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~~
