Mouse

I am sooooo……sleeeeepy.

We didn’t sleep very well last night. Lately Bryan and I have gotten into a bad habit of starting into deep discussions about the direction of our lives around 10:15 at night. Our recently weaned one year old is newly insecure about the world and wakes up at six in the morning hollering for company. But the reason we didn’t sleep well last night has nothing to do with either of these things, and is in fact an altogether much smaller reason.

We have a mouse in our room.

I had seen suggestive evidence of such a creature in our room earlier this week but had brushed it off with a rather naïve hangover from my childhood: “It can’t be a mouse. This is America.” But of course last night, right after we had finally wrapped up our thoughts on facing the future with courage, I heard an unnerving scratching under the bed. I flipped on the lamp and sure enough, a brown ball of fuzz scurried under the bedside table.

I nearly had a heart attack.

   

We spent the next 30 minutes trying to whack it with shoe then scrounged up a trap out of the garage and planted it strategically on the floor in the corner, all the while terrified that Annabelle would somehow miraculously climb out of her crib in the night, open her closed door, walk into our room and step on the trap. I went back to bed cramped with the suspense of waiting for the trap to spring shut (Did it get my baby?) and deeply angry at the tiny rodent in our house. How dare a mouse come into my bedroom!

I have distinct memories of rodents in our house in North Africa that could carry this little guy here around in their mouths. One of the first nights there we were sleeping in a mud tukul when we heard the jaws-of-death trap that Bryan was always afraid would take his arm off every time he set it up snap shut with a crack like a gunshot on the other side of the room. We laid there in the dark for a moment and then recoiled in horror as we heard metal being dragged slowly across the cement floor. Another time, our cat Nimir brought a rat almost as big as he was into our living room and then let it go at the feet of our horrified American guests. The maimed animal scurried and bled all across our house with our sadistic cat chasing and batted at it while I uselessly ran after him trying to shoo them both outside. It was terrible. But on both of these occasions, and many others in between (I won’t mention the rat in the toilet incident), I remember laughing. Yes, of course, it was disgusting and irritating, but it didn’t really upset me. It just seemed to come with the territory. It was just part of the deal. But last night I was downright mad.

Expectations, I am learning, are everything. Realistic or otherwise, they have incredible power to shape your perspective. Expect a few rats and you get free entertainment. Expect a pristine home and you get a sleepless night and a headache the next morning.

I would do well to remember this. It seems like sometimes I forget that trying to live faithfully, to make a difference, to carve out a life of compassion, to try and live to our fullest human potential – whatever you want to call it, living well, is going to cost us sometimes. It will put us around a few rats from time to time, whether they are situations, or feelings, or people or…well, rats. But somehow knowing that going into it all helps me so much. They honestly don’t seem so bad when you know they are coming. In fact, sometimes their nasty little presence helps remind me that maybe I’m in the right place after all.

I’ve spent too much time being mad at mice lately. I’m ready to laugh at rats again.          

                                        (I'm sorry, I had to.)

Journal

I rarely go back and read journal entries from earlier seasons in my life though I have been filling up notebooks since I was nine years old. There are trunks of my daydreams, prayers and poor attempts at poetry scattered in attics and back-bedroom closets around the world. My best friend got a journal for a birthday and just like I refused to ever let him out-run, out-climb, out-karate me, (at least not without some competition) I wasn’t about to let a boy out-write me. I am pretty sure he gave it up after a day or two. He runs Ironmen for fun now while my skinny jeans have long-been relegated to the bottom drawer. But I’m still writing.

Of course, to be fair, long seasons of my life are represented only by blank pages. When I am my happiest I can’t seem to find time to write, or perhaps the need. Other than a few emails or stray blogs, I have no written account of my fist kiss, my wedding, the birth of my daughter. If you picked up my journals it would be easy to mistake me for depressed woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But then you would look up and see that there are long months, sometimes years between the dates.    

So I’m not sure why I started thumbing through my most recent journal the other day. But I did and stumbled over May 28^th of last year. We were sitting in Nairobi a few weeks after Annabelle’s birth, agonizing over whether we should return to our home in North Africa while rumors and reports of approaching conflict were spiraling out of control. And now almost exactly a year later, I am sitting in Dallas, TX as we listen to the rumbles of new war from a thousand miles away and wonder what this will mean for us and our future. A year ago I wrote…

I am remembering the day they found the landmine on our compound right now. I am remembering sitting on the porch while Bryan was out talking to the UN or something, and feeling a torrent of emotions. I remember writing that morning and using pen and paper to sort through my emotions, trying to identify each one and arrange them in some kind of order. I feel like that right now. I need to write in order to organize my emotions and give appropriate attention to each…

…I sit here with my baby on my lap and laugh for feeling so worked up about the most predictable thing in the world. I knew we were going to have a baby. I knew politics in S were going to get messy. And yet here I am pulling emotions off the shelf like I never knew I was going to need them. So how am I feeling?

Well, scared for one. The thought of covering Annabelle’s head while we lie in a ditch because the North is shelling K makes me sick to my stomach. All this new motherly instinct is coursing through my veins making me think, “Are you freaking out of your mind?” Coupled with the fear is a bit of guilt. Am I being unfair for taking my daughter into this mess? Am I a bad mother? Plenty of people would think so.

And then I’m feeling impatient. We’ve been away from S for so long. I feel so disconnected from people, language and daily life. I feel anxious to get back, to get involved, to catch up and plug back in. The thought of being delayed, even for the most legitimate reason imaginable makes me sad.

And then, to my shame, I feel excited. The thought of lying in a ditch covering Annabelle’s head because the North is shelling K makes me sick to my stomach – in a tingly sort of way. What an adventure. What a story to tell. This is the kind of life I have always dreamed of…

We did go back to North Africa a few days after I wrote those words. Months later we were on the last plane out, minutes before bombs fell on the dirt airstrip where we had just stood. Was going back wise? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. But those last days there were some that I can still feel the most vividly. The oppressive cloud of war that hung over all of us made each handshake, each sip of tea feel so present that even all this time later I can still taste them. I savor those rich memories.

Today I have felt myself pulling down those jars of emotions that we all knew we would need to use but that still somehow seem unexpected all over again. They are the same. Fear. Guilt. Impatience. Excitement. They are still exhausting. But in a world where none of us escape the weight of heavy things, I choose these. This is still the life I have always dreamed of.

I need to remind myself of this sometimes.