A Love Letter to My Home

Dear "Red House"

I have wanted to write this letter to you for a long time, but I just couldn't wrap my heart around the concept of it; the concept of really saying goodbye. I knew that leaving you wasn't an "I'll see you again soon," but a, "thank you for the time we shared" and it burned my eyes and choked my throat.

I wanted to tuck a handwritten note into your eves for only you to know, but I was raw & sore with goodbyes I could barely say. I wanted you to keep a piece of truth in your foundation so that no matter where time took you, you would know, that you ARE loved and always will be.

When I met you, you were so broken. You were abandoned and unloved, forgotten and cast aside. When I saw you, I knew, I knew I wanted to share my life with you. I wanted you to shape me and change me in all the ways that I would do the same for you. I wanted to love you whole as I knew you would do for me.

People might think I'm crazy for loving you so, but it's something I can't explain. You were home. You were the first time I had hope that I could plant roots. Where people saw dust and broken bones, I saw scabs that would heal & scars that would mend. You were my vision, dream home, and you became my reality.

Our first night with you was spent as a family of three on a mattress in your living room. We cuddled there nursing our first born through a high fever on memorial day weekend. You sheltered us then. 

We brought our second born home to you. You let me shape a nursery and dream a room up that I missed with my first. You answered this quiet little dream of mine that lived loudly in my soul.

You hosted our friends and families. You stayed up with me during the sleepless nights. We gave you your white kitchen and you gave it back to us. You shared laughter, arguments, and sorrows with us. 

If your walls could talk....

You let Christan protect you & give me my dream with his hand made white picket fence. You kept my babies safe while they laughed and played in your yard. You entertained us on the lawn for afternoon wine picnics with the neighbors. You were our office & our nest.

Dreams became REAL with you, within you.

So, my dear sweet "Red House" as our boy named you, I love you.

I will always love you.

You could not have inherited a better new family to love and to love you back. You are sheltering them as you sheltered us. They are shaping you as you are shaping them. 

You are no longer a house, you are a home.

With love, 

The family who will always know you as home

Unstitched

I use to think I was the most honest woman out there when it came to motherhood.  And to clarify, it's not because I wanted to be, I just didn't know how to be anything else.

I entered motherhood with so many questions, doubts, fears, and un-met expectations.  I was so fatigued form a near 28 hour labor that I have very few memories of my first son's birth. I remember seeing his face & feeling the sweeping relief that, "it was over." When I brought our son home, for the first time in my life I was over taken by the fear of being alone. I was in need of people to be with me at all times. I went in to motherhood with my walls down and completely raw. I had no qualms saying that it was hard, that I was tired, and I wasn't sure I ever wanted to do it again. Those first months shaped me and that was the honesty I took to the streets. 

Birth wasn't magical. Breastfeeding wasn't miraculous. My relationship to my baby wasn't this serene snow globe of perfection. 

Birth was brutal (& nothing I wanted to see). Breastfeeding was exhausting, isolating, and immensely overwhelming. I loved my baby in a way I couldn't describe, but I was also afraid I wasn't enough for him. 

So I talked about it. I wrote about it. This blog was birthed from it. My Lips In Stitches...a lifelong need to write because my journals were all I had & the reality of becoming a mother melded into this one place, one title with two meanings.

I stepped away from this place after I lost my second baby. 

That was a season that bore a hole into the core of my self-understanding. I berated my ambition & I could not embrace the loss that came on Christmas Eve. It was a dark & long season all while being blessed & good in it's own right. 

My fingers have been idle. My words have been mute. My desire to pour out dried up.

Time has passed. A LOT of time. I've woven in and out of this place but I always end up back here. I'm addicted. I'm addicted to the need to lay it down and walk away new. I toyed with the idea of another new blog. My husband asked, WHY? 

Good point.

I thought on it. 

WHY? 

Because I didn't want to re-share this old place. I didn't want to relive these old words. I was embarrassed. I was afraid that I could be judged for this place. I wanted to remain hidden to those who could reach me but be known to those I'd probably never meet. And I've been thinking on this...thinking on it the way you kneed bread...mundane, repetitive thought that eventually molds itself into a final product, or in this case a decision: I will write here again. I won't change the name or hide from the years that brought me here. I'll own this. I'll let the past and present mingle here and dance showing me what can unfold from my vintage thoughts renewed. 

I'll be honest here as I always have been & I will share. I will unleash the trappings of my heart and be free because of it. 

So, cheers. Cheers to the second volume of a place beginning to be unstitched!