Not having any official responsibilities at the Reformation Day Faire, I got to skip the early exit, and leisurely left the house around nine to head to Go Play with just myself, two boys, an entire costume change for the Reformation Day Faire including different shoes and a blanket to use for a shawl in case it was cold, and just in case, a craft project and my medical terminology textbook.

Go Play was its usual fun with a discussion of the ins and outs of playing Battlestar Galactica, a game of Sabetour (in which I tied for first), and two games of Dominion (in both of which, I think, I came in second). Things were just really starting to gear up when it came time for me to head over to Ref Faire. Theresa was there to take over ‘watching boys at Go Play’ shift, and I’d decided that I wanted to get to Ref Faire in time for the outside events starting in the afternoon.

A brief excursus here into the subject of my new haircut: I just got my hair cut very short, for me. It’s a few inches past my shoulders, with swept to the side bangs. I spent the first twenty to thirty minutes at the Reformation Day Faire fielding “I LOVE your new haircut!” comments. Part of me honestly enjoyed the attention I don’t usually get, and part of me started to find it just a bit ridiculous. For those who are wondering, yes, I like my new haircut, no, I didn’t freak out about getting that much cut off, and no, I probably won’t keep it. I got my five minutes of fame for a having a ‘cool’ hair cut, and I’ll enjoy it while it lasts, but (I think) I’ll be ready to head back toward being a person with long hair by time I’d need to get it trimmed.

I spent most of my time chatting with people I haven’t seen in a long time, or with people I mostly know through the internet, punctuated by hanging out with old friends on the security team (or chatting at the registration desk) and getting the inside scoop on what was going on.

I re-discovered something about myself, which is that I really prefer to be working behind the scenes over getting the apparently seamless presentation. I ‘got’ to help out in the kitchen a bit, and serve the salad for the spaghetti dinner the church put on. This involved keeping salad served up in bowls as fast as people could come take it, helping two people with food allergies, and telling multiple people that the salad in the bowls already had dressing on it. At one point I was falling behind and running out of salad, so I needed some help to keep up with the salad consumption, (obviously, involving time pressure and dealing with people, both of which usually just stress me out) and at the end my feet and back hurt, even if that makes me a wimp compared to people who were on there feet for 17 hours straight that day. And I have to say, I loved it. I’m filing this away under ‘trying to figure out what I’m good at it’ and will try to make sense out of it later.

Pretty soon it was time for the dance. The rational part of my brain had decided long before dancing in a long flowing dress in a crowded room wouldn’t even be fun and I really just shouldn’t bother. As the dance got closer it started to get shouted down by the part of of my brain that was jumping up and down saying, “Dancing is fun!”. There was even a contemplative part of my brain positing that I just didn’t want to dance because I was pretty sure I would never find anyone willing to dance with me anyway, so it was safer to just decide not to. I ignored that theory, but still somehow found myself in the corner full of other girls, (opposite the wall lined with guys, as the room had somehow magically segragated itself…) watching the Virginia Reel, and clapping along.

The next two dances, however, found me discovering that having old friends on the security team is not just useful for finding out what’s going on, but excellent for finding dance partners when they’re taking turns actually being security and dancing. Good thing too, because I have a sneaking suspicion I would have gotten (very politely) yelled at if I’d very rationally managed to avoid dancing altogether…

And so the crazy, fun, busy day closed with me turning over a Lee Ann Womack song in my head:

“I hope you never lose your sense of wonder,
You get your fill to eat but always keep that hunger,
May you never take one single breath for granted,
GOD forbid love ever leave you empty handed,
I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean,
Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens,
Promise me that you’ll give faith a fighting chance,
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance.

I hope you dance….I hope you dance.”

Life has been rough for me lately, not so much because life has been rough, but because I’ve been emotional and confused and hurting. Well, I can still point to the same reasons that I’m having a difficult time with life, but over the last couple days I got a minor but much needed attitude adjustment. I experienced a few small but striking moments of providence in my life, and I got one beautiful, crazy day.

And at the end I got the choice to dance, and I did.

I keep thinking I must surely be okay now, because I’m doing better than I was a couple of weeks ago, and yeah, I know I’m fighting some spiritual battles right now, but I’m past the worst of that now, right? (i.e. ’shouldn’t I be over that by now?’). Plus, it’s not like I have anything reasonable to complain about besides that. I watched the kids for 2 1/2 days while James and Theresa were out of town, but Gabrielle had them for several hours on two of those days, and there were no emergencies. I’m getting twinges again like the ones from the cysts (I have a scan on Wednesday and we’ll see if that means they’re coming back or not), but even with mild cold symptoms and lack of sleep, it’s not like this constitutes a debilitating health problem.

But, when you come down to it, those are all just added annoyances, anyway. They’re not really the reason that I’m not okay. Here’s the big issue for the moment:

I’m never going to get married.

Now, I don’t know that’s true, but here’s the thing: I *have* to able to say that if it is true, then I won’t fight God on it. I have to be able to say that He can have anything, even a dream that I hold onto a lot harder than a lot of stuff I actually have in my life. And I have to believe that even then, He is still good.

And that last sentence particularly is giving me fits. Because I know it’s true. I have known it far back as I can remember. But right now it doesn’t feel like it would be true. Does that mean I don’t believe it? I don’t really know.

But I know I need to believe it more than I do. And I know it hurts to let go, more than I can stand. And I know that even when the dust finally settles, and I can clearly see God’s goodness again, this won’t be the last time I have to fight this battle, any more than it’s been the first time, even if this one is more intense than any time I’ve fought it before.

And I have to say, that even knowing it isn’t true, it feels lame that this is such a big deal to me.

This is the part where I’m supposed to sum everything up nicely. Well, I think this is the best I’ve got right now:

Lord, I believe–help my unbelief.

It’s not that life is that hard right now. If life were hard, at least I’d have an excuse. If there were some obstacle to overcome, people would gather round and tell me it was okay. But life is just putting one foot in front of the other, and moving forward, and right now I’m tired of it.

And thank you very much, if you’re going to tell me that that’s just life as a grown up, I really don’t want to hear about it. I know that, okay? I’m doing it.

I’m washing dishes, and studying, and excavating layers of clutter from my room, and beginning to poke at unfinished projects to see if I can finish them. And I am moving forward, it’s just one step at a time, and I’m not so good at the slow progress process.

Sunday I just wanted to curl up and cry somewhere, and hope that someone came to make it all better. And I pulled out of myself long enough to realize that nothing was actually wrong, and maybe there was something better to do with my time. So, I went and chatted, and poured out the tale of my couponing woes, and walked in the rain, and cleared tables.

And I still didn’t accomplish anything spectacular, but I knew that a few years ago I couldn’t do that. Being miserable for no reason was just being miserable and I hadn’t figured out how to pull out of it.

So that whole ‘one step at a time’ process really does get somewhere. It’s good to know that when I’m plodding along, feeling like I’m not getting anywhere. But I have to say, I still don’t like it.

I was thinking about being married. (Excursus: Whenever I contemplate a life apart from singleness I imagine being married. Not getting married. Important something there.) I was contemplating the fact that when I am married I will have promised my husband that I will follow him wherever God calls him and therefore us. And for some reason I was assuming that because I’d promised to follow wherever I would have to leave Peoria and follow wherever. Like, because I’d promised God was going to make it happen. And then I realized that I was getting upset.

I don’t want to leave Peoria. More than that I don’t want to leave Orange Street. I feel very strongly that I have important work to do here. Okay, currently the work I can point to is teaching Noah and Justice to read and being in charge of set up and clean up of our Tuesday Night on Orange Street dinners. It’s not glamorous, but I feel in my soul such a deep steadiness about my place here that I cannot argue. It’s the same steadiness that convinced me to move here five years ago. And I realized that if getting married meant leaving the place where I was sure of my calling I would rather not. I would rather be here and single with that steadiness than married without it.

Times past I wouldn’t have been able to say that. Not too long ago I was so hung up on getting married I wasn’t even thinking about what I was meant to be doing. I was longing for a place, a heart home, a man who’d call me his. I was craving a man with a mission so I could be married and be sure what to be about. But that Spirit of His snuck up on me and put in me such a surety I feel like a fortress.

Yes, I still want to get married and yes, loneliness still hurts. I haven’t all of a sudden changed into a heartless goon for God and I still am convinced I do not have this supposed ‘gift of singleness’ people are so hot about. But I am grounded. I am convinced of what I should be doing and, shockingly, I’m actually doing it. I have my niche to fill and by God’s might I’m filling it. And I’ll keep on until He whispers it’s time to move on. Cause I’d rather be here, lonely and single, laboring under the smile of God than someplace else, even married, and drifting.

I like tailoring what I’m listening to to my mood. It’s like eating a bite of just what you wanted or wearing the exact right clothes for your mood. It’s a form of expression all it’s own when you pay attention to what you’ve a hankering for and an emotional release to have someone sing just what you’re feeling.

For much of my growing up years I preferred to listen to male singers because I hadn’t figured my voice out and I could actually sing along with the deeper voices. As I’ve grown (and had some informal voice training) I’ve branched out to female singers. But there was still a gap, still a mood I was missing.

The female singers I enjoy, like Sarah McLachlan and Dido, tend towards melancholic and moody which is no problem for me, but they have a specific brand of moody. And when they talk about relationships they tend to talk about the jerk who dumped them or having a broken heart because this guy is not right for them or, on rare occasions, exulting over falling in love. None of these events or sentiments are quite what I would call my forte. I can’t relate to the specifics though I can enjoy their expressions of the emotions. So that music is great for certain moods, but I found that one mood in particular was going begging. I had no music for the loneliness that comes from being single.

Okay, I know that’s really specific. And I know it’s unfair to expect a songwriter to grok that very particular emotion and a singer to deliver such a specific mood to me. So I wasn’t expecting to ever have any music for my lonely moods in my collection. But then I stumbled upon Deb Talan.

Deb Talan is currently one half of a duo called The Weepies (the other half is Steve Tannen) who specialize in a folk-pop I think is charming. People have called them childlike and talked about their harmonies, which are beautiful, and their clever lyrics, which border on whimsical. They sing about simple things with great emotion and very quickly after I bought one of their albums catapulted into my top ten favorite music artists. I first heard about The Weepies from Paste Magazine which is a magazine focused on American indie culture. It had a story about the Weepies, talking about how they’d each been recording solo artists and fans of each other before they met and formed the Weepies. And somewhere in there they got married and had a baby boy.

What I didn’t know is that, before she met Steve Tannen, Deb Talan was singing about being very single. I’d desperately wanted some more Weepies music, but I’d already bought all three albums so I bought a Deb Talan album A Bird Flies Out. On it there are two songs that fit, that exactly fit that one specific mood of single loneliness. She speaks my thoughts for me and sometimes says things I’d thought, but hadn’t said out loud. She has no answers, but asks the questions so hauntingly that it satisfies.

In the song “How Will He Find Me” Deb Talan sings about wandering through the world wanting someone and waiting for him. But how will he find her? She’s nothing special so what is going to attract him to her?

If I don’t stand out like a star among the moons
if I am always late and he always backs away too soon
I walk the world with a skin so thin
I can wear no adequate protection
everything comes crashing in.
If I’m too wide open for this place
but not enough for him to recognize my face

And what shall I do with a drunken heart
with goggle eyes and the troubling hunger
reaching forward to trick mirror men
leaning out and in again.
If love is a game how can it be creation?
And if I’m wasting my time
how will he find me?

The part from “Saturn’s Light” that resonates with me the most is right at the end. She’s talking about watching people who are in love and almost taking it for granted when you are sitting all alone. And how sometimes just the wanting makes life difficult.

Saturn’s light throws a ring around the moon
and I said my prayers too soon, no one was listening.
There’s a hush on the street
I can hear my own heartbeat,
and my lonesome breathing
but my soul’s little bird can still sing:

Couples kiss across counters and tables
I smile and then look at the wall.
But some people hold hands and they don’t pay attention
like their love is somebody else’s invention.
Our heads say hold back, but our hearts run to strangers and say
“look at me, look at me, look at me.

I don’t plan on ever meeting Deb Talan. But maybe someday I’ll be able to tell her somehow how much these two songs she wrote five years ago have meant to me. How her art has been expression for me and how she sang my thoughts I don’t usually speak. Maybe someday I’ll be able to tell her, but for now I’ll just hit repeat and listen to that song one more time.

Sometimes it feels like God brought you this far, but then just ditched you, or maybe forgot about you. It’s not true. Both halves of this matter. Of course it’s not true–but it still really feels like that sometimes. On the other hand, after Jesus came to earth, with all the humilition and hurt that implies, died a slow and painful death for your sins, brought you through all the pain so far, slowly making you more like Him and teach you more about Him, did He really just leave you behind now? No. Just no.

It’s not about what you feel like, it’s about obeying anyway. It feels like I have always known that my emotions are not supposed to be the basis for my life. What God says is far more reliable than what I feel like at a given moment. But somehow, for a lot of my life, I expected that to mean that I would ‘feel’ a drive to obey and love God whether I felt like it or not. Some Sunday mornings it ‘feels’ like I’m failing to worship properly because I’m distracted and don’t ‘feel’ worshipful like I’m supposed to. So I try to pull my attention back to the service when I notice its wandering, and settle for knowing that every word of praise I’m singing is true, whether I’m ‘feeling’ it at the moment or not.

Trying really hard isn’t good enough. Only God can change your heart. This is lifted straight from a sermon Pastor B preached while he was visiting a couple years ago, but I think that still counts as having learned it. This is where I start to get lost in my own words, because everything I said about doing your best to obey when it doesn’t feel like it’s working is still true. But it’s also true that really, it’s not working, it’s not going to, and you just have to wait patiently while God slowly makes you more like Jesus. While you’re doing your best to obey. At this point I decide: Life is mysterious. Deal with it.

Yes, God really does know better than you do. Yeah, all those great plans I had for getting married at eighteen and being the world’s greatest farmwife/homemaker/homeschool-mom? I would have failed horribly, been miserable, and probably made everyone around me miserable. Spending the last five years getting the above three points drilled into my head was much better than the way I wanted my life to go. Still working on embracing the fact that this presumably means that God knows better about my life right now, and therefore my current life is better all around than the way *I* want it to go.

So, there. Yay for me, I learned all the obvious things I thought I knew already. Well, probably not *all* of them yet.

Oh, and also don’t open van doors when there are fragile things on the other side that might have shifted while you were driving and be ready to fall out. That’s an important one too…

SWCF, 23, seeking theologically correct vampire who wants a sidekick fighting the forces of evil in his path to redemption for past evil vampiric acts. Must be alpha male and slightly crazy. Brooding angst and offbeat sense of humor preferred. Serious inquiries only.

Did I miss anything?

See, I myself live in between. I’m single, but I live with a family. I live with a family, but I don’t live in my husband’s house or my father’s. I’m unique which is nice, but gets difficult when I’m working through an issue and would love the advice from someone with experience being where I am. Most people are experienced either with A or with Z, but I’ve never met someone who had the slightest idea about Q.

I feel very single most of the time. I feel lonely and that craving for someone who would be my special, someone I could have an exclusive relationship with that no one else has. I feel like I am made for someone, but there isn’t anyone I have right now that I complete or who completes me. So I’m dealing with all the trials that come with being single.

At the same time I deal with all the trials that come from living in a family and caring for children. I get woken up at night by crying children, I understand the frustrations of teaching a child who doesn’t want to learn, sometimes I desperately need to get out of the house and away from all the noise and confusion. I deal with the trials of raising children and keeping a home going.

Now, I’m highlighting the trials I’m carrying from both sides. There are good parts of being in between for sure. I left for five weeks with a minimum of pain and suffering. I have little people who miss me when I’m gone and are thrilled to see me when I get back. And what I’ve described so far isn’t actually the in between I’m talking about. I know some young women who live a life very similar to mine with one small, but so very important detail- they still live in their father’s house.

Leaving home was a very big deal to me. It has been an even bigger deal than I imagined at the time. When I moved out I left an important facet of being a woman in Erie. I left my father who was cherishing me.

This I think is the biggest part of feeling in between. When people I listen to talk about being a single young woman working as an assistant homemaker they assume that the woman is living with her father who is cherishing her as he should. So even though they might feel lonely for a husband there isn’t any insult being added to injury. She is still being loved and taken care of and being made to feel like a special person. But I left that behind. My father cherishes me through phone calls and visits and I can’t imagine life without that, but he isn’t here. There are times when I’ve wished I would feel specially loved instead of merely useful. I’ve gone through patches where I’ve felt distinctly unfeminine because there wasn’t anyone treating me especially like a woman.

I’m not criticizing anyone in my life for this lack. My father does his best, but he’s not here. Seth does his best, but he’s my brother and we’ve never thought about this before. When I was deciding whether or not to move here I honestly never considered this aspect of my life out of my father’s home. It’s something I figured out on the way and we’re working on dealing with it as best as we can, but there’s no one to ask advice from and there’s no one who’s talking about this.

And that’s because I live in between. I live where people haven’t thought about and not many understand. I am a pioneer and I’m realizing that I really don’t like being a pioneer. I’m much more comfortable following a well marked path than trying to blaze my own. But this is where I am and here I will stay until I’m called elsewhere. And hey, maybe while I’m here I’ll write a book to people who might follow in my steps. No doubt it will be a very short book with a limited audience.

If you are married then you’re married. If you’re single then you’re not married. In my head I don’t think of myself as ’single’. I think of myself as ‘not married’. As soon as I figured this out (or rather had it pointed out) then it made perfect sense why my world revolves around this fact. It is easy to build your life around what you are not. If you see yourself primarily in terms of what you are not then that’s what you build your life around.

I think very comparatively. I am a outgoing person, an extrovert, for better or worse I am a people person. So I tend to think of myself in terms of other people. The first time I started thinking I might be good at writing is when I, in all charity, noticed I was better than someone else. Most of my gifts and abilities involve communication and other people. Well, the bulk of the other people around me are married. They are first Christians and then they are married. We have the first thing in common, but as soon as I get to the very next thing there is difference between us. I am in a serious minority and I know it. All of my siblings are married, most of my friends are married. I have a few single friends, but I think one of the first ties forged with each of these friends is the hope that we could all be single together. My social circle revolves around married people and families.

I recently read a book called Quest For the High Places by Natalie Nyquist. Actually I read it twice. It was a very helpful book and I would recommend it. What might have been the most helpful thought was actually almost a throw away sentence. The sentence went something like “It is very hard to be single in a married world.” This was the first time I’d noticed how very married my world is. I am surrounded by married people who want other people to be happy like they are. I walk in a world that values marriage and assumes that most people will get married. It is the next step in my life according to all I’ve read, seen, heard, thought. I haven’t taken that step yet so I can’t join the majority elite. I am less in this world I live in. Being single doesn’t mean I am something; it means I’m not.

And it doesn’t help that I really want to get married. I mean, it easy to blow off feeling excluded if you don’t really care. It’s not that big of a deal to be denied entrance into the Cod Liver Oil Every Day Club. It might actually be something of a relief. But I want to get married. I want to join all the people who are normal in our circle. I want to stop being a ‘not’.

I think at this point the thing I need to change is my assumptions. There’s really not much I can do about getting married right now and I need to change something. But assumptions are a royal pain in uncomfortable places to change because they’re not anything you think; they’re things you assume without thinking. But I might be able to shift myself away to a new sun if I start seeing single as plus and not a minus. I mean, it’s not as if I like being stuck in this orbit. I would love to get a place where I can tell vomit stories without it having anything to do with being married or not. It’s certainly nice to have a goal.