So when we sit down at the computer and open a vein we offer life to someone else. We pour out what we’ve learned or failed to learn as a lifeline to someone else.

We offer our stories across computer screens, transfusion-like.

On Wednesday morning I re-live the same story I’ve lived a hundred times in a hundred different airports. There’s the familiar waiting, the knot in stomach, the worrying I’m at the wrong gate. There’s the anticipation and the flutters every time the automatic doors open and the aching, bursting excitement.

A mom comes through with three kids. They are all just years older than my own three. They come through at a flat run. I look from them over to the crowd; I want to see if I can spot who they’re running toward before they arrive.

It’s easy.

Light is pouring out of her, that smile so wide it cracks open the seams of Dulles airport. White, white hair and a body made for story time and chocolate chip cookies. She’s standing still but she’s running just as hard at they are.

I always cry at airports.

We share our stories because they lifeline remind us that we’re all created out of the threads of the same story.

The tiles are dirty white same as in South Africa, Guatemala, Ukraine. Airport tiles. Time loses all meaning in between departure and arrival gates. We simply wait. We suspend. We remember how little control we have over anything.

When you whisper into my inbox how you stole a year from “real life” to go home and raise your grand daughter my story stands up and screams applause at yours.

Time is wasted on airports. People simply are. They are angry or frustrated or desperately sad or whole. They are the realest versions of themselves when they are holding desperately to the people they love. We were never made for good-bye.

This is my boring, ordinary, sacred story.

I missed their wedding in November.

I watch the door open and close and open again with each new group of people who aren’t them.

He is my little brother who was always like my big brother and I’m so relieved I’m on time to meet him and his new-I’ve-known-her-forever wife. I’m usually late. He knows that. How many arrivals have seen me rushing to the gate and him already sitting on a chair waiting for me. Not today; today I am waiting. If you’re waiting in an airport you’re on time.

I wait.

I’m on time.

And when I see him the time between then and now unravels and I know he knows. This is how it feels to live in the in between. All those missed nephews and first neices, missed dedications and Tae Kwon Do lessons, missed birthdays, missed engagements, missed houses and moves and churches and opening nights and padkos, cross-country, Karoo nights.

When the doors slide open it’s all washed away.

And I’m there hugging his tall body and holding onto his hand. She’s my sister now and not just my friend.

For ten days we will get to live in real time again.

Tonight I write for all the homesick. Because sometimes home comes to us.

All we have to do is open our arms wide and welcome it.

::

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I think motherhood should come with a super hero cape and a cheerleader.
My {free} ebook The Cheerleader for Tired Moms might be the next best thing.
Enter your email address and it’s coming your way just before Mother’s Day!
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Well, it happened and you can listen along with us as I talk about my middle name, why I don’t think I’m cool enough to be a “Rachel” and how my middle son likes to fart more than I think is probably normal.

Yea, deep stuff like that.

There’s also a side of surviving homesickness, travel with kids under age 6, and why I wasn’t as gung-ho about Downton Abbey as Twitter was. Kindly, don’t hold that against me, eh? Oh yea, and I talk about my daily chaos and the super hero who helps me through it.

So, if you’ve got a big stack of laundry to fold and need some company, you can tune into me and Tsh podcasting over here.

We laughed a lot. I hope you do too.

Laughter is an instant vacation.  ~Milton Berle

PS: Yes, yes my kids do wear cowboy boots with shorts. Yours don’t?

::

::

I think motherhood should come with a super hero cape and a cheerleader.
My {free} ebook The Cheerleader for Tired Moms might be the next best thing.
Enter your email address and it’s coming your way just before Mother’s Day!
Delivered by

Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

I think motherhood should come with a super hero cape and a cheerleader.
My {free} ebook The Cheerleader for Tired Moms might be the next best thing.
Enter your email address and it’s coming your way just before Mother’s Day!

Delivered by

Click here to download a free copy of your own personal cheerleader,
because you totally deserve a cheerleader if:

1. You can’t remember when last you slept 8 hours in a row.
2. You’ve forgotten what warm food tastes like.
3. You can change a diaper in the pitch dark.
4. Other adults refer to you as “{insert your child’s name’s} mom.”
5. You’ve been to the pediatrician more times in the last year than the hair salon.
6. Your vacuum cleaner cries “uncle” before you even plug it in.
7. You regularly discover food in the microwave you’d forgotten you started to heat for yourself.
8. You spend two hours slaving over a dinner that your kids declare “disgusting!”
9. Your potty training sons have really bad aim.
10. You just discovered that the lid on the baby food in your diaper bag came off.

I wish I could send you each a live-in cook, cleaner, chauffeur and masseuse for Mother’s Day!

The next best thing might be my free EBook – The Cheerleader for Tired Moms. If you subscribe to this here blog, it’s coming your way in May!

It’s coming to you in time for Mother’s Day.

It’s a collection of your and my favorite posts about motherhood from this blog.

It’s free! for all Gypsy Mama subscribers. So, if you aren’t already, just click here to subscribe to the Gypsy Mama by email or in a reader {it’s all free!}

When the EBook launches it will be delivered with love, extra helpings of encouragement and a set of pom-poms to your inbox

Like the double Snuggie – it’s made to be shared!

It’s full of the things I wish someone had told me at the tired beginning.

If you’re a mom, you’re my hero. Period. This freebie is for you! {Click to Tweet!}

I’m cheering you on – loudly and probably with un-blowdried hair.

Much love and Cheerios,

Lisa-Jo {the Gypsy Mama}
{who owes Annie a lifetime of chocolate for bringing the Cheeerleader to life with her design mojo!}

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I think motherhood should come with a super hero cape and a cheerleader.
My {free} ebook The Cheerleader for Tired Moms might be the next best thing.
Enter your email address and it’s coming your way just before Mother’s Day!

Delivered by

Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

“What did you do today?”

And I think about lists checked off and conference calls and the crock pot I had to run through the dishwasher and still rinse out by hand. I think about the four rooms that I vacuumed and the EBook cover design I’m excited about. I think about a small garden in a ceramic tray the boys helped me plant and four loads of laundry.

I think about 8 diapers and two changes of baby clothes.

I think about the fried egg I burned for breakfast and the bagel sandwiches I made instead. I think about six bags of sand box sand and two baths that followed. I think about Skype calls and text messages and deadlines ticking ever louder.

I think about a first time reading of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and how Micah pulled a Joey and wanted the book as far away from him as possible after only the first two chapters.

And I think about that last hour of daylight before bath and bed and comatose sleep.

“We ran cherry blossom laps,” I tell him.

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Motherhood should really come with a super hero cape, don’t you think?
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Hey gang, my humblest apologies for the misbehaving linky today. I heard they had a crash on their server and we’re all feeling the ripple effects. But the linky elves are trying to fix it and I hope it will be back to behaving properly again soon. In the meantime, feel free to leave your link in the comments. What you write is, after all, the heart of Five Minute Fridays.

Love and chocolate all around for your lovely patience!

~Lisa-Jo

Around here we write for five minutes flat on Fridays.

We finger paint with words. We try to remember what it was like to just write without worrying if it’s just right or not.

Want to play Five Minute Friday? It’s easy peasy! (<–-Tweet this!)

1. Write for 5 minutes flat – no editing, no over thinking, no backtracking
2. Link back here and invite others to join in.
3. Meet & encourage someone who linked up before you.

OK, are you ready? Give us your best five minutes on:

::

Loud…

::

GO:

He stares at me from the back seat with eyes hot, red, determined, defiant and desperate to be understood. I stare at him through the rear view mirror with eyes that echo his own blue exactly and match his mood perfectly.

I am just as angry as he is.

The only difference is that outright temper tantrums with the snot and tears and whiney mouth aren’t really navigable for grownups steering a minivan to school. I want him to just quit it. I want him to be rational. I want him to understand how mad he’s making me.

He just wants to wear the red striped shirt instead of the orange one.

Last minute battles when we’re all but out the door crush a day before it even begins. The rehab can take ages. Even when he’s finally found his way to a small island of calm and the teacher has hugged him and I’ve admired his sprouting bean, his eyes are still hot and we hug each other good-bye almost angry at how much we love each other.

The mother job is hard. Because every time I look his temper squarely in the eyes I see the reflection of my own. DNA surprises in all kinds of ways. The boy who was my 24 hour best friend just yesterday can unhinge me this morning in under five minutes.

We navigate these bumpy waters together – carefully. It is a hard crossing. I have to learn carefully when to yield and when to hold firm. The waves are unpredictable. And sometimes I have to shout into the wind, “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

STOP

OK, show me what you’ve got.
And once you link up, a little extra encouragement from me should pop up in your inbox!
Subscribers, you can just click here to come and play along.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You’re lovely! Happy Friday. Eat chocolate.
And can I send you my Mon-Thurs posts by email for free? {just enter address}
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::
Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

On the days when I hurry them through brushing teeth and climbing bunk bed ladders and demands for just one more sip of water. On evenings when I rush and mutter and long for the solace of bed and laptop and online. On mornings when I rush to find lost shoes, chug down honey nut Cheerios and pack lunches and stuffed bears.

How much does the rush cost me?

We want to be on time, yes. But on time and frayed around the edges, on time and in tears, on time and relieved to be parting ways is no one’s win-win.

The rush is all mine. I can choose to shelter them from it or not.

The clock is all mine. I can choose to dictate from it or not.

The rhythm is all mine. I can choose to dance to it or not.

Because the melody of any day ebbs and flows around a mother’s mood.

And if I can set my mood by the desire to send them off at peace and full of the knowing that they mattered then they will have a gift to unwrap the rest of the day.

Knowing that they mattered to their mother more than her to-dos.

And yes, I hear you saying that there are things we can’t actually be late for. And to-dos must be done sometime or lives will unravel. I agree, I do.

But I am learning to tell the difference between the rush of the doing vs. the gifting of the doing.

I am learning to spot the wonder in the ordinary. Because if it is all a gift to me from the Father who gives good things, why don’t I re-gift it to my kids before we rush out the door?

Time and again I have to reel my fast, wagging, frustrated tongue in and slow down the crazy that’s about to spill out of me. And because we do still need to be on time these are the things I’m trying out in order to get us there with tempers and kind words in tact:

This doesn’t make breakfast any more nutritious than a bowl of cereal or a bagel and cream cheese most mornings. But it does make us all feel filled up in the ways that matter most. Some mornings we still snap and no one brushes their teeth and car doors are slammed. But other mornings – more mornings these days – there is time factored in for slow. Time factored in for connecting before parting.

We don’t have big prayers or profound Bible readings – but we have the heart of the thing. The rhythm of secure kids and restrained parents. There is give and take. An episode of Mighty Machines if breakfast is eaten. Time with the hamster if teeth have first been brushed. A half hour of swashbuckling in the yard if they’re dressed in full ready-to-leave-from-the-yard-when-mom-calls clothes.

If I want our kids’ morning routine to work I have to work the hardest at keeping it together. Myself first. My tongue, my temper and my temptation to dish out blame for being late.

So I take a deep breath when I’m lying there listening to Zoe start to wake up, before I can will myself out of bed. I take a deep breath and picture the hand of the carpenter who lived over 2,000 years ago – rough and strong and tender – ready to lead me into the dance. There will be crazy and whining and bed head. There will be the same red cereal bowl and yellow spoon Micah’s used a hundred mornings before.

There will be trails of socks and cries that someone is out of undies. There will be missing library books and someone who insists on wearing his camouflage pants again. There will be a raggedy toy bear and a baby that trails around behind every body, unpacking everything.

But on the very best mornings, oh yes on the best mornings, there will also be dancing at our house.

::

I love that you’re visiting. Make yourself comfy, we’re pretty easy going here.
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Give me a man who isn’t afraid of croup and will sit in the bathroom for long steamy shifts with the shivering, hacking boy as they both breathe in the healing steam of the shower.

Give me a man who knows which boy needs what lovie and who can always, always find the missing pacifiers. Give me a  man who comes home early without being asked. Give me a man who always brings chocolate.

There were days I ranted about forgotten roses and anniversaries. Now I wake up at midnight and find you on the bottom bunk with a boy who’s sweating out his fever and my heart blooms.

You are my middle of the week, March 1st Valentine.

::

Thank you for stopping by. Feel free to put your feet up on the furniture.
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I sat across from the man I love on the bed we’ve loved in since we were first married ten years before. I sat and smacked fist into palm and said it again and again and again, “But this can’t be what I’m supposed to do with my life.”

And there it was – the old frustration that stuck in the back of my throat and that I hadn’t been able to swallow down for two long years. Two years of two-hour commutes and long hours at the office and away from my kids. Away doing work that didn’t fit the me that lived inside my frustration; long hours aching with the wanting to be doing something else.

But I didn’t know what it was.

I just knew that there was something else. And it started with wanting to be able to encourage women.

So I sat across from the man who’s known me and loved me since that night we played baseball on the national mall and then walked the long way home back to 8^th street. He was as patient with me then as he is now.

He spoke to me of callings. He reminded me that every ounce of frustration I felt was part of what helped me translate my story into one that other women could relate to. And he told me that it was these broken, hard parts I was living that would feed my words.

I watched him in the glow of the two yellow bedside lamps and saw that he heard me. He got what it felt like to not be doing the something I thought I was made to do. But he showed me that without this struggle I wouldn’t be able to encourage women the way I felt called to. Without fighting the balance of motherhood and work and self and calling and commutes I wouldn’t understand where many other women need encouragement.

I spent a long time thinking about this. And months later I wrote about it to my friend, Holley:

So, I have been thinking about you today because I am at a conference discussing some groundbreaking work to bring justice to the poor and afflicted. For many years that is the kind of work I have been involved in also. But, I have consistently felt this call on my heart to speak into the lives of women. Young mothers and wives who feel that what they do isn’t important.

I don’t know many who would consider that a needy population group. But I sure do. I am them.

So, I blog. I write my heart out to this beautiful audience who need to be encouraged as I wish someone had done for me. Because young mothers and struggling women have great needs too. And while it’s not my job, it is my delight to be used by God to be part of the plan for meeting them.

I wrote it at 1am and I found that putting those words down filled me up – with joy, with purpose, but mostly with relief. My story is useful to others because of the frustration I’ve juggled. My story can encourage because I know how it feels to feel unimportant. My story translates the stories of many other women because it is so seemingly ordinary.

This thing – this something else – that I had been waiting for? Turned out it had been unfolding in my life all along. Right there in the commuter lane, in between making school snack packs and tucking kids into bed I’d been finding my voice.

And when I write about my every day ordinary mess, I am connected to the women I so desperately want to encourage. The women I want to wrap arms around and laugh with and say, “You’re doing far more than just OK, sister.”

God has made a way for me through the frustration and into the nooks and crannies of other people’s stories.  It has grown from my passion into my job. I can lay myself down right where I am, word by word, plank by plank, and build a bridge that connects us.

There is a Carpenter who shows me how.

And you? You who fume and flail and question the now that you’re living? Maybe we have this frustratingly perfect route in common.

Perhaps what is hardest about where you are right now will end up being the wood and nails and words that connect us.

Write it down. Build the bridge.

That many might walk across.

::

Tomorrow I will share more about what my bridge looks like, but today – what about yours? What are the hard wood and nails you have to work with? It’s OK to be frustrated with them.

::

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Starts the day out with a gold ribbon ceremony for showing honor, courage, responsibility at school and all he can think about is the reprimand that ended his school day.

All praise clouded out by a finger shaken in his direction. His breath fogs up the glasses that hide his eyes as we walk home. From the minute he shuffles down the school’s steps I feel the itch in him that something is out of place.

I try to hear him above the school buses and kids racing home toward the weekend. I bend and duck awkward toward his eye level to try and lip read his sadness.

“School is stupid. I always do everything wrong.”

The bright little golden ribbon stuck to his red shirt says otherwise, but it’s hidden beneath his thick coat now and the dread at having done something wrong is pasted across his face instead.

“But what happened?” and I try to get him to go back to the beginning and tell it to me step by step. How could a day that started with me taking his picture next to the principal end with him this defeated?

I feel the knot in my own stomach and the hairs of defensiveness rising on the back of my neck. I want to make it right, by pointing out how wrong everyone else must have been.

But the wind’s cutting off any words I try to get out and he’s so hunched against the cold and his sadness that I don’t think he can hear me anyway. My forehead is as scrunched up as his posture and I can hear the frustration mounting in my mind as I push the stroller, focusing on the puddle, the ice patch, the path with the too-close cars.

It’s the cold; it bites through my frustration and makes me notice other things. The minivan parked around the corner, the hill home, the Friday evening pizza and a movie night.

And then it hits me – I’m the grown up. I’m the grown up and Jackson’s just six and soon he’ll be seven, eight, nine, ten. I am not actually going to be able to barricade all disappointment or misunderstanding out of his life.

But I can help put it in perspective.

He gets in the car and slumps into his car seat- staring out the window. I pump the heat, look back over my shoulder and describe to him how the day started. We walk through the ceremony again; the ribbon, the hard work and 30 accumulated mini gold tickets it took to get him there.

And then, after I’ve heard the outline of what went wrong in the afternoon I tell him that’s ok. Even though it’s a bummer when a day starts out great and ends with a bump, that’s part of growing up. That I know how it feels because it doesn’t stop when you’re a kid.

Grown ups make mistakes too and wish they could have do-overs and feel frustrated when the one small thing they got wrong clouds out the big thing they got right. And it’s up to us to choose which thing ends up being the story of our day.

I suggest we make his Friday story about the gold ribbon. Hot chocolate at home helps the decision go down. As does an adoring baby sister, a little brother and a movie night with dad.

And somewhere in the middle there’s a moment – a moment when I get to look into the eyes that I know are mine and tell him that I don’t need a gold ribbon to know he’s special.

That I’ve known since a summer afternoon in Kyiv, Ukraine when I whispered to God what I wanted for my birthday. Since I walked Kreshatik street with Peter and met Heike and Cliff, Bob and Colleen, and all the Skinner kids for cake and ice cream at the Golden Gate restaurant. Since I looked up at the sun with squinted eyes and knew that God had saved the best till last.

Since I asked and God answered and the answer was Jackson.

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I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of Him.
~1 Samuel 1:27.

No gold ribbon and no mess up can add or subtract from that gift.

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Want to keep up with this here blog? Sign up to get my posts emailed to your doorstep right here Or delivered to your reader of choice. Or just like us on Facebook or Google Friend Connect.Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

This week I’m traveling for work. Alone. And I laughed out loud in a dark Arkansas parking lot when I saw the rental car I’d been given – a mini van.

Motherhood isn’t a sweater we can shrug out of when we feel like it. It’s a change in our DNA.

It’s what makes us want to comfort the mom with the crying toddler at 3,000 feet, what makes us smile at the dad wearing a baby through airport security, what makes us tingle all over at the anticipation of 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep.

I open my white mini van on a dark and rainy night in Razorback country and I’m smiling so hard to myself at this secret the mini van and I are sharing. There’s the seat where Zoe’s chair would normally go and Jackson would be over my right shoulder and Micah all the way in back yelling directions, questions and instructions I can barely hear from way up front.

But tonight the car is crazy quiet. And I get to choose what’s on the radio and no one will ask me, “are we there yet?” I’ve already slept three hours on the plane, unhindered by embarrassment – another fringe benefit of motherhood – sprawled across three seats with my cheek resting on my computer bag. The deep exhausted sleep is totally worth the strange imprint I’m sure I woke up with.

I miss my kids. But I find there’s something inside of me that’s been lacking oxygen and suddenly I can breathe and I take deep gulps of being alone in that big, beautiful mini van.

It’s dark and raining and there’s nothing ideal about the driving conditions except my heart that is looking around with fresh eyes, remembering the me that lives inside this mother’s DNA.

There is a good man stewarding those kids we made so I am not afraid to say my tight, monkey hug good byes to them and drive an Arkansas mini van down this rainy road with prayers of gratitude for stolen moments alone.

I don’t know a mother who isn’t better for time alone.

Time without a hundred hands all held out waiting, asking, holding, poking, clinging. Time without someone constantly in your me-space. Time where you get to cut only your own food and don’t have to be strategic about planning bathroom breaks and outings aren’t scheduled around someone else’s nap schedule.

Some days you don’t realize how over-stimulated you are until you’re in a car alone listening to the rhythmic thud of wipers across the wind screen and you can almost cry from the beauty of it.

Alone is essential to a tired mom because it’s really time to spend listening to herself – her own thoughts and prayers and desperate ideas for creativity and plans and a future longer than next week’s school recitation of “Chicken Soup and Rice.”

I may be driving toward Siloam Springs, AR for work, but I am headed toward time spent apart from my everyday crush of the urgent, the predictable and the routine.

Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, [Jesus] said to them, “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.”

I turn off the freeway and find a drive through chicken place. There’s a hotel room waiting for me and eight hours of uninterrupted sleep ahead. A shower without someone knocking on the bathroom door and a bed that won’t have two extra people in it when I wake up.

I am not running away from this mothering DNA of mine, I am simply remembering what it needs to keep running.

And you?

When last did you have time to remember yourself- what do you need to keep running?

{Related posts for additional encouragement}
Why motherhood shouldn’t be graded on a curve
When sleep deprivation is a good thing
Sometimes the only Monday morning list I can manage
The best ways *not* to help a new mom

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I love that you visit here. Truly. And thank you.
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