The Renovation
Hey folks. It’s been a while, and life is wild out here. Wild and good.
and wild.
The house is a mess. A huge mess. Walls cut. Wood trim stripped, some primer applied. The mantle is half gooey mess, half sanded wood. The ceiling cut in a dozen places. No interior doors up. {The camera hasn’t left it’s bag for a month, so I only have cell phone pics, but here is one of what will be my son’s room.}
By wild I mean kind of undone.
And for myself, on the days where it slows, days like a birthday, a break, I sometimes find myself a bit undone…in a not pretty way. Kicking and screaming I fight the raw, I fight the process.
Who the heck is a mess on their birthday? a. lot. of. people.
Behind closed doors it can happen.
We slow for a second, but the sander keeps whirring. The train keeps coming. They keep up at FULL SPEED AHEAD and you get RUN OVER, railroaded. No more gentle sanding. The damn sander is just spinning full speed on that one spot.
So the birthday, a thing which I’m never so about anyway, was a wash. No biggie.
Today that day is over. Today I can give you an update. Today I can tell you how good things are happening. Today I am sustained.
We are still between homes. The mega move is still happening, but we have a FABULOUS place to stay with family. This week we got approved for nursing services for the remaining months of our health insurance, so I have some HELP! In addition to that, we’ve found some fabulous resources and had dozens of seeming coincidences line up. Seeming but really it’s felt very much like a sustaining hand carrying us and a path being paved out before us.
School is starting next week. We just revised the IEP for my son, and it seems like things will go quite well. The services in this area are impressive and there are some very kind people behind them.
Our house is still in a state of demolition, but the new pieces are starting to float in. When we move in, for the very first time – we will have a LIFT! and an accessible bathroom and other pieces we’ve never had before to accommodate our son’s wild movements and tall growing frame.
My husband is on leave. Thankfully he had a nice handful of days saved up with his job, and so he is able to still get his paycheck while he begins looking for a job. …and it’s a process. Quite the process. …to switch jobs and career fields and states. But it’s going very well. His contacts abound and he is treating it like a full-time job. Networking and interviewing around town while the kids and I have a space to live in and help!
Church. Oh church. Does every special needs parent sigh when they say the word? Every parent? Every person? Maybe not, but my goodness, the gathering of broken people to worship God is just tough for so many reasons….for the way Sunday morning is always the day for stress fractures to come to surface in marriage, in parenting, in all. We’ve been through the times (and I’m talking past and present) where our fight-or-flight is pushing hard against a thin veneer. You know, where you can’t establish eye contact when any of the dozen little groups of happily chatting polished people? Where you feel as if you’ve been splattered with red paint and no one wants to look. We had a tough Sunday a few weeks ago. After the unsuccessful attempts to make eye contact, the cold-fish-of-a-lady in charge of kids was out win. As se checked the kids in…she verbalized her assumption that our 8-year-old (in a wheelchair) would NOT join the children his age.
Oh yes she did.
The prayer we’d prayed when we sighed before rolling open the van….it was the ONLY thing that kept us from running. Call me dramatic, but I wanted to be a puddle on the floor. I swallowed hard and restated her ignorant assumption. (It usually helps for people to re-hear their words from your mouth.) “So you don’t want him to join the other children? What ages does this go up to?” She then back-stepped.
Before reaching the class, I whispered to John, asking if he wanted to just leave. “Let’s just meet the teacher.”
In the end, our son had a FABULOUS experience with a really great teacher. (We knew all was more than okay when we met her and she greeted our boy.) The kids were great and a super Dad guided them in getting to know our boy better. When we entered they all wanted to know where Blue was going to school. The one boy attending the same school cheered when we gave them the name of the school, so excited to know he would see out boy again! (oh. my. heart.)
Our boy put out the pouty lip when we left. (that heart again!) He didn’t want to leave his new friends. Although we opted not to return there, I do see that we would have deprived him of that good experience were it not for the grace that wrapped round our day in the prayer in the van. We were carried.
We are still figuring out the church thing, and still working hard not to judge those that judge. So hard. We are still counting the gifts, holding tight to the worship and the word that sustains.
No amount of polish will ever change the fact that a church is a group of the broken worshiping God, the God who allowed his son to be “broken bread and poured out wine.” So we look for the places that are visibly reclaimed. Less polish. Less veneer. More function. The old taking on new form, but not so much so that it has forgotten it’s reclaiming. And as for those pieces, those people, that have too many layers of varnish, the cold fishes, the ones who judge? Who knows where they will end in the reclaiming process, or what chemicals are at work even now on their surface? It’s my job to focus on my own sanding down, my own restoration, not theirs.
And so, yep, some days are just too dang wild…the kind of wild that is just plain ugly and brutal. Some days we stop the running and the train smacks right into us, the sander just won’t stop spinning. Some days I’m just to raw to be of much use, but those count too. Even and especially when it’s not pretty and feels horrible, we can grow, we can become more beautiful, can’t we? We can be made into something better if we surrender to this sanding, if we let the hard days, the wild days, come and go.
The mega isn’t so mega when we aren’t in it alone.
One day, one minute at a time here in the wild wonder of a mega move,
Miriam
a Rearranged Life 
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We love you guys! We are praying for you — I’m sure you miss Manna. We sure do. I’m glad to hear Blue had such a great time though at church. We will keep praying!