Moments that will always make me smile

I want to let everyone know that I appreciate all the love and support and have appreciated also the people who have contacted me and let me know that in telling my story, it has given them strength to tell their own. I hope that all those who are finding courage, and realizing that they are not alone, will find God and his purposes for you through this venture.

One thing I want for sure in the telling of my story is for you to know that this is not a sob story, a negative narrative, or a plea for comments, compliments, or sympathy. It is a story of me. Please realize that while I write of painful experiences, I am not unaware of the numerous amount of blessings also poured out by God, friends, and family upon me. I will be including those also. Keep in mind that my story is not done at the end of every post. You actually may have a life time of reading ahead of you! :0) Hopefully this story will be going for a long time.

This story is completely from my perspective and you may think that I should not have had certain feelings or thoughts. I can't help the past and the perspective that I had. I can only choose Jesus to lead me to new perspectives and to grow to embrace the life that he has lead me through. I only want to find meaningfulness in his leading.

I sat at the Canada games centre the other day, eating a sandwich while my children ice skated around the rink. Slightly behind me and to my right was a group of people. I have seen them often. One was a mother of 4 boys I had learned through the grape vine. There were also her two youngest boys sitting with her in wheelchairs. There were two therapists and a friend or counsellor or another therapist ( I'm not sure). They all sat chatting, eating and laughing.

The two children, whom I've seen often, I had learned have MS. They spend their lives largely in their wheelchairs. They have to be carried around otherwise. They have an older brother that also has MS and out of the 4 children, is one who is fine. My heart goes out to them!!

I was unintentionally privy to their conversation. I overheard the mother say, “I blame all my problems on my mother, and I tell that to her every time I talk to her.” I continued eating without blinking but in my heart I was disturbed. How must that mother feel when she gets blamed for all this woman’s problems. How would it be to feel that you were to blame, especially for insurmountable problems such as MS. This mother was obviously hurting and her mother was also as a result.

I turned my head as the sun glinted a reflection off the glass door to see a young, beautiful woman enter the building. She looked to be in her early or mid twenties. She had only one leg, gone all the way up to her thigh. Wow, I thought, “I wonder what her story is?” There are people everywhere that have a story to tell. I do too and I want it to be one of encouragement!

There were some things in my childhood that made me glad. Lots of things, most things actually! But, there are some things in my childhood that make me smile every time I think of them. Those are the fuzzy warm things!

I had two of the best set of parents available on earth. I am so grateful that God chose them for me!! He knew I needed them and still do to this day. My mother was a constant. She was there all the time. She brought us to wonderful places, bought us enough animals to fill a barn yard several times over. She taught us everything she knew. She homeschooled us (I'm forever grateful for that!), and she was both strict and loving.

My Dad was busy a lot but he was always home in the evening. He read stories and biographies to us every night. He taught us to pray and he was a real spiritual mentor.

But there were specifics that never got over looked by me. They were were purposefully meant for me alone and they are the things that endeared my parents to me more then anything.

One day, I was in the hospital. It must have been in the day that family could not stay during the night but could only come during visiting hours. I was terrified of being left alone. I never felt loneliness, like I did when I was left alone in the hospital during the nights, as a kid. I didn't sleep. I just cried quietly to myself all night long and in the morning hours before visiting hours. I remember one such time. It was the winter. It was back in the day when they dressed you in striped flannel pajamas. I lay in my bed crying.  I'm sure I looked terrible.  I'm sure my eyes were swollen and red.  I had been crying for hours.   Then the door opened and in walked my dad. He was by himself. He had a long wool,  coat on. He was covered in wet sparkles from head to toe but he took one look at me and without removing his wet gear, he gathered me up in his arms and seated himself on the nearest chair. I curled up in a fetal position on his lap and sobbed my heart out. He whispered to me, “If I had known that it would be like this to you, I would never ever have left you here!” I believed him. It was the best thing a dad could have ever said to any little girl.

My mother had a look that was special to me. Most mother's probably do. You hear a lot about “The Look” or “The Evil Eye”. Yes, my mother gave me those too sometimes but my mother had a special look too, that was just meant for when you did it right, when she was proud of you, when she was

satisfied, or when she just needed to reassure you that everything was going to be just fine. I can't describe the look but I do remember seeing that look often during hospital stays. She still gives me that same look everytime we part ways and she wants me to know it's ok. (She knows I hate good-byes and don't do well with them). She gave me that look when I had my fourth miscarriage and she said, “God will give you another child, trust him!”  That look is fleeting, It is not something I could capture on a camera. It is meant for me. I can picture it only in my mind and it is the most beautiful picture of my mother that I keep always!

 

One day, while I was still very young, my dad said that I was to go with him today. I don't remember the reason. I don't know if my mom and siblings were doing something else, I only remember that my dad took me and me alone with him to the woods. We were going to be gone all day and we were going to saw and stack wood all day. I don't remember actually being very helpful but this I do remember. My dad took me. No one else, just me! He also made US a lunch himself and we sat on a rock and ate it together. It was peanut butter and onion sandwiches, I remember, thinking that they were a bit strong for my taste but if that is what dad ate, I was proud to eat it too. I happily reported to the rest of the family later that they were the best sandwiches ever. Actually it was just the best feeling ever, to be singled out to be special.

One thing that my mother would do every once in a great while that always made me look back with fond memories is, she would buy a little box of lemon meringue pie filling and cook it up and put it in little containers with spoons. She would place four of these containers in a basket or backpack and send my sister, my two cousins and myself on an adventure in the woods or fields to play and eat lemon meringue pudding. It was so very lovely and storybook like to me that I never forgot those times.

Just one more favourite memory if you don't mind. When I was 12 years old my parents were planning on moving from Ontario to British Columbia. My mom and dad left us in the care of my Aunt and Uncle and when to see the possibilities in the West. They agreed to purchase a health food store and the next step, I guess, was to purchase a car. While there, my dad wrote us kids letters. We each received a letter in the mail, which of course we were very pleased about. But about a week later one more letter came in the mail. Just one! It was one just special for me. It was a letter with a poem that my dad had sat down and written himself all about our new (to us) yellow car. It was a poem about the colour and about the fact that the car really was more then just yellow, it was a lemon! I thought the poem was funny but what made that letter something special is that is was just for me. I put it on the fridge with a magnet for a while, I kept it in my drawer for a while. I treasured it! He took time especially for me. He spoke to me in my love language!

Thanks Mom and Dad, I love you!

 

I Feel for other people

When I talked about “Ugliness” in my last post, I was referring to pain, sadness, fear, and insecurities. These things feel awful to me and I see them as ugly but only when they come from me. Strange but true. When it is coming from someone else, my heart nearly bursts like a dam with a flood of sympathy and emotion. I can't handle seeing other people suffer!

I was talking to someone not too long ago, saying, I would like to go back to college someday and become a nurse. I am not sure if I could handle it though. I feel other people's physical and emotional pain way too much.

There are times when I struggle to keep my composure while driving down town and I am forced to pull off the road as an ambulance goes whizzing past. The emergency, the panic, this feeling of tragedy overwhelms me and I fight tears.

Is it post traumatic stress disorder? I don't know. I don't know how I would figure that out but I can tell you I have had to fight tears for other people's misfortunes all my life.

And so here I'm going to tell you one of the most boring stories ever, at least to me, that is. It has become so worn out, old, and petrified with telling that it makes me almost sick to re-tell it yet again. But this is where my story starts so I'll make it brief and maybe this time the whole world will have read it and I'll never have to tell it again.

When I was 3 years old I ran out on the road in front of our house. I was hit by a car ( or should I say, I ran into the side of a moving car). I fell under the car as the driver slammed on his brakes. He jumped out and grabbed me by my feet and dragged me out from there but I had been pinned by the muffler on half my face. I was severely burned. I had scrapes on my head, knees and burns on my hands. Yup

Over the next few weeks in the hospital I really don't remember any pain. I rode around on a tricycle, ate Popsicles and generally was unaware of anything to serious. After all, I was 3. I do remember being stuck to my pillow because of the oozing wound drying at night. I still remember the scab coming off my face. I remember magazines being wrapped around my arms so I couldn't bend them and scratch my face. I remember a little boy named Rocky (ironically) throwing a rock at me and calling me pizza face. Still, I was only 3 and that didn't bother me for more then just the moment.

It was later that I began to be more aware of what I looked like. I became a little more self conscious.

I was eight when I had my first reconstructive surgery done. My mouth was pulled way up on one side and my eye was pulled down at a funny tight angle. I was fully aware of every one looking at me as we travelled home from the hospital. Even when we got home, there were always lots of questions from everyone, everywhere we went. Adults were generally polite and didn't pry, but children always asked what happened. I tried never to let any of it bother me but there were comments that made me think. I remember once in church during some evening program. My sister and I were both dressed in our brand new grey dresses that my mother had sewn for us. A well meaning neighbor complimented us as we stood side by side. “Wow, (to my sister) You are very beautiful and you (talking to me now) have such a pretty dress.” I must have pondered that for some time because I never forgot it. My thoughts were that my dresses were pretty but what I really wanted was for me to be pretty.

When I was nine, I was told by a child that I was so ugly that nobody would ever marry me when I grew up. I didn't like what he said but I was kind of used to brushing off people's comments by that time. Thing is, I told myself, it didn't matter, that I was fine, that it didn't bother me. I had convinced myself that it was so. That is until...

When I was 14 years old, There was a new kind of surgery that had come out to deal with scarring. I had had all the usual surgeries, skin graphs and the like. I was left with a large scarred patch on my face with a skin graphed patch in the middle. Kind of like an appliqued crazy quilt. I was quite self conscious inwardly about it because the edges of the middle patch of skin were raised up and it looked, for all the world, to me like a crater on the moon. Now a new kind of surgery was going to take that away.

This new surgery was a bit of a long procedure. The surgeons had to cut between the skin and the flesh and inserted a bag with a valve on top and sew it up. Through the valve they injected saline solution to fill the bag, stretch the skin and grow it so that they could remove the scar and cover it with the fresh skin they had forced to grow. It sounded hopeful.

Every week I went to the hospital and they injected more solution into the bag through my skin. They filled it until my body would go into shock and I would be shaking from head to toe uncontrollably on the hospital table. My skin would be stretched so far that it would begin to grow new skin cells. It was painful, ugly, and hopeful!

I was very self conscious. My face bubbled out on one side hugely. I wore my coat over my face in church, in town, in other people's houses. I even remember my father-in-law-to-be (I didn't know that then) asked me if he could see, just let him see what it was like and what was happening. I wouldn't let him. Not even once. (I always felt bad about that after). Then one day this crazy thing in my face got infected and within an hour my fever was raging and a small pin prick of an abscess turned into a hole the size of a quarter. I was rushed to the hospital. IV's were put in, surgery would happen immediately in the morning. I was sick but I was excited. I was going to be beautiful. There was only going to be a tiny line left on my face. I couldn't wait. It was what I always wanted.

The next morning, or was it afternoon by then, I woke up from surgery. My eyes were still blurry but I watched the window to the hall for my parents. I wanted to know their reactions. I wanted to know what I looked like. I wanted a mirror. I was kind of expecting a new face.

Finally I saw them coming, I studied mom's face, my mother looked at me through the window as she walked. She started to cry. She walked right passed my room. I was devastated. I can't tell it even now without crying. That was one of the most disappointing moments in my life. I cried a lot and still cry at that memory every time I think of it..

When my mom did get herself together and come back I didn't ask for a mirror right away like i wanted to. I think it was the next day that I asked for one but she refused to get one for me. Later, when she left to get some lunch, I weakly crawled out of bed. I grabbed my IV pole for support and walked to the bathroom. I didn't call any nurses for help, I waited till there was nobody but me. Nobody was going to stop me. I went in the bathroom and shut the door behind me. I positioned myself straight in front of the sink and peered into the mirror in front of me. I was so shocked by what i saw that my head began to swirl and I grabbed on to the sink to steady myself and keep myself from fainting.

Well, eventually the swelling went down and healing took place, It was indeed better then it had been. Two more surgeries followed in the succeeding years but beauty never did.

I became very aware of everyone who looked at me and I despised my looks. I was always polite and I always answered people's questions kindly, except for once. ---- One time in Africa, at some friends place, I was sitting in a circle of friends, many of them around my age or slightly older (I was 18 at the time). I was actually quite embarrassed about myself most of the time because several of them were real nice young men and I felt so ugly, clumsy, and self conscious which I was sure was totally disgusting to them but I didn't know how to help it. So, I sat quietly listening to their fun chatting. All of a sudden I realized that one of the guys was staring at me. I'm sure he was seeing right past me but I shrunk up inside. I looked straight at him and with my eyes all big. I gave him the staring look right back. Oh, he shook his head and broke out of his stare. As for me, I was so ashamed of myself for making him feel bad. I figured the only reason someone would stare at me is because I was strange or ugly. Never again would I make someone feel bad for looking at me.

But these years of accident plus surgeries made me very sensitive to the emotions of other people. I did not want anyone else to feel inside like i did. I felt it was unfair. If there was to be pain, scars, or emotional trauma, let it happen to me.

I recall when I was 16, a friends little boy was filling a generator with fuel when the fumes made their way to the pilot light of a hot water tank and blew up. It caught everything on fire including himself. He was burned severely. I learned of this, and I cried uncontrollably for days. I kept saying over and over, “It's not fair! He was such a good looking little boy! I would have rather taken his place!”

Another time I had a friend who worked as a logger in the woods. It was rumoured that while he was cutting some trees, a large branch fell and took off his nose, and while it didn't kill him, I was just as devastated. Again I cried my eyes out for days for my friend. The same thoughts kept saying the same things, “It should have been me! He didn't deserve to be ugly!” Thankfully, it ended up only being a rumour and my friend was fine.

Now, years later, I still struggle. I stood watching a dog sledding race, here in the Yukon when all of a sudden the little musher lost control and fell off the back of his sled. His dogs raced on without him, pulling the careening sled behind them right into the face of a photographer who was laying on the snow trying to get the best shot. How bad the wound was, I don't know. There was blood. I was beside myself. I was in tears. I could feel her pain. There was her little boy, screaming in panic beside her. He was well taken care of by other relatives but I wasn't. I could feel his panic but I was totally useless!

You know, I don't see it as a bad thing to feel so deeply for other people whatever emotion they exude, (so long as I learn not to project my own emotions into their situations).  It is probably a good thing. I believe that Jesus feels our pain as fully as we feel it, maybe more. He came to Earth and endured every temptation, every rejection, every pain. The difference between him and I is that he uses his pain for the healing of the nations. "By His stripes we are healed."  I am striving to learn how to be like Jesus. How can I learn to be like him? If I could use my experiences to help one person find joy or one person find Jesus or one person find healing and strength, then it will all have been worth it. I must learn to do more then internalize their pain along with my own.  I must learn to lift them up!   How do I get beyond the helpless state and take someones hand?  I know the wrote answers, I think, but I want it inside of me to experience.  I want my experiences to make a difference for someone in a tangible way.

I would add pictures of me before accident and after and during my childhood if I had them but I do not own ny childhood pictures.  Maybe my sister could find some.

 

 

Writing Again - A look at my heart

My sister has been encouraging me to write tidbits of my life. The kind of stuff that has made me who I am, that has helped me grow, that has made me wiser, some of which I am often silent about.

I was reflecting last evening on why have not shared certain thoughts and feelings and experience, especially the painful ones, at least not in a serious, meaningful way. I realized, that although, I have told parts of some of my experiences, it has been in a trivial sort of story telling way.

I have not cared to tell much to people who are near and dear to me. Those trivialized experiences hold a great deal of weight inside of me, whereby, if I were to tell them them to someone who cared, I might cry. I hate crying!

As I reflected last evening on why I have never shared some of the painful experiences in my life, I concluded that I don't want people to know that I've been so deeply affected by them. I don't want to look like I'm insecure. I don't want to look like I haven't got life by the horns. Although, I'm sure it all shows as I don't hide that very well.

The fact is though, I AM deeply affected by painful experiences. I have convinced myself that it is better to keep them quiet. I have told myself both consciously and subconsciously that these things don't matter. They happened and there is nothing to be done so stuff it.

My mother-in-law recently said to me, “Julie, you have suffered a lot of losses, have you ever let yourself grieve?”

Ummmm, Uhhhhh..... I don't know. I cry by myself sometimes. I don't know how to grieve though because every time I cry, I look in the mirror and I see a red eyed, scarred face looking back and I often (cross that out), always tell that face audibly to “Stop it!! You make yourself ugly that way!”

That has been my way of dealing with pain for as long as I remember.

One day,

in college, my boyfriend just up and broke up with me the very evening that I was writing a letter to my parents to tell them that I had fallen in love with a most wonderful man and he with me (he had told me that he loved me only the day before). I was absolutely devastated. I cried, I looked in the mirror. I told myself to get a grip. I talked about it over and over to a sympathetic friend (nothing mean or angry just, “What did I do wrong?”), until one day, he was tired of it and said to me, “You know, you are becoming a very ugly person!”

I was struck dumb! I was hurt! I had never had anyone else tell that to me but it was like a light bulb went on in my head. I became silent. I walked to my room and looked in the mirror. He was right and I knew it. I had always told myself the same thing. I was Ugly when I showed my pain on the outside! It took me a few days but I eventually approached my dear friend again, and thanked him for helping me to see. It was true and I had always said so myself.

Never should I burden people with ugliness, Ever! Any pain I had, I would have to hide as well as I could. There was nothing to be done about it anyway, so why bother expressing it.

So, “Julie, have you ever grieved?”

No, I guess not. I don't know what that means. Honestly! What is a person supposed to do when they feel sad, angry, violated, upset? And so I'm embarking on a journey to learn. To express myself somehow without being ugly. I don't have the answers yet. Not even a clue.

I asked my dearest friend the other day, “What is grieving?” Her answer to me was, “I don't know, but I often wandered how you could go through trials that would devastate most but act like it doesn't matter”.

Well, it does matter. It matters lots! And so I'm going to tell you some of my experiences, not to be ugly, not to whine, not to show you the injustices of people who have hurt me (I will not name any names) but to simply share. To learn from them, to grow by them and away from them. To own up to the fact that I am affected by things but don't have to always and forever feel it.

God is leading me on a journey that I hope will help me, and maybe someone else who is in similar circumstances.

Pray for me because, as I share, the same words always come back to my mind. “This is stupid!” Ok, well, if it is, foolishness is mine. You can think of me what you will, but so is freedom to express myself and I think I will.