Read an excerpt from Unglued. Coming August 2012!
Emotions aren’t bad. But try telling that to my brain, pulsing with the reality I should be sleeping at 2:08 a.m. instead of mentally beating myself up.
Why had I become completely unglued about bathroom towels? Towels, for heaven’s sake. Towels!
The master bathroom is the preferred bathroom in our house. Although my three girls have their own bathroom upstairs, they much prefer our more spacious bathtub downstairs. As a result, our bath towels are frequently hijacked. I’ll hop out of the tub and reach for the freshly laundered towel I hung on the rack the day before only to discover it isn’t there. Ugh. So I wind up using a hand towel. (A hand towel. Can you feel my pain?) And while using said hand towel, I mutter under my breath, “I’m banning the girls from our bathroom.” Then, of course, I never do anything to make the situation better and the same scene gets repeated time and time again.
I’d been dealing with the bath towel, or lack thereof, situation for quite a while. Then Art got involved. Up to this point, he had somehow managed to escape the woes of using a hand towel. But not this day. And his happiness did not abound upon discovering nothing but air where the towel should have been.
Since I happened to be nearby, he asked if I might please go get him a towel. I marched upstairs convinced I’d find every towel we own strewn randomly about my girls’ rooms. I was preparing a little scolding speech as I went. With each step, I felt more and more stern. But when I went from room to room, there were no towels. None. How could this be?
Completely baffled, I checked in the laundry room. Nope, no towels there either. What in the world? Meanwhile, I felt the tension in my neck as Art called out once again.
“I’m coming, for heaven’s sake,” I snapped as I walked to the linen closet where the beach towels are kept.
“You’ll just have to use one of these,” I said as I tossed the large Barbie beach towel over the shower door.
“What?” he said. “Isn’t this the towel the dogs sleep on?”
“Oh good gracious, it was clean and folded in the linen closet. I wouldn’t give you a towel the dogs had been on!” Now my voice came out high-pitched and it was clear I was highly annoyed.
“Ugh. Is it too much to simply ask for a clean towel?” Art was asking a question, but to me it was more like a statement. A judgment. A slam against me.
“Why do you always do that?” I screamed. “You take simple mistakes and turn them into slams against me! Did I take the towels and hide them who-knows-where? No! Did I let the dog sleep on the Barbie towel? No! And furthermore, that isn’t the Barbie towel the dogs were sleeping on. We have three Barbie towels — so there! Now you have the dadgum 4 – 1 – 1 on the towel issue. And none of this is my fault!”
I burst into tears and ran upstairs to give the girls a piece of my mind. “Never! Ever! Ever! You are not allowed to use the towels in our bathroom ever, ever, ever again! Do you understand me?”
My girls denied using the towels, which only made me madder. I punctuated each step I took heading back downstairs like a writer slamming her pen on the point of an exclamation mark.
Back downstairs, I grabbed my purse, slammed the door, and screeched the car tires on the driveway as I peeled off to a meeting. A meeting for which I was now late and in no mood to participate. It was probably some meeting about being kind to your family. I wouldn’t know. My mind was a blur the rest of the day.
And now it’s 2:08 a.m., and I can’t sleep.
I’m sad because of the way I acted today. I’m disappointed in my lack of self-control. And the more I relive my towel tirade, the more my brain refuses sleep.
I have to figure this out. What is my problem? Why can’t I seem to control my reactions? I stuff. I explode. And I don’t know how to get a handle on this. But God help me if I don’t get a handle on this. I will destroy the relationships I value most and weave my life with threads of anger, short-temperedness, shame, fear, and frustration. Is that really what I want? Do I want my headstone to read, “Well, on the days she was nice, she was really nice. But on the days she wasn’t, rest assured, hell hath no fury like the woman that lies beneath the ground right here.”
No. That’s not what I want. Not at all. I don’t want the script of my life to be written that way. So at 2:08 a.m., I vow to do better tomorrow. But better proves illusive and my vow wears thin in the face of annoyances and other unpleasant realities. Tears run down my cheek; I’m worn out from trying. Always trying.
So who says emotions aren’t bad? I feel like mine are. I feel broken. Unglued, actually. I have vowed to do better at 2:08 a.m. and 8:14 a.m. and 3:37 p.m. and 9:49 p.m. and many other minutes in between. I know what it’s like to praise God one minute and in the next minute yell and scream at my child — and then to feel both the burden of my destruction and the shame of my powerlessness to stop it.
I also know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of this kind of unglued behavior, how painful it is to feel the sting of someone else spewing at me. The disrespect, the hurt, and feeling so misunderstood that I want to hurt the one who hurt me.
And the emotional demands keep on coming. The unrelenting insecurity. Wondering if anyone appreciates me. Feeling tired, stressed, and hormonal.
Feeling unglued is really all I’ve ever known. Maybe it’s all I’ll ever be?
Those were the defeating thoughts I couldn’t escape. Maybe you can relate. If you relate to my hurt, I pray you also relate to my hope.
What kept me from making changes was the feeling I wouldn’t do it perfectly. I knew I’d still mess up and the changes wouldn’t come instantly. Sometimes we girls think if we don’t make instant progress, then real change isn’t coming. But that’s not so. There is a beautiful reality called imperfect change. The day I realized the glorious hope of the imperfect change is the day I gave myself permission to believe I really could be different.
Imperfect changes are slow steps of progress wrapped in grace.
And good heavens, I’d need lots of that. So I dared to write in my journal:
Progress. Just make progress. It’s okay to have setbacks and do-overs. It’s okay to draw a line in the sand and start over again— and again. Just make sure you’re moving the line forward. Move forward. Take baby steps, but at least take steps that keep you from being stuck. Then change will come. And it will be good.
These honest words enabled me to begin rewriting my story. I couldn’t erase what had come before, but I stopped rehashing it and turned the page afresh. Eventually, I started blogging about my raw emotions and imperfect changes. In response, I got comments whispering, “Me too.”
“Being unglued, for me, comes from a combination of anger and fear,” wrote Kathy. “I think part of it is learned behavior. This is how my father was.” Theresa honestly admitted, “What makes me come unglued? Ignorance! Hatred! A non-forgiving spirit! Cruelty! A holier-than-thou attitude! Wow, I didn’t know I had so many. I just walk around saying, ‘Lord, help me!’ That’s all I can find to say.” Oh, Theresa, I understand. Sometimes all I can think or say is, “Lord, help me.”
And the comments kept coming, all of them expressing the exact same struggle, the same frustration, and the same need for hope. Women with kids and women without kids. Women caring for aging parents and women struggling with being the aging parent. Women working in the home and outside the home. So many different women whose daily circumstances differed but whose core issues were the same.
I realized then that maybe other women could make some imperfect progress too. And this book was born from that simple realization. But I had to laugh at the irony of it. I had just published a book called Made to Crave that dealt with what goes into my mouth. Now I was writing a book called Unglued to deal with what comes out of my mouth.
Unglued is about my imperfect progress — a rewrite for the ongoing script of my life and a do-over of sorts for my raw emotions. It’s an honest admission that this struggle of reining in how I react has been hard for me. But hard doesn’t mean impossible.
How hard something is often depends on your vantage point. Consider the shell of an egg. Looking at it from the outside, we know an eggshell is easily broken. But if you’re looking at that same shell from the inside, it seems an impenetrable fortress. It’s impossible for the raw white and tender yolk to penetrate the hardness of the eggshell. But given time and the proper incubation, the white and yolk develop into a new life that breaks through the shell and shakes itself free. And in the end, we can see that the hard work of cracking the shell was good for the baby chick. The shell provided a place for new life to grow, and then enabled the chick to break forth in strength.
Might the same be true for our hard places? Might all this struggle with our raw emotions and unglued feelings have the exact same potential for new life and new strength?
I think so. I know so. I’ve seen so.
Indeed, emotions aren’t bad.
God gave us emotions. Emotions allow us to feel as we experience life. Because we feel, we connect. We share laughter and know the gift of empathy. We can drink deeply from love and treasure it as only emotions will allow. And yes, we also experience difficult emotions such as sadness, fear, shame, and anger. But might these be important as well? As being able to feel the hot stove tells our finger to pull back, might our raw emotions be important indicators as well?
Yes, but I must remember God gave me emotions so I could experience life, not destroy it. There is a gentle discipline to it all. One I’m learning.
So, in the midst of my struggle and from the deep places of my heart I scrawled out simple words about lessons learned, strategies discovered, Scriptures applied, imperfections understood, and grace embraced. I wrote about peace found, peace misplaced, flaws admitted, and forgiveness remembered. And eventually, I celebrated progress made.
And that’s the promise of this book. Progress. Nothing more. Nothing less. We won’t seek instant change or quick fixes. We’ll seek progress. Progress that will last long after the last page is turned.
We will walk through our progress together. You’re not alone. Neither am I. Isn’t that good to know? Isn’t it good to have this little space and time together where it’s okay to be vulnerable with what we’ve stuffed and to be honest about what we’ve spewed?
There will be tender mercies for the raw emotions. No need to bend under the weight of past mistakes. That kind of bending breaks us. And there’s already been enough brokenness here. No, we won’t bend from the weight of our past, but we will bow to the one who holds out hope for a better future. It’s a truth-filled future where God reveals how emotions can work for us instead of against us.
Our progress is birthed in this truth, wrapped in the understanding that our emotions can work for us instead of against us. And then we get to cultivate that progress, nurture it, and watch it grow. Eventually, others will begin to see it and take notice.
That’s progress, lovely progress. Imperfect progress, but progress nonetheless.
Oh dear friend, there is a reason you are reading these words. There is a hurt we share. But might we also drink deeply from God’s cup of hope and grace and peace as well? The fresh page is here for the turning. A new script is waiting to be written. And together we will be courageous women gathering up our unglued experiences and exchanging them for something new. New ways. New perspectives. New me. New you. And it will be good to make this imperfect progress together.