Sweet Sixteen

McKenzie radiates light. You can see it, can't you? Her moral compass is straight and strong and she is not afraid to be herself in any situation. That's a comforting thing to be able to say when you're the mom and she's your daughter. 

I hear the stories and feel the worries from some of my fellow raising a teenager moms, but when I stop to evaluate my own worries, I find that I have very few regarding McKenzie. Mostly I just feel excitement to see where she goes in life.

And now that she's sixteen, she's on her way to more and more freedom!

For her birthday, Eliza and I snuck her out of school and took her to her favorite lunch-place: Panda Express.

She drove to and from, trying to rack up more minutes towards the hours she still has left to get her permit - doesn't she look like a natural behind that wheel?!

But the most notable thing of the day, in my opinion AND hers (I'm guessing), is a pretty bouquet of flowers. Flowers from a boy. A boy that she likes.  That she likes, likes. Who likes her back. And his name is Jake.

It's a good thing I really like Jake, too.

We didn't get to see her much during the day... she went from early morning seminary to school to play practice, came home for half an hour for some quick hugs (and to rub in the fact that she's taller than I am)...

...and then disappeared into Vegas for volleyball practice.

She spends a lot of time in her extracurricular activities and we miss her while she's gone. She brings a sense of order and dependability into our home, along with a flash of fun. She laughs at herself with no problem and will often have tears streaking down her laughing face as she confesses to something embarrassing.

A few days after her birthday, she invited a whole big group of friends out to Cane's and bowling.

Brian and I set up a giant table for them at Canes and then sat by ourselves at a nearby one. Similarly, we got them all set up in four lanes of bowling before sliding into the background to watch. I know she would have been fine if we had joined in with the group, but there was something whispering inside me to stand back and let them be. It's the first time I've ever felt that way, and as we watched and laughed from the round table in the back, they were oblivious to our presence at all. And it was beautiful to be able to see these friends all interact with each other 'unsupervised'. They're a good group of kids.

Happy sixteenth birthday, my wonderful Kenz! You are so loved!

San Diego

The three of us went to San Diego at the beginning of the month. The special vacation was technically for Carson's twelfth birthday, but the fact that he is actually thirteen-and-a-half is pretty indicative of the way we run our lives around here.

When Carson was little, he walked on the balls of his feet. With every step his ankles would bend like little shock absorbers and spring him forward into the next step. It was so cute that I would remind myself, again and again as he bounced beside me, to tuck that moment away into the memories of my heart. I was so sure that the bouncing wouldn't stay forever...

Now, I realized as Carson bounced alongside of me through the streets of San Diego, I'm not so sure anymore. He has a literal spring in his step, a smile on his face, and a witty remark in his head almost always. And he is so. so. fun to be around.

We opted to rent a fancy car and drive the five hours to San Diego as opposed to fly. That way we controlled our own arrival and departure times and ended up with a few more hours to play. We hit the ground running! And started with an escape room.

We weren't sure for a minute there, standing at the door to the escape room, that we were in the right place. We had typed it into our GPS, arrived quite early for our appointment time, walked around the block a few times past the stench of baking urine, and then entered a small, old, deserted building in search of suite 301. Up an elevator and down a carpeted hall, we still hadn't seen a soul by the time we arrived at the door and tried the doorknob to find that it was, confusingly, locked. We checked our watches and the address one more time and once we were sure we were in the right place at the right time, we stood in the hallway and called the number listed.

"Hello?"
"Uh, yeah, hi. We have an appointment for the escape room right now... and I think we're here... but the door is locked... we might be lost."
"Oh. Uh. Just a minute... (long pause with scrambling sounds) Are you in the building?"
"Yes, we're in the building, standing in front of door 301."
"Okay. Uh... (More shuffling sounds) Wait, so you made it in past the glass doors? At the front of the building?"
"Yeeesssss....?"
"Oh. Uh... (Long pause) Okay. We'll be right there, bye."

I'd be lying if I said that I didn't feel a twinge of fear as I realized that the story of a fake escape room drawing unsuspecting victims onto the third floor of a deserted building could be a good one, and my fears weren't allayed at the sight of the disheveled, college-aged boy who then opened the door and invited us in.

Turned out well, though! A case of a couple of unorganized college kids trying to run an escape room. The room itself was a fun one. We solved it quickly, and Carson's brain was an integral part of it all.

Later that night, we went to a movie called Ford and Ferrari. I am outnumbered by boys, after all.

It wasn't thaaaaaat bad.

And then dessert!

We found a cute little Bubble Tea place tucked away in a little hopping corner and decided to try it. It was crowded and the menu was all new to me (I don't even know what Bubble Tea actually is... and, what the heck is a Puffle?! (Carson's eating a Puffle)), I'm trying to make healthier eating choices, but I wanted to be adventurous, and the lady taking my order wasn't super helpful in explaining things, so I ended up hastily ordering a Coconut Mango Bubble Tea with Mango Boba on the bottom. But as I sat and waited for my drink to arrive I thought to myself, you know, this Bubble Tea actually probably has tea in it...

So I pulled out my phone for a little research and, who would have guessed... there is tea in Bubble Tea. So after my delicious looking tea drink arrived, we put it to the side and I got back in line and ordered a non-adventurous smoothie instead. Staying true to values is hard and inconvenient sometimes.

But the smoothie really was delicious, so I don't have much to complain about.

The next day was Sea World.

Carson had never been to Sea World before and, apparently, it was high on his list of 'Things To Do While I'm Still A Kid'. So, really, it was our whole reason for taking him to San Diego in the first place.

He got hold of the map seconds after we entered into the park and within a few minutes had our whole day planned out around showtimes and rides.

Our favorite show was the dolphin show, of course.

Towards the end of the park's open hours, Carson sank my heart all the way to my toes when he said that it was time to go ride the water ride. Now, don't get me wrong, I love a good water ride.

When it's hot outside.

But it was not hot outside, and I hate being cold. I did make a fuss about it and they knew I was dreading it, but instead of sympathizing with me, they laughed at me and pulled me along to stand in the line anyway. Which I did, but I made it clear that this was all an expression of my deep love and devotion to my son.

By the time we got up to the front of the line, we'd watched every single person come off the ride drenched from head to toe. I'm not exaggerating when I say every single person, nor when I say drenched. I'd never seen a more consistent water ride that way. The drenched adults looked grumpy and the drenched kids looked surprised. I looked nervous.

As we loaded into our raft, the worker mentioned something about the 'waterfall finally getting fixed' that day. It was up and running and I prayed that I would be one of the ones to escape it and not one of the ones that went straight through the middle of it.

My prayers were in vain, however. Now, I've been on lots of raft water rides in my lifetime, and there are always waterfalls at some point. But this waterfall was unlike one I'd seen before. It was a sheet of water so thick it didn't even break its form from the top of the rock to the surface of the river, and it spanned the entire width. There was no such thing as escaping. I put my backpack on my lap and hunched over it as much as I could, sparing my belly and the top of my thighs from the torrent. Everything else, however, from my hair to my squishy shoes was dripping.

And I was freeeeeeezing. So were Carson and Brian, I might add. Things got a little less fun after that, but none of us wanted to admit it for another hour. We spent $6 to stand in a family dryer for 5 minutes which felt amazing when it was on, and definitely took the edge off the cold, but it didn't do much to actually dry us out. I was so cold that at one point I zipped my jacket over my wet shirt to wiggle myself free of it, stuffing the whole wet mess into my backpack. It made things better, but I was still stuck with my pants and my shoes. Thankfully we'd done almost all we'd wanted to do, so after admitting that we didn't actually care that much about seeing the penguins (we missed the penguins!), we stopped in at the gift shop to find little stuffed animals for all the other kids and headed back to the hotel.

I'm kind of on this 'pack really lightly' kick which is amazing for the fact that I only had a backpack to carry around, and sad because I was freezing and soaked in my only pair of pants. When we got back to the hotel room, I crawled into my pajamas and sat through two episodes of Jeopardy with a hairdryer in one hand and my blue jeans in the other. We laughed at all the useless knowledge over the hum of the hairdryer and finally my jeans were dry enough to go back out on the town.

To be honest, we were all pretty beat and might rather have stayed in and ordered takeout. But we piled in the car instead in search of the Red Fox Steakhouse and Piano Bar where we had a reservation waiting for us.

Poor Carson, somehow we broke him through the day because as we sat waiting for our dinner he felt sick to his stomach and wasn't sure he wanted to eat at all. Which is very unCarsonlike. He perked up enough to play one of my favorite dinner table games, however, 'What Do They Have in Common'. Pick two random nouns and go around in a circle saying things they have in common. If you can't think of anything, you're out.

Jaguar and banana, for example. They both rot. Both are found in jungles. Both have seeds, of sorts... etc. That one went on for fifteen rounds at least.

The next day we spent on bikes traveling 16 miles down and up the coastline.

Biking is always my favorite way to explore. We ended up at Imperial Beach and had some pretty amazing sea food out on the pier.

Carson heard about clam chowder in bread bowls and was sold.

Carson is going to do great things with his life. He has so much love to give and so much kindness and compassion and humor. He has a gift in seeing all sides to a story and has the courage to sacrifice his own desires when they come in conflict with another's (usually. Sometimes he'll power through with his own agenda and drag someone else against her wishes onto a water ride on a cold day).

He truly, truly is one of my favorite people.

Healing in Evermore

My sister.

Amber has traveled a difficult road through this past year. Of course, all of our roads are hard (I suppose life was designed to be that way) and I know that many of us sit here at the beginnings of a new year excited to try something new, be something new, think something new, so that the year in front of us might be a bit (or a lot) better than the one we've just left behind. And, not taking anything away from the difficult years of everyone else, Amber's road has been so terribly hard. She's been working to rebuild herself from a marriage that shattered.

Her husband, Caleb, came into the family a few years ago and brought with him the greatest hugs, a beautiful and raw sensitivity, an open heart, and so many video games that he quickly won the hearts of my sons. How I love Caleb! But soon after their marriage he started realizing that he was not comfortable with the way things were. He was uncomfortable with his mind, he was uncomfortable with his body, and through the course of time, slowly, painfully, and steadily he worked to bury the man who was Caleb and to become a new woman named Chloe.

Amber took care of Caleb fiercely through those years. She listened to his fears and nursed him through his depressive episodes and went to counseling with him to try to make their new and complicated relationship work. She supported his wardrobe changes and kept every single secret he begged her to keep. But in the end, after years of service and sacrifice, her sorrow was deeper than any sorrow I've seen when she told me that she simply couldn't love a woman in the same way she loved a man. And when I asked her what she will miss most she whispered without hesitation and with tears running the length of her face,

"...him."

Caleb is gone. And this year, Amber has had to heal from his strange and uncommon death while she watches Chloe stand right there in his place and serve as a tangible shadow and a bitter reminder of what used to be. She has had to watch, her heart bleeding in the darkness, as Chloe shines in the social media spotlight, posting selfie after selfie of her continuing transition, supported, praised and hallowed for her courage. Chloe deserves the love, of course, just as all of us deserve love, but I often wonder what might be different if Chloe's supporters could see that behind Chloe's public courage lay a broken man who was held together by his truly remarkable, strong, and loving wife. A wife who selflessly supported him and helped him along his path as far as she could, knowing all the while that by so doing she was breaking her own heart. She was sacrificing her own hopes and dreams as she helped him to seek his.

But, sadly, people don't see that. They don't see her. At least, most of them don't. Amber's sorrow has not been public and, unlike Chloe, her support team has not been broad. She's been held up by only the closest family and the closest friends and, as fate or divine hand would have it, by a job that landed right in her lap at just the right time. This job was seemingly crafted just. for. her. and gives her the motivation and the energy to keep waking up and to keep moving her feet and to keep putting good out into the world.

She is a full-time actress at Evermore, an experience park where they work her long hours and depended on her willingness to go the extra mile and to invest herself fully in the success of the park. To my eye, it has given her a sense of purpose by day, and by night it has given her a safe place to escape from real life, to become someone entirely different, to live in another world, another dimension, to obey different rules and to be driven by different reasons for life. Caleb doesn't exist in this world. She started as Ina the quiet and nervous dragon trainer and, true to herself, she threw her whole life into it. For almost a year, night after night, she was Ina. She spoke in a perfect Irish accent, teaching guests in the park all about dragons and about her life as a dragon trainer, answering questions about Ina's personal life and childhood as if they were her own, sending guests on quests, and instating them into her guild of dragon trainers if they completed certain tasks.

Now she's Cecily the bubbly, funny travelling actress who speaks in a perfect British accent. She mills around the park with others in her troupe putting on improvisation shows, making guests laugh, and engaging in conversation with anyone who is interested. She is so delightful to watch!

To be honest, when I first started hearing about Evermore, it didn't sound all that intriguing to me. It caters to the live-action gamers of the world and since I don't really understand what that even means, I felt like this wasn't going to be 'my thing'.

But I certainly wanted to support my sister. So I packed up my kids and headed off to Evermore to see what there was to see.

Since then, we've now gone four times - every time we visit Utah - and we have had such a delightful time at each one.

The park is clean and beautiful and the attention to detail is astounding. They have real owls and falcons that you can get right up close to and if I drop my reality lens from my eyes I swear they have real dragon trainers and elven rangers and knights and hunters and goblins and fairies too. They roam the park in outfits dripping in detail and stories that are rich and sound. They interact with you without ever dropping character, answering your questions, asking for favors, teaching you all about their world of Evermore, and inviting you to become a part of it.

I didn't get any pictures that I would title 'What Evermore Is' because my eye was so focused on my own amazing family, but if I were to go back tonight I might enjoy going by myself just to capture some of the magic, some of the details, some of the story.

It is very common for us to be spending time with Amber outside of the park and have her ask out loud to herself, "Hm... I'd like to use this in the park... I wonder when it was invented..." Every single thing they bring in has to fit within the overall story, every detail matters. It reminds me of the Disney parks in that way and, if I'm not mistaken, I seem to remember Amber telling me back when the park was just opening that the lead guy developing this park had, in fact, been an Imagineer.

I still don't understand the storyline at Evermore. From what I understand it's quite complicated and, truthfully, I just don't have the bandwidth to figure it all out.

But I do know this: even though we don't really know what's going on most of the time, and even though my kids have already been four times in one year, they're all still begging to go back again.

Even little miss Eliza wants to go back. She calls it the 'party'. She has the most fun collecting gold pieces, which you can earn by completing tasks. This time, a British character named Piper handed Eliza a very dull pencil and asked her if she would please go find a hunter and ask him to use his knife to sharpen it. She said that if Eliza brought it back to her, sharpened, she would give Eliza a piece of gold. Eliza took it quite seriously and after getting the 'pencil cut', she held onto that earned piece of gold the entire night.

Timothy was told to ask a goblin a certain question and then to report back the answer. And, after we explained what a goblin might look like, Timothy's eyes were sharp and alert searching for one through the better part of an hour.

Carson and Miles were challenged to a game of chance with a knight, and unfortunately came out defeated. I spent my time wielding a pretty good British accent ifIdosaysomyself, and McKenzie and Brian enjoyed encouraging the rest of us and walking through the lights and taking Eliza on the train eleventy-hundred times.

It really is a fun way to spend an evening, and I love it for that.

But mostly I love it because, for me, it is another piece of evidence that God is in the details of our lives and that, even when things fall all. the. way. apart, he is working in the mess, working in the rubble, creating places of refuge and healing in a way that is perfectly crafted and catered to fit His broken-hearted.

How Do You Make Things a Memory

It's been over two months now since Jess's birthday, yet the day won't quite leave me alone. It keeps coming back to me in memories and details that will scroll through my mind in the most unlikely places. It's almost as if the details are asking to be recorded, begging to be recorded, as if details could do such a thing.

So, I suppose I'll sit here and type for a while.

I was going to let June 11th go by with little more than a head nod this year. It wasn't a conscious decision, it was more the absence of a decision. A non-decision that was created by subconsciously choosing in the weeks and days leading up to His Day to push the rising thoughts of him to 'later'. Again and again the thoughts would surface, they'd knock at my consciousness and ask for my attention, getting more and more frequent the closer the calendar crept towards June 11, and again and again I would push them away to later until I woke on the morning of his birthday to realize...

...there were no more laters.

But, before my body even turned in my bed, the thought of 'no more laters' brought feelings of overwhelm and discomfort, so I opened my eyes and told myself that, really, there were still hours of laters left in the day, which gave me the room to, once again, push the thoughts of Jess away.

That might sound cold. I know. It's just that, thinking about him can sometimes feel so deep and intense and overwhelming that I don't always have the courage for it. And this year felt particularly difficult because I didn't know exactly what I should do to honor and remember him.

In the past, I hadn't needed to make that decision because it was already set in tradition. But our tradition to take the kids to the temple grounds on the evening of the 11th had been broken two years previously when Jess's 12th birthday turned out to be unexpectedly grueling for my emotions. I had run away from church in tears that day and wasn't able to stop them long enough to come out of my bedroom for the rest of the day, let alone to take the entire family on an outing. And then Brian was out of town the following year for Jess's 13th birthday and I didn't feel strong enough to face it by myself... so again, we didn't go. Which meant that this year, on his 14th, the inertia was decidedly moving in the direction of not going, and changing that direction by myself felt hard.

Also, our family felt all weird... Carson was in Utah with my parents and Mckenzie was on trek, and our beautiful Colombian daughter, Daniela, was visiting for the month. It didn't seem right to carry on the tradition without McKenzie and Carson, and I wasn't sure how I felt about letting Dani into this most tender and vulnerable piece of me; it has so much to do with my beliefs in temple ordinances and the plan of salvation, after all, and even though Dani has always been utterly respectful and lovely when it comes to my religion, she is Catholic and doesn't have all the same beliefs that I do. I didn't want things to be awkward sitting on the temple grounds - for her or for me.

So, all that to say, I didn't really know what to do. Which is why I suppose it just felt easier to push the decision away until 'later'.

And since I still had hours of laters left in the day, I didn't have to think about it right then, and decided I might as well get up and get dressed instead.

So I got ready for the day, helped the kids with breakfast and chores, threw in a few loads of laundry, put a shopping list together and headed out to pick up some groceries.

And all the while there was a nagging voice inside telling me that I wasn't really fooling myself with all the rushing around. Sure, I'd have a long list at the end of the day to make myself feel justified and, sure I'd be able to say, I was just so busy, I didn't have time. But I mostly knew that that would hardly compensate at the end of the day for the feelings of sadness and guilt that would come from realizing I'd pushed the day away from me and let it pass in a colorless, dull blur. I knew it, but my will to protect myself from any short term negative emotions was strong, and I pushed it all away again.

Keep yourself busy, I told myself instead. Keep yourself distracted.

It's safer that way.

So I stopped by my dear friend Melissa's house to help her paint, unpack, and clean for an hour or so. She just moved her family into a new place over the mountain into Henderson (breaking my heart in the process, but that's another story) and had all the things to do that come along with a story like that, so she could use an extra set of hands. Plus, I hadn't seen her in a couple of weeks and I missed her.

The chaos in her home felt wonderful to me when I walked inside - distraction at its finest.

"Show me your house!" I said. We both laughed because we could hardly see through the mounds and mounds of half-emptied moving boxes, let alone make it through a walking tour. But we lost ourselves in conversation and companionship while she shared her visions of tearing down walls and putting up shelves, and painting kitchen cabinets. And somewhere in the middle of it all, she picked up a vase full of beautiful flowers that had been sitting out-of-place among all the wet paintbrushes, used paper towels, rags, drills, half-emptied moving boxes, paint cans, and hundreds of other odds and ends. "Hey," she said, "these are for you."

I laughed out of confusion. "What the...?! Why are you giving me flowers?"

She looked at me gently and said, "Isn't today Jess's birthday?"

Silence.

How did she know?

Silence.

The world inside of me seemed to suck itself into a tiny pinpoint deep within my chest, leaving a silence and darkness in every square inch of me. And then a whisper of a rumble came from that deep space as, far away, a dam crumbled. I couldn't speak. I couldn't think. There is nothing in a vacuum. I stared at the flowers for long seconds before I slowly reached my hand out to accept them. And when my fingers touched the cold glass, the wave of emotions that had been held behind the dam hit hard, roaring through that pinpoint, filling the vacuum with all of the thoughts and feelings I'd been trying to hide from myself for weeks.

"How...?" I started, finding some words and fighting through the roaring emotions. "How did you know?"

"You mentioned it once," she said with a shrug. She waited until I looked her in the eyes before continuing, "I know how hard it can be to feel like you're the only one carrying the memories, the only one carrying love for a child who didn't get the chance to make any other connections. But I want you to know that I love Jess, too. Even though I never knew him, I love him and am so grateful for him because he has helped make you into the person you are - and I know you. And you have blessed my life so much."

Well, that did it. It was the ugly cry. The uuuuuuuuugly cry.

See, in order to understand how deeply her comment cut, you have to understand something else. But it's hard to understand and even harder to explain. One of the most interesting things regarding how this all works for me is that, when my mind fills with thoughts or when my body fills with feelings about Jess, they never seem to have any origin point. Meaning, there's rarely something that happens externally that will trigger a thought or a feeling of him. That, alone, makes some sense to me because I don't have any 'normal' memories of Jess, so not much of what happens in 'normal' life reminds me of him. Therefore, when I try to trace my thought train back to find the station from which it left, I can never find the station. It's as if the thoughts and the feelings just appear out of thin air. And, what's craziest about them is that, they often have a mood. Sometimes they feel gentle and sweet, and sometimes they feel pushy, like they don't intend to leave until I've given them some attention. Sometimes it'll be a long time between feelings, and sometimes they're so frequent I can't keep up with them. But whether they're calm or intense, frequent or sparse, when they do come they always feel alive.

Nothing else in my life feels this way. And lately, I've started to wonder if it's him...  Of course, I don't know how the spirits of our loved ones on the other side interact with us while we're here on this Earth, but I've always believed that they probably play a much bigger role in our lives than we realize. So, to me, it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility that those unique and special thoughts and feelings I have of Jess could be coming as a result of him reaching out to me.

But I hadn't been thinking about any of this in the weeks leading up to his birthday. Instead, I'd been pushing the thoughts into the background, suppressing the feelings, hitting them all down with a mallet like I was playing wack-a-mole. But when Melissa expressed her love for Jess, she reminded me with softness and clarity that he is there, capable and deserving of love and still playing an active role in my life. Though not her intention, her comment showed me how shallow I'd been acting, and breathed the life back into Jess for me. And in that moment I realized and believed with a crushing guilt that he, my son, had been trying to connect with me. And that I had turned my shoulder and put up a wall in response.

Melissa stood there in compassion and gave me a safe place to cry those ugly tears. She looked at me with such tenderness in her eyes, tears rolling down her own face while I talked, and I knew in that moment that Heavenly Father and Jess had not given up when I wouldn't let them through my walls. They had found a way around me, right there in Melissa. I felt so intensely grateful for her that she had followed the promptings in her heart that had nudged her to put down her paintbrushes and get a vase of flowers for a friend in need.

"Thank you," I said to her when there was nothing left to say. "Thank you for breaking this all open and forcing me to think about it today."

There are so many invaluable lessons I have learned though my life that have Jess and his story at their roots. Lessons about faith and God and trust and love. Lessons that have made me into who I am. Lessons that keep coming and that I have felt prompted and guided again, and again, to record. And one of the most important lessons I've learned is how essential it is to remember, and how quickly I forget.

I had not remembered, and I felt chastised all the way home. It was a bitterness I'd never felt before, and more than once I pulled my car to the side of the road because I couldn't see well enough through my tears. God was reminding me that Jess coming into my life in the way that he did was not an accident, he came here to teach me. And that I have a responsibility to nurture that knowledge and to pass it on as much as I can to my own children. The pain was both intense and motivating, and suddenly the discomforts that had been holding me back before in getting my family to the temple that night seemed insignificant.

I explained my heart to the children as we sat around the temple that night. And all of the concerns I had about McKenzie and Carson being gone, and about Daniela joining us turned out to be empty.

It was a beautiful night.

The children were all reverent and attentive and full of the most beautiful questions. 

And at the end of the night, while Timothy and I were walking hand-in-hand to the car, he turned to me and asked, "Mom? How do you make things a memory?"

"What do you mean, love?"

"Just... how do you make things a memory?"

"Well, I suppose you just take the time to notice the details around you while it's happening, and then you keep thinking about it as much as you can once it's gone... Does that answer your question?"

He shrugged his little shoulders. "It's just that, you told me that we came here before, but I don't remember it... I just really don't want to forget this time."

Remember.

Remember. 

Remember. 

I squeezed his hand a little tighter and tried to breathe around the lump in my throat. "I completely understand, buddy." 

Just then, I noticed a small, smooth rock next to our feet. "Do you see that rock?" I said. "Why don't you pick it up and take it home with you. You can put it on the shelf above your bed and then every time you look at it, you can remember."