the rose of kiev

When I got married, I said the same vows with the same good intentions that everyone else does.  I was in love and I meant it when I said "for better or worse" and "until death do us part".  I looked into the intelligent hazel eyes of my new husband, and I was ready to work to build a strong stone home with him.  We were going to show the world how it was done; we were going to overcome the legacy of my parents' divorce, of our grandparents' unhappy marriages.   We had dreamed of crafting our marriage into a comfortable home; resilient - with carefully masoned stone blocks; stable - on a meticulously laid foundation. And we had talked about how to maintain it together: stay ahead of the leaks, repair the cracks, update the windows, build future additions.  He is an engineer and craftsman, I am an artist, and I could only imagine us building something beautiful, efficient and comfortable.  I was excited to build that home, that future, with him.   ...

I firmly believe that the most enduring of marriages are made of people who are, not the best matched, but who are the most committed fighters. Marriage isn't about finding the perfectly compatible person, even though compatibility has a helpful place.  It's much more about finding a good person to fight for who will fight for you, too. That fighting?  That bloody-nosed refusal to lay down and quit?  That's what commitment looks like. Commitment, real and long term, takes a rough strength.  Pledging vows is easy in the heat of infatuation; "In sickness and in health" is an easy promise in the midst of health and youth. It is a harder vow to hold when it is ugly and overweight, tired and sick and irritated.  It's harder to hold to when it is aging and angry, insecure and emotional. It's hard to stay when you want to leave. It's hard to still commit when it's no longer easy. But, in a marriage, we promised to commit then, too: in weak...

Leaving a church you love is difficult. What a small word, "difficult".  Nine letters, three syllables, a small vague word full of heartbreak. It is October now.  And in October of last year, I left a church I loved. It was the right decision.  But it was "difficult". Dave and I left at the end of October.  At this time last year, we were in the final throes, and I was thrashing, in agony, miserable.  The church I loved and the people I loved were hurting me.  And worse, the wounds were inflicted with imperfect judgement and the best intentions. Some mornings, I still wake up angry thinking about it.  Misguided love is a dangerous thing. For some reason, it helps to know that it hurts so much because I loved them, that church, so much.  My heart was there, had grown vessels and nerves, was pumping blood, deep-set in the chest of that church.  And then when we left, I had to cut it out. I sometimes wonder if my heart wi...

I wrote this last week before our one-year-old cat, Huck, got sick.  We had to put him to sleep Friday evening around 5:30.  I miss these moments with our little buddy. When I went out to run errands this morning, I almost didn't bring a jacket with me.  On an excessive whim, I snatched a tattered fleecy sweatshirt, the one with the cigarette hole in the elbow (I don't smoke, but I used to spend a lot of time on porchs with smokers).  The moment I stepped outside, I was reminded that it is no longer August - it was cool, lower 60s, a cold breeze and a lingering fog in the trees of the school yard.  I closed the door behind myself and quickly shoved into the sleeves, gathering the cloth around me. Summer is saying goodbye.  I know Ohio well enough to know there are still a few hot days ahead, but I know that Summer's grasp is gone.  And our short-lived beautiful Autumn is coming into her prime. It was a beautiful summer. Oh, for lots of rea...

Thoughts on Marriage Quiet Time Dave and I had a lot going on when we were first married: we were in a church that met at least three nights a week, we each had a full-time college class load, and we both had part time jobs.  But in June of 2010, we both got our degrees.  And in October of 2010, we left that busy church.  Our lives have quieted down a lot, and the quiet has been good for us. Dinner has become an important part of our evening rhythm.  We both get home from work at about the same time, and I put together a simple meal.  There's an unassuming melody to it, a gentle heartbeat.  I ask how many tator tots he wants, and he always says 15.  I knock on the study door when the food's about done, and he gets my silverware and napkin for me.  I hear the scraping legs of unfolding TV trays in the living room as I dish up his plate.  If it's early enough, we watch the news on PBS; if it's later, we watch Jeopardy and Wheel...

Several reasons. First: I've become an obsessive drafter. I have many ideas at various levels of conception in my blog cache, and I've only satisfactorily completed and published a fraction of them. Second: Graduating from college has snuck up on me, and it has included things like exit counseling for loans and repayment plans and figuring out how to take care of health insurance. It's a bunch of strangely adult and dead-dry boring tasks. Third: The past three weeks in particular have been devoted to a new writing project, something I'm hoping to put up here in chunks as it matures. When my grandmother began dying May 10th, I immediately began to take careful notes. She passed away the following Sunday, and I continued to take notes until long after my family privately wept over her urn that Friday. The project will be book-sized, and it will be an attempt to photograph my Dad's side of the family in that two week period. There are three motivations to this project:...

I'm generally comfortable in my own skin and satisfied to be myself. But if there's one thing I don't have, and am morose to be without, it's discernment. Dictionary.com describes it as "acuteness of judgment and understanding". Some of its synonyms are "shrewd" and "astute". My favorite synonym is "perspicacity". Solomon asked for discernment when God came to him in a dream and offered him anything he wanted. Proverbs can't stop yapping about those who are discerning ( here , here , here and then some). A man of discernment is considered knowledgable and wise . I have some friends that are perspicacious. I want to be a perspicacious person. And I am not. I wish that weren't the case, but that's just the fact of the matter. One of my dear friends has been going through some difficulties in her life over the past few months. The problems are all knotted up and intertwined, the strands gummed together and fraying, almost...

Prayer has wrought a mess of good havoc in my life. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how praying had boosted my self-confidence and given me a " holy spunk ". One of the essential ingredients to that lesson was the taking away of both a fear of Man and a desire to please Man; they were invaders in place of holy desires to fear and please God. An unexpected new issue has arisen in the wake: Apathy. And a resulting lack of motivation. I couldn't place where it came from at first, mostly because it neatly coincided with the end of Fall Quarter. But as the days passed, the apathy remained in atypical forms. I usually pack my schedule full of hangouts with different people, cramming in coffee with someone at every gap in my day. But for some reason now, even with multiple whole days free from work and school because of the break, I would feel no compulsion to schedule time with even a single person. It was such an uncharacteristic thing that I started asking questions about...

In her life, my grandmother has tried many tactics to get the love she longs for from her family.  She'll throw a fit at my brother's ballgame to draw attention.  She will show up unannounced on doorsteps.  Many Christmases I've received a set of "Thank You" notes under her tree.  She is generous; and often that generosity comes with fine print.  She works very hard in all the wrong ways to get the affection she's so desperate for. All my life she's been like a woman holding a handful of water, not understanding that the tighter she grips, the more drips away; rather than having more control, she only has less of it to hold. My grandmother is an intelligent and well-read woman who has been in church almost every single Sunday of her life.  I have no doubt that she's read and heard and been taught the story of the prodigal son many times.  And I wish so badly that she could've really listened to it and heard what the story had to say about who God i...

A few months ago, my boss took everyone in the office out for drinks to celebrate a new big client that one of the lawyers had just signed on.  We cheerfully paraded out of the office at 4:30, ready to drink to the occasion.  The evening sun sparkled through the tall bar windows on my glass of rum and coke as we swathed ourselves in a haze of laughter at the corner of the bar.  A few stools down the other legal receptionist, a middle-aged Southern blonde, politely declined the appetizers because her husband was already at home cooking dinner for her.  One of the lawyers joked that her husband was trying to get her in the mood; she replied with a smile and quickness, "He doesn't have to work that hard to get me in the mood."  We all laughed. That laughter has gone. At the beginning of October, she called off work one Thursday.  She had taken her husband to the hospital the previous night with severe abdominal pain, and the doctors couldn't identify the cause.  After se...

Normal is underrated. Three weeks ago, I had a cyst removed, and for the next week I was in post-scalpel misery.  Even while popping painkillers like Pez candy, I was rendered virtually immobile.  I couldn't lie on my back.  I couldn't walk.  I couldn't sit.  Not without pain rocketing throughout my body.  While lying on the floor with an oversized pillow and watching bad TV drama to distract from the throbbing, I often thought back to before, when I stupidly took those normal actions for granted. Those times without are when we understand the value of normal.  It's when I'm at the bottom of the deep end that I realize how sweet air is.  It's when I'm too busy to eat lunch that I get to dinner and remember how good food tastes.  Normal is a delicacy we've become accustomed to dining on. Being married to and loving Dave feels so normal now, almost alarmingly normal.  Telling him I love him is part of my daily routine.  Watching him sleep while I get ready...

Right about this time last year, Dave and I were sitting at a card table in the second story of his house on 12th Avenue making an attempt to whittle down our guest list.  We crunched the numbers together on Excel, both per head, and how much each head would cost to be there (food, cake, favors, beer, tablecloths...).  It was one of the more stressful days of our engagement, so we took a break to sit on the roof and watch a distant set of belated fireworks.  While we were out there, my pragmatic Dave had an epiphany. "So...by the time we add up the cost of everything involved in the wedding, how much will that cost in comparison to the stuff that we get?" I scuffed the shingles with my sandal.  "If you add up the bridal showers, bachelorette party and wedding presents together, we'll probably break even." "How does that make any sense?  Why not just use the money we have to get the stuff that we need?  Why all the extra stress?" I smiled and looked tow...

Marriage is: Someone Who Believes in You Girls have these weird things called hormones.  When  those IFAW commercials   come on showing the starving kittens and begging for donations, it's the hormones that make girls cry.   It takes a feeling like sympathy and tips the scale to tears.  And last week, hormones turned my uncertainty about my writing into full-blown paralysis and a tear-choked throat.  Squeakily I asked Dave to sit down and talk with me for a little while because I felt weird.  And with that quiet assurance of his, he laid down on the bed with his arm around me as I clung to him, tears slowly darkening his light blue shirt.  He waited until I was ready to talk, until enough of his warmth and strength had seeped into me to ask, "Do you think I have a shot at being a writer?" He rubbed my shoulder. "Of course I do.  I wouldn't be encouraging something I thought was a pipe dream."  He had cured me in fifteen perfect words. About Honesty Want a go...

Six months ago I put on a white dress and a ridiculously high pair of heels.  I walked down the aisle with my father wearing my mother's veil.  I met Dave at the altar, and we read the vows we had written to each other in front of nearly 300 of our friends and family.  I walked back out of the auditorium with Dave as "First Kiss" from The Last of Mohicans played over the sound of clapping.  We got out to the hallway and hugged each other until our attendants followed, shrieking with happiness for us.  I remember looking down at my new ring through the happy tears and spluttering, "Oh my God, it really happened!"  There was joy, such an awesome amount of joy, in those first five minutes. But there was no magic. Let me explain. I was raised in the church by Christian parents and graduated from a Christian high school.  At every moment in my young life, the wonder of marriage was on a sacred pedestal.  Living together with someone "in sin" was the unthin...

Every time I go to West Virginia it seems that I am being adopted by someone else's family. My high school friend Tabatha brought Amy and I down the week after our graduation to spend a week on the holler where her mother's side of the family lives. I talked Tabatha and Amy into piercing my ear for me, which I quickly regretted with loud obscenities when they picked a needle too small. Later that summer, my dad's then-fiance Leah drove us down to her parents' home for a weekend of card games and adventuring in the woods. That was the week Josiah convinced me to bike down their steep gravel driveway; I came limping back to the house with a bloody hip after I used it as a brake. This past weekend I was officially adopted into a happy mess of McCray, Matheny and Mitchell relatives at an annual family reunion that Dave's Granny Rena and her cousins hold in their small birthtown of Nitro, West Virginia. The wide Kanawha (KA-NAW) River cuts through the soft Appalachian fo...

I laid in bed at around six'o'clock in the evening a couple weeks ago, listening to the ceiling fan as I stared at the wall. It had been an exhausting week filled with a rainy birthday, a sinus infection, and not enough time with Dave. Earlier that afternoon he and I sat in the Lowe's parking lot for an hour wearily talking through ways we had let each other down and how to get through the rest of the school quarter. As I began to wake up from the three-hour afternoon nap we had taken together, I contemplated many things that fit into one general heading: Marriage is hard. Those who are married understand that small sentence with every fiber of their experience and being. Those who are not married may be aware of its truth, but the hard wisdom isn't in you until you're in it. But for me, the difficulties have been opening my eyes to see something about God and the importance - the beauty - of freedom in love. What's so strange about God is that He is both a pa...

there are days when I look at my blog and groan, thinking about the time it would take to sit down and write an entry, because I wouldn't write and post anything I didn't like or put myself into. and when I need an incentive to put something else up...I read the comments tagged onto the end of another long entry of mine, and remember there are people out there reading it and checking to see if I added something else. and the rush from that gets my creative juices going once more, remembering funny stories and thinking of the day's events, wondering if I can make it enjoyable for one of you guys to read. So, I've been assigned the task of cleaning my room. In other words, I pulled out my handy jackhammer and put on my trusty hard hat, just to be safe. I don't think you could understand - my room is a Teenage Junk Landfill. I wouldn't be surprised if I find something living under my dresser, once I finally work up the guts to reach my arm under there and I hope it...