You Break it, You Build it

***Warning: This is a much lengthier, more personal post.***

While September was, easily, a much better month for this family than August was (see the next post for the fun times we were able to have), I still haven't felt quite myself.

Of course I miss Dane and our relocation is taking its emotional toll, but the biggest reason has to be sleep deprivation.  With a month or more of irregular sleep patterns (due to illness, vacations and visits) Atticus and I had some really bad habits.  I'll spare you the details (they changed every day, anyway!)  The long and short of it is that we hadn't slept past 6 AM (and often hadn't slept past 5 AM) for weeks.

Sure, I have been sleep-deprived before.  Newborns are SO hard and I do not want to diminish that in any way.  But feeling like I had a newborn again, when he is, in fact, a toddler, and a completely healthy one at that, was extremely frustrating.  It began to have a disturbing effect on me: I felt more anger than I've ever felt before.  There were moments in the middle of the night that my emotions seemed uncontrollable.  I, honestly, was ashamed of the way I behaved and the thoughts I had.  And, in response, my self-loathing was, likewise, disturbing.  The words "unworthy," "monster," and "unlovable" were playing through my mind like a broken record in the days that followed.

Don't worry- Atticus is totally okay.  But it has been an eye-opening, painful experience to see just how very weak I am.

Here we are trying to make the best of a day after a particularly rough night.


We're big believers in faking it until you make it.  Doesn't always work but it did in this instance! :)

I have to admit, there were many nights where I didn't even feel worthy to pray and I felt very, very alone.  I've felt this way before, but never so often or for so long.  Needless to say, I've had a lot of time in the wee hours of the morning to do some thinking.  A lot of it was incoherent and probably irrational, but I wanted to record a few of them, if only for myself.  We'll see if they make any sense.

I've been watching a lot of building lately.  Whether it's blocks, videos of tractors (see the next post), or playing with toy cars and tractors, it consumes a lot of our time.  And when Atticus started playing with these toys, from my perspective, there was no rhyme or reason to it.  While I wanted to sort them all by color or size or make a nice tower or just delicately roll the cars back and forth,  Atticus's favorite thing to do was to knock it all over, throw them, or start hitting something with them (this is usually accompanied by a high-pitched "Oh no!")  When I made him some magnets-- thinking they'd be so educational and imagining the orderly way he'd play with them-- the very first (and second, third, and fourth!) thing he wanted to do was pull them apart.  He wanted to break them.  I was pretty frustrated and kept having to find ways to make them Atticus-proof.  No easy task.

I found myself thinking, "What are you doing?!  What's wrong with you?!  That's not how you're supposed to play with that!"  Ha ha, yes, the micro-manager came out in full force.  So on the surface, I answered those questions with the response, "Oh, he's just being a boy!"  Which is true.  Boys just play harder and more aggressively and it really is good to let them get out their energy (in healthy ways!)

I also thought to myself, "He needs to be able to experiment.  Don't shut him down or make it a crime to think outside the box."  This is also true- I think we often shut people down because they aren't playing, thinking, or operating the exact way we do.  Our unfamiliarity creates a sense of discomfort, so we discourage them.  And we could be missing out.  When I take a step back and just let him play, it really can be amazing to watch how his little mind works (he seriously looks at everything in an x-ray, inside-out way, wanting to "ope-it" or open them all).

But a deeper thought that has more recently occurred to me is that there's also an eternal principle at work here.  I think it can be summed up in the following way:  Breaking things is precisely the way that things-- better things-- get built.  I can think of many bad or even good things that have to be broken, sometimes even totally leveled, in order to build or create something beautiful and useful.  Here are a few:

• I had an archaeologist who would come present for my 7th graders every semester.  In every presentation, he would start by telling them that "Archaeology is, by its nature, destructive."  In order to uncover history and prehistory, you have to destroy anything that covers it.  But, by so doing, you unlock information and build knowledge. 
• Construction sites and all of the digging and holes that have to be dug in order to lay a firm foundation.  
• Farms and gardens require clearing the land of rocks, trees, and other impediments to get started.  You also need to break the ground to plant the seeds.
• Pruning trees.
• Any written work requires edit after painful edit in order to tear out the unnecessary and leave something coherent and worthwhile (ha ha, too bad I don't follow that pattern for these posts...)
• In fact, I imagine just about any artist has to painfully break/remove/change parts of their work and restart again and again in order to get their desired result.
• Even a dentist has to break/destroy parts of a tooth in order to rebuild it and make it serviceable again.

I recognize that none of this is new or revolutionary, but the concept has definitely been more meaningful as I've watched my little boy and seen him as a creator in the making.  It has certainly helped us to butt heads a little bit less (over playing, anyway!)

Then one Sunday morning it all came together.  I was headed to church when a song came on called Blessings by Laura Story.

As I heard some of the following lyrics, I began sobbing:

...what if your blessings come through raindrops
What if Your healing comes through tears
What if a thousand sleepless nights are what it takes to know You're near
What if trials of this life are Your mercies in disguise...

...We cry in anger when we cannot feel You near
We doubt your goodness, we doubt your love
As if every promise from Your Word is not enough
All the while, You hear each desperate plea
And long that we'd have faith to believe

As I listened to these words, I had two realizations.  

First, I was never alone.  Of course, I had known this in my mind, but it was just not registering in my heart for the month.  Indeed, all of the feelings of being alone had been a result of my distancing myself from Him.  It was and is never the reverse.

Second, I was in the hands of the Creator- the Master Builder.  And for whatever reason, I was being broken so that I could be built into something better.  

I had read about it before and mused over what a fascinating concept it was (C.S. Lewis has some amazing quotes about this in Mere Christianity and Jeffrey R. Holland gave an awesome talk given about broken things not too long ago).   But, after feeling so broken, this realization was more than a breath of fresh air.  It was a life line.

That's not to say that my little boy suddenly became a great sleeper.  Far from it.  But I am hopeful that, regardless of the number of REM cycles I experience each day, I will 1) think and behave a little better 2) be more willing to forgive myself  3) begin to see who and what I need to become as a result of being broken.