Revelation

We sat on the sofa together facing our marriage counselor in her too-small office.

It was only 2 weeks into our counseling and she asked my husband a question.

“Have you ever been on medication for your ADD?”

I thought we’d be going around and around about the reasons why I’d had an affair and how we could get through it as a married couple. Instead, after addressing some initial big problems our therapist honed in on Chad’s lifelong struggle with ADD.

“Yeah, Ritalin when I was a kid,” he told her. “But not since about the second grade.”

“You’ve lived your whole life up to this point withOUT medication?” she asked, amazed. And then added, “How’s that working for you?”

As they openly discussed Chad’s ADD, his symptoms and his feelings of failure I watched my husband’s face. He was relieved to finally be able to talk about it and for someone else to acknowledge the severity of the disorder, how it can affect relationships and work habits.

Could we finally be getting to the bottom of some of our communication issues? The sarcasm? The anger? I thought. I knew my contribution to our marital mess was tantamount to marriage suicide and his symptoms of ADD were in NO WAY equal to what I had done. But even so…

Things began to finally make sense for both of us.

We left that appointment with a phone number to a psychiatrist and a recommendation from our therapist for Chad to try medication.

It’s Not Funny

When we got married 13 and a half years ago, we always joked about Chad’s ADD. That by the time he was 18 he’d had more jobs than years he’d been alive. That he always lost his keys, never would be on time, and that he misplaced his wallet daily.  We would laugh at his constant change of subjects, about the way he “interrupted himself” during most conversations, and about his lack of respect for authority. We were proud that his ADD contributed to his artistic tendencies: his love for music and songwriting. He was always the life of the party…

Until it all became not funny anymore. For either of us.

He would regularly get frustrated at his own inability to stay focused and would apologize almost immediately after a sarcastic remark had left his mouth.  He became disappointed in himself at not being able to function like most other men: Type-A, calculating, and organized. He had trouble sleeping at night and would often experience night terrors (sleep disorders can be a symptom of ADD) and had difficulty turning “off” his brain at the regular time at night. He could never conquer the piles of paperwork that towered on his desk at work and transferred his feelings of inadequacy into an I-don’t-care attitude.

Crowds agitated him. Chaos made him nervous. Too much noise made him edgy.  And details? Too many details almost sent him into a catatonic state.

I couldn’t count on him to pay the bills because he’d forget. I was forever making excuses for our delays because he was always late, without calling. He’d simply forget he had to be home.  He regularly did things like locking his keys in the car or locking himself out of the apartment, which, to my own frustration, I would have to fix. I’d call his name repeatedly and he’d ignore me.  I’d ask him a question and he wouldn’t answer, but tell me a story about something he read in a magazine earlier. He used sarcasm and belittling words as a defense mechanism.

He couldn’t protect me or take care of me because he could barely take care of himself.

And I had no idea how to take care of him either: a grown man with ADD that needed different things than other husbands might.

Like a Box of Cheerios

One morning in our apartment, Chad tried to open a box of Cheerios for breakfast.

He fought with the inane plastic inner bag for a moment and POOF! The bits of cereal exploded all over the floor and found themselves into every corner of the tiny kitchen.

Too. Many. Pieces.

He froze. He couldn’t deal with all the little details that cleaning up an entire box of Cheerios would entail. There were just too many.

I screamed and laughed and offered to help sweep while he held the dust pan.  He couldn’t even do that much.

He walked out of the room leaving me in the middle of a pile of cereal.

He describes ADD like a hundred radio stations all on, all at once in his brain. Listening to me is like trying to tune a single station at once while all the others are playing music and vying for his attention.  It’s exhausting at best and nearly impossible at the worst.

And the Cheerios are the details that he has no hope of ever organizing. There are just too many so instead of trying to do what he can, his tendency (symptomatic of ADD sufferers) is merely to do nothing.

Hope

Chad saw that psychiatrist and she listened to him. She offered him a bit of hope in the form of a new (at the time) medication called Concerta.  Unlike Ritalin, which had to be taken once every 4 hours — impossible for someone who forgets everything to remember to consume — Concerta was a once a day med, taken in the morning and would wear off by bedtime.

Chad lived the first 29 years of his life and the first 7 years of our marriage like that. When he started medication everything began to change.

On Monday you’ll get to hear from Chad and I will also be giving suggestions on how to live in the same house with an adult sufferer of ADD. I’m not a therapist or a psychiatrist, but I’ve lived with my husband for 13 years and we’re learning, together, to navigate the ADD waters.

[Note: Before you send me a bunch of crazy emails, I'm NOT advocating medication for EVERYONE and I'm not talking about PARENTING a child with ADD. I'm only talking about being a spouse of an ADD sufferer. Even though ADD can be hereditary, neither of our girls has been diagnosed yet.]

Any thoughts?  Is anyone else out there married to or close to an adult with ADD?

Chad is writing about ADD and folding laundry on his blog today. Go read!

We watch a lot of PBS in my house. And my daughter (eight-years-old and counting) is drawn to the cooking shows.

Amazing because I’m a “fix-it” meal preparer, I fix dinner. I don’t cook it. My family eats heathfully and well, but I don’t spend hours over the stove like the women on TV that make cooking an art. I just don’t. (cue the let-me-send-you-my-meal-plan emails).

Together we watch Barbeque University, Julia Child, Lidia’s Italy or America’s Test Kitchen. And its the sauces that get me. Always the sauces. The patience and waiting and endurance that goes into the sauces.

A large pot. Add ingredients. Use a wooden spoon to stir it all around and then simmer. All day. Or all afternoon at the least. The ingredients that enter the pot at the start of the cooking experience are the same ones that enter your mouth during dinner, but they don’t taste the same.

The cooking, the heat, the simmering has changed the ingredients.

The tomato has taken on the flavor of the basil, the onions have melded with the garlic. And the sugar? The sugar has done something to everything else in the pot.

The end result is beautiful.

Am I making you hungry yet?

Someone emailed me about this post and said:

“[There is a] fine line between being a child of God with a hopeful future and being a child of God that has this as a defining moment in her Christian walk. I don’t want this to define me but there is NO WAY to separate my walk with God from it. No way to separate my new marriage…from it. No way to separate my new perspective on life and my kids from it.”

Our stories can’t be separated from our lives and our perspectives just like I can’t separate the tomato from the garlic at the end of the afternoon. So live in that. We can see the past, the things we’ve done and the things that have been done to us, as a certain seasoning. Let the past be the pepper or garlic that makes the sauce speak up.

And then there’s story.

I couldn’t tell my story the month after or even the year after I’d lived it. I was too raw. I hadn’t simmered yet.

It took me nearly six years in stages: telling a couple friends, speaking to my women’s group at church, then sharing on this blog last August.

If we allow our experiences and personality flaws to be handed over to the Holy Spirit, then He works beautiful magic with them. He simmers them and let’s their tastes intersect with one another to become something entirely different (and better) than what He began with. He is the Creator. He can create that sort of magic in a person’s heart.

So if you have a story, and we ALL do, let it simmer. Let it cook. Be patient. It might take all afternoon or even all day.

But I promise, after God has shaved off all the raw grief and hurt, after you have come around again to look at it with new eyes, you’ll be ready to share.

Are you sharing your story yet? Or does it need more time to simmer?

[If you've shared your story on your blog, leave the link here in your comment so we can read where you've come from.]

Oh yeah.

None of us really want to do that.

To stand naked in front of the metaphorical mirror and nitpick myself.

I’m sagging here. I’m chubby over here. And look at that, I never noticed that line before.

And then the realization that

It

Will

Only

Get

Worse.

It doesn’t get better from here. Gravity. Time. Age. Cookies.

[sigh]

[another sigh]

My husband knows when I’m defeated when I let out a long, depressed-sounding breath.

“I can’t find anything to wear” is code for “Nothing fits me the way it used to.” I think after 13 and a half years of marriage he understands my cryptic speak.  “You look great, honey.” He says. “I like that sweater the best,” as he points to the bed, cast-off clothes piled on the end.

But I still have to look at ME.

In that mirror.

And I will look at me.  And I will look at my heart. Because unlike my mid-thirties body,

A heart

Can

Get

Better.

So many times I want to look the other way, pull on a pair of pajama pants and a big sweatshirt over the curt words, the frustrated thoughts at why-did-he-leave-his-stuff-all-over, and the single-mindedness of me. I want to rummage in my own closet through clothes on hangers to find the right face to wear, the right words to say, the perfect expression for my mouth.

But instead, I need to look directly at my heart and discover what needs to change in me. What do I need to fix to be the girl that God needs me to be for my husband, my daughters and my friends? I need to look at myself in the harsh florescent lights and let Him know me, search me.

Can I change the impatience? Can I change the procrastination? Can I change the sometimes-laziness? Can I fix the sour thoughts? Is there hope for me? Or am I destined to submit to time and allow myself to get worse and worse until I tumble into the bitterness of convalescent homes?

No.

Open my nakedness up to the One who created me. Open up the ugly corners of my heart, the things I think I hide from Him.  Stand in front of Him and allow Him to do the changing and then be willing to do the work. I have to look at myself, but with God as the filter and the catalyst for change.

What do you think? Is it hard or easy to look at yourself “naked”?

***The winner of the Illuminate necklace is Jordan:

“electricity! What would we do without it? And it isn’t until we loose power that we realize how precious it is.”

Congrats Jordan! Enjoy!

And if you didn’t win, you can buy the Illuminate necklace HERE.

Last weekend we visited the snow.

[Which means we pile the kids in the car, set the GPS, drive one hour north and then sit in stopped traffic on the highway with the rest of Southern California with their ill-prepared rain boots and tennis shoes doubling for all-weather winter footwear. One hour turns into three]

At one point we almost turned around. Oh wait, we did turn around because someone in my car thought that “it might be better to try to find a way around the traffic.” The secret road turned out to be closed because of mudslides from the week before. We’d already sunk two hours in the trip so got back in the line headed up the mountain.

Toward the snow.

Toward the thousands of crazy people headed toward the ski resorts.

We just wanted a sled run and a clear place to make a few snow angels.

There was whining. And a hundred when-will-we-be-theres.  There were sibling arguments and marital arguments. There was one [loving] I-Told-You-So. There was Scrabble on the iPhones. The cars were moving so slow and were so close together that we could ALL hear the music and cursing of the guys in the truck in front of us. [Thankyouverymuch for teaching my children some new words]

Three and a half hours from door to illegal parking spot.

When we finally got there the kids took off toward the hills, and un-used to snow, promptly found themselves hip deep in the stuff. In an I-can’t-put-my-arms-down moment, my three-year-old lost her boot in the quicksandy snow and my eight-year-old plunged her right foot into a knee deep puddle of unfrozen water.

Right off the bat.

No harm. We found the hidden boot, we sloshed in the wet one and we sledded. We built a no-faced, no-armed snow man (or woman?) and we sledded some more. We got snow in our hair, we dodged the uncontrolled descents of unpracticed adults on kid-sized snow discs and we even got a little sunburned.

We forgot the three and a half hours in the car: the whole morning WASTED for a measly 80 minutes of snow play.

Or not.

Wasted?

Thirst and a need for a toilet sent us back to the car. Oh, and wet gloves, a freezing eight-year-old foot and snow down the back of my jeans (after wedging myself inadvertently in a snowy birm after a trip down the hill).

All of that time, all of that gas, all of the whining. Was it a waste?

Never. Because we had an adventure.

My kids will remember the white brilliance of the late morning on the snowy hill and not the long car ride. They won’t even remember us turning around to find a “better way” probably.  They’ll remember the cold snow on their tongues, holding my hand as we walked up the hill, and laughing as we watched Hope tumble off the disc, her long, tangled hair a halo against the white.

They will remember that we skipped church [gasp] to take a family day, and that it’s okay to do that once in awhile.

We paid three and a half hours to receive a little over an hour of family memories. Forever memories. Adventure memories. Memories that can’t be purchased in the same way ever again. And the memories are ours alone and will become part of the culture of our tiny family.

No one can take that from us.

A simple story and a simple truth.

Adventure’s worth is incalculable.

What will be your adventure today?

Last week we had a family photo shoot. My in-laws, my other in-laws, the cousins.

They were only in the country until Thursday so we had to make every day count.

And as we are pulling up to the park for the session, the rain drops begin signaling the first big storm of the year.  Our photographer, if she hadn’t known our family for so long, would have called the shoot. Canceled. She normally doesn’t do shoots in January for this exact reason.

But we did it anyway. We hurried, got wet, and a little muddy.

And she was semi-frustrated. Like any good photographer would be.

Not. Enough. Light.

The clouds came in dark and consuming on a Sunday afternoon, far earlier than nightfall. She kept snapping photos and kept looking at her digital screen with pain on her face.

“I don’t know if any of these are going to turn out,” she said to us.

Illuminate.

It’s what the sun does. It’s what she expected the afternoon light would do to our faces, shining through the sheer umbrellas the children twirled and making their eyes glow.  Illuminate. To give light to something. A camera captures not just smiles and families, but the God-given, earth-born light that we all take for granted.

I’m so excited that I get to show you one of my friend, Lisa Leonard’s new designs.  Her Illuminate necklace.

It is breathtaking.

And guess what?

I get to give one to one of you.

We’re going to try something new this time. To enter, leave a comment about something, just like light, that you take for granted. And then, if you want a SECOND entry, go and follow Lisa on twitter. Come back and leave a comment that you did so and you’ll be entered a second time. Giveaway will close at 9pm Tuesday night.

Super easy.

[Remember, to be entered that 2nd time, you have to 1- follow Lisa on Twitter and then 2- come back and leave a comment HERE that you did it.]

What do you take for granted?

This morning you can find me in the corner of my Starbucks, cozy with a Venti and the rain dripping down the windows.

It’s on a big street so when I get sick of writing  I watch cars.  Or Twitter. They’ve rearranged the seats in here so I can hole up in the corner in a a soft chair AND have an outlet nearby. Perfection.

Or later today you might find me in my living room with my almost four-year-old. We will be watching The Berenstain Bears and playing War with playing cards on the sofa.  The dog might be sleeping on the floor next to us.

Maybe you’ll find me washing dishes or tap tap tapping on my laptop getting a blog post ready for the next day.  You might find me texting a friend or returning some emails. I might be editing some photos or helping my second grader with her Lighthouse project for school.

I do all these things, but I am not the sum of what I do. Or what I’ve done.

I know I’ve written about this before but I want to clarify something because a few weeks ago a former reader emailed me and said this:

“I’m sick of hearing you talk about your affair. Get over it, will you?”

And then she promptly unsubscribed from my email feed.

That’s fine. I know people do that. I get the email notifications.

But it actually made me think about something. I don’t want to be the girl who camps in the past, who can’t look forward, who has to use her “problems” or her sin to create her identity today. I don’t want to be that girl.

I don’t want to wear my sin like a badge.

Because I’m not proud of it. I am proud of the grace God has bestowed on me, but I am not proud of my sin. I never will be.

But here’s the thing.

It is part of me. It just is.

Call it a consequence or a catalyst but it will always be a part of me. Just like my childhood, my relationship with my sister, the fact that I didn’t go to my grandfather’s funeral when I was 10, going to church 3 times a week growing up, attending a Christian college, my best friend, Ralna, from 4th grade, throwing away the cookie a little boy baked for me when I was six-years-old.

Those are all parts that make up who I am.

So I’m not going to be the girl that camps in the past (because God knows none of us want to listen to Milli Vanilli and wear Doc Martens again) and I will not wear my sin like a I-Can-Weave-A-Basket patch, sewn on my shirt with the careful, even stitches of my mother.

I will however, let the GRACE of God that was given to a woman wretched and sin-ridden continue to cover me, refresh me and renew me. And if I have to recall that time, if I speak of God’s grace to others and use my own life as an example, if I write God’s story in a book, then I will. If God gives me the honor of talking to some of YOU who have doubts in your marriage, who have gone through the storm or who have visited Hell like I have, then I am truly humbled. I welcome it and pray that God continues to give me wisdom as I talk to you.

But I won’t camp there because in reality, even if I’m in the plush corner at Starbucks, I’m living in the middle of Grace.

What do you think? What is the balance between living in the past and living in Grace?

(If you want to read my story, click here.

If you want to email me, sarah at sarahmarkley dot com.

If you want to twitter or facebook, then clicky clicky.)

Don’t talk to me in the morning.

At least if it is Monday through Friday, from 6:45 to about 7:35.

Coffee doesn’t even help.

Let me explain. I’m not grumpy. I’m just focused. I’m a goal-oriented person. I move from A to B and do everything that needs to happen in between in order to get me (or my family in this case) to our goal: leaving for school.

I make lunches, take a shower (perhaps), get kids dressed, teeth brushed, hair brushed, breakfast eaten, dog walked and fed, and anything else that needs to be done in to make the goal, leaving for school, happen.

I’m not grumpy. Really I’m not. But I am focused. If Chad tries to tell me a nice story or ask me about the upcoming weekend, or wants me to listen to a song he’s written, it really can’t be between the times of 6:45 and 7:35 in the morning.  In reality, if it doesn’t contribute to our goal, leaving for school, then it has to wait.

I’m just wired that way. I’m aware of it, and I’m also aware that I have to be flexible living in a house with probable THREE non-goal-oriented individuals.

Because the older I get the more I realize that people matter much more than getting something done.

Relationships are the only thing we’ll take into the next world.

We won’t take things to heaven, money or degrees. I can’t count my blessings using the measure of how-many-things-I’ve-ticked-off-my-list. I can’t pack my heart full of goals I’ve completed.

But I can pack it full of people. And conversations. And smiles.

And while, yes, we still have to leave for school on time, we still have to pile the mini-van full of girls, french braids and pink back packs, I can prepare myself for the hectic mornings. I can remember that children’s hearts are important and their routines are secondary. I can remember that my husband’s face is memorable, and I won’t remember tomorrow if I left at 7:35 or 7:36 today.

If I want a real to-do list, one that really matters, I should fill it full of names of friends to call, to write and to hug. I should think about our futures and not our pasts. It should be a list of things I can do to pour into the lives of my children, my family and the people I might meet during the day. I should make a list of people I need to thank or apologize to. My real to-do list should have the games my kids want to play with me on the floor in front of the TV, the names of each of their dolls, and what they don’t like about the boy who sits near them in class.  It should have the desires and dreams that belong to my husband, the prayers and needs of my sister and my mother-in-law’s favorite stores.

What a overwhelming list!

Maybe.

Or maybe I will just be pleasantly surprised at how much I actually get done keeping PEOPLE in mind over things.

Do you need to make a new list today?

I walked all day beside him but by the time we got home last night, I felt like I hadn’t seen him at all.

We took the day off of work and school to farewell the cousins and our sister- and brother-in-law before they head back to England this week. It was our last hurrah.

So we battled the tornado warnings and a torrential lunchtime downpour to win as a prize a crowd-free day at Disneyland. Ten minute waits on all the big rides and most of them we simply walked on. It took more time for eleven people to make a decision WHICH ride to go on than it did actually waiting in line for it.

And all day long, I was near my husband but never with him.

He was distracted by theological talks with our brother-in-law and with emails and text messages from his office. I was distracted by disciplining combinations of five different kids (only two of which were my own) and by making sure we had all the people with us all of the time. We were all distracted by the rain, wet feet and cold hands.

Yet we plunged on (very literally) and came out of a ride in the early afternoon to a bright blue sky.

Hurry. Let’s hit all the rides we can. No one’s here. The rain has stopped (temporarily) and we can walk without splashing in ankle-deep puddles.

And yet the whole time, he and I were busy holding little hands and we ourselves never held hands. We barely hugged each other and we certainly didn’t get a minute to spare for ourselves.

I know. This is how these things go and I wasn’t really expecting anything different. But we got to the end of the day with soaking socks and we realized that we’d completely missed each other. We lived the whole day together but we never

really

saw

each

other.

How can I live in someone’s presence but not really acknowledge him?

How can I live in Someone’s presence but not really acknowledge Him?

I just did.

How many days do I live saying I follow Christ, acting like I follow Christ, wearing my Christianity like a wedding ring, but I do not live like I’m really in love with Him. I don’t walk next to Him. I don’t look for Him in the crowd. I don’t speak to Him in the soft, kind words I would use inside my home. In fact, I may not speak to Him at all.

There are days that this is true. Sadly.

But I don’t want to spend another day like this: living with Him, yet not living for Him.

I have to remove the distractions, pull on some rainboots, and focus on the Who of Who He is.  I have to keep in my mind constantly that I am His, that I only live in relationship to Him and that my whole life is made up of steps that should follow Him. I have to live remembering that He is always there.

Because honestly, sometimes I forget.

I have to actually look at Him to really see Him.

What about you? Do you ever feel like this?

When it rains in Southern California, Californians duck inside.

Malls are empty, people don’t walk their dogs, some people keep their kids home from school, and a lot of us don’t own umbrellas. None of us wear rain boots, we don’t know what rain COATS look like and if we’re hungry, we order pizza or Chinese delivery.

And God forbid if it rains on a Sunday because if it does, the pews will be vacant.

I’m exaggerating a little, but in reality, we really don’t know what to do with “weather”.

Now if I lived in another part of the world, perhaps like where my sister-in-law lives, I might have my own pair of Wellies and a bucket by the front door full of umbrellas. Each of my kids would have all-weather coats and wouldn’t be tempted to splash in puddles because puddles are as old hat to them as tumbleweeds are to us.

Rain wouldn’t stop us in our tracks because rain would be a part of our lives on a daily basis.

Weather scares Californians because we aren’t used to it.

And I do all I can to make my life as comfortable as possible. Don’t you? I don’t like change. I don’t like a lack of routine. And I do NOT like having to dodge the water-filled potholes that the rain creates.

It’s only because I’m scared. And whenever I’m scared of something it stops me.

Like a Californian on a freeway when it drizzles.

I look at my life and wonder where I’m stopped or flooded. I’m such a rain pansy. Where have I let the fear of spinning out or getting caught in a pothole take over?

“STORM WATCH 2010″ I laugh to myself.

Am I stuck in the same ministry because I’m worried I won’t be good at anything else? Am I fearful of beginning new friendships because I think [gasp] she might not like me once she finds out all my junk?  Do I not say the hard thing to someone because I’m afraid that they might stop wanting to hang out? Or what about my future? Am I scared to trust God with my whole future because I’m scared of what He might ask me to do?

I’m so dang comfortable sometimes that I know I’m not used to the deluge of rain. I just want to duck inside, light a fire in my gas fireplace and make myself  a cup of coffee.

Oh, but the rain, the abnormal, out-of-character Orange County rain is so good for us. It makes our hills green, it refills our reservoirs, and it for sure creates the need in us to come out of our comfortable, dry-weather lives.

So I have to welcome the rain, the out-of-the-ordinary, change-inducing rain. I have to ask the Lord to alter me, to put me in situations that cause me to think on my feet and to function outside of the routine within which I am comfortable.

It is the only thing that will get me from here to where I want to be: comfortable in a rain coat and Wellies.

Are you a rain sissy? Do you resist change?

They say you can’t choose your family.

I say that you MUST.

Their cousins have been here for almost a month.

They’ve been establishing new connections, creating memories and arguing once in awhile too.

Their cousins live in another country and my kids don’t have the luxury to see them on weekends or for birthday parties or for Easter egg hunts. We live from infrequent visit to infrequent visit, meanwhile attempting to bridge the seven thousand mile distance with phone calls and emails.

So I’ve been upending our schedule, pushing and squishing and trying to squeeze out every extra minute we can spare so they all can play together. We’ve been to the park, horseback riding, to church, to the nail salon, and everywhere in between trying to give them TIME.

Adults can seem to make do better without time. It moves faster for us so while the prospect of having to wait a year to see someone is difficult, it isn’t unbearable. For my kids, when their cousins get back on the plane for England this Thursday, it will be as if the world has stopped.

When they’re adults, their memories of knowing their cousins won’t be a jumble of a long string of afternoons at the pool or summers at the beach.  They will never have the chance to just be “thrown together” in the big middle of a bunch of adults celebrating the fourth of July, running barefoot through the yard with sparklers. I think their memories, instead, might be distinct, like trips in photo albums, rich with purpose and intentional interactions.

I suspect when they are a bit older they’ll spend time on their own email accounts, sharing photos and making video calls.  But that too will have to be intentional friendship.

They will have to choose to be friends, choose to be family.

I hope that being so far apart will teach them a different aspect of family and friendship:  in order to establish real relationship for a lifetime you must choose to love a person, even if he or she is in your own family. Family must be chosen and those relationships must be sought after with intention.

You are stuck with your parents, your sister and brothers, your in-laws and your cousins. You had no hand in selecting who these people would be. So, in a way, you can’t choose your family. However, to be family, really family, you MUST choose them. On a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. We must choose to love, to listen, to fellowship, to do life with them.

Do you agree? Can you choose your family?