"Precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke

This blog, quite accidentally, turned into a blog about grief.


Sometimes I try to write exactly why that is, or what the point of writing about it is, or just get my arms around a loss quite as confounding as a divorce. I find myself-still-when I tell people that I’m divorced feeling like I want to somehow convey that I took my marriage vows very seriously, but also that I’m a much healthier, much happier person divorced than I was particularly at the end of my marriage. Why I stress over this, I don’t know-it’s beyond silly.

"We must trust in what is difficult.”

I have found myself recently trying to explain why this time of solitude, this time of falling into a sadness that had, to my mind, no conceivable end, why that is the ultimate grace of grief?

Here’s the thing: I wouldn’t trade it. I wouldn’t, if I could somehow reverse time, do anything differently. Being still was important. Not knowing the ending is important (as hard as that remains for me). Being alone is important.

Learning to be alone has been the biggest grace of all. Going to football games and sitting by myself, going out to dinner by myself, to the movies and shopping and all the things that I dreaded to do alone for some reason-I can’t quite remember why that seemed scary to me 3ish years ago but it did.

"I believe that that love remains so strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life.”

I’m not quite eloquent enough to state this in the way I want to, but my point is this: grief is a gift of grace. And it doesn’t seem like it at all, and it only seems sad and lonely. But, for me anyway, figuring out who I am when you strip away all that I defined myself as, it’s such ultimate joy.

I honestly intend to pivot the blog into a new space-and I always worry when it’s this sort of piece that insists itself to be written that I am again only seeming like that sad, lonely girl when I promise, I am anything but-but I want to give this a voice. I want my little corner of the universe to be stamped with this truth, always-holding the pieces of something that you loved is sad. It just is. But it’s also the beginning of who you get to become.

Ultimately, I grieved not only Nick and the loss of our family, but the loss of who Joy was as a wife. Taking the time to sit inside of that empty space and just let it live-it’s hard. But the reward of figuring out, well, okay, if I’m not that Joy, then who the heck am I? It’s worth it.

“Love consists of this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.”


*Quotes from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

But Do You Have A Plan?

Planning is my love language.

Sincerely. It’s my act of service to the world. It’s taken me 39 years and some therapy to learn that not everyone wants to be organized-this was a revelation to me. I knew that not all people were organized, of course, but I assumed that all people in the world deep down wanted to be organized, and have everything in its place. Coming to terms with the idea that not everyone is at least striving for order-it was (is) a mind-blowing thought.

For me, order is my coping mechanism. I would have been adjusting the drapes as the Titanic sank. The more out of control something feels inside of my life, the more I place my routine around it. See: my hair.

So anyway, this is one of my favorite times of year, middle of August, weather just starting to turn a bit, planning out all of my fall decorating and activities-and, of course, the girls and I getting back into the routine of school and sports and dance and piano. Even though summer is gloriously fun, and it is so nice to have a break from homework and just lay around and swim and read a lot, the three of us do best with a routine, and fall provides that for us.

(We have learned to lighten our schedule in the past year, and concentrate on only the activities that are bringing us joy. But that’s a different blog post.)

Because I basically live my life on a school calendar schedule still, fall is when I buy my planner for the year. In the past four years I have bought an Erin Condren paper planner. I loved the look of Erin Condren. The paper planner lives on our kitchen island, to serve as a reference point for the girls (and sometimes my parents) as to what is going on when. Everyone has their own color so you know immediately if the activity includes you. This suited us.

However, this year when I began my planner shopping, I wanted something a little different (not a lot different). I still wanted the look of the Erin Condren planner-spiral bound and sturdy paper and the vertical layout-but I wanted to customize the layout. I wanted each of the girls to have their own space-I didn’t want to be wedded to using the different colors because, while it’s pretty to look at, it’s time consuming to write everything out in different pens, and really, we are the only people who ever look at it.

I ended up getting a Plum Paper planner and I am delighted with it. It has a similar look to Erin Condren (the only thing I really miss is the rose-colored spiral binding). I was able to break each day out into a space for me, Betsy, and Felicity, as well as a space for work, meal plans, and the blog, which was exciting and somewhat grownup. There’s also space for anything extra that might not fit those categories.

When I added in all of our fall activities, I did use the colors, but I’m fairly sure that going forward I’m not going to-it isn’t necessary anymore, and I actually like the look of the black pen on white paper.

Plum Paper was significantly cheaper than Erin Condren as well (I spent $40 as opposed to $80). Overall, I’m very pleased with it.

The other calendar that I use on a regular basis is the Cozi app. This lives on my phone, and also on Nick and Jenifer’s phones, and Betsy’s phone. It’s a shared calendar so that we know when the girls’ activities are-it would work well for anyone that you want to share your calendar with, but I would especially recommend it for co-parenting. It saves us a lot of back and forth about when the girls are available.

I could go on and on. For me, laying something out is the best and easiest way to know what is coming. It’s cool if planning isn’t your thing. But if you are struggling with balancing your schedule, those are two of the easiest ways that I know of to get your arms around it.

And for now, I’m super excited for football Friday night and the idea that it’s nearly time to get out all the pumpkins and I am most blessed to be going into another school year with my favorite girls, which will surely be full of all the things, and we will hope for more good than bad, and savor all of this time together.

Fear of Falling...

Remember in January when I said 2018 was going to be my year of being brave?

One week ago today, being brave was climbing a rather rickety ladder up 25 feet in the air and flipping around on a trapeze as if I had the slightest notion what I was doing.

The old Joy would probably not have tried. She definitely would not have actually succeeded in doing a backflip off on the bar. Why is that?

Certainly part of it is that I am in better shape than the old me-that cannot be denied. But also I have become a tad bit fearless. As I climbed that ladder I told myself that even if I fell down and made an idiot of myself, what did it matter? I would have tried. I would have proved to myself that I am willing to take a risk. That’s a tricky thing for me, trusting that risks won’t always end in hurt. Or that even if they do, I won’t break from said hurt.

Two weeks I got to hear Lysa TerKurst speak (because of this sometimes amazing thing called the internet). Lysa is the most profound speaker and teacher that I have simply stumbled upon on my own journey through this maddening grief and rebirth cycle I’ve been on. I’ve mentioned the First 5 app that I use for my devotions a couple of different times-Lysa is the head of Proverbs 31 ministries, of which First 5 is a part. Lysa’s teachings reach some part of my soul that is aching to understand my faith in the context of loss.

Her teaching, the one that I was listening to as I was washing my hair two weeks ago, her teaching was about continuing in the face of disappointment. I listened as she weaved a tale of theological teachings and grand ideas about faith and sin and ultimate redemption, and then she got to the bit where she tied this into her own story of loss and disappointment. Her story of her husband’s betrayal, and of what that sort of disappointment does to your soul, and how on earth you take that and move on and change somehow for the better.

Sometimes I feel so ridiculous for how hard my divorce was on my heart. In reality, my divorce was a healthy and necessary part of my life. I don’t go into all of the bits and pieces of the bad in my marriage. But rest assured, I do know, somewhere, in the back of my mind, I’m this new and different person, physically and emotionally and even somewhat spiritually, because…because. How many different ways can I teach myself that I’m a better person for letting go of this notion that holding onto something that was causing me nothing but hurt and pain and misery in the end was a brilliant idea?

I’m none too sure. But flipping around on a trapeze bar, being told by the instructor that I’m flying so well-somehow that’s a piece of it. My sister and my brother-in-law at one point said to me, “This is the new Joy.” And I know that seems silly-I know that my family in no way at all blames me for ending my marriage-but it’s like, it means the world to me that they have my back. That they have embraced all of these changes, even the ones that probably seem a little crazy and somewhat vain.

Spending an entire week in a fifteen passenger van with your entire family can get a little hairy. You’re cramped, you only have certain snack foods, and, if you are me, you only have a little bit of data on your phone that you have to hoard for uploading pictures. Tensions run high. It can be especially easy for me to feel like a kid, the only one on the trip without a spouse, without someone else to act like my crazy is somehow divorced and different from the rest of my family’s crazy. I drive everyone a bit batty because I can’t quite help myself from talking so much and so loudly.

But on a trapeze in the middle of absolutely nowhere, Massachusetts, I flipped and flew and served as some sort of metaphor for figuring out life 3 years after a bomb detonated and tore life all to bits.

Maybe there is no real difference between flying and falling.