Squashing Spiders

These messages are everywhere. We are so proud and strong, right? Wow, women who do it all and have healthy attitudes and lifestyles and are somehow humble! Everyone is striving for this and yet what I hear from my female friends is, I'm exhausted. This is an impossible standard and I can't keep going. I wish that for one day, just one, someone else would take care of me.  This week these things are getting to me. How does one try to take good care of their body without the feeling that they need to get better because they are so unhealthy, so hideous, so disgusting? How does one try to be beautiful and virtuous on the inside when they know the truth about what's inside? When "within" one feels... Crazy? Incompetent? Self-obsessed? Undeserving? Rotten?  I can't "love" myself or heal myself. I am too broken to do that.  And that needs to be okay. Woman. It's okay for you to need something from the outside. We need God. God made it this way. We nee

 When I told some of my friends about  the Good Dad I had seen,  and how it made me cry, it went the way these things usually go: We talk about the lack of Good Dad examples in our lives. We talk about how, when we see these things, we get happy and weepy at the same time.  And then we talk about what an extremely low bar that is, and we get angry. I wish that wasn't the case, but feelings just ARE. All you can do is acknowledge them and figure out why they are. We wish the default was decency. We wish the default was being loving and giving. We wish it wasn't so shocking to see a Good Dad. What can be done? How can we appreciate the Good Dads without accepting the status quo of Most Dudes Sucking So Much? How do we expect goodness from men and raise good men? How do we not turn into bitter man-hating harpies?

Today was an emotionally exhausting day. I wasn't a hard worker and I was DEFINITELY not a great friend. It's that wonderful progesterone-fueled time of the month when I am angry, anxious, paranoid, needy, and just feel ugly in every way. I second guess everything I say and do, ruminating endlessly, but I also get so hurt over what I perceive as someone not caring about me, and I had several crying jags over it today. Trying to distract myself from THAT, I was able to focus on getting a lot done as a MOM.  At the end of the day, when I was out walking my dog, I thanked God for giving me the energy to be brave and productive as a mom, but needed to hash out the other feelings I was having.  It was a warm, breezy evening—the kind that you imagine some southerner in a movie might slowly look up at the sky and say, "There's something in the air, alright..." Perfect for a deep conversation with God. My dog and I walked through the vast grounds of the church in our neig

Years after joining a very conservative Lutheran Church, which in itself was sort of an act of defiance, I'm still struggling to find my place there and sitting with uncomfortable conflicting thoughts. This is where I hope to put some of those thoughts, to untangle them and figure them out. It is not a place where I will try to do good writing or be persuasive or anything of the sort. It will be a moderately embarrassing journey for me, I'm sure.  That said... Welcome, I guess?