Idea Dust

Author: Felecia J

  • The Unplanned Postpartum Depression: The Part I Didn’t Tell

    December 6, 2012.

    I arrived at the hospital in the late hours of the night to induce the delivery of my son.

    A pot of gold waiting at the end of a colorless rainbow.

    A baby who never got the chance to be born, followed by a pregnancy complicated by a subchorionic hematoma that gave this baby only a 50% chance of survival, leaves a woman clenching her fists as tightly as she can to hope—all while preparing for the fall.

    Prayers for God’s mercy on a fallible woman became regular conversations in our house.

    Once, in the shower, with a large pregnant belly and an overwhelming feeling of helplessness, I leaned on the only One I believed had the power to change an outcome I could not control.

    On my knees, water dripping down my naked body, I begged God to make Matthew mine.

    It was a request I didn’t feel completely worthy of asking.

    I had a Doppler at home to listen to Matthew’s heartbeat. Most mornings, I checked.

    Hearing that little gallop gave me something pregnancy otherwise couldn’t: proof. For that moment, my baby was alive. He was still there. We were still moving toward the finish line.

    I thought I needed to get him born.

    If I could just get him here safely, maybe I could finally exhale.

    I didn’t know yet that the fear would come with me.

    Before pregnancy, I was happy, outgoing, and enthusiastic about life. Depression was not something I knew intimately. In fact, I remember someone I knew struggling with depression and making a comment that they needed to do something about it.

    Get help.

    Make a change.

    Do something.

    I didn’t mean to be cruel. I simply didn’t understand yet that sometimes a person can desperately want to get better, do the things she’s supposed to do, and still wake up sick the next morning.

    I was about to learn that the hard way.

    But here we were.

    Our pot of gold.

    The hospital hung Christmas lights every December, and I had told Robert that if I ever had a baby there, I hoped those Christmas lights would somehow make the cut into the final scene.

    They did.

    It was a long labor, but I remember the miracle of seeing a real-life baby in front of me.

    He cried.

    The world around us seemed to light up like a spotlight had suddenly been turned on in the room.

    I took my baby and smiled.

    Then he closed his eyes.

    And I lost my breath.

    “He’s dying. Please help him. Take him.”

    I screamed for someone to help him.

    It shocked everyone.

    Including me.

    Matthew wasn’t dying.

    He had simply fallen asleep in his mother’s arms.

    For months, I thought I just needed to get him here safely. But when he finally arrived, something inside me didn’t receive the message that the emergency was over.

    I had my baby. I still needed proof that he was okay.

    We had no idea this would be the beginning of a season of sorrow.

    ⸻

    We made our way home, and I rocked Matthew in his glider and nursed him on demand.

    He wasn’t nursing well, and his weight became something we legitimately needed to watch. I took him to the hospital every Friday to be weighed and kept track of that little piece of paper like it was a certificate of survival.

    Eventually, my anxiety won, and I supplemented more and more.

    That wasn’t my plan.

    But I could not tolerate feeding my baby without being able to see and measure how much milk he had actually gotten.

    A few days after delivery, I was struggling even to get up and grab Matthew because of tearing and stitches. I wasn’t getting much sleep. I wasn’t drinking enough. I wasn’t eating enough.

    I remember my skin even feeling different.

    Once I healed from the physical pain, I realized I was living in a pool of grief.

    This was not what I pictured.

    This was not what Facebook made motherhood look like.

    People smiled in pictures. They doted on their babies. They put a sticker on their baby’s onesie every month and photographed the milestone.

    I had the monthly sticker.

    I had the camera.

    And I stood behind it feeling like a fraud.

    ⸻

    It was a slow fade.

    At first, I worried about breastfeeding and Matthew gaining weight.

    But underneath those ordinary concerns, something much larger was taking shape.

    I loved him more than anything, but he represented something I had not quite been able to wrap my head around:

    Someone needed me now.

    My life was no longer entirely my own.

    And I had a problem with that—not because of Matthew, but because I didn’t feel like I had lived my life in a way that could guarantee Matthew would always have me.

    My mom almost died from stage 3 breast cancer when she was 28.

    I was nine.

    She tried to go to a doctor, and they turned her away because they thought she was too young. She was postpartum, too, and she was initially told the lump was a swollen milk duct.

    A year later, it was still there.

    It was cancer.

    My mom cried.

    My mom thought she was going to die.

    I thought she was going to die.

    Before Matthew, those memories belonged to my childhood.

    After Matthew, I could suddenly see them from my mother’s side.

    And worse, I could see them from his.

    ⸻

    Before motherhood, I jumped out of airplanes for fun.

    People told me I should get mammograms because of my family history.

    I didn’t go.

    In fact, I went to tanning salons instead.

    I was quivering as all of this began unraveling in my mind.

    I loved my son more than life, but suddenly every careless thing I had ever done with my own life felt like something that might cut our time together short.

    The tanning beds.

    The screenings I skipped.

    Every stupid risk that once belonged to a young woman who assumed she had plenty of tomorrows.

    Now somebody needed those tomorrows from me.

    And I couldn’t promise them to him.

    I couldn’t bear the thought.

    But the thought kept finding me in my dehydrated, sleep-deprived slumber.

    The glider where I had started out rocking Matthew became a place in the house I feared, simply because I knew my thoughts became louder there.

    My inner reprimand screamed at me from the corner of that room.

    Eventually, I stopped going in there.

    The more I thought about all the normal young-adult choices I’d made—choices that no longer felt normal in this state of mind—the more I thought about life and death.

    And then another realization hit me:

    I had brought Matthew into this world, and someday he was going to die.

    We all are.

    I had always known that.

    But suddenly I couldn’t understand how everyone else was okay with it.

    I felt selfish.

    I loved him desperately, but part of me wished I hadn’t exposed him to a world where suffering and death were inevitable.

    I hated myself for doing this to both of us.

    I even resented my own parents for having me.

    I never wanted to hurt Matthew.

    I never had thoughts of hurting him.

    Quite the opposite.

    My mind was consumed with preventing anything from ever hurting him.

    That was part of the prison. I had assigned myself the impossible responsibility of protecting another human being from everything—including the parts of being human that no mother can prevent.

    My thoughts became a prison.

    And I was suffering.

    ⸻

    Motherhood came with responsibilities I understood.

    Feed him.

    Bathe him.

    Change him.

    Take him to the doctor.

    Keep him warm.

    Love him.

    But somewhere in my postpartum mind, other responsibilities quietly appeared on the list:

    Keep Matthew alive.

    Keep yourself alive so you can raise him.

    Never let anything separate you.

    Those were the responsibilities I could never finish.

    There was no box I could check that said:

    Matthew will always be safe. ✓

    There was no test I could take that promised:

    You will live long enough to raise your son. ✓

    But my brain treated those impossible guarantees like ordinary maternal responsibilities.

    And every day, I felt like I was failing to complete them.

    The only way I knew how to emotionally survive was to try to get ahead of everything that could possibly go wrong.

    Keep harm out of Matthew’s way.

    Find anything that could be wrong with me before it was too late.

    Prepare for the worst before the worst could surprise me.

    But that was a much bigger job than it sounds like on paper.

    What if my mother’s cancer was coming for me?

    Was the buzzer about to go off on my own life?

    How do I prevent Matthew and me from separating?

    What if I’m already too late?

    Will I go to heaven?

    Is there a heaven?

    Is there a God?

    Of course there is a God.

    But what if there isn’t?

    Then dying becomes much worse.

    Then I don’t leave my son for a better place.

    I just leave him.

    There was an ambiguous sense of impending doom, but I didn’t understand yet that the catastrophe was happening inside my mind, not in the world around me.

    I couldn’t understand how other people could be happy.

    How could they be so calm knowing what they had exposed their children to simply by bringing them into the world?

    And if I admitted that I was having these thoughts, how would everyone look at me?

    Am I broken?

    ⸻

    Christmas came only a few weeks after Matthew did.

    I remember sitting with extended family while everyone opened presents.

    At some point, I started crying.

    People noticed.

    They teased me a little for being emotional, and I gave them the explanation that made sense.

    “It’s just so sweet.”

    And it was sweet.

    That wasn’t a lie.

    But it wasn’t why I was crying.

    I thought it might be my last Christmas.

    I was sitting in a room full of people who loved me, holding the baby I had begged God to give me, surrounded by Christmas presents and family and all the evidence of a life I desperately wanted.

    And inside my mind, I was already grieving leaving it.

    Nobody in that room knew.

    I had given them an explanation they could understand.

    ⸻

    I could barely bring myself to talk to Robert about any of it.

    At one point, Robert needed to travel out of state for a week, and I knew I wasn’t comfortable being alone with Matthew for that long.

    So we made a plan.

    Every single day Robert was gone, someone from our family came to stay with me and Matthew. For that entire week, we made sure I wasn’t left alone trying to carry everything by myself.

    We were taking precautions.

    We knew I was struggling.

    People were helping.

    And I was still sick.

    Having someone there didn’t silence my thoughts. It didn’t suddenly make me feel like myself again. But it made those days more manageable.

    Even on ordinary days, I barely made it to 5:00.

    When Robert came home, I felt relief.

    But the next morning, the thoughts were waiting for me again.

    How do I control them?

    Why won’t they leave?

    I was supposed to love this season of my life.

    Everyone online seemed happy.

    I wasn’t happy.

    I was sad.

    And I was living in an almost constant state of terror.

    I couldn’t get help by staying silent.

    But I couldn’t tolerate the thought of the look I might get if I admitted everything out loud, either.

    Then I did admit some of it.

    And afterward, I didn’t always want to do it again.

    Because how many times can you tell the person you love that you’re still not okay?

    How many times can someone ask whether you’re feeling better before you desperately want the answer to finally be yes?

    Sometimes I wanted everyone to believe I was getting better.

    Sometimes I wanted to believe it myself.

    I was tired of being the sick person.

    I was afraid that if I kept talking, people would eventually realize just how consuming this had become.

    They would think I was crazy.

    There was something wrong with me.

    It was dark.

    I was never okay.

    How long can I live in this darkness?

    Will I ever see the light again?

    Will I ever genuinely laugh again?

    How long can my heart race and break?

    How long can I live in constant emotional agony?

    How long can it feel like a thousand miles just to walk into the kitchen and make breakfast?

    I became afraid of waking up because I knew the pain would still be there waiting for me.

    And yet I was terrified of dying because that meant leaving my son motherless.

    I desperately wanted to live.

    I just desperately needed this to stop.

    There were moments I wished I had never been born.

    Not because I had a plan to end my life.

    I didn’t.

    I didn’t imagine how I would do it.

    I didn’t want to leave Matthew.

    That was the very thing I was terrified of.

    I wanted an end to the unbearable feeling of being alive like this.

    I was stuck.

    ⸻

    And perhaps the strangest part was that I didn’t know this was postpartum depression.

    I thought I knew what postpartum depression looked like.

    In my mind, postpartum depression meant a mother didn’t want her baby. Maybe she couldn’t bond with him. Maybe she regretted becoming a mother. Maybe she wanted to hurt herself or her child.

    That wasn’t me.

    I wanted Matthew.

    I had begged God for Matthew.

    I loved holding him. I wanted to nurse him. I wanted to take care of him.

    I had never thought about hurting him.

    I didn’t want less motherhood. I was terrified of losing it.

    So I didn’t understand what was happening to me as depression.

    It felt like fear.

    It felt like danger.

    It felt like something terrible was coming and everyone else was inexplicably calm about it.

    It felt like an enormous responsibility I couldn’t figure out how to complete.

    I didn’t understand that postpartum illness could look like this, too.

    I only knew that something had happened to the woman I used to be.

    And I wasn’t okay.

    ⸻

    Five weeks postpartum, on a Friday night, I went to the hospital to have Matthew weighed.

    I saw my OB in the elevator.

    With tears threatening to stream down my face, I said, “I think I’m going to have to call you Monday.”

    He looked puzzled.

    “Is everything okay?”

    And for the first time, I found words for it.

    “I’m not okay. I think I’m depressed.”

    He was stunned.

    I don’t think he understood yet what kind of depression I meant.

    “You wanted this baby so bad.”

    “I know,” I told him. “But I feel like I can’t keep him safe. I’m having thoughts about whether God is real. And then I feel hopeless.”

    The strange thing was, he was right.

    I had wanted this baby so bad.

    I had begged God for him from the floor of my shower.

    I had spent months terrified that I would lose him.

    I had listened for his heartbeat.

    I had prayed over the bleeding.

    I had waited for him.

    I had wanted him more than anything.

    And none of that protected me from postpartum depression.

    In some ways, how desperately I loved him became tangled up in it.

    ⸻

    I did what I knew to do.

    I told my doctor.

    I started medication.

    I attended Bible study.

    I prayed.

    I accepted help.

    My family showed up.

    And I was still sick.

    There wasn’t one morning when the medicine suddenly worked or one Bible verse that snapped me back into myself.

    Sometimes Bible study comforted me. Sometimes questions about God and eternity frightened me even more.

    But I kept going.

    Getting help did not mean I immediately got better.

    That battle went on for about a year.

    And that taught me something I wish I had understood before I ever made that careless comment about someone else’s depression:

    Wanting to get better and knowing how to get better are not the same thing.

    Neither is getting help and immediately being well.

    I had done something about it.

    I was still doing something about it.

    And for a while, I was still sick.

    ⸻

    I became someone I didn’t recognize.

    A fun-loving, social, enthusiastic woman quietly became afraid to say too much—to accidentally reveal to the outside world what was happening inside her.

    Somewhere inside me, I knew other people weren’t seeing what I was seeing.

    But knowing that didn’t make it feel less real.

    The cancer diagnosis hadn’t happened.

    The funeral hadn’t happened.

    My son had not lost his mother.

    The catastrophe existed in my mind.

    But the terror existed in my body.

    And from inside that terror, possibility could feel almost indistinguishable from reality.

    I had spent the beginning of Matthew’s life asking God for something impossible:

    Let me know we’re going to be okay.

    Eventually, my prayers became smaller.

    I asked God for five years.

    Just five years to be his mother.

    Five years to take care of him.

    Five years to get him a little bigger.

    Five years before I had to leave him.

    That was all the frightened woman I had become could bring herself to ask for.

    Matthew was born December 7, 2012.

    It has been almost fourteen years.

    ⸻

    Author’s Note

    This is not what postpartum depression looks like for every woman.

    This is what it looked like for me.

    It happened many years ago. I have been off antidepressant medication for several years, and I am doing well today.

    I share that not because medication is the right answer for every person, or because my recovery followed a straight line.

    It didn’t.

    But during that season, honesty and medical treatment were invaluable to me.

    I told my doctor.

    I took medication.

    I prayed.

    I went to Bible study.

    I accepted help.

    My family showed up.

    And sometimes I still woke up sick the next morning.

    Recovery was gradual.

    There is something else that stayed with me.

    Robert will tell you that if I hear someone has had a baby, chances are I’m going to make them dinner.

    Sometimes I know the mother.

    Sometimes I don’t know her at all.

    There are women who have eaten meals I’ve cooked who probably couldn’t pick me out of a crowd. Maybe Robert works with their husband. Maybe I simply heard that somebody brought a baby home.

    I don’t need to know whether she’s struggling.

    That’s sort of the point.

    I remember what it was like when people asked how I was doing and I didn’t know how to answer.

    I remember wanting desperately to feel better.

    I remember being exhausted by my own thoughts.

    And I remember that sometimes another question—even one asked with tremendous love—felt like one more thing I had to answer.

    So I don’t usually knock on the door unless they want company.

    I leave dinner by the door.

    No diagnosis.

    No expectation that she tell me how she’s doing.

    No requirement that she be struggling enough to deserve help.

    Just dinner.

    Because I can’t tell by looking at a new mother which one is having the greatest experience of her life and which one is quietly trying to make it until 5:00.

    Sometimes showing up for someone means showing up with help instead of another question.

    If you are somewhere inside your own version of this darkness, I hope you will tell someone the truth.

    And if you’ve already told someone and you’re still not better, tell them again.

    I once thought getting help meant getting better.

    Now I know sometimes getting help simply means having people help carry you while you get better.

    Not better yet did not mean never better.

  • Case Was Cold by 8 A.M.: Back-to-School.

    Case Was Cold by 8 A.M.: Back-to-School.

    I just dropped the big kids off at school for their second day. I have a picture to prove it.

    I also took one yesterday after school because I forgot to take one before school. After all, we were two hours late.

    Why?

    Well, our neighbor let me know she saw trash all over our yard and added that it might be a bear. She told me to check my security cameras.

    We don’t have cameras in that particular spot, and I don’t know the password to the cloud system.

    I looked for evidence of scratch marks or bear prints.

    Mystery remains unsolved. Case was cold by 8 a.m.

    Our dog got neutered and needed to be picked up, and the kids begged to go with me. How could I say no to that?

    Though I tell Robert all of the time I want to be pursued, chaos never fails to pursue me. But I meant him, not chaos.

    I grabbed Starbucks, and my lid wasn’t all the way on, so I wore my overpriced coffee instead of drinking it.

    I treated the kids to Starbucks. Matthew made sure to thank me with a punishment: hot chocolate and a white T-shirt.

    What was I thinking?

    But more importantly, I actually don’t understand his wardrobe choice anyway. We bought name-brand shirts at $30 a cloth, and he picked the white T-shirt that was $8 for a pack of five.

    At least we all got the endorphin release we showed up for when we picked up Scout because, boy, was he glad to see us again.

    At first he didn’t recognize us when the vet tech brought him out, but once he smelled us and recognized Abigail’s high-pitched “Babies!” he knew he was about to jailbreak out of there.

    He started crying endlessly and jumping all around.

    Then he got Abigail dirty, too.

    The rescue had us take Scout to a vet in Clarksville. I wasn’t particularly excited about that part, but the kids and I did have fun listing all our dogs in ChatGPT and asking it who would win in a fight between them and a black bear.

    The storytelling made us all laugh because it described our dogs so well.

    I got Scout home, the kids changed, and then off to school they went.

    The kids have one rule for their unpaid Mumber (Mom Uber) driver.

    No Mom music over volume 2 under any circumstances in ANY parking lot associated with these sophisticated heathens. Like, Bone Thugs and Harmony, you don’t get a free pass on this rule.

    So I turn down Pandora on my phone as we approach the premises of learning and drama, as I have been instructed.

    “Come on, kids. Let’s hurry inside.”

    I unplug my phone, and the phone and Expedition volume aren’t in sync, so Def Leppard through the middle school parking lot?

    Yes.

    Matthew jumping out, covering his head with a backpack, and walking away swiftly? Also yes.

    I thought about telling the front office why we were late, but then I decided that would be more work and she probably doesn’t care.

    I barely cared, if that’s okay to admit.

    That afternoon, I planned a special dinner for the big kids.

    Chicken Alfredo, garlic bread, salad, and an ice cream bar.

    I got their favorite toppings and anticipated their arrival.

    That turned into a complete shit show.

    Abigail ate by herself because she can’t eat at the dinner table lately without fighting with her brothers about the sound of their smacking and gulping.

    She even gets on to me.

    Sometimes I catch myself holding my breath so she doesn’t give me a dirty look.

    I told her if she had nothing to say about her day, she could get the ice cream bar ready.

    Well, she discovered that Matthew put the two tubs of ice cream in the refrigerator.

    Then he put my P3 lunches and the boys’ Lunchables in the freezer.

    We were able to salvage the ice cream for the night, but the second tub would not survive being put back in the freezer.

    I laid out all the groceries for Matthew, and we counted how much money we actually wasted by not paying attention.

    Almost $50.

    He looked upset.

    I asked him why he looked upset. I specifically asked, “Do you feel bad?”

    He said no.

    He said he didn’t think he was the one who did it, even though he was the one who put the groceries away.

    We explained that the groceries didn’t grow legs and make it to the extra fridge on their own.

    He said he put them all away but not in those places.

    This was frustrating because the groceries had only been at the house for a couple of hours.

    He wouldn’t own it, which was the most important part to us, or apologize.

    Then Robert said he wasn’t in the mood for ice cream,

    So I didn’t have any either.

    Jonah assured me that he had just discovered he likes melted ice cream.

    Kaleb said he doesn’t like strawberry ice cream. It was Neapolitan, and I was about to scream. But then he said, “I am glad you got this kind because it’s good.”

    I guess he didn’t realize it had a strawberry stripe in there, too. Kind of like how he hates onions, and I hope he doesn’t notice them in my chicken spaghetti.

    So once the kids finished, we went to bed, and I wondered how all of this ended without me getting ice cream or learning about the kids’ day.

    I woke up at 1:00 a.m. feeling sugar-short, so I had a handful of Oreo Thins and then went back to sleep feeling satisfied.

    Not as good as a sundae, but better than not having dessert at all.

    Robert talked to Matthew before bed.

    When we woke up at 5 this morning, I could tell Robert was a good mix of agitated about Matthew’s thoughtlessness and melancholy about how the night ended, so I started “Just Give Me Jesus” on Alexa with a soft smile and a kiss.

    Sometimes I want to scream for him to snap out of it, but sometimes you gotta let Jesus fight those battles for you.

    I say that with a mischievous smile because I know him well enough to comfort him without trying to talk him out of a mood.

    This morning was much better.

    I put this prompt in ChatGPT, and it finally got the conversation that I was reaching for yesterday:

    “Right now, I’m driving Matthew and Abigail to school. Matthew’s 13, and Abigail’s 11. We need something to listen to on the way to school. Give us some encouragement for the day, some laughter, and give them something to challenge themselves with for the day.”

    Abigail’s eyes got really wide because she doesn’t realize that I gain some understanding about her through ChatGPT in other chats, so when it said, “Abigail, you’re 11, which means you’re entering the era where you can simultaneously be incredibly mature and become personally offended because somebody breathed weird near you. Also normal.”

    Her mouth dropped. Her eyes opened wide.

    She said, “Mom, is there history in this text or is this a new conversation? How does it know all of this about me?”

    I let her stay puzzled because, as I said, I am mischievous, in an innocent way, of course.

    Abigail told me she had done most of what the response said for today yesterday.

    They had a new girl, and a teacher asked Abigail to make her feel welcome.

    Abigail said, “Mom, she was so pretty, so I just looked at her and said, ‘You are so pretty.’”

    I love that because I tell women they are beautiful and hot all the time.

    Because I am a mom.

    I know how it goes.

    I am married, so I don’t want that from other men. I know my husband doesn’t always know when to say it, so we women have to remind each other that we still got it.

    I am glad Abigail is not trading compliments to get one in return.

    She sees someone she genuinely thinks is pretty, and she let her know.

    That’s it.

    That matters.

    It might have changed that girl’s entire first day of school.

    And I made it. I didn’t cuss at anyone through all of that.

    But I cussed here, so I guess it had to come out somewhere.

    Yesterday afternoon’s photo.

  • I Built the Doorway

    I Built the Doorway

    I used to believe Robert had to plan and initiate our dates for them to feel meaningful.

    I thought that was what being pursued looked like.

    If I planned the evening, asked for the time, or told him exactly what I wanted, I felt that somehow it would not count. The romance would feel less romantic because I had helped create it.

    But the older I get, the more clearly I know what I want. And the more comfortable I become asking for it.

    There is a kind of freedom in being honest about your desires. In believing it is okay to let vulnerability win and simply say, I want this. I want you. I want time with us.

    So that is what I did.

    I could have waited for Robert to initiate a date night.

    And I have in the past waited until resentment brewed.

    I could have hoped he would notice the opening and plan something himself.

    He’s missed those hints in the past, too.

    I used to wonder, “Does he see me?”

    But this time, I tried something different.

    Instead, I sent the text.

    We had a few children away, and the ones who were home rarely interrupt our date nights. We also had some wins from the week worth celebrating.

    So I told him I wanted him. I asked him to bring home dinner so we could eat outside, have a drink, and spend the evening together by the pool.

    I built the doorway and waited to see whether he would walk through it.

    He did.

    And it became one of the most romantic nights we have had in a long time.

    The anticipation began for both of us as soon as I sent the text.

    He came home with Ridge Brothers barbecue and a big smile. We ate outside at our outdoor kitchen while the sun went down. We talked. We swam. We talked about our children, because apparently even when parents escape their children, they still take them along in conversation.

    By the time we climbed into the hot tub beneath the stars, the entire evening had slowly drawn us toward each other.

    There was no abrupt switch from responsibility to romance. We had been walking there together all evening.

    We began kissing like teenagers again.

    Just as we started to kiss, one of the songs from our wedding began playing.

    Robert and I both love rock music, so naturally we found ways to include it in our wedding. “Everything” by Lifehouse played as our ceremony began. “Never Gonna Be Alone” by Nickelback played during our joint wedding slideshow.

    That night, when Nickelback began playing beneath the stars, I realized something.

    We had made a promise all those years ago without fully understanding what it would require.

    And somehow, we had kept it.

    Not perfectly.

    Not easily.

    The clock moved faster than we imagined it would. There have been moments when we reached for our marriage, and moments when we pulled away. Days we wish we had not allowed to slip past us. Moments that, had they been our last, we would have regretted taking for granted.

    But we kept finding our way back.

    The words that reached me most that night were the promise not to miss another day.

    Because love is not only a feeling you happen to receive.

    Love is a gift you keep choosing to give.

    It looks like dependability. It looks like keeping promises when keeping them is hard. It looks like holding tightly without pretending you have never disappointed each other.

    It is loving someone beyond their mistakes.

    Forgiving each other in disappointment.

    Celebrating each other in success.

    And sometimes, it looks like refusing to deny yourself the gift of asking for what you want.

    I used to think that initiating the evening meant I was not being pursued.

    But I understand it differently now.

    I opened the door.

    Robert walked through it carrying barbecue, wearing a big smile, and ready to meet me there.

    I did not create the romance alone.

    I simply gave it somewhere to begin

  • The Best Part of You

    The Best Part of You

    I tried writing outside, but the sun beat me to my seat.  I landed in our room, on our bed, on my side of the bed, of course.  I’m just here to wish you a happy 40th birthday.  

    I really didn’t want to dive into our love story on your birthday because this is about you, but your life has impacted mine in such a meaningful way that I can’t separate that story from the way you lived in front of me for the past 18 years, from how I came to understand the character of Jesus.

    I think the kids will like this one when they’re older.

    Summer 2008:

    I had recently moved back home from attending college in Florida.  I had a tough year in Florida and got in way too deep in a relationship.  I left mid-semester, and I was trying to start over.  A new romantic relationship was not on my radar.  

    I knew of your dad from his regular Sunday evening visits to Outback with Phil.  He always sat in another person’s section so I never served him, but I did occasionally say hello.  

    When you came to Outback with him during your summer break, Susan went back to the kitchen and said that Tommy’s youngest son was eating with him.  Ironically, she wasn’t trying to set you up with me at all. She was talking you up to the girl your dad had actually brought you there to meet. She said that you were in college, had straight As, were thinking of attending UT for your master’s, and you were a real catch.  I was curious, so I came over and said hi. Then I didn’t see you again until the end of the summer.

    She was right. You looked like a good catch. I just didn’t know then that the best part of you had nothing to do with the résumé she was sharing.

    In the meantime, I was working on myself.  My family traveled a lot and didn’t go to church, but I felt a tug I couldn’t explain that drew me closer to God.  I asked the only person I knew who went to church similar to the one I went to as a little girl, and I started driving 45 minutes on Sundays to go to church with her.  

    Then you came back to Outback, and I told you and your dad how I got kicked out of this super snobby private school because I wouldn’t go to chapel.  

    Then you asked what school it was…and we both laughed because we realized we had not been that far apart in this world after all.  You were there at the same time as me, but you were just older.

    I told you how I was going to church with Bethany, and you invited me to church with you.

    That was the church you grew up in.

    That was the church I started attending alone even when you went back to college in the Fall.

    That became the church where we got married.

    Then we moved, and it became the church we later brought our kids back to visit.

    I still love that church.

    But to tell you the complete truth, the church was only the backdrop to what I was witnessing right in front of me.  

    You changed my life and my view of Jesus.  

    I met a lot of people in that Baptist private school, but, Robert, there is no one like you.

    I was amused from the start.

    It wasn’t because you were Hit Man Jacks and Captain on the football field in high school.

    It wasn’t your conviction for the Lord.

    Or the 3.98 GPA.

    Or that you knew a lot about the Bible.

    It wasn’t that you’d spent your life quietly honoring your convictions about purity.

    Or even your confidence about heaven.

    Those things were admirable.
    They just weren’t what changed me.

    The world might label you a believer based on those merits.  

    What impacted me was much deeper, though.

    The simple truth is this: seeing Jesus in you never came from what you said about yourself.

    I had to ask, and you responded as if it were no big deal.

    That is just who you are.

    The humility of it all is exactly the fertile ground where my faith could grow taller than the surrounding weeds.

    You’ve never made me feel like you were leading me to Jesus.  You’ve always said you chose me because of my heart.  You wouldn’t have chosen someone to save.

    You’ve always made me feel like we were growing closer to Him together.

    And I never learned much from what anyone has said, but I came to know Jesus even more because of what you did to teach me.

    You’ve admitted when you were wrong without needing me to admit my part in return.

    Which, in the end, made me want to admit my part.

    I know you know more about the Bible than I do, but every time I remind you of that, you shake your head no before I can finish my sentence.

    I’ve seen you take the blame for things that aren’t your fault at work.

    You aren’t a gatekeeper to heaven with a scorecard.

    People call you when they are struggling.

    Not because they think you are perfect.

    But because they know you know you aren’t, and you’re not afraid to admit that.

    I may slip a curse word every now and then.

    I like an occasional glass of wine.

    Even still, I know you aren’t looking at me through the lens of a religious leader in the church, but rather through the loving eyes of Jesus who wants me to sit with him comfortably, even if I bring my sin and all.

    I remember when we were dating, we would lie around your apartment, and I would ask you questions about the Bible, and you would say you didn’t know the answer when you were unsure.

    You could have fooled me.

    You grew up in a Baptist school.

    You attended church every Sunday.

    You went on a Mission trip.

    You could have answered to the best of your knowledge to impress me.

    But that isn’t you.

    You are the one in the room not talking,

    while quietly carrying more wisdom than the people doing all the talking.

    That is the person who taught me how much Jesus really loves me.

    Not because we attended church.

    Not because you knew every verse in the Bible about God’s love and told me about it.

    Not because when the world was being worldly in the years before we met, you were keeping your values and convictions.

    None of that makes you the man who taught me about Jesus.

    Growing closer to Jesus with you looks like, “Let’s look that up together,” instead of “I know the answer.”

    And, “Felecia, you’ve been reading your Bible so much that you’ve encouraged me to read it more,” instead of, “This is what a holy woman does.”

    It’s that you never once—and I mean not even once—reminded me of who I was at my worst.  

    You had a lot of high horses to ride on, but for the last forty years you’ve chosen to put other people in the saddle while you quietly steer them around.

    That’s why people who are struggling call you.

    But it makes me smile too, because a lot of them don’t know you as I do, and some of them might be more nervous than I was about showing you their broken pieces if they knew the truth I knew.

    You’ll probably be uncomfortable with every word I’ve written here.

    You’ll tell me I’ve exaggerated.

    I don’t think I have.

    Happy 40th Birthday.

    Thank you for showing me what following Jesus is like more than any sermon ever could.

    I love you.

  • We Thought We Were Remodeling a Backyard

    We Thought We Were Remodeling a Backyard

    I remember when we moved into this house, my heart loved it.

    The pool was a bonus and completely unexpected since Robert had always sworn he would never own a pool. So you can imagine that walking into a backyard with a wooden deck, pergola, hot tub, and pool felt like stepping into a Hollywood home.

    I’ve said in other remodel posts that our house was older and definitely needed updating. But the backyard was the last place I ever imagined transforming because, honestly, just having a pool at all still felt new to me.

    At our old house, we spent our summers at Magic Springs and the local country club pool. I already felt blessed to have access to those places, so I was overwhelmed with joy when we suddenly had a pool in our own backyard.

    Then one day Robert said we needed to replace the pool liner.

    He also wanted to add another skimmer.

    Then I realized what he really meant.

    We weren’t just replacing a liner.

    We were tearing out all the concrete around the pool… which meant the wooden deck had to go, too.

    Side note: If you want to know how conservative I can be about money, I actually asked Robert whether the contractors would leave the lumber from our old deck behind so we wouldn’t waste it.

    Robert said he’d rather just let them haul it away.

    So…they did.

    We helped lay our concrete.

    So we started by hiring a contractor for our pool liner.

    Then we found Wenscalo, our concrete contractor. I wrote about him here.

    Last, we needed to decide what “outdoor kitchen” meant to both of us. I shared that story here.

    We had a long way from start to finish.

    We had already made a lot of memories in that backyard.

    Every Fourth of July, we’d host our neighborhood party there. The kids loved swimming. Friends gathered around the pool.

    But if I’m being honest, when Robert grilled, I usually stayed inside or floated in the pool because Arkansas summers are no joke.

    The space was fun, but it didn’t really invite us into the same conversation.

    Robert would be on the elevated deck behind the grill, separated from the rest of us by the railings. If I wanted shade, I went inside. If I wanted to swim, I stayed in the pool.

    Everyone was technically together.

    But we were also kind of…compartmentalized.

    One of my favorite details of the remodel isn’t the pavilion or even the outdoor kitchen, though.

    If you know me, you know I love my dogs.

    So yes, the most exciting part of the renovation is actually the pool liner.

    A standard pool liner is typically 20 mil on the sides and 20 mil on the bottom.

    Because I love my dogs so much, Robert installed a 27-mil liner on the sides and a 30-mil liner on the bottom.

    He told me it was “just in case the dogs got in the pool,” not “for the dogs to get in the pool.”

    But I can’t help but smile because we both know he bought it for my dogs.

    I showed Robert that paragraph before publishing it.

    His response?

    “I’m glad you like the liner…now you can stop reading my mind.”

    The pool has become one of my favorite places to spend time with Charlie, my golden retriever mix.

    He’s my oldest dog and probably my closest dog companion. He’s aging outward, if you know what I mean. I worry about him spending too much time in the Arkansas heat, so I’ve been trying to teach him to swim.

    I also trained our Belgian Malinois to swim the perimeter of the pool without ever touching Robert’s precious liner.

    Husband brag.

    Robert persevered through it all.

    Not only did we build the kitchen, but he also saved us about $3,000 by doing all of the electrical himself.

    He installed:

    • Ceiling fans.
    • TV.
    • Electrical outlets for chargers and other plug-ins.
    • Electrical for our outdoor fridge.

    Impressed is not the right word.

    I stay in awe of him.

    Another before picture from Zillow.com

    Last week we officially finished the backyard remodel.

    Life has already started happening there.

    On Monday, Robert came home from work, and I asked if he wanted to go for a swim with me.

    One thing I love about conversations in the pool is that cell phones don’t really belong there.

    Every now and then I’d dip underwater and swim a lap. When I’d come back up, we’d simply pick up the conversation where we’d left off.

    I asked him how his day had been.

    “Busy. Stressful.”

    Normally, that probably would have been the end of it.

    Instead, I said, “Tell me more.”

    He explained that he’d been filling in for his boss while also taking on a new project initiative at work. It was a lot to carry all at once.

    I asked him about the new project.

    He laughed and said it was boring nuclear stuff that I probably wouldn’t understand.

    I said, “Try me.”

    As he kept talking, the word busy began to open up into something more.

    There had been moments in his day that carried more weight than he had realized, but he had been moving so quickly that he hadn’t stopped long enough to process them.

    Nothing terrible had happened. He had simply been carrying more than his first answer let on.

    What struck me was that I never would have known any of it if I had accepted “busy and stressful” and moved on.

    I think sometimes that’s what life does.

    The longer we talked, the more I could see him sorting through thoughts.

    I was glad our conversation gave him room to do that.

    That night made me realize something about us.

    Sometimes our date nights become more about the setting than the connection.

    We get dressed up.

    Take a selfie.

    Order dinner.

    Answer the waiter’s questions.

    Talk between interruptions.

    There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

    But somewhere along the way, I think we sometimes feed our stomachs more than our souls.

    What Robert needed that night wasn’t advice.

    He needed my curiosity.

    He needed someone willing to ask one more question after “busy.”

    Someone willing to say…

    “Tell me more.”

    Maybe if we’d been sitting in a crowded restaurant, I would have accepted “busy” and moved on.

    Instead, we were floating in a pool with nowhere to be.

    When we finally got out, Robert smiled and said,

    “Thanks for listening to my boring job all night.”

    I laughed.

    “It is a pleasure to be the one you come to,” I told him. “I always want to hear about it.”

    Looking back, I thought we were remodeling a backyard.

    We poured concrete.

    We replaced a liner.

    We built a pavilion.

    We created an outdoor kitchen.

    But I don’t think that’s what we were really building.

    We were building a place where conversations last a little longer.

    Where phones stay a little quieter.

    Where “busy” becomes “tell me more.”

    I know there will be night swims with the kids because we have already had a couple.

    Ice cream by the pool.

    Football games under the pavilion.

    Dogs splashing where they probably shouldn’t.

    And I have a feeling there will be many evenings when Robert and I lose track of time because one conversation quietly turns into another.

    If that’s what this backyard becomes over the next twenty years, then every decision, every ounce of concrete, and every dollar we spent will have been worth it.

  • More Than a Contractor

    More Than a Contractor

    When we originally started the backyard remodel, we wanted stamped concrete. It seemed like an upgrade over a plain concrete slab, but I’ll be honest with you—no one wants to do stamped concrete. We got three quotes, and every one of them jumped dramatically when we asked about stamped concrete. Even then, Wenscalo’s bid was still about $6,000 to $10,000 less than everyone else’s.

    So just know, if you ever decide to include stamped concrete in your own remodel, be prepared to pay an arm, a leg… and probably a hand too.

    Robert designed the entire backyard himself, but after looking over his plans, the materials we had chosen for the outdoor kitchen, and the natural stone that would border the concrete, I started to wonder whether stamped concrete would actually distract from the heart of the backyard rather than enhance it.

    I also knew I wanted a big sectional out there. I wrote about that here. Then I wanted a rug under the sectional, and before long I found myself wondering if anyone would even notice the extra $10,000 we were about to spend on stamped concrete.

    So the week before the pour, Robert texted Wenscalo, our contractor, and told him we wanted to switch to brushed concrete instead.

    Wenscalo replied that it was no problem.

    That was just like Wenscalo.

    He’s a hardworking, easygoing contractor our family grew to love. He has three sons who work at the nuclear plant, and Robert says they’ve given their family name a great reputation there. I haven’t met them, but if they’re anything like their dad, I imagine they work just as hard.

    Most days, Wenscalo worked alone. Occasionally he’d have two or three guys helping him, but honestly, he worked like a crew of ten all by himself.

    We grew attached to him. Robert would cook breakfast just to convince him to stop long enough to eat.

    One of the things I admired most about Wenscalo was how thorough he was.

    When Robert first showed me his backyard design, something about it felt unfinished, but I couldn’t figure out why. Once Wenscalo began pouring the concrete, he brought over several different stone samples and asked me which one I liked.

    That was it.

    The concrete needed a natural stone border. My brain knew something was missing, but because I’d never built a backyard before, I couldn’t identify it until Wenscalo laid those stones in front of me.

    Wenscalo speaks mostly Spanish with a little English, but somehow we became friends anyway.

    We’d feed him lunch or breakfast, and he’d return the favor by bringing fresh vegetables from his garden. I love to garden, but Wenscalo knows how to garden—and there’s definitely a difference.

    He brought us pounds of cucumbers and fresh green beans.

    Robert spent a lot of time talking with him despite the language barrier, and eventually we started helping him with the concrete work.

    The second day of the pour, one of Wenscalo’s employees didn’t show up.

    Robert asked, “How can I help?”

    Wenscalo handed him the concrete buggy while he spread and finished the concrete, making sure it stayed level and moist enough for brushing.

    The next day Robert had to work, so I took over driving the buggy. It was a neat experience getting to help him and learn a little about his trade.

    Once the concrete was finished being poured, Wenscalo arrived with the stone on his trailer.

    I was excited to help unload it.

    Then I tried to lift one.

    It wasn’t happening.

    Those stones weighed somewhere around seventy pounds each, and they weren’t thin decorative veneer. They were solid, full-thickness natural stone that would become the face of the patio and the border around our concrete. The fireplace stones were a little lighter—probably forty or fifty pounds each—but that may have been my limit.

    What impressed me wasn’t just the weight.

    It was the craftsmanship.

    Every stone had to be considered before it was ever mortared into place. Wenscalo would pick one up, turn it, set it back down, try another, chip a corner, saw the edges, adjust the mortar, and somehow make pieces that came from a quarry look like they’d always belonged together.

    At one point he told me, “If you do too many at a time, it will not be level.”

    That sentence stuck with me.

    Standing there in late-June Arkansas heat, watching him wrestle those massive stones into place one by one, I realized I wasn’t just watching someone build a wall.

    I was watching an artist.

    Looking back, I’m so glad we skipped the stamped concrete. I think another $10,000 worth of decorative concrete would have competed with what became the real centerpiece of the backyard. Instead, my eyes are naturally drawn to the outdoor kitchen and those beautiful stone walls every time I walk into the backyard.

    Then Wenscalo surprised us.

    He wrapped the steps in the same stone even though we hadn’t asked him to. He also built a walkway from the outdoor kitchen to the breezeway leading to our guest house.

    He didn’t charge us a dime for the walkway.

    He simply had extra stone and wanted the project to feel complete.

    Then he suggested we install lights beneath the stone on the pergola.

    After the stone and lights, looking back, choosing brushed concrete with natural stone instead of stamped concrete was one of the best decisions we made during our backyard remodel.

    He was right. They looked amazing.

    It made an incredible difference.

    The day he installed those lights, he brought his wife and his two youngest boys.

    When the boys wandered up to my office door, I picked up the youngest and introduced myself.

    Wenscalo smiled and said, “They are fine.”

    I laughed and replied, “I know, but they’ll have more fun with me.”

    So I stole his kids for the day while he and his wife worked.

    We had so much fun.

    Alex, the older brother, spent half the day pretending to shoot all of us. We became surprisingly good at dramatically collapsing to the floor and playing dead. Then we dressed him in Spider-Man clothes, ate ice cream, went swimming.

    By the end of the day, he’d had so much fun that he kept telling Wenscalo the same Spanish phrase over and over when it was time to leave.

    “Me quedo.”

    “I stay.”

    Even though I was exhausted from our own late nights laying fireplace stone, his happiness reminded me how fulfilling it can be to be tired because you spent yourself creating joy for someone else.

    Alex had a little brother named Juan.

    Juan wasn’t quite as adventurous as Alex, but he loved to be held, and I enjoyed rocking a little one to sleep again.

    Relationships between homeowners and contractors can sometimes be full of stress, but ours turned into something entirely different.

    Abby and I miss all of them.

    I think Robert misses his friendship with Wenscalo too.

    One of my favorite memories still makes me laugh.

    Robert had spent hours trying to level the mortar for the outdoor kitchen’s first course of stone. Wenscalo walked by, glanced at it for about two seconds, smiled, and said,

    “Okay… now give it a little hit.”

    Robert tapped it with his trowel.

    Perfectly level.

    Just like that, Robert gained the confidence to keep building.

    Some people leave their mark because of what they build.

    I think Wenscalo and his family left theirs because of the kind of people they are.

    They built us a beautiful backyard, but somewhere along the way they also became friends.

    And I have a feeling we’ll be hiring them again.

    If you’re in the Arkansas River Valley and need someone to build concrete, stonework, or an outdoor living space, we couldn’t recommend Wenscalo more highly.

    Wenceslao Flores

    phone 479 747 3015

    email. wenceslaoflores45@gmail.com

    address. PO.BOX 1311

  • The Marketplace Deal I Was Sure Wasn’t Going to Happen

    The Marketplace Deal I Was Sure Wasn’t Going to Happen

    We have lived in this house for six years.

    When we first viewed the house in person, I immediately fell in love.

    Everyone made fun of me because I kept saying, “The house has great bones…” But it needed a lot of aesthetic work.

    Over six years, we replaced the flooring in our bedroom. We actually added Luxury Vinyl Plank to the entire house. We installed it ourselves within the first two weeks of owning our house.

    We removed the tile and added stone veneer to the fireplace in our bedroom and the living room.

    Painted the walls.

    We also removed a vanity that came straight out of the nineties, and we replaced it with a wall and a bigger closet.

    But our bedroom still felt like chaos even with those upgrades because our furniture was not “our” furniture.

    We needed a bedroom set.

    That took a lot longer to find than I expected.

    Lately, Marketplace has been flooded with scammers, so each time Robert and I shop there, we default to low expectations of completing the sale.

    Robert and I had been talking about replacing our bedroom furniture for years.

    When we got married, the very first furniture we bought together was a black bedroom set from Ashley Furniture. We loved it… until we moved.

    Suddenly, the black furniture that looked perfect in our first house didn’t fit our next one. So around 2014, we bought another bedroom set from Ashley’s.

    About six years later…

    We broke the bed.

    Yes.

    While we were in it.

    I’ll give you a second to laugh….

    Okay. Moving on.

    Like he always does, Robert somehow engineered a repair that kept that bed alive for several more years.

    Eventually my mom gave us another bed, but it wasn’t part of a matching bedroom set. Before long our room looked like we’d furnished it by collecting random pieces over the last twenty years.

    We had two nightstands and a dresser from one bedroom set.

    A completely different bed.

    And Robert’s forty-year-old chest of drawers that his grandfather built by hand.

    I painted it a couple of years ago, and honestly, that thing is still built better than most furniture today. Nothing is loose, the drawers still glide perfectly, and I secretly loved how ridiculously deep they were.

    Apparently, I have a thing for furniture that’s actually functional.

    It just wasn’t exactly… coordinated.

    For the last couple of years, I’d casually searched Facebook Marketplace.

    And let me tell you something…

    Marketplace is absolutely full of beautiful furniture…

    …for someone else.

    I’ve realized I have a pattern.

    I don’t settle easily.

    I waited for the right husband.

    Now apparently I’ve spent two years waiting for the right bedroom set.

    Robert graduated with a 4.0 engineering degree, was captain of his high school football team, and somehow managed to save his purity for his wife. I couldn’t have designed a better husband if someone had handed me a checklist.

    So yes…

    Marketplace has been full of perfectly nice bedroom sets.

    They just weren’t my bedroom set.

    Cherry wood? Absolutely not.

    I know it has its place.

    If you’re decorating a law office or executive office, go for it.

    But in my bedroom?

    No.

    Pine?

    Better.

    Still not my favorite.

    The color had to feel right.

    The texture had to feel right.

    The style had to feel right.

    I’m picky.

    Then one afternoon Facebook sent me a notification.

    New listing.

    A king-sized Ashley bedroom set.

    The seller said she’d only owned it for about a month and was moving.

    She wanted $2,500 for everything—the bedroom furniture and the living room furniture.

    I only wanted the bedroom.

    So I offered $1,500.

    She said yes.

    And that’s when I became convinced it probably wasn’t going to happen.

    For the next twenty-four hours, every little thing made us question it.

    Robert thought it might be a scam.

    The listing only used Ashley Furniture’s stock photos, and before he was willing to hook up the trailer and drive across town, he wanted to see actual pictures of the furniture.

    So he asked me to message her and ask for real photos.

    I actually wasn’t worried about that.

    I believed she had the furniture.

    I was worried she’d walked back into her bedroom, looked around, and realized,

    “Why am I selling this for only $1,500?”

    She said she’d send pictures.

    Then she didn’t.

    She told me she’d be home around 5:30.

    Then she messaged saying she wasn’t feeling well.

    By then I’d already written the ending in my head.

    I told her if she changed her mind she could let us know.

    She replied that she wasn’t changing her mind.

    Robert reminded me,

    “You still need those real pictures.”

    So I asked again.

    She didn’t respond as quickly this time.

    I texted Robert,

    “She never texted back.”

    “I’m heartbroken.”

    He replied,

    “I was afraid of that.”

    Finally she messaged.

    “I’ll be in town around three. I’ll send pictures then.”

    A few hours later…

    My phone buzzed.

    The pictures were real.

    The furniture was beautiful.

    Robert immediately replied, “Wow.”

    The furniture looked exactly like the Ashley photos.

    Suddenly…

    This thing I’d already started talking myself out of believing was actually happening.

    That evening we hooked up the trailer and drove over.

    Walking into the house, everything looked practically brand new.

    As we loaded furniture, we started talking.

    She shared that she was a widow who had recently started dating again. She believed she’d found someone to build a future with, so she rented a home in Arkansas and bought this bedroom furniture for the life she thought they were going to build together.

    But life had other plans.

    The relationship ended.

    She decided to move back home to Tennessee.

    Looking back, everything suddenly made sense.

    When she’d first told me she’d be “home around 5:30,” I’d assumed she meant she was getting off work.

    She wasn’t.

    She’d already moved back to Tennessee.

    She’d been planning to drive more than five hours back to Arkansas just to finish cleaning out the rental house.

    When she told me she wasn’t feeling well…

    She wasn’t backing out.

    She simply wasn’t up to making a five-and-a-half-hour drive.

    I had written an entire story in my head with only half the information.

    Then she smiled and said,

    “Oh… the adjustable base goes with it.”

    I looked at Robert.

    He looked at me.

    Neither of us knew that was included.

    If you’ve ever priced adjustable bases, you know they aren’t cheap.

    Then, while we were loading everything, she remembered something else.

    “Oh… I bought two extra mattress protectors. They’re still in the package. You can have those too.”

    A minute later, she pointed toward the nightstands.

    “Those lamps came with the bedroom set too.”

    This was amazing. The dresser literally had the extra hardware attached to the back of it.

    It seemed like every few minutes she’d remember something else that belonged with the bedroom.

    One thing I’m especially glad I asked was whether Robert should bring tools.

    She immediately said yes.

    Ashley had assembled everything for her, so it wasn’t something she’d really thought about.

    That one question probably saved us a lot of frustration.

    If you’re buying furniture from Facebook Marketplace, don’t assume it’ll fit through the door assembled.

    Ask first.

    Bring tools.

    Your future self will thank you.

    Before we pulled away, I looked at her and said,

    “This is going to be really well loved.”

    And I meant it.

    With four kids, there was no way we would’ve walked into Ashley Furniture and bought this set brand new.

    What she no longer needed became an incredible blessing for our family.

    At one point, Robert stood there looking at everything and simply said,

    “You did a great job finding this”

    If you know Robert…

    That’s basically a standing ovation.

    The funny part?

    He almost talked me out of buying it.

    He was exhausted.

    Work had been unusually demanding.

    We have a backyard renovation underway.

    From his perspective, we already had a bedroom set that worked.

    I remember telling him,

    “We can’t keep saying we want a nicer bedroom and refuse to pay store cost, but then pass on the right bedroom set because it shows up at an inconvenient time. At some point, something has to give.”

    Now he’s told me more than once,

    “You were right.”

    His favorite part?

    The adjustable base.

    I will say, Charlie and I like that feature, too…

    I used to buy tons of support pillows to sit up comfortably in bed.

    Now, I don’t have to.

    And honestly, I had never heard of an adjustable base until we picked up the furniture.

    Now? I don’t think I could ever not have an adjustable base.

    Just a week earlier I’d been walking through Ashley Furniture looking at patio furniture.

    One table.

    A few chairs.

    Four thousand dollars.

    I could not. I would not.

    Here we were loading an entire king bedroom setup—with the adjustable base, matching lamps, unopened accessories, and all the extras—for $1,500.

    Buying everything new would’ve cost several thousand dollars more.

    But honestly…

    I am not sharing this to tell you about the furniture.

    It’s about waiting.

    It’s about not settling on what you really want.

    Whether that’s your spouse, your coffee cups, or your bedroom set.

    And when you do find what is just right, don’t write a negative ending before the ending comes.

    And sometimes recognizing that the right opportunity doesn’t always show up at the right time.

    Life had kept us from buying a matching bedroom for years.

    Groceries.

    Kids.

    Basketball shoes.

    Gymnastics.

    Home projects.

    There was always something more important.

    Looking back…

    I’m actually grateful we waited.

    Because waiting made room for an opportunity we never could’ve planned.

    Sometimes patience saves you money.

    Sometimes patience gives you something better than you expected.

    And sometimes…

    A Facebook Marketplace deal turns into one of your favorite rooms in the house.

    Also, the tension between Robert and I at the beginning of the transaction made me realize something about myself.

    I will write about that next because it was a helpful insight when you are going against the grain with your person.

    If you’re shopping Facebook Marketplace…

    • Ask for actual photos if the listing only uses stock images. Buyers want to see the condition before making the drive.
    • Ask whether the furniture has already been disassembled. If not, bring tools.
    • Don’t panic if a seller takes longer than expected to respond. There may be a story you don’t know.
    • Don’t be afraid to negotiate respectfully.
    • And if the right opportunity shows up at an inconvenient time… don’t automatically pass on it. Sometimes the inconvenience lasts one afternoon, but the reward lasts for years.

  • Secure in Love, Anxious About Losing It: Anxious Attachment

    The last time I wrote about the book Attached, I mentioned thinking that I had an anxious attachment style. What I did not explain was that I eventually landed somewhere slightly different: securely attached, but with anxious tendencies.

    Before reading the book, if you had asked me what anxious attachment looked like, I would have pictured a jealous person.

    Someone who checks her husband’s phone. Someone who feels threatened by other women. Someone who is constantly searching for evidence that she is about to be replaced.

    So imagine my surprise when I recognized parts of myself in the description.

    Because I am not jealous.

    When Robert and I were engaged, my mom and stepdad came to visit us at the house we had recently purchased. We were cooking dinner and visiting when Robert’s phone rang.

    There was a woman on the other end.

    She was stranded at the Russellville exit after dark and asked if Robert could come help her. She knew he lived nearby. I knew her from the short time I attended Robert’s high school, and I remembered thinking she was beautiful.

    Robert wanted to go help her, and I supported that.

    As he was leaving, I remember my mom protectively asking, “Are you sending him by himself?”

    “Yes,” I said.

    In my head, I was thinking, Why would I go? My family is visiting, and I can’t do anything to help her.

    My mom apparently felt that I was not being protective enough of my future marriage, so she sent my stepdad with him.

    Seems pretty secure of me, right?

    About a month later, we were close to getting married. I would soon be moving into our house, so I came to Russellville to decorate while Robert cleaned the gutters.

    I remember him standing on a ladder.

    And I remember thinking, I hope he doesn’t fall and die.

    I told him I could not bear to watch him up there.

    At the time, I knew nothing about attachment styles, but I carried that memory with me for the next sixteen years of our marriage.

    It made me wonder whether anxious attachment can take different forms.

    I do not check Robert’s phone. He has given me his Facebook password at least twenty times, but I could not tell you what it is right now.

    I have never spent much time worrying that another woman might take him from me.

    But I can cry almost instantly when I think about saying goodbye or about everything that could happen before we are ready to.

    The other night, Robert and I were outside working on our outdoor kitchen. Heat, exhaustion, and sleep deprivation had taken their toll on me.

    I looked around at everything we had worked so hard to build together, and a thought entered my mind:

    What if tomorrow God decided it was Robert’s time to go home?

    Suddenly, all of it felt temporary.

    The house. The outdoor kitchen. The pool. The life we had spent sixteen years creating.

    Without him, I would become the woman who had it all and nothing at the same time.

    It was not a fleeting thought. It produced sadness. It created a knot in my throat and brought tears to my eyes.

    It also produced an action response.

    I went and found Robert a hat. I turned on our enormous outdoor fan. I made sure he was not getting overheated.

    And I told him I loved him.

    I know that may sound like an enormous emotional leap—from watching my husband work in the heat to imagining life without him—but it is not much different from an anxiously attached person sensing a slight shift in a relationship and imagining its complete demise.

    The difference is that I am not anxious about being chosen.

    I am anxious about losing what has already been chosen.

    I hesitate to say that without clarifying something important.

    I do not think my version of anxiety is somehow better, deeper, or more loving than someone else’s.

    On paper, jealousy may sound less loving than being afraid of death or separation, but I do not think fear becomes more noble simply because it is not about betrayal.

    Anxious attachment is still anxious attachment when the feared rupture is death, an accident, emotional distance, abandonment, or another person.

    All of it deserves self-awareness because all of it can lead us to react to fear as though it were fact.

    My anxiety may not make me search Robert’s phone, but it can make me search a delayed phone call, a change in routine, or a quiet expression for evidence that something is wrong.

    Trusting his faithfulness does not always mean I peacefully trust life.

    My fear can also make it difficult to fully enjoy something while part of me remains aware that it will not last forever.

    Sometimes I think I try to survive the loss of things before I have actually lost them.

    One of the most interesting things I learned in Attached was that people with anxious attachment tendencies can be extremely sensitive to emotional changes.

    Because they fear rupture in a relationship, they may become highly alert to changes in mood, behavior, tone, and routine.

    Long before I read the book, I knew I was good at reading a room.

    I notice emotional shifts before anyone says a word. I watch patterns. I detect changes. I decode them.

    Detecting the shift is not usually my problem.

    The decoding is where I can get into trouble.

    The book describes research in which people with anxious attachment tendencies were often able to recognize that an emotional atmosphere had changed. But when they were asked to immediately decide what had caused the change, their interpretations were much less accurate.

    They detected the shift correctly.

    Then anxiety filled in the blanks.

    When they were told to pause before deciding what the emotional shift meant, their accuracy improved. Their instincts had noticed something real, but they needed time to separate what they observed from what they feared.

    Eventually, I began to recognize that pattern in myself.

    My boss was quieter than usual, and I wondered if there was a problem with my job performance.

    It turned out that they had received terrible news on the way to work.

    Robert seemed preoccupied, and my mind whispered that he might be pulling away.

    It turned out that he was distracted because he was acting as director while his boss was out of town.

    My instincts were not necessarily wrong when they told me something was different.

    I was wrong when I immediately assumed the difference was about me or about the security of the relationship.

    The most memorable example happened during one of Robert’s outages at the nuclear plant.

    A man from the plant had previously died on his way home after working night shift during an outage. A year or so later, I woke up at 7:00 one morning, and Robert had not made it home.

    He was normally home by 6:30.

    He was not answering his phone. He had not texted to say he would be late, and at that time, I did not have a direct number I could call inside the plant.

    The more time passed, the more frightening the silence became.

    Logically, I knew that if he had been in a serious accident, the police likely would have contacted me.

    But ambiguity is fertile ground for an anxious mind.

    Every unanswered question became another opportunity for my brain to create an answer, and every answer was worse than the one before it.

    Robert finally called at 7:45.

    The person who was supposed to relieve him had been late. Robert could not leave his position or get to a phone until someone arrived to take over.

    Nothing terrible had happened.

    But my brain had noticed a break in a familiar pattern, and it immediately prepared me for rupture.

    That is the anxious tendency I recognize in myself.

    It is not, Who is he talking to?

    It is, Why is this different?

    It is not, Is he going to choose someone else?

    It is, Is something happening that could take him away from me?

    Understanding this has not made me incapable of anxious thoughts. It has simply taught me not to treat every thought as a conclusion.

    Now, when I sense a shift, I try to separate three things:

    What did I actually observe?

    What story did my mind attach to it?

    What else could be true?

    Sometimes intuition is telling us that something has changed.

    But anxiety is often the voice insisting that we already know why.

    The pause between those two things has changed the way I respond, not only in my marriage but in nearly every relationship I have.

    I am also not speaking from a place of believing that betrayal or separation could never happen.

    I know spouses can leave. Marriages can end. People can make choices that once seemed impossible.

    I have just never felt that Robert’s hand was on the door.

    I am much more convinced that if he leaves this life before I do, it will not be by his own choosing.

    And that is where I land on my attachment style.

    Maybe I am secure in my marriage but anxious about its permanence.

    I do not believe our story would end because we stopped choosing each other.

    What makes our bond special is not that the world contains no one else with potential. We do not choose each other because there are no other attractive, interesting, or compatible people in existence.

    We choose each other because we committed to.

    No matter where temptation, difficulty, distraction, or disappointment appears, we both know where we are going to end up.

    In each other’s arms.

    Maybe I was never afraid that Robert would stop choosing me.

    Maybe I was afraid that one day, life would not let me keep him.

  • I Thought I Wanted a Sectional

    I Thought I Wanted a Sectional

    Our backyard remodel is almost complete. We are waiting on the pergola to go up. Meanwhile, we have been doing the fun part of the remodel—furnishing.

    I will admit, this part is more fun for me than Robert.

    I dream it up. He supports my crazy ideas. I order. I get excited.

    I had my heart set on a sectional in front of the fireplace. I had dreams of a cool fall night, a cozy sweater, a glass of red wine snuggled up in front of the fire watching TV.

    But have you looked at the price of outdoor sectionals lately? They cost an arm and a leg… and a hand, too.

    I finally found a sectional to make my cozy night dreams come true for the reasonable price of $500 on Wayfair.

    When it arrived, it felt like someone switched my coffee cup.

    I could not like it.

    The backs of the seats were too short and not supportive. The cushions were thin and lightweight, causing them to shift as we sat down. Then once you plant yourself on them, they just… squish. That’s the best way I know how to describe it.

    I don’t know if it’s just me, but when Robert makes my coffee and uses the wrong coffee cup, I sort of have to choke it down. My lips don’t like coffee out of stainless steel. They like to hug the cup as I drink. My heart feels deflated when the cup is too small; there has to be either too much coffee or too much milk, but it can’t be just right in a small cup.

    Then I realized I might be the same way about seating.

    I have all sorts of outdoor seating around our house. I have egg chairs, an outdoor twin bed that I made with thick pillows all the way around it. I have a lounge rocker. I love chairs. If I am going to sit, it has to be comfortable.

    When I finally found the courage to tell Robert that I hated the outdoor sectional we bought, he was understanding. I decided to go to HomeGoods and find something to test in the store.

    But…..Right before I left, it occurred to me that if I wanted to really love it, I might have to make it.

    I loaded up Abby, and we got a couple of miles into our trip to Conway when I said, “I think we’re going to go home. I know that we are going to find something pretty at HomeGoods, most likely wicker, and the appeal will be more based on looks than comfort. I think I need to make what I want for the backyard.”

    I found some plans on Etsy for $5. I chose the sectional and table by Ana White Plans. I gave Robert my material list since he was already going to Lowe’s.

    It looked like a big job to start.

    Robert teased me, saying he thought it would take me three weeks to complete the sectional.

    That’s a great way to summon the competitive side of me.

    So that night, I got to work.

    First, I consolidated the material cut list for the couch and the separate sectional. I went to the garage and labeled and cut all my wood. I used my Ryobi Brushless Sliding Miter Saw and a bright green marker to label the pieces.

    Tip: I use a bright green marker because it’s easier to find the labels.

    The plans looked overwhelming at first, but they were actually built around one simple pattern. Every armrest was basically the same: two vertical posts, a couple of horizontal rails tying them together, and an apron underneath that gave me a solid place to attach the rest of the frame. Once I figured out that one assembly, I just repeated it.

    It was like building with life-sized LEGO pieces.

    Then came the framing.

    The seat frames were even simpler than the armrests. I started with two long boards running the full length of each seat and connected them with vertical supports. Most of the seats were built with the supports spaced about 17 inches apart, creating a series of sturdy rectangles that would eventually hold the seat slats and cushions.

    I used invisible joints thanks to my Kreg Pocket Hole Foreman.

    They are extra fancy and not necessary. In fact, the plans didn’t call for that.

    The corner sectional was the only piece that changed things up a bit. Instead of several evenly spaced supports, it used two 70½-inch rails with just three interior supports. The two outer openings measured 20½ inches wide, while the center opening stretched to 22 inches.

    Even though the dimensions changed slightly, the process didn’t.

    Measure.

    Mark.

    Clamp.

    Check for square.

    Drive the screws.

    Repeat.

    By then I wasn’t really following plans anymore—I was following a rhythm.

    Every completed frame looked a little more like the picture I’d had in my head, and every pile of leftover lumber got a little smaller. Somewhere in the middle of all those pocket holes, tape measure markings, and screws, the project stopped feeling intimidating and started feeling inevitable.

    Especially when Robert helped me attach the armrests.

    I attached the armrest to the sectional piece since it only required one armrest. I won’t do that alone again. It was not fun.

    Almost there…

    The coffee table ended up being a miniature version of the sectional. It started the same way—with a simple frame—and then we added the tabletop boards one by one. This is where Robert stepped in with his OCD.

    If you’ve ever built something with evenly spaced boards, you know that your eye can spot one that’s even an eighth of an inch off. Robert wasn’t about to let that happen. He measured every gap, adjusted each board, measured again, and only then drove the screws home.

    I probably would have looked at it, shrugged, and said, “Looks good enough.”

    Robert would have noticed it every time he walked by.

    That’s one of the reasons we make a good team. I’m usually thinking about the big picture—what the finished project is going to look like and how it’s going to feel to use it. Robert is the one making sure every board is straight, every gap is consistent, and everything is built to last.

    By the time we finished the table, it felt like we’d built it a dozen times already. The process was familiar, and every new piece went together a little faster than the last.

    Once the frames were finished, all that was left was adding the seat slats.

    Suddenly, it wasn’t a stack of boards anymore.

    It was a sectional.

    When we carried everything out to the patio, I couldn’t stop smiling. The wood hadn’t even been sanded yet, and I already loved it more than the store-bought sectional I’d sent back. There was something about knowing every board, every screw, and every measurement because my own hands had put them there.

    Then the cushions arrived.

    I held my breath as we dropped them into place, wondering if all those hours in the garage had actually been worth it.

    They fit perfectly.

    Robert stretched out across the corner seat.

    Charlie claimed his spot beside him before I had a chance to.

    And just like that, the picture I’d been carrying around in my head for weeks was sitting right in front of me.

    I thought I wanted a sectional.

    What I really wanted was this.

    Not because we saved money—although we did. Not because I got exactly the dimensions I wanted—although I did. But because every time I look at it, I remember the green marker labels, the sawdust covering the garage floor, Robert making sure every board was perfectly spaced, and the moment something that started as a $5 set of Etsy plans became our favorite place to end the day.

    A few days later, our pergola contractor stopped by.

    He looked at the furniture for a minute and said, “That’s some nice furniture.”

    Robert smiled and said, “Thank you. Felecia built it.”

    The contractor looked confused.

    “Who’s Felecia?”

    “My wife.”

    He shook his head, looked back at the furniture, and laughed.

    “Man… you and her should’ve just built this pergola.”

    I couldn’t help but laugh because that’s exactly what I told Robert before we hired him.

    Maybe that’s what I love most about building.

    It isn’t about proving you can do something. It’s about looking at a project everyone assumes requires someone else and quietly asking,

    Why not us?

    Sometimes the answer is a pile of lumber, a garage full of sawdust, and a place where your family will drink morning coffee, watch football on cool fall evenings, gather with friends, celebrate birthdays, and, Lord willing, make years of memories together.

  • Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino

    Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino

    Ninja Creami Copycat

    This Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino is the perfect combination of coffee, chocolate, and crushed cookies. It is rich, creamy, and just indulgent enough to feel like dessert while still technically qualifying as coffee—which feels like a loophole worth protecting.

    The Ninja Creami gives it that thick, smooth coffee-shop texture, while the chocolate drizzle, whipped cream, and cookie crumble make every sip a little extra. It is perfect for hot afternoons, weekend treats, or anytime regular iced coffee is not quite exciting enough.

    Why You’ll Love This Recipe

    • Rich mocha and coffee flavor
    • Thick, creamy Ninja Creami texture
    • Crunchy chocolate cookie pieces
    • Easy to customize
    • Much less expensive than buying one at a coffee shop

    Ingredients

    Frappuccino Base

    • 1 cup strong brewed coffee, cooled
    • ½ cup whole milk
    • ¼ cup heavy cream
    • 3 tablespoons chocolate syrup
    • 2 tablespoons sugar
    • ¼ teaspoon vanilla extract
    • Pinch of salt

    Mocha Cookie Crumble Topping

    • 2 tablespoons crushed chocolate sandwich cookies, such as Oreos
    • 1 tablespoon mini chocolate chips, optional

    For Serving

    • Chocolate syrup
    • Whipped cream
    • Extra crushed chocolate sandwich cookies

    Instructions

    Make the Frappuccino Base

    1. Add the cooled coffee, whole milk, heavy cream, chocolate syrup, sugar, vanilla extract, and salt to a bowl or pitcher.
    2. Whisk until the ingredients are completely combined and the sugar has dissolved.
    3. Pour the mixture into a Ninja Creami pint container.
    4. Place the container on a flat surface in the freezer and freeze for 24 hours.

    Spin the Frappuccino

    1. Remove the frozen pint from the freezer and place it in the Ninja Creami.
    2. Select the Lite Ice Cream setting.
    3. After the first spin, make a small hole in the center of the mixture.
    4. Pour approximately 3 tablespoons of milk or half-and-half into the hole.
    5. Select Respin.
    6. Continue respinning as needed until the Frappuccino is smooth and creamy.

    Assemble

    1. Drizzle chocolate syrup around the inside of a tall glass.
    2. Pour half of the Frappuccino into the glass.
    3. Sprinkle in some of the crushed chocolate sandwich cookies.
    4. Fill the remainder of the glass with the Frappuccino.
    5. Top generously with whipped cream.
    6. Drizzle more chocolate syrup over the whipped cream.
    7. Finish with the remaining cookie crumble and mini chocolate chips, if using.
    8. Serve immediately.

    Tips for the Best Frappuccino

    • Brew the coffee a little stronger than usual so the flavor stands up to the milk, cream, and chocolate.
    • Let the coffee cool completely before mixing the base.
    • Freeze the Ninja Creami container on a perfectly flat surface.
    • Do not worry if the mixture looks dry or crumbly after the first spin. Adding milk and using the Respin setting will smooth it out.
    • Use a combination of finely crushed cookies and larger cookie pieces for the best texture.
    • Chill the serving glass before assembling the drink to help it stay frosty longer.

    Easy Variations

    For an even richer chocolate flavor, add a little extra chocolate syrup before freezing.

    For a stronger coffee flavor, replace some of the milk used during the respin with cooled coffee.

    For extra cookie crunch, add another layer of crushed cookies halfway through the glass.

    This Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino is creamy, chocolatey, and filled with just the right amount of cookie crunch. It tastes like something you would order from a coffee shop, but you can make it at home without changing out of your pajamas—which clearly makes the homemade version superior.