Back in 2000, my husband and I watched Billy Elliot with a mixture of amusement and fascination.  Neither one of us knew anything at all about classical ballet, and we were mystified by the strange peek inside the culture of ballet that the movie showed.  Why was that ballet teacher so mean to him?  Why was there a whole montage of him just trying to look at himself in the mirror while turning? Why would he need to move so far from home to ever hope to be good?  Why would anyone pursue such a thing that is so hard?  But the look on Billy's dad's face at the end, seeing his son leap onto the stage--the awe, the pride, the joy-- we both teared up when we saw that. We got it. You sacrifice for your kids, for their dreams, for them to push beyond obstacles and fear, and to embrace the thing they love as fully as they possibly can.

Our daughter was born that year, and she started dancing almost as soon as she could walk.  The Wiggles' Dorothy the Dinosaur was her first teacher--I can't tell you how many times we watched her perform Dorothy's Butterfly Ballet.  But I never got tired of it. By the time she was five, she had cajoled, goaded, and begged us into allowing her to take class once a week at a ballet studio 15 miles from our house.  She got to perform in The Nutcracker, and she never looked back.  She's had some mean teachers, and some who were just tough because they had to be. I watched her practice turns for hours at a time. Flip and whip. Hands on the shoulders. Then on the turning board. Then in pointe shoes. We've watched her struggle through puberty, massive growth spurts, anxiety, disappointment, and self-doubt.  We've seen her conquer all of those and keep moving forward, every year making a little more progress toward her goal.  Why would anyone pursue such a thing that is so hard?

This year, we let her move far away from home to attend a full time high school training program.  Though the training she was getting here was excellent, she needed more structure than she could get here at home, so we released her. She didn't need to move to hope to be good; she was already good. But she needed to move so she could develop her vision of herself apart from others' pre-conceived ideas.  She needed to be seen by fresh eyes, and she needed a chance to see with fresh eyes.

Now she's close to finishing her senior year of high school, and for the first time, she doesn't have a clear step forward.  She has a few options to choose from, and we are hopeful that she will keep moving forward. But I have come to accept that I may never get to see her leap on stage as a professional. She may not ever get paid to dance.  Recently, I had the epiphany that I really wanted that moment that Billy's dad had, of seeing the realization of a dream materialize in front of me. Somewhere in the back of my mind, that moment lived in a quiet little corner, a wish that occasionally blossomed into a hope.  But it was never my dream. It was always hers, and so I had a little chat with myself about it.

I told myself that the awe and pride that Billy's dad felt belongs to me as well.  I have watched my child push through obstacles and fear and embrace the thing she loves as fully as she can at each step along this journey.  I have sacrificed time, energy, money (MONEY), and sanity to allow her to go as far as she can. I have actually had his awestruck expression on my face more times than I can count--when she stepped on stage for the first time, when she managed to complete 64 fouette turns in class during parent observation, when she gracefully congratulated friends on getting scholarships and roles and promotions that were denied her, when she spoke encouragement into her friends during their hard days, when she showed class and kindness on her good days, and on and on....

So even though I feel like we are looking into the void right now, I am not sad about it.  Whether DD continues to move forward as a dancer, or whether she takes all that she has gained from this journey into another adventure, I have had those moments that take my breath away. What more can we ask as we plummet upward?

Happy Families

Welcome to Plummeting Upward! Thank you for taking a few minutes of your limited time to share this oxymoronic journey with me.  The title of this blog comes from my youngest child, the one in the green shirt. He tripped one night while walking upstairs, somehow managing to catch himself and to keep moving forward,  falling against gravity rather than tumbling back down. He literally fell UP rather than falling down. I can't think of a better allegory for what my life has been like than that.

In this blog, I hope to tell you stories about myself and my life. True stories. Complete stories.

For example:

I love this photo.  This is the most recent in a series of photos that we take every year when we go pick apples in the mountains of north Georgia. My kids stand next to me, and my husband takes the photo. It is this way every year. It was this way when I weighed 180 pounds. It was this way 2 years later when I weighed 120 pounds. It was this way the year I had a surgical shoe on my foot because of an infected toenail that took an entire summer to clear up. (That was the year I spent the entire trip saying, "Don't kick dirt on my foot!")  It was this way last year when we had to squeeze the trip in between ballet rehearsals, sleepovers, and robotics team meetings, and NO ONE was in a good mood. We have always fought for this photo because we all somehow just knew that it mattered.

And so here we are again, on a mountain, in an apple orchard, apples on our heads, posing for a photo taken by the head of our home...

Who had almost walked out on us 7 months before...

Because the stress of homeschooling and parenting 3 kids with anxiety disorder was too much. Because inconsistent boundaries and poor communication had caused such chaos in our home that every day felt like a war zone. Because life isn't all apple orchards and rainbows.

Sweet reader, this photo is precious to me because we had to plummet upward to get here. When life became overwhelming, we fell flat on our faces in confusion and exhaustion. 

BUT...We fell forward into the arms of a gracious and loving God who pointed us to the human help we needed to begin to learn to be a family again. We fell into the arms of friends and family who loved us in spite of ourselves and who prayed for us as we began to work toward healing and wholeness. We fell into hard work, counseling, vulnerability, and fear, a rewriting of the old story in the hope of telling a new, better, truer one.

There are so many stories in this one photo. Not just the obvious one.  I hope to tell them all to you as time goes on. I hope that I will be brave enough to be completely, terrifyingly honest. And I hope that in reading my stories you, too, will find a place where you can be honest. Where you can fall forward and know that you are loved, no matter what your story is.

~~Peace~~