An update on life per ye blog times of olde

I transferred all the kendraspondence content to this proffy site to be less insane, oh I mean, to streamline the brand and it's all nicely in tandem with some other moves happening.

Like how we moved across town to the cutest little cottage. I keep pinching myself at the good fortune, which leads me to the notion of favor.

I've been feeling some favor over my life. I learned recently that mentions of “favor” in the New Testament usually uses the Greek word "karis." I'm told its purest translation is "grace." And that's changing my conception of what favor has meant and looked like, at least for me, in the past. Because from my sloppy read of favor in Scripture, it usually entails God doing a mighty feat through a cracked or flimsy vessel. God favors the surrendered heart so he can do his thing. It challenges our present-day definition of favor, from the verb associated often with teacher’s pets and the noun associated with plastic eggs full of slime netted from a birthday party.

At first blush, there is no expectation tethered to our modern concept of favor. A coach runs plays centered around one player; a party girl hands out bath bombs to her guests. But of course there is an expectation. To whom much is given, much is expected. So score some goals with all that ice time. And invite me to your party next time.

Our family has been given a house to occupy for as long as Loverpants is in this school’s employ, and in exchange we pay the price of our proximity. We have surrendered privacy for community, boundaries for a lack of a mortgage.

Whereas God lavishes us with favor and expects nothing in return. He has already paid the ransom for our very lives. This is why the Gospel is just so impossible, so unmanageable. What could we even offer him?

And yet he makes like our turning hearts toward him like sunflowers arching toward sunlight is enough.

I’m overwhelmed by the favor God has shown me recently: our house, some writing opportunities, the unbridled love of family and friends. It’s too much.

And then I remember how long we have lived with housing uncertainty in our short 13 years of marriage. I think about how dry and dark the winter was when I was pitching my little typing hands off to just land one article with one measly pub. I can’t forget the trials my friends have faced down and had to take on the chin.

This too, is where God has shown favor. The favor of his restoration. think I like God doing a new thing even through old battered vessels best of all. It’s not just the unlikely characters that he works through. He shows favor even when we have trashed the house.

In the last few months, I have seen the restoration of my daughter’s easy, trusting smile to an otherwise furrowed brow. I have seen the reunification of a friend’s marriage. I have seen a friend get engaged and thrive in her career after a year of scorched earth. I have seen my baby brother blow out 30 birthday candles on a cake. God has shown his kindness when we couldn’t have muscled any of this on our own. He has restored the years the locusts have eaten and dried the tears that the vipers had shaken out of us.

Restoration is my favorite. I’m buckets of grateful. God is good. 

Update: Greetabl experience

This past fall, I gave Greetabl a go. You may have seen the post. Nobunny paid me to do it. I'm just a sucker for a good novelty item that:1.) can be gifted 2.) <$25 3.) that will not require me to scan the Target Dollar Spot for tiny giftable novelty items <$25 and end up fighting with cart munchkins for the last pair of Shopkins socks. Urrghgah!

I sent my friend Jeni a Just Because Greetabl because moving away from her has been hard on my heart and has left a wide gaping hole in my stomach where the muffins she used to deliver me used to be. After Jeni discovered that the Greetabl I sent her was in fact for her and not for her cousin who was re-routing her mail through Jeni's address (long story), she was quite delighted with her li'l bumblebee Greetabl with tea inside.

Since that maiden voyage, I've sent a Greetabl to my cousin Kore (it had Leslie Knope on it. Who wouldn't love it? Knopebody, that's who.) I also sent one to StepMom for Mother's Day and she loved it because of the personalized pictures of her with my kids. I even shared the love of the Greetabl with my friend Foxy who sent one to her new bosslady. Upon receiving of said Greetabl, Bosslady sent her this text that I found crazy charming:

Because I'm passionate about gifting and not committing an assault in Target in the act of gifting, and also about my friends being called beautiful humans for filling their bossladies' maws' with caramels, I think we should all send more Greetabls and here's 15% off to sweeten the deal!

P.S. Father's Day is upcoming and my old man will be most likely receiving one, too.

Laundry, Lorelai Gilmore and how motherhood is not a monolith

Where did it begin? Where is the point of origin? When did I first begin to believe the myth that motherhood is a monolith, a mere one-dimensional portrayal of sacrificial chores? It's a problem that we've been unpacking for time immemorial, and Mother's Day is a reminder of both the traction we've gained in understanding the complexity of motherhood and how little ground we've made in dismantling the mythology of it. It's ironic that the living, laboring example in my home wasn't the narrative I accepted, but as we know, detergent commercials and greeting cards are powerful to reinforce the myth of motherhood.

It took becoming a mother myself for me to begin to understand that I will never fully understand: the mystery of bearing another mystery. I have been changed by begetting a whole person, who will change in form and finesse, who will change me, who will change the world. 

My mom, to whom I was born almost four decades ago, can clear the entire board in Jeopardy! just as handily as she can deep clean a bathroom. She is whip-smart and bewilderingly competent at a great many things. But I, too, thought Mother's Day was to be a celebration of her dutifulness, of her servitude, and that by Giving Her the Day Off from Chores we were more than gifting her everything she could ever want.

Bless.

I believe if we listened more to the mothers who have experienced abject loss, the loss of babies, the loss of jobs, the loss of jobs because of babies, the loss of babies because of jobs, the loss of grown children to a world who could not love them well enough, the loss of grown children, the loss of love, the loss of enough, we might come closer to understanding the myriad layers of grief and hope and resilience that motherhood embodies.

Remember this Mother's Day that a greeting card holiday does well to celebrate that which is happening on the outside: the bouquets and brunches; the gifts and the glory of fingerpainted art. But we will do well to celebrate the universes a mother contains on the inside.

I didn't know when I became a mother the 18-hole golf course that would become my heart what with its expanses of lush greens and patches of forbidding sandtraps, the deep dark lakes where all the errant tees and balls are abandoned and forgotten, and all the daily scrapes and whacks my heart would take, not to mention the loss of whole segments of myself that I thought had disappeared but which I found walking around in a warm, huggable body asking me what's for dinner.

I could never have imagined what my mother contained on the inside but now I know that is where her real work was done, the work from which she will never be given a day off. Her hopes for me and the ways I would use my gifts and avoid life's sandtraps, her belief in what I could be, the desires she held for my life that went unstated, unbidden, I can only now begin to fathom. The monolith of motherhood wants us to believe that our mothers' sacrifices are relegated to laundry. But what of the dreams they surrender, what of the soaring hopes they've had to lay down?

As Lorelai Gilmore so aptly stated, while hefting a box from Emily Gilmore, "It's heavy. It must be full of her hopes and dreams for me." I know now that is a box I will never be able to lift since they don't fit in a box at all. They are contained in our mothers. I am a grateful vessel among them.

Happy Mother's Day. If you have a mum, hug her hard.