So we don’t paint any kids rooms. And we don’t buy kiddie-clothes. And we aren’t showered with gifts every-other Saturday for months.

Watching her open all those presents caused a bit of a panic attack for me. And I know y’all wanna rush down to the comment box and say “oh mandy, y’all will be fine” but lemme explain.

Although we have one more step in finalizing our application papers, I’ve got this feeling that it could happen quickly. I don’t mean “quickly” as in the next few weeks. But quickly as in the next few months. Pre-summer?

Maybe?

Good grief, hopefully…

And, while my ready-to-pop friend is opening an hour’s worth of gifts, I’m comparing. (And I know that’s the one thing that women aren’t supposed to do—compare themselves with other women. But I was at a baby shower, for crying out loud.)

If the adoption process goes as it may, we’ll have about a month—maybe six weeks—from when we hear about the kids until we bring them into our home. If we are spending weekends getting to know them, when in the heck am I going to have a half-dozen showers? That was my panic point right there: Knowing there’s a wonderful community of people that are sitting on go and ready to help us bring these kids into our homes, but not knowing how we can cram the “getting ready” part of it into just a few weeks.

Thankfully I had a wing-man at the party, and as we drove home afterwards she reminded me that we won’t be able to make the adoption public until just before they are moving in. See, as it works with the state, you sort of “date” the kids and if everybody likes everybody, they move in. So the “yay we’re adopting these kids!” moment comes just before we bring ‘em in. By which time we’ll already have beds and books and maybe even bikes. (eee!!!!!)

Oh and then there’s the other possibility, which is the newborn at the hospital who needs a home and we have a few days/hours notice.

Either way, I ain’t got nine months to figure this out. And I ain’t got no “What to Expect when You’re Expecting” manual to read, either.

So what do we do? We paint our living room tomorrow. And call it “nesting.”

I mean, seriously, what else can we do? Wait.

Thank you so much for reading attentively. Now I unleash you to leave those “oh Mandy, y’all are going to be fine” comments below. I could use a few today, because I’ve got two hours to get this house ready for our last home visit. The one where we need to have our knives out of reach and our poisons put away. Oh and she’ll look for a fire extinguisher and carbon monoxide detector, neither of which we have at this current moment.

Ah. Time to wake Drew up.

So, waiting for coffee this morning, coffee that is still brewing, I say to him, “Are you ready to pick some numbers?”

“Yes! four thousand one hundred—”

“No no. Wait.”

“Negative Eleven!”

Now I’m laughing. This is impossible. I married a math major and he’s brilliant and he’s just come in all sweaty from a run and his endorphins are flying and he’s going to be funny.

“Eighteen point seven.”

At that point I explain the contest and he drinks some water and settles down and here we go.

The winners are!!!!

CORI! yay

and Betty! yay again!

and Leigh Hill! woot woot! Who is #11 since Jeff and I don’t count. (See, Jeff. I told ya you messed up my count.)

I’ll send your email addresses to Jeff and you’ll get a copy of each of his new e-books. And, y’all, they are really really cool! Congrats!

Thanks for playing everybody. Y’all made my week sun-shinier.

We talked about sources of inspiration and hiding from all the noise and unplugging from social media. We talked about finding ways to find your words when they’re all lost. We talked music and songwriting and I confessed to him that I’m so distracted/enamored by Adele’s voice that I haven’t paid much attention to her songwriting skills.

I don’t think he judged me for that.

And now, Jeff is rocking the writing world, flying through the ranks and leaping over his peers in a single bound. His blog is at the top of the list of 2011′s Top Ten Blogs for Writers. He is generous with resources and in fact I’ve been molded by his “Intentional Blogging” course. All of that is pretty cool, but the most exciting part is that he’s just signed a writing contract and will be published in the not-too-distant future.

I say all this to say: dude knows what he’s talking about.

Some of my favorite recent blog posts include:

• Great Art is Transcendant
• How to Improve Your Writing in One Counter-Intuitive Way
• The Last Writing Prompt You Will Ever Need

He’s recently released a pair of e-books that are valuable writing tools. To get a copy of both “Before Your First Book” and “The Truth About Writing” leave a comment below. Drew, my amazing mathematician husband, will pick three numbers on our hot date tonight and I’ll announce the winners on the morning of manana.

Sound good?

I hesitate.

I look at the paper towel roll—a worthy but slightly more expensive alternative.

In this weird metacognitive moment, I can’t ignore the oddity of my behavior: standing in the kitchen holding a cold pickle jar while looking back and forth between two pickle-holder options.

Why do I have a problem with getting a napkin??

And then a voice in my head says, “Find out the reason you don’t want to do something that you probably should do. Acknowledge the hesitation and then work with yourself to eliminate or move around the barrier. You can still achieve the thing that you really should do, while cooperating with your hesitations. They are there for a reason, but they don’t have to rule you. Work with yourself.”

Standing alone in the kitchen I nodded to the voice and echoed it with a more Mandy-like inner voice: “Work with yourself. Ok. I can work with myself.”

Seriously. That’s what went through my head. I was paying attention. I heard all of it.

I decide to make it a personal mission to work on eliminating the obstacles hat keep me from doing the things that I really should be doing.

Starting with this napkin quirk.

The first step is to reach for a napkin. The second step accompanies the first: I ask myself what stopped me earlier?

It’s the system. We’re down to two napkins which means I need to replenish the napkin holder and I don’t like pulling napkins out of the plastic napkin pack.

Why not?

They sit at the bottom of the pantry, very close to the floor. Very inconvenient. And I’m an ergonomist at heart and my inner-ergonomist has issues with the bending and digging and trying-not-to-knock-anything-over that is all a part of the napkin-replenishment system.

Ah. I can fix that.

My hands move quickly through the pantr, sliding a few things around to place the napkin pack neatly on one side of a face-level shelf. Pleased. Then I effortlessly, smoothly, gracefully slide a handful of fresh new napkins from the pack. It was beautiful, y’all. I wish you could’ve been there to see the smile on my face.

New napkins go in the dispenser.

Pickles go on my napkin.

Jar goes back in the fridge.

And I sit down at my laptop to encourage you to notice the things in your life that you really should be doing that you don’t want to do. Ask yourself why, then make it a personal challenge to eliminate or work around some of those obstacles. In the end, you may really enjoy the results.

So, what is it? Any ideas of things you should, but don’t wanna, do?

The conversation was so tense that we might as well have been yelling. Our words were slow and careful and calm—the kind of eery calm that holds back the rising tide.

The conversation rolled in waves over a span of a weekend. Oh, it was supposed to be a wonderful weekend, but he said he wanted us to start having family devotion time together and, well, I didn’t take so kindly to that idea.

Before bed that Saturday, I spent a good 20 minutes holed up in the bathroom trying to figure out what I was going to do about this. And he tried desperately to keep me from shutting him out. That’s our dance. I’m the quiet one. He’s the pursuer. And he bravely pursues.

This kind of disagreement meant going to bed angry, which also meant waking up to the mess on Sunday morning. And doing church together as the preacher and the worship leader.

Oh, mercy.

Oh, Sunday.

I try hard not to talk to him all the way to church that morning, even though he kept pursuing with his harmless questions and me with my short emotionless answers. And I run to practice with the band. And I’m not even thinking about the lyrics, I’m thinking about how I’m going to get through the Family Devotion Time Fiasco of 2012. What do I say to him? Do I say anything? Do I tell him how I feel about this? Or do I just comply?

I mean, seriously, just days before I told a young woman that the backbone of marriage is communication and if that breaks down there’s little left between the two of them.

He walks into the sanctuary—my handsome preacher husband who I know would die for me and who knows I want to kill him and who probably isn’t sure why because I’m not sure why, but here we are and I don’t even want to make eye contact with him. How do we get to these places?!

Yes, the grown-up thing is to talk about it. I can at least tell him how I feel. That is a very strong gesture towards maintaining open communication and open relationship. He’s a big boy, he can handle it.

So, between practice and service, I walk up and hug him and then I keep moving with very little eye contact. But that hug said “Ok, let’s do this church thing. And then let’s keep walking.”

After church we went out for lunch. Tense “conversations” are so much better in public when we know others can hear us. And I told him that I didn’t want to change his mind about any of this and that I really do appreciate his desire for us to share more of our spiritual journeys with one another.

But, I needed him to know how I felt about all this.

Inhale.

I told him how I felt. And I admitted that I was very messed up and that this family devotion time topic seems to bump up against an overwhelming number of sensitive areas in my life and I’m having a hard time with it.

And he listened.

And he knew that my only goal was to maintain open communication. Not change him. Not change our plan. Just give him an understanding of my side of this conversation.

And you know what?

That made all the difference in the world. And there is peace in Casa Thompson now. And, yes, we are having FDT and it is weird and slightly unconventional but it’s a middle ground and it fits us. And we’re both happy.

And I kinda like him again.

I guess I should tell him that, too, huh?

Oh the caged bird

dreams of a strong wind

that will flow

beneath her wings.

Ironic.

I ignored the purposed amount of new candles I’d just set out; I felt compelled to free this one. Eventually I ended up on the floor, legs crossed, working hard at that candle. Breathing heavy. Anxious.

In a moment of metacognition I had this inner conversation with myself. I asked myself why it was so important to free this one inconsequential wick? I answered that there remained a flicker of life and light in that candle. So I continued to scrape away all the sediment and ash.

Eventually my hands grew tired and I promised myself I would chip away more wax later that day, determined to bring light from that burial.

But, still not knowing why.

Until now, in this recounting… I can see that I need light in my life, warm soothing glowing light, and I’ll do just about anything to get it.

What’s your word for 2012?

The potter’s house.

The potter, who spends time teaching me how to collage and make books and journals and breathe like an artist. Who let’s me take home a 30-something-year-old National Geographic if I want to cut it into artful pieces.

The potter. She calls me “kid.” I like that.

Maybe it’s because she also teaches me how to “play” as an artist —to explore different avenues of creativity. And now I’m exploring and I’m trying not to burst with excitement when we “play.” She doesn’t know it, but I’m wide open right now.

Or maybe she does know it. She asked me to bring what I’ve been working on, because she needed some inspiration. How did she know I was working on something? So I grabbed my art journal on the way out that morning, and I tried to act like it was no big deal when I sat down at her art table in her sunny art room and she said “ok, what’d ya bring?” and I pulled out my art journal and started flipping through the pages and telling her how I did all of it.

And then we made books. (I know, right? How cool is that?!)

And then she asked what I was doing for the afternoon. And that’s when she invited me to spend the afternoon with the big girls on the retreat.

The writing could wait. I’d already decided to receive every creative opportunity she handed me.

I returned to her house around 2pm. Introductions, hand shakes, hugs. The ladies were gluing pages to their 2012 journals, prepping them for words and photographs and memories and introspections. The room was quiet, but the energy was grand.

I took my seat at the table. And she said “OH! You have to show them your art journal!”

Inhale.

Did she know this meant bearing my soul to these women? These creative divas from all over the state who just gathered together here to reflect for the weekend? Um. Show them my art journal? Show them?

I acted like this was no big deal. I reached down in my bag and carefully pulled out my “Making Space” journal. What was I going to say?

“Well, they call this an ‘altered book’ — it’s just a book about interior decor that I found at a local thrift store.”

I open the book: “I taped each seam and coated each page with gesso, but you can still see the words and images. It’s so much better than staring at a blank page. It gives me something to start with.”

Ok, time to turn the page to what I’ve actually created.

That’s when I start flipping fast.

“I use a two-fold for each day. Art image on the right page, and words and thoughts from the day on the left page. They always match up somehow.”

And flip. Flip. Flip.

And they oooh.

And the potter says “Don’t you just love that?! It’s just loose! It’s so loose!!” And she smiles and shakes her arms and shoulders like she’s a rag-doll and I feel like I’ve accomplished something even though I’m not really sure what “loose” means because I could dissect and explain the intention of every smudge and splatter and upside down word that I placed on that page.

And I smile back and slide the book back down in my bag and take a deep breath.

The kid, playing Show And Tell for the grownups.

Or, the artist showing other artists the secret world of her own inspiration and creation.