Welcome to the Funny Farm (21 page)

Lose the Loose Ends

I
F ONLY SPLIT ENDS AND LOOSE ENDS HAD MORE IN COMMON.

When it comes to split ends, all I have to do is change shampoos, get a haircut, or wear a hat.

Loose ends are another story.

My life seems filled with loose ends. I'm talking about projects I've started or things I need to take care of that just keep hanging around. And around. And around. Not even the Energizer Bunny is as persistent as some of the loose ends in my life.

My house is filled with unfinished projects. There are chairs to be painted and clothes to be donated and articles to be written. Last spring I bought draperies for the living room. They've been sitting in a bag on the floor in the corner for months.

And then there's that thing I do with photo frames. I buy them. I display them around my home. The thing I never seem to get around to doing is filling them with photos of real-life people I know and love.

In fact, if you come to my house, glance at a sofa table, and see a framed photo of an attractive person with cover-girl looks on par with Christie Brinkley's, then turn to me and say, “Who's this?” there's a chance that I will answer, “Oh, that's my mom” or “that's my daughter.” There's also a good chance I'll shrug my shoulders and confess I have absolutely no earthly idea. That's because you'll be looking at a photo of some anonymous model hired by the company that sells the frames.

So you can see that I have lots of good intentions.

Sometimes I run a little short on results.

Which I guess is okay, except for the fact that all this “unfinished business” can make me feel overwhelmed. In fact, sometimes my loose ends get so numerous that I can't go five minutes without stumbling over one of them and feeling, well, sort of undone by all the details that keep slipping through the cracks.

I guess I could try to get more organized. That would be one approach. I've tried before, of course, and it hasn't worked, but I'm willing to try one more time. (FYI: If I ever DO succeed and become a paragon of organization, you'd better get right with God because this is definitely a Sign And Wonder, perhaps even of the Last Days variety, which means there may be merely hours, even minutes, before Jesus returns.)

I guess the other thing I could do while I'm thinking about getting organized is relax a little. Loose ends aren't the end of the world, right? I mean, BIG loose ends like forgetting my kids and leaving them standing in the carpool line over spring break is something to be avoided, but maybe LITTLE loose ends like the fact that visitors think I'm related to Christie Brinkley aren't the shameful failures I tend to think they are.

That's the real problem right there, isn't it? That feeling of failure. You see, when I have unfinished projects hanging around, I start to wonder if I'm a big fat failure. I think of the sterling work ethic on which our Great Country was founded, and I start to hear fifes and drums and a patriotic voice-over that sounds uncannily like George C. Scott saying, “Would Betsy Ross have unfinished draperies lying on HER living-room floor for six months? Would Caroline Ingalls be four months late on a writing deadline? Would Martha Washington have photos of toothy blonde models sitting on her coffee table? Of course not!”

But on better days—when I remember to ask the Lord to quiet the yammering jaws of George and any other accusing voices in my head—I'm able to think of my unfinished projects in a brand-new light.

After all, I'm not the only one around here with an unfinished project. There's someone else I know who specializes in Works-In-Progress, which is just another way of saying Not-Done-Yet, and HE'S not a failure. In fact, he's Lord of Lords and King of Kings, and the biggest unfinished project he's got going on at the moment that I happen to be aware of is, well, me.

So there it is, the simple truth that brings me comfort and hope. It's like Paul wrote to the Philippians: “For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus” (1:6
NASB
).

So the next time I see something I'm still working on, I'm not going to feel bad. I'm going to take it as a reminder that I'm not so different from that unstitched cloth, that I'm a work-in-progress, that I'm in good hands.

I'm also going to stop beating myself up about the things I've yet to finish. I take after my Father, after all, and you know we creative types just can't be rushed.

49

Boy Crazy

K
AITLYN IS ON THE PHONE WITH A
B
OY.

His name is John and he's been calling every day now for a couple months, and they would both be MORTIFIED if they knew I was writing about them this very minute.

I'm not sure I'm ready for this. Anybody out there got any suggestions?

How did this happen? I mean, it wasn't all that long ago my sister and I were sprinkling glitter on the windowsill trying to convince Kaitlyn that's where the tooth fairy got into the house.

A couple years before that, Kaitlyn was starting every morning by crawling out of her crib, padding to my bed, patting me awake with her hand, and saying, in a very measured and articulate manner for a two-year-old, “I want SOMEthing to eat and SOMEthing to drink and carTOONS on TV.”

Before that she used to sit in her diaper in the front of the supermarket cart and gnaw on animal crackers and frozen broccoli (yes, I said frozen broccoli) while I did my shopping for the week.

And now she's fourteen and she borrows my shoes and she's on the phone with a BOY.

Actually, there's a part of me that thinks this is going to be fun. Despite the moments of panic I'm experiencing on a nearly daily basis, I'm sort of enjoying the process and promise of ushering her into young womanhood.

A couple months ago, for instance, I took her and one of her friends, Amanda, to the opera.

The week before the performance, we went shopping, and the girls bought strapless formal dresses at an outlet store. Driving home in the car, they made plans. Kaitlyn said, “Let's do each other's makeup for the opera.”

Amanda said, “My sister-in-law said she'll come over and fix our hair!”

Kaitlyn said, “I'm going to get my nails done.”

Amanda said, “I think I'll wax my brows.”

Kaitlyn sighed. “Too bad there won't be any guys our age at the opera.”

But I was glad.

I was glad that, for this first foray into grown-up dress-up, there were no boys involved. I was glad the girls were enjoying their feminine beauty not to impress some testosterone-drunk teenaged boy, but just, well, just because.

I couldn't resist the opportunity. I said, “You don't need boys at the opera. Do you think a boy would notice that you waxed your brows? Of course not. It takes a GIRLfriend to take one look at you and say, ‘Ohmigosh, you waxed your brows! They look GREAT!' Dress up for your girlfriends. Dress up for yourself. Dress up for the fun of it. But don't dress up for boys. They won't know how to truly appreciate the effort!”

The girls laughed, the sort of two-faced laugh that appears to say on the surface, “Yes, Mother-dear,” but in reality is being used to communicate to each other the sentiment, “Just humor her. She doesn't know anything about boys. She's old.”

But the truth is, I know how easy it is for women to get caught up in a hunt for approval and affirmation from men in their lives. I know how easy it is for us to define our identities and derive our value based on (a) whether or not we have a boyfriend or husband and (b) what we think these male-gendered folk think of us.

Unfortunately, this tends to be a fairly reliable recipe for disappointment and disaster. This is because men don't REALIZE they are functioning as the genesis of our self-esteem. They think their role is mostly to bring home a paycheck and occasionally, maybe around Valentine's Day, buy us a new garage door remote. If they only knew that their every word and deed (or lack of word and deed) is the hammer and chisel by which the very identities and self-worth of their women are being shaped, they would probably, instead of being such an overall clueless class of individuals, decide to stay bachelors much longer.

Of course, the Bible tells me that there is one Man in whom I can safely place my identity, one Man whose love for me makes me valuable, one Man whose thoughts about me are more numerous than the grains of the sand and the stars in the heavens.

I want to communicate this to Kaitlyn before it's too late. With God's help, maybe I have a chance.

And in the meantime, I'm going to go on enjoying the process of teaching her the finer points of being a woman.

I'd better go now. She just finished waxing her brows, and I want to be the first to notice.

50

Good Gifts

T
HE OTHER DAY
I
CALLED MY FRIEND
L
INDA AT HOME.
When she answered the phone, she sounded groggy.

I said, “Sorry, did I wake you?”

She said, “No, you didn't wake me.”

I said, “Oh, well, for a minute there it sounded like I woke you up.”

She said, “You didn't.”

“That's good.” I changed the subject. “So what're you doing?”

She said, “Actually, I was taking a nap.”

I was still chuckling at that one when Kaitlyn came home from school. She was grumbling because she'd been late to school that morning and now she had detention.

I said, “What did you expect? Fifteen minutes after you were supposed to have walked out the front door, you were still standing in your pajamas in the bathroom. Of course you were late to school. You should have been ready sooner.”

She said, “But Mom, I
was
ready. The only thing I had to do was put on my clothes.”

I call this the Barry defense, after Washington mayor Marion Barry, who once said of his fine city: “Outside of the killings, we have one of the lowest crime rates.”

So I'm sitting here feeling like I've been missing out on a growing trend, the trend of optional logic.

I think this is a helpful trend.

The only trend I can think of that would be even more helpful would be the trend of optional calories.

Then we could say things to waiters in restaurants like, “I'll take a double slice of the caramel turtle cheesecake in the edible white chocolate bowl for ten calories.”

I think ten calories is a reasonable amount to have to spend for a rich, gooey dessert that's larger than a full-grown trout, don't you?

This makes much better sense to me than the current system, which is to assign an ironclad number of calories to tasty foodstuffs, especially since the number that gets assigned is always a very large number, so large, in fact, that scientists sometimes borrow it to count the number of galaxies in the universe when it's not, of course, being used to identify the calories in, say, a single chocolate kiss.

So optional calories would work for me.

So would optional stress.

Speaking of stress, friends George and Nancy invited us to spend a weekend with them at an oceanfront beach house in Galveston.

I hate it when that happens.

Don't get me wrong, I like the beach. And I love these friends. But sometimes packing, planning, and getting out the door for a two-day vacation can seem daunting, especially when you're already feeling overwhelmed.

So that's where I was two days ago, feeling stressed and overwhelmed and like the last thing I could handle at the moment was getting everybody packed up and out the door.

Luckily, Beth dropped by right about then and literally pushed me up the stairs. “Go pack,” she said. “I'll finish your dishes and round up the kids and make sandwiches for the road, but you WILL be out the door in half an hour or else you'll answer to ME.”

Sensing that staying home could be hazardous to my health, I packed.

And I'm glad I did. As I'm writing this, I'm looking out a bank of open windows at my kids playing in the waves not twenty yards away. Beyond that, there are dolphins dancing in the swells. There's an ocean breeze cooling the house, and the sound of the waves breaking is a never-ending lullaby. It's a familiar sound. Sometimes, in the springtime, the wind rushing through the trees around my house sounds just like this, just like the ocean. Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine that I'm at the beach. It's one of Nature's more soothing voices, and I've heard it in the wind, and I'm listening to it now, in the waves just a stone's throw away.