

13. Never trust a cat alone in a room with an un-caged guinea pig.

14. Say that again, but this time at least sound like you love him when you do.

15. I think a 12-passenger van is exactly what we need.

16. Eat one more bite. Do it because you love me!

17. You’re only allowed four squares of toilet paper in this house!

18. You’ll understand this when you get bigger.

19. What would the Wiggles do to cheer you up if they were here (while in the ER getting stitches in a 2-year-old’s head–followed by our family singing a medley of the Wiggles’ greatest hits)?

20. Let’s use our vacation money to visit relatives every summer for the rest of our lives!

Please do not eat while leaning over my computer.

I know there are more. I wish I’d written them all down! Doesn’t every parent say that at some point? I thought I’d remember all of the funny things. Now middle age has hit, and I can barely remember where I parked my car, much less things that happened ten years ago!

I’d love to hear some of the funny things you’ve said to kids or things your parents said to you. Chime in with your funny stories in the comment section!

Why You Can Go Home Again

Posted on July 31, 2014 by lauramckillipwood

This one really isn't packed. I've seen them with people hanging out the doors. Saw a babushka beat a man with an umbrella to force her way on one once.

This one really isn’t packed. I’ve seen them with people hanging out the doors. Saw a babushka beat a man with an umbrella to force her way on once.

A few weekends ago, I went to Cincinnati to pick up my children after their visit with friends. I experienced something I hadn’t experienced since I lived in Ukraine and traveled back and forth every summer. No, it wasn’t a good bowl of borscht (although I kinda wish it were) or a packed trolleybus in 90 degree heat (very glad it wasn’t that). What I experienced was that feeling of going home again.

I drove into town from the south and caught sight of the skyline across the Ohio River. I have never been a big fan of cityscapes, but seeing it reminded me of how my husband always pointed it how beautiful it looked when we drove into Cincinnati from that direction. I drove across the Ohio River and remembered that claustrophobic feeling of being caught in the very narrow space between the wall of the bridge and a semi truck in the lane next to me. That bridge was the one that gave me an unreasonable fear of accidentally driving over the edge and plummeting into the water below, not knowing which child to save if they were all buckled into their car seats. I’m glad I rarely cross any bridges these days! Even more glad my kids can swim!

This is the view of Cincinnati I saw, but I did not take this picture. I was busy driving.

Seeing the place we used to live and our friends who still live there reminded me of a few things.

1. Living in a new place and navigating around it for the last year, I forgot the feeling of knowing where I was going and understanding where places are without having to plot out my driving plan ahead of time or plug addresses into Mapquest. Being back in the place we called home for 13 years made me miss living somewhere that I felt connected to in a deeper way than just knowing the path to the grocery store and back. Not only did I remember where things were, but I remembered that sense of really being a part of life in a particular location. It takes a while to feel completely integrated into the new place, and being back home reminded me that we aren’t really at that stage here yet.

On a positive note, though, moving somewhere new shows us all that we really can learn a new place, find friends, and fit in. We may feel a sense of “otherness” at times, but we still feel like part of what’s going on in our new place. I think that has built confidence in our children, and I’ve seen them become more outgoing and mature since we moved.

Our first selfie together. Wait! Is it still considered a selfie for me if I’m not the one holding the camera?

2. Not only did I see places I remember, I saw people I hadn’t seen in a year. In my experience, when I see the people I know and love after an absence, I often feel like we are just picking up where we left off. Maybe I have these grand ideas about emotional and exciting reunions, hugging and crying, but in reality those things don’t usually happen to me. When I arrived at my friend’s house to pick up the kids, one of her children greeted me nonchalantly, and then my friend walked in the room. We both said, “Hey!” like we’d just seen one another last week. I love that. I wouldn’t trade that easy familiarity for all of the hugging, crying, made-for-tv-moments in the world!

The kids and I went to dinner with other friends on the spur of the moment. I called them up, and before I knew it we were all sitting in Skyline laughing and eating and having fun. More fun than I remember having had together when we actually lived within five hundred miles of one another. When you live close, you just think you’ve got all the time in the world to get together…but then you don’t.

Feeling good and hungry? Skyline time!

On the way back to Nebraska, we talked about how weird it was to see everyone and how Nebraska seemed almost like a dream. The children wistfully said they felt like they’d never left Cincinnati in the first place. I reminded them how nice it is that we have people we love in both places, how if we’d never moved we would never know that out here on the prairie live a whole bunch of great people! My children are learning early in life a lesson I didn’t realize until my adult years. A seasoned missionary once told me, when talking about how hard it was to leave people you love, “When you’re a missionary, no matter where you go, you’re leaving people you love, but you’re also going to other people you love.” That concept has stuck proven true time and time again in my life.

Gratuitous picture of our trip to Graeter’s. Because what trip to Cincinnati is complete without a trip to the world’s best ice cream place?! Alex looks a little less-than-ecstatic about it, though. Can you tell who the introvert is after a lot of social interaction?

3. Some things are more important than sleep. I hadn’t willingly pulled an all-nighter for years. Having babies cured me of the desire to stay up past about 1 am. However, I stayed up late both nights I was there. One friend and I stayed up until 4 am! Does that time even exist anymore? After hours of sitting on the couch talking about everything in the world, she asked me, “What time is it?” I looked at my nearly useless watch that has not one real number on it, and my exhausted eyes crossed. I said, “I think it’s 4:00. Is that what this says?” The next night I went to Applebee’s and then cruised around Colerain Township with my former coworkers until way late. Who needs sleep when you have such a limited time together?!

My two beautiful former coworkers. Look at those faces! See how much fun we had at work?

I think that the longer I live, the more I realize that it’s not true that you can’t go home again. Home just changes definition, becomes more fluid, and grows to include a new place after you leave the old one!

15 Ways Marriage is Better After 15 Years

Posted on July 17, 2014 by lauramckillipwood

Aw! We look sweet together after all these years.

Aw! Don’t we look sweet together after all these years?

Last week Andrew and I celebrated our fifteenth anniversary. Actually, we celebrated all week. Our kids went home with my parents after our vacation and visited friends in what became a whirlwind tour of the Rockies and the Midwest. We had a week to ourselves, a luxury we don’t get all that often.

It’s so interesting to me how having children around changes us. I don’t notice it when they’re here, but within a day of them leaving, I saw a difference in the way we related to one another. The stress level in the house decreased almost the minute they left. I didn’t boss anyone around because the ones who needed bossing had migrated to other parts of the country for the week. We went out to dinner a lot since eating out costs much less for two than it does for five, and we enjoyed picking out restaurants we wanted to try instead of going somewhere that offers Kids Eat Free or Happy Meals.

Not only did we ruin our diets for a week, but we also went to a movie. And then another one. That’s right, folks! We saw two movies in a row! They even had stuff like bad words and scary scenes, and we didn’t even have to worry that we were corrupting the youth or ensuring a week’s worth of nightmares. Not only did we see two non-cartoon movies, but we stayed up late to see them and did not get home until after 1:00 am. This is something that has not happened in our lives since the advent of children.

So all that nice time alone with just my husband right around our fifteenth anniversary got me thinking about what’s better about marriage after fifteen years. Here’s my list of Fifteen Ways Marriage is Better After Fifteen Years:

1. We already know what each other likes. If we’re going to a movie, we can predict with accuracy which one the other one is going to like. I can tell you that if we’re going out to dinner, Andrew is going to like to go to a Chinese buffet, especially if he’s had time to plan and didn’t have lunch in order to get good and hungry.

2. We already know what each other doesn’t like. This comes in handy when we’re mad and we really want to get under the other person’s skin. Not that I do that or anyone ever should. No, never do that.

3. We can wear whatever and the other one doesn’t care. In fact, after fifteen years, I could probably wear the same set of pajamas all day and all night for three weeks, and he would either not notice or just not inquire about it. This is, in my opinion, a good thing. The pressure’s off. We’re both accepted into our little club of two.

4. We’ve got a whole bunch of shared memories. Of course, in our case, one or the other of us doesn’t really remember all of them. Which leads to number five.

5. We’ve got another person around who reminds us of things we might have forgotten. If he can’t remember what our third baby looked like when she was born, I know where the baby album is. It works out.

6. We don’t stress out about buying some fancy schmancy gift for events like anniversaries. Giving gifts gets somewhat tricky when you share a bank account. Am I buying him a gift with his own money? This year on our anniversary, Andrew and I were driving to work and he said, “What do you want for our anniversary? I thought maybe you’d like to go shopping at Goodwill for a new outfit.” We both laughed because shopping at Goodwill for a special treat sounds pathetic. But there was a pause and I said, “Actually, that does sound pretty good!” And he said, “I knew you would!”

7. Our lives are solidly intertwined. Is that piano in the living room mine or his? Neither. It’s both of ours. We don’t have much that we can point to and say it belongs just to one of us. When he gets a new job and moves to a new place, so do I. Yesterday I read an article about what happens when two married people both have careers that require them to move around a lot. How do they decide whose career gets priority? I read that and realized this has never been too much of a problem for us. We decided the career priority question satisfactorily a long time ago.

Watch out! There’s been a fight…or 500 fights.

8. Things we argued about in the beginning are still issues between us. We can’t change our personalities and the fundamentals of who we are, and in a lot of cases those are at the root of many arguments. However, we have figured out some ways to cope with those issues. And how horrible would it be if we were bombarded with new and mysterious issues each time we solved one set? That would be terrifying! At least when there’s some disagreement between us we know what we’re up against.

9. We’ve persevered through some stuff, and a lot of it has been rough. That’s something we can feel proud of. Sometimes the only reason we stayed together was that we promised God that we would. Looking back, we have enough experiences to know that sometimes just staying and changing one little thing in our relationship or in our responses to each other is enough to make a big difference. When the rough times end, we are glad we didn’t give up.

Faux artistic, black-and-white photo

10. We probably have many years ahead of us. We’re not just starting out with stars in our eyes and a whole life ahead of us, but we probably do have a lot of years left together. We’re young enough to travel and try new things and old enough not to waste our time on things we don’t enjoy.

11. We’ve got a routine for most of what we do. We’re not reinventing the wheel every time one kid has a dentist appointment or someone gets sick. We know who does what, and things run a little more smoothly because of that.

12. We survived our children’s baby, toddler, and preschool years. This was a feat, and, although I don’t remember quite a bit of it due to severe sleep deprivation, I’m proud to say we made it through, and we’re all still alive.

This was Emma's third birthday, the time when things started getting easier on the kid front.

This was our youngest’s third birthday, the time when things started getting easier on the kid front.

13. We haven’t yet reached our children’s adolescent years. I am not saying more because why worry over the insanity that hasn’t yet happened?

14. We have someone to come home to. When Andrew goes on a work trip, he knows we are waiting for him.

15. We are a family now. Not just a couple of people starting life together but a real group with a group identity and a collection of shared experiences. We’re the people in our lives who will know each other for the rest of our lives. Friends come and go, but family is forever…and our kids can’t escape that fact, even if they run off to visit far away friends in another state for a week!

We Crashed a Family Reunion

Posted on July 3, 2014 by lauramckillipwood

This is how I sometimes feel when visiting relatives.

This is how I sometimes feel on vacation. I know I’m not alone in this growly, too-much-fun-is-just-too-much feeling.

I am smack dab in the middle of a week of visiting relatives. And by relatives, I mean step relatives. My youngest daughter, surrounded by my stepfather’s family at a reunion, looked at me with a look of shock and awe and said, “Are all these people my relatives?!” She’s grown up with my stepdad as one of her Papas. He’s treated her like a regular granddaughter. So how to answer that question? Do I say “No, these are just some strangers who have taken us in and treat us nicely”?

I thought for a moment, then said, “Yes, they are your family.” She’s heard all about divorce and remarriage. She knows that Papa isn’t my dad, but I think she needed to fit the new people into her life in some manner, and this was a good way. After all, you can never have too many people to love your children, right?

And maybe I sometimes also feel like this on vacation.

Besides, these relatives are actually really great. My mom and stepdad, Tim, have been married for twenty-some years, so even though much of his family lives in Colorado and I live in Nebraska I’ve met many of my stepdad’s relatives before. I went to their family reunion about 18 years ago, when my parents’ divorce and remarriages felt somewhat fresh to me still, and I was unsure how to answer that question of who they were to me myself. I felt strange as an outsider coming into their homes and meeting all of them. Would they even want me there? But they accepted me as one of them from the beginning. Treated me like one of the family when I probably did not, in fact, seem like one of the family to them. Even so, I felt accepted by them.

Last weekend we packed up our car and my parents’ SUV and headed west to Colorado. The vacation promised greatness from the beginning because the children rode in the car with my mom and Tim, and Andrew and I got to spend the entire eight hour trip alone in our car! We all checked into a hotel in Denver, and each night one child slept with my mother, giving us the luxury of only two children, one per parent, and a much easier bedtime routine.

We did some typical touristy things.

We went to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. You can see Denver in the background.

Lookout Mountain in Denver. Not pictured: Buffalo Bill's grave...or maybe not. There's controversy over whether he's actually buried there or not.

Lookout Mountain in Denver. Notice that there is at least one stuffed animal in every photo. This is true of just about every picture ever taken of my girls.

Crossed the Continental Divide and had our picture taken…along with a stranger’s fingertip. So glad we have that little bit to remember him by!

In the evenings, we had dinner with Tim’s family. The children were shockingly polite. My son even impressed his elders by removing his hat during introductions and inside the house. Nobody argued. Nobody spilled anything or had any wild bodily fluid episodes… not even the children!

The very best part of the whole trip so far, though, happened after a discussion of an injury of my mom’s and how she still is taking medication for it. This came on the heels of a conversation about how Colorado has legalized marijuana, so naturally someone commented about how Mom should self-medicate her injury while at the same time enjoy the state’s newest legalized drug. Of course, my mother would never, ever do such a thing, and that made the joke even more funny.

Andrew and I were talking to Tim’s sister-in-law, who was hosting us at this reunion, and told her about the joke. We said she should have made brownies and sprinkled them with some parsley to offer my mom. She laughed and said, “Well, actually, we have brownies for dessert!” We laughed at the irony and thought no more of it…until she came out carrying a tray of brownies and sporting a twinkle in her eye. She held them out and offered them to us. “I made these special brownies for our guests from out of state. Because you can’t come to Colorado without sampling some!”

Brownie, anyone? Come on, you know you want one!

This was possibly the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. This woman, a sweet and beautiful great-grandmother with wonderful artistic ability and a soft-spoken demeanor, offered my mother a plate of pot brownies! I still laugh just thinking about it.

Maybe it’s because this other family hasn’t been intimately present in every minute of my business or because I have only a few pleasant memories of them at two short family reunions. Maybe it’s because I’ve always been an adult in their eyes and have been treated like one from the first day, or because I don’t hold them to the high standards with unreachable expectations like I do my own family at times, but sometimes other people’s relatives who have become your own can be a whole lot of fun! And maybe answering my child’s question the way I did showed me that it’s ok to love stepparents and that loving one group doesn’t mean I don’t love the other.

	Jada on 15 Ways Marriage is Better Aft…
	Martha Silva on Location, Location, Location!
	Kristy on Living in the Tension
	lauramckillipwood on Perspective
	Ken Braden on Perspective

Something Complete and Great

"That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great." –Willa Cather

Author Archives: lauramckillipwood

About lauramckillipwood

What’s Your Goliath?

What If People Talked About Soft Drinks the Way They Talk About Coffee

A Big Waste of Time

Like Riding a Bike

I Was a Cemetery Telemarketer

I Was the Perfect Mother

Things I’d Never Say If I Didn’t Have Kids

Why You Can Go Home Again

15 Ways Marriage is Better After 15 Years

We Crashed a Family Reunion

About lauramckillipwood

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: