So this is life...

I have three brothers.

They wore buzzcuts in summer, and I braids and pigtails.

We had a tree fort we regularly fell out of, a Tarzan swing in the woods, 

and a million sledding hills.

I was homeschooled until I graduated from high school, 

and became an academic star at the local university.

I’ve always dreamed of being a professor and a missionary.

Before either dream came true, I met a mountain man .

He kissed me long and hard, read the same books, and brewed beer and wine.

And he makes the most miraculous Shrimp Pad Thai this world has ever known.

His mother’s house was a dream, 

and she wore a gold hooded sweatshirt when I met her,

a mane of the most beautiful gray and chestnut hair flowing thick.

I felt at home…and fell in love.

I was a young mother once, 24 .

 I gave up my nursing career to nurse babies.

Now I have four children, born in four years, 

who daily test my patience and bring me the highest heights of joy.

We homeschool with a mishmash curriculum of Saxon, 

hands on physics and chemistry, and lots of good books.

I've walked through loss and lived to tell the story -
4 years of battling cancer, until remission in 2012,

the loss of a dear babe in 2009, and heart problems in 2010.

In 2012, I graduated with my doctoral degree in nursing.
Now I'm on the hunt for a job as a professor -
a childhood dream coming true.

Shortly, we will move onto the mission field.

I have one daughter who is my doppelganger, body, soul, and spirit.
She is the 8 year old, constantly critiquing her own athleticism,
and reading Bullfinch's Mythology for fun.

Another who is my ballerina and singer and fills our home with beauty.

A third who is a little lioness with a pixie grin as she waltzes 

through her days, each one a gift since we almost lost her at age 3.

My son is a mechanical genius who scares my husband and I 

with his precociousness and charms us 

with his angelic smile and blond coif hovering over chocolate eyes.

I have one son in heaven, his body lying in Wisconsin soil,

his grave marked with a large blue rock of granite.

His name is Theodore.

We are blessed to live in a “family compound”, 

with my best friend and mother, academic adviser and father, 

bosom friend sister-in-law, brother and their children 

all within an 1/8 mile of our yellow farmhouse home.

When I dream, it is of the poor

The hungry

The hurting.

I play classical music on my piano and blues on my harmonica to ease tension.

I suffer from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder after being excommunicated from a fundamentalist church.

I am a childhood sexual abuse survivor just learning to name emotions.

I have a bucket list that I can’t possibly finish

And a million ideas of how to change the world.

I am the modern mama caught between career and home, 

artist and chef, writer and housekeeper.

I write this as a journal of the innermost thoughts of my head and heart.

I write it as worship to the great God I will forever serve.