Wait, Hurry Up

How is this life what it is? I can’t handle the movement of it.  I remember the minute before I walked down the aisle at my wedding and wanting so desperately to take the moment in and yet knowing full well that I just couldn’t.  There was no way to fully understand, embrace and experience the change that was happening.   I wanted to feel every little thing, the leaving of one chapter for another.  I felt like I was straining to open my eyes really widely to stare intently at the turning of the page so that I realized it and was aware for every second of the turning.

But we can’t soak it in completely.  The page turns at its own pace with a ticking movement and then once it's turned we can’t go back really, except to remember. We have to let go to move forward.  And so it seems I’m moving into a new chapter and cannot for the life of me figure out how to soak in these last weeks.  Trever and I have been married for almost nine years and it’s all we know.  It sounds so silly but it’s blowing my mind that we’ll be a family of 3 in just a two weeks. TWO WEEKS! It has been just us, travelling when we wanted, late nights when we wanted, only the two of us to plan for, deep sleeping, young, married, a family of 2.  People try and tell us the changes and feelings we’ll experience but no one can know them until they know them. This is for almost anything in life, no one can tell you what it’s like up ahead until you know. So I sit here with a blurry future certain of nothing but change, thrilled for what's ahead but slightly sad for what we're leaving behind.   

I’m not the type to dwell in the past and I tend to like change, it’s just that I know how significant this is and I sort of wish I could slow it all down so I had time to process it.  I want to etch it in stone the feelings of pregnancy, to encapsulate this season of life so that I remember every bit of it and be sure that I have felt the whole thing while it’s happening. I’m afraid to let it become a memory.  I hope I loved every second of this decade of life, I hope I soaked it in while I had it.

But then who really cares, because I’ll get so see what her face looks like and if she has long fingers like me, or green eyes like Trever.  This vacillation is where my mind can spend hours -  toggling between thoughts of what will be different, what we’re letting go of and thoughts of what we’re stepping into, what we’ll become and who she’ll be. Of course in any new chapter I never wished to go back, so I know once I'm there I'll be nothing but thrilled.  But today I just feel the intensity of the movement.  

My sister Hayley texted me and asked me if I’m in the phase where I cry all the time.  I wasn’t really but I’m suddenly very raw, I feel every single thing, like all my nerves are fired up on all cylinders.  So I’m assuming the tears are around the corner.  Tears over change, tears over excitement, tears over fear, tears because I’m hot and need a nap, tears because I’m turning 30, tears because going out to dinner will feel like a treat, but mostly tears because we cannot wait for this new person that will become, in an instant, an inseparable part of who we are.

P.S. I keep having irrational delivery fear in the middle of the night, although it's not because of what you would think.  It's things like...people always say, 'pack your hospital bag'.  What's a hospital bag? What do people bring? I don't have a bag? Why doesn't anyone tell you what's in the hospital bag? Are there secret mother things that should be in said bag? Should I set a bag out with chapstick and a hair tie? I don't know. If someone could enlighten me that would be great for my REM cycle. 

P.S.S. Someone say a prayer for Trever for obvious reasons, most notably paragraph five in this post. Also, the father's day card I gave him read, "Let the great adventure begin."  T minus 14 days until the adventure. Woah, let's do this.

You're a nut milk

So as it turns out high stress levels, international travel and eating out for two months can cause some problems in the ol' bag of bones.  Trever and I are trying to remedy those effects, which are played out by high acid causing painful stomach cramps.  Drama.   

Everyone is always talking about how we have these crazy high acid diets due to overly processed foods with added sodium, too much caffeine and alcohol, low nutrients in plant foods from modern farming practices and blah blah we’re giving ourselves cancer.  I cook really healthy but when you’re trying to heal from the damages of an unbalanced pH you gotta get crazy with the alkaline diet, as in not just green salads but green salads and no lemon or vinegar for the dressing.  yummmm.  Of course lemons and vinegars are ok in a normal balanced diet and over the long term assist in pH balance, but when trying to reverse some acid effects those things are out, aka flavor is out, aka a month of rabbit food.

So here’s what I’m learning:

First, our calcium/magnesium ratios are generally off (too much calcium) which plays into high acid levels.  You can take supplements but a great way to absorb magnesium is by taking Epsom salt baths. 

Stress adds to an acidic levels.  Do yoga.  Or say no to things.  Or don’t renovate a house.

Drink alkaline water and not coffee. Or maybe replace coffee with a turmeric latte if you’re a real bad ass.  Trever and I tried those and lordy are they somethin’ else.  It takes some serious commitment to develop a liking for that (1 tsp. Tumeric // 1 tsp. Honey // 3 parts Water // 1 part Almond Milk)  Although I haven’t tried it with fresh turmeric only dried, so maybe that will help.  Not likely. Another healing option is licorice tea - blerg. 

Peanuts are acidic, switch to almond butter.  Also avoid dairy, switch to almond milk. 

Almond milk is soooo easy by the way.  It’s a 1 to 4 ratio of raw almonds to water.  Soak the almonds overnight.  Drain, then add almonds to water and blend it up real nice.  Filter it through cheese cloth and there you have it.  To add sweetness, soak dates for an hour and blend them into your milk with a splash of vanilla.  This way you don’t have all those weird additives they have in store bought almond milk.

Avoid cereals and grains other than plant-based proteins like quinoa, which is obviously the grossest of all the grains.

Eat any raw fruits and vegetables. 

Avoid eggs.

Don’t eat sandwich meat.  Actually don’t ever eat sandwich meat, ugh, murderers.

Of course with balance things like lemons, berries, vinegars, eggs and wine (quality of life) can all be added back in.  But for now we’ll be having quinoa with avocado and a sprinkle of salt, apples with almond butter, broccoli salad with creamy almond dressing (recipe to come), and I’ll be giving a lot of my sourdough bread away. 

If we’re lucky Trever will drop another ten pounds, per his usual response to diets, and our fat cat Grey, Colette and I will keep putting them on. I hope you learned something utterly fascinating from my health related antics, if only that I'm a total nut.  Cheers. 

Even Keel

I heard a reading the other day which encouraged the Christian to contemplate whether they could truly desire God’s will over their own blessings.  It’s such an interesting encouragement to make for a couple of reasons.  The first is, of course, the general assumption that a blessing is to be lucky or to have good fortune. This mindset is reinforced by facebook blurbs such as, “I’m not lucky, I’m blessed #childofgod.”  I actually saw this post and of course my brain exploded when I read it.  It’s such an American Christian way of talking about God’s work in our lives.  I wonder if you could get those words out in front of a tortured Chinese Christian, I wouldn’t recommend trying.  Blessings can only truly be understood in light of the greater purpose of this life, otherwise we will have a terrible misunderstanding and attribute only our good fortune to God and have quite a confused soul when tragedy inevitably comes our way.

The second is the difficulty of such a task.  I think about the way I pray for Colette and wondered momentarily if I was capable of praying for some greater purpose to be accomplished, even if that meant suffering for my unborn daughter.  The answer is I’m not, all I can truly desire is her healing. I suppose Jesus prayed for the task of crucifixion to be taken from him.  If he could have had it another way he begs for that to be so.  Maybe that means we're allowed, or even made, to pray that we are spared life's pain.

Yesterday we went to St. Joseph’s hospital, where we will be delivering, to have a tour of the unit and have a medical conference.  It was all quite overwhelming, even looking at the operating room Trever and I were both a little faint…so that should make D-day pretty interesting. Like who catches who?  After the tour we sat in a waiting room allowing the blood to make its way back into our brains and discussed the horrible lighting that is itself 90% of why people want to faint in hospitals, the other 10% is the smells and the beeping. 

We were then called into a conference room not knowing what to expect and found ourselves at the head of an enormous table surrounded by 15 or so hospital staff.  There sat the chief of general surgery, cardiac surgeon, Labor and Delivery charge nurse, NICU director, and a lot of other people I can’t remember.  We were not expecting this! They went around discussing their part of the birthing, NICU, transfer, testing, surgery process with kindness and reference to Colette by name.  It was simultaneously comforting and terrifying. Comforting that they take this so serious and that we are in very good hands.  Terrifying because her condition actually deserves all of this.

They didn’t give us a ton of new information for what to expect after she’s here because basically they don’t know enough until they see her to make any educated guesses.  But one of the doctors came up to me and said, “I’m going to be your realist.  Expect a slow long process and then if it’s shorter you’ll be relieved. This is far better to clinging to expectations of a speedy and easy process and finding yourself disappointed for every day that it drags on.”

So I got home and climbed in bed with a new reality check and slept for two hours.  I knew that moment was coming, I had become far too positive over the course of the last couple of months and knew something needed to bring me back down to reality.  This was it.

I was asked the other day about my range of emotions as we get closer to delivery – I said 85% excitement and 15% fear, anxiety, stress and general light-headedness (per the florescent lighting in my future).  Also nobody asked me this, but I would like the world to know my back hurts and I weigh more than my husband, who by the way has returned from Italy and with tornadic (derivative of tornado which spell check tells me is not a word) energy has put our house together and made it home.  People come over and assume I have good taste because I have clearly decorated my house so well and I nod my head until they ask me, “who painted that?”  I usually respond with my name for the piece, “oh the blueberry donut? Not sure.”  It breaks Trever’s heart, his little color obsessed heart. 

Opposites attract as they say, but I digress. At this point we’re one month out from meeting Colette.  I want it to come quickly and I want time to slow down too.  I want her to be healed quickly and preparing my heart for the long journey that awaits.  I want to make almond milk in my new kitchen and I also want to take a nap.  I am very even keel these days.

Finally, I wanted to thank you for all your kind responses to my maternity photos.  It meant a lot to have so many people celebrating with me. Thank you! 

Au Revoir. 

Pictures!

My friend Shannen took maternity photos for me the other week.  We drove to Malibu and she had this crazy way of making me feel comfortable while being photographed. I was feeling nervy about it but it ended up being really fun.  We were romping around the fields saying, we are Gwyneth, we are Gyweneth, while unknowingly there were tiny little bits of weeds making their way into every segment of our clothing and bags.  It was worth it though and I totally sobbed when she sent them to me.  I debated doing maternity pictures but I'm glad I did, I'm happy to be celebrating and documenting this crazy season of life. 

A Peaceful Second

I use this app that compiles a one second video from every day into what is now a several minute video full of my life.  It’s probably really boring to an outsider, but to me each second represents a flood of memories and it makes me really nostalgic and grateful. It also makes me kind of stressed out because I can literally watch my life passing by.  There are so many lives I wish I could live, like why am I not a farmer? But that’s a rant for another time.

I was watching the video the other day for the first time in a while and there are certain clips that represent some of our darkest moments this year.  There is a hardly noticeable clip of a beach view in Laguna, but I remember the day so vividly.  Trever and I had received some really horrible news the week before and we had pretty much stayed home all week.  Saturday came along and we still didn’t want to see people but we wanted to get out so we went to Laguna with puffy eyes and had lunch on the water.  I remember exactly how it all felt.  I was so raw, all the callouses has been ripped off and I was so alive to pain and grief and God in some bizarre ways. The pain was so acute, the fear overwhelming, our unknowable future taunting, and yet somehow in the middle of it there was peace.  There was a connection to hope I had never before experienced.  There was a proper view of life and what mattered that I wish I could bottle. There were parts of how I felt that I wish I didn’t have to let go of. 

But of course we settle in, and when we were once positive we would never feel normal again we do.  Human nature is to crawl back to that homeostasis for survival, but sometimes that normalcy is numbing. It makes us complacent. We forget what we learned in the darkness. We forget what matters. Where the veil between us and the divine was thin in tragedy, we find it once again thick and elusive in the mundane. Our longing for the hope of the eternal fades to the background because life feels ok.  

I feel this way.  Right now I dream a lot about having a kitchen and less dust and more homemade coffee.  The day-to-day has captured me and I can remember clearly what occupied my mind just months ago.  This is not to say I don’t think often of Colette and melt into a puddle of fear begging for mercy on an hourly basis, but in general my mind has compartmentalized leaving extra room for mostly the mundane.  Now all those spiritual practices that were once part of survival have again become disciplines, choices made because they should be made. Now that my happiness feels within grasp I want it more than anything.  I think I want it more than the hope that once held me up, well the hope that still does hold me up whether I remember it or not.

Maybe this is human nature that we’re made to find balance and peace. It seems it’s how we survive and yet the flip side is we lose our souls to it, we so easily lose our purpose to complacency and new kitchens. But maybe it’s ok that I rest in this moment of peace seeing as how we're just SIX WEEKS away from meeting baby girl and all that will come with that. I don’t know.    

Things to notice in my video– First, anytime my brother-in-law Tyler is in the video he’s flipping me off, which could either be representative of a contentious relationship between the two of us or his general bad attitude regarding documentation in the form of videos.  Second, Trever at one point is wearing a facemask, this is actually a regular occurrence post turning thirty. Third, my friend Jessie can complete entire sentences in a one second clip, she believes this is a skill, we just think it’s very loud.  Lastly, my cats are very fat; we would appreciate if you would hold off on the judgment as we are currently working very hard on getting them a legitimate diagnosis so as to alleviate us from our responsibility for their obesity.  If you know a shady vet hook it up!

Also our kitchen is done today.  We all need a good happy cry over this! Pictures to come.

Recognition

I keep thinking I have nothing to write about but I think it has more to do with the fact that I don’t have space to sit and think. But we’re all bored of hearing about the moving saga so I’ll let that one lie until I can show you before and after photos.

We have just returned from the alternate universe that is vacation.  It was perfectly timed and it was absolute bliss.  We went to Ojai, Santa Barabara and Los Olivos.  We napped every day, stared off in the distance for long periods of time, I read a little, we swam a little, we picnicked at my favorite winery in Los Olivos, we ate dinner at 9pm, and we binged watched really bad TV.  I mean, what else is vacation for?

Then within twenty-four hours we left Los Olivos and the zen of the golden hills, came home and started working on the house, went to Hoag hospital to see my newest nephew Rory come into the world and woke up at 6am for a garage sale.  Rory is absolutely perfect and no matter how many of my sister’s births I witness (we’re not Mormon) I will never get over what a miracle the whole thing is.  

As a side, 6am is apparently not early enough for the garage sale types.  People should sleep later on Saturdays, it bothers me that they don’t.  But it doesn’t matter anymore because we have decided garage sales are not worth it for the Hoehne’s. Neither Trever or I are in sales for good reason, we sold a washer/dryer set for $15, a BBQ for $10, and after we got bored of it all we just put a big free sign up and went inside.  We ultimately got what we wanted though, big annoying things that were taking up space went away.

Then! On Sunday we went to my sister Brittany’s church to see Crosby, her youngest of four, get dedicated (really though we’re not Mormon, we have brown hair).  You expect to go to your own church and have everyone tell you how much they’re praying for you and your family.  You don’t expect to go to your sister’s church and have people you have never met know you and your unborn daughter by name and tell you that they’re praying for you every day.  It was really humbling.

It was also Mother’s Day that day. I felt so celebrated for my mother-to-be status and yet with each reference to the norms of mothering I thought about the abnormal.  For the mothers that have been lost, for the empty wombs. I think about them not to pity them or pity myself but because the validation in recognition can bring ease. The pain should be noted in the midst of the good because there always is pain in the midst, as that’s the reality of our world.  I celebrate perfect babies being born all around me with real and full joy because it’s really good news. But of course the grief is there. Abnormality is cruel isn’t it?

The funny thing is in the afternoon I had a conversation with my brother-in-law’s sister who had high-risk pregnancies and births.  We talked about the abnormal and it took away the loneliness of grief. It was all I needed, to laugh about the normal mom’s who lose their minds over a medication they don’t want to take or not being able to breastfeed for three years. I hope I’m that person for someone one day, the normalizing comforter.  In a weird way we’re lucky when we get to be that person for someone.  It puts to use our pain, which is the best thing we can ever make of it.  Then at least it has a purpose. 

Also I got a new doctor.  One of the first things he did was ask Colette's name and called her by it the entire appointment.  He validated her humanity and it was everything I needed from him.  Hallelujah for that. 

That's All for Now

It’s been rather quiet over here on my blog.  I am not cooking so no fun recipes and I have no time to read or think much so I don’t have any particularly interesting thoughts to share. But we moved people! We Moved! Some really generous friends came over and helped us lug our life six blocks from our old place to our new one.  We loaded up pretty much everything into our back bedroom and our garage so all we have is a bed.  But I made it very cozy so at least there’s that.  All of our kitchen appliances are currently in our dining room as the kitchen is down to the studs.  The cats are losing their minds and so are we a little bit, but we woke up this morning and wandered around our tiny space dreaming about what it would be.  And the really lovely news is that our kitchen will be done in just two weeks thanks to our magician contractor and his team. We’ll be sure to take good before and after photos.

In other news, we had a meeting with our cardiac surgeon today.  He said there’s only a 50/50 chance the heart condition Colette has been diagnosed with even exists.  Apparently it’s hard to see aortic arches. If the condition is present it’s a very common and uncomplicated surgery and they might even be able to go through an incision in her back.  He was very unconcerned and we left a meeting with a doctor feeling buoyant, which is a new experience.

I feel lighter recently and excited to meet her.  I feel hopeful that’s we’ll all make it through this with some scars but a ton of strength.  By the grace of God we are seeing miracles happen in her tiny body and we are getting through it all with peace and an unexpected joy.

Sometimes I have moments of sadness when I remember that this isn’t normal.  I walked into target and saw a cute little baby outfit and thought how bizarre it was that I haven’t bought anything for her.  I remember that my celebration is tentative, that it almost makes me sad to have joy because it reminds me that I might have to let go.  But we’re celebrating in ways that don’t feel overwhelming.  My sisters, my mom and I did a spa day and Glen Ivey for a mini celebration.  Some friends are taking me to a fun lunch at Pelican Hill. I was in a team meeting at work and all my co-workers stood around me and prayed for me and I sobbed because I suppose I believe in prayer. The amount of people that reach out to me and remind me they are praying daily for Colette could make me sob in this café I’m sitting in. Our people are celebrating joyfully with us in just the ways we need them to and they are very tangibly a source of strength in moments of weakness. For all of this I am so grateful. 

This is all to say that in the chaos we’re quite irrationally ok.

That’s all for now, more to come. 

Recent Reads

By Amy Tan

By John Mark Comer

By Fredrik Backman

By C. S. Lewis

By Rod Dreher

By Amor Towles

By Pamela Druckerman

By Liane Moriarty

Meth Lab Therapy

I’m pretty sure Trever and I are on the verge of snapping.  We are STILL not moved.  Yes it’s a tragedy, but we decided that it makes more sense to bite the bullet and get our kitchen done before Colette arrives.  You know dust and chaos and hammers aren’t always conducive to newborn life.  Because of this we are waiting until the demo is done before we move which means we’re still a week out which means we will be living amongst boxes for another week.  Another weeeeek.     Also our loft complex is currently painting the outside of our place so there are large plastic sheets covering all of our windows adding a dungeon/meth-lab effect to boxes and half painted walls.  It’s very pleasant.  I told Trever I feel home sick, like I’m traveling but I’m not. 

Yesterday I had to let a guy into our place to look at the fire sprinklers and he kind of creeped me out so I left the front door open.  After he left I went upstairs and noticed our cat Grey was not in her usual place of sloth and I started looking for her.  I slowly started panicking as I checked all the usual fluffly comfort spots she’s drawn to for hours of hibernation and she was nowhere to be found.  The panic got worse and I thought, well this is it, this is what breaks us, our fat cat runs away and we snap. 

I opened the front door and she was eating a plant outside.  She can’t resist eating no matter what it is. She gags down these long pieces of grass and they cannot taste good, but she’s committed so at least there’s that. So we haven’t snapped.  Our fat Grey cat is happy and sleeping and we’re marching along.

We currently have two chairs in our living room.  They are kind of in the middle of the room next to the pile of boxes and they’re facing each other like a therapist’s office, if therapists met in meth labs.  Trever and I sat down and looked at each other after a meal of frozen burritos and finally had a second to catch up. 

I’m reading a book called The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher and it’s messing with me. He’s essentially making the argument that the society that caused St. Benedict to create a new Monastic order is very similar to the cultural space we are in now.  He’s not saying we should all be monks, but rather that there comes a time when culture is so in contrast with a Christian way of life that to live fully into our religious convictions there is an element of removal that must happen.  He says, “we will hardly be normal, but we should never have tried to be.” 

Trever and I were talking about this book, about how we want to live our lives, about choosing now what matters and how we want to be as a family. I was saying how the most depraved part of myself wants Trever to be successful for his sake and for mine, so we can travel the world together and spend the summers in Paris and have all these cultural experiences.  That’s what I really want, I want to be rich and pretty and in Paris.

But then of course life throws a few curve balls and we start figuring out what matters in life. We are forced to remember why we’re here and what give us hope.  Suddenly we are becoming conscious about every choice, rather than letting our life float along to an undecided future.  For the first time we’re starting at our destination and working backwards.

We never want to miss God’s blessings revealed in goodness.  Things like the cardiologist now saying Colette's heart is more of a suspicion and less a diagnosis so surgery may not be necessary, or that her omphalacele is a bit smaller than previously thought, hallelujah times a million for every tiny miracle along the way.  And yet we never want to forget his blessing through pain.  His presence in difficult seasons is a blessing unfathomable, something that changes us and gives us a faith we are otherwise incapable of. Trever and I sat in our chaotic dark living room like we were in a bizarre therapeutic session and cried.  We cried because, well partly because we’re stressed, but really because we could have missed it.  We could have just summered in Paris and missed the whole point. It would have been fun, and yet I wonder if we would have eventually come to regret not actually living for something bigger.

God saved us from ourselves I suppose.  What a bizarre gift, something good sprouted in us from a pile of rubble. The blessing is in the miracles and yet it’s in the pain just the same, it’s the grace of God to remind us who we are. So that's where we're at, we're remembering what's written into our DNA, we're connecting with the very breath that gives us life, we're becoming conscious again.  Turns out I don't want to slip back into the mindlessness of pleasure, I really want us to stay awake.  

Meaning

I took a grief counseling class the other day for continuing education.  In an odd way it was a bizarre sort of comfort to be in a class like that.  The educator took a survey during the class to see the number of people who have experienced significant losses and the percentages were far higher than one would have thought.  On the other hand it is rather depressing to spend a day in a room of therapists telling stories of clients who have crumbled under grief. It’s unfortunate that I couldn’t have a glass of wine post saddest class ever.

Viktor Frankl said that despair was suffering minus meaning, and so a large portion of working through grief and experiencing healing is finding that meaning.  In this class however, when we got into the details and stories of how clients found meaning the bottom dropped out.  Things that gave meaning to people seemed to me hollow and almost illusory, methods for coping connected to very little reality.  How do you make peace and find meaning out of nothing but the pain of this life?  The room was in awe of a story of a woman whose father had died and so after he was gone she wrote letters to herself from him and mended their broken relationship. If it works for coping, fine, but it’s thin at best.

Humans have a capacity to construct their own reality and so after loss this can be done as a means of coping, the truth of something is a secondary matter to finding what works. The only substantial meaning making to me however, needed to be connected to more, not just because it works for survival but because it's the only thing that makes sense of it all - and that's faith. Of course the argument could be made that religion itself is a coping mechanism that is constructed to create meaning out of nothing, but then we’re all believing in something I suppose, believing in nothing is a belief just the same.

There were large swaths of my life that I could have gone without my religious beliefs.  They helped me make good moral choices in life but it didn’t necessarily offer any true worldview shifts, encourage radical life change or provide a source of comfort that was beyond what any other non-religious American might experience.   But I’m different now, and there I was in a class on grief and the only possibility for meaning to me was faith.  Faith seems like child’s play until grief forces the issue of meaning and suddenly it is everything else that seems like child’s play.  The only proper source of comfort becomes – there must be more. It’s in our DNA to find meaning, weaved there within the foundational human capacity to reason. And so we have to find it, which I think reveals the truth that it’s there. 

I think about Syria a lot recently.  Every time I pray or begin to pity myself I think of the lives lost in this evil civil war.  I force myself to look at the photos depicting the ravages that have flattened cities and taken countless lives and left its survivors hollowed out from grief. I heard a very OC woman the other day talking about how we can’t just give ourselves to the needs around us because then we would just be empty.  She was making an argument for boundaries, which is fine, and yet I wonder if empty is what we’re meant to be. I don’t mean non-sustainable, dysfunctional or codependent empty, I mean actually giving our lives to the broken among us.  Our boundaries are so locked in we think posting on social media is action. We think churches are for creating well-funded institutions that serve to pat upper-class believers on the back. We think the chief goal of community is to create a safety huddle. We think we’re here to make our lives lovely.

I know this is all depressing, but I think when we look at the actual pain in this life we are forced to feel the weight of the world’s reality, and Lord help us it should move us into action.  It should force the issue of meaning both beyond this life and within it.  What’s our role?  They say the church is hemorrhaging young people and we blame the institution for not being compelling, or being too this or too that. I wonder if instead we shut our rambling mouths and took on the responsibility of living lives of wisdom and action.  Hipness would stop defining our relevance and compelling lives would instead be the draw.

We should make ourselves deal with this, we should connect with the pain around us, we should look at the photos of those in Africa trying to survive a famine.  We should let it get us down as we see an old man in his bombed out apartment in Syria smoking a pipe and listening to old records. I’m writing to myself here because this issue nags me all the time.  I’m moving at a sloths pace towards action and not because I’m supposed to but because I have to. 

I think we can and should let pain change us, we can allow it to move us.  We can engage the darkness for the sake of participating in shedding light. We can do it all in an effort to partner with God in changing the world, all the while waiting for and believing in restoration, all because it’s the meaning of life.

Because isn’t it? 

Reprocussions for the Things

Trever and I close escrow tomorrow.  I forgot how stressful it can be buying a house.  All the loan documents and paperwork is nightmarish for both Trever and my personalities.  Then of course the moving bit has its own unsettling effect.  I woke up in the middle of the night last night and did yoga in my kitchen, which is the only open space in my house, just to ease some tension of living in the aftermath of an explosion of things! We have too many things. I ended up waking up this morning and cleaning my house, which felt like wiping a bit of mud off a pig.  I pushed boxes into corners and made my kitchen and bedroom the safe zones.  I mopped the floors and cleaned the bathrooms, all of which had cycled out of control once the first frame came off the wall, and then I took a nap. 

I need naps recently.  I missed the tired portion of first trimester pregnancy and so I felt like I bypassed the fatigue and pregnancy wouldn’t get me down.  I know all the mothers are internally patronizing me for my adorable ignorance, because of course I now feel like I returned from another time zone only yesterday and just cannot beat this jet lag.  I’ll be in a meeting around 3:00 and could literally close my eyes mid sentence and likely fall quickly asleep.  I have to avoid people with calming and slow voices during that part of my day.

This fatigue however, could also be due to our current diet.  We went to Trader Joes this weekend and bought a bunch of frozen no cook meals for the week in anticipation of the chaos and a boxed up kitchen.  On Monday night I heard the beep of my microwave, peeled back the plastic cover from a plastic plate full of Veggie Korma and placed it in front of Trever.  My granola self looked upon what I had become that night and shamed me for my decisions.  Trever on the other hand was rather happy, like so happy that he told me I was going to have a hard time convincing him to go back to eating the way we normally do. He's noted that lucky for us these frozen sodium packets are low in calories which is an added benefit to death by preservatives.  You see, it might be important to know Trever is kind of ironic by nature.  I was talking to my friend Kayla about this, how right in the center of all his good taste, fashion industry work, fine art degree and general hipness, he’s still from Hemet and would honestly prefer Del Taco and PBR to a client meeting at Nobu. Truth is though, this is actually one of my favorite things about him, shitty towns make good people, sucks the life right out of any pretentiousness.

So, I ate my sodium rich indian food and was grateful in the middle of the craziest season of life we’ve had to date.  Houses are just houses and in the midst of chaos we kind of have to laugh at all that’s happening.  I clutch my round belly in gratitude for a tiny life that has already changed me in ways I could never have understood before.  I pray for her incessantly and can’t wait to make her a home that’s simply walls and a garden but really a place that she’ll feel loved.

I know she already is so loved.  My friends and family have been so kind and gracious and grieved and celebrated with us like she was their own. And to all of you who have been following along with me, I wanted to say thank you for your love.  The grace with which you have responded to me, my writing, and my family has overwhelmed me.  Your continual offerings of encouragement and prayer has been an honest source of support for Trever and I.  It’s been a difficult season and yet there has been comfort knowing the amount of people who have been crying over, praying for and celebrating Colette.  It’s humbling to be the recipient of your love.  So thank you, with all of my heart, thank you. 

And that's a wrap, off to the boxes again. 

Abnormal Nesting

Things feel good right now.  I know, aren't we all relieved not to find some 100 pound post again? We got that positive news about Colette's heart and I'm running with it.  Part of me wants to hold back on the relief knowing that more bad news could always be around the corner, since she still has a more minor heart condition and the omphalacele, the complications are endless.  But I'm doing my best not to live like that, I'll take the joy while it's here.  Someone recommended I read Ecclesiastes because it reminds us that life is hard, but it's also fleeting, and so we enjoy the times of joy and the simple bits of pleasure we get from life.  This was good advice so I'm loving what's in front of me.  

We're moving in a couple of weeks and we took some frames down this weekend and BAM we are unsettled.  We also made the bizarre decision to sell our couch and we likely won't be moved for close to two weeks. This means, as you might assume, that we don't have a couch only our super cozy wood floors and a few chairs. I don't know why we did this to ourselves.  Also they say I'm supposed to be nesting, but I can't.  Partially because we're moving and partially because we decided not to do a nursery or a shower before Colette is born.  I think there would be a part of me that would be tentative about celebration and constantly wondering what it would be like to have such a lovely nursery empty.  We don't need to send our minds there so we'll work out room details when she's coming home.  

So I cook.  A lot.  I have a nice kitchen in our place now, but our new home has a very old and tiny kitchen.  We'll be re-doing it but for a while my refrigerator will be in another room, as in I'll forget the milk and walk out of my kitchen into another room to get the milk. This is weird.  As for now I'll cook in my nice kitchen.  My friend Julie told me she makes her own almond milk, I was inspired, so I did the same.  I use the dried almond meal from the milk for my homemade granola, which Trever ate for three meals yesterday. Repetitive? Yes. But that's what happens when he's editing from home and I work late.  

Fun fact, I had a co-worker basically tell me I would lose my brains towards the end of my pregnancy. I didn't believe him. But then the other day I turned the oven on to dry out my almond meal, left for 5 hours, and realized while at a restaurant with friends that I probably burned my house down.  Suddenly gruesome images of my house melting and our cats slowing burning to death flooded my brain and I walked straight to my car without saying anything and drove home in a panic.  All was well, but I drove 15 minutes back at 10:30 at night because they had ordered pizza and I like pizza.  My friends were confused by me.  I was confused by my brain.

I also made granola bars.  They're really good and simply made from dried fruit and nuts and I make fresh bread a couple of times a week.  So at any given time in my kitchen you might find jars of floating almonds, a bowl of sourdough starter that looks like soupy bread dough, and some stacks of chewy bars for the taking.  Next up, kambucha.  I have friends that make this too and will give me some of their scoby.  Add jiggly pancake to my scary kitchen. Trever wishes I had different hobbies.  Recipes to come. 

Jam

So it looks like we're moving.  Not to Paris like some thought, maybe one day though. But just a few blocks away from where we live now. Radical. We really wanted a yard and although we love our place now it has bad juju.  The month we moved in my Dad got diagnosed with cancer and went through treatment which almost took his life, then Trever's Dad passed away, then we learned of our infertility, then we've had to endure the pain and joy of this pregnancy.  

Get me OUT! 

Some might say it's an interesting decision to be moving right now, it's not as if we have space for added stress, but it's also a nice distraction.  The place we are moving to is tiny, built in 1920 and full of character. It's got a ton of windows and loads of sunlight, there are tiny doors leading outside all over the house and the bedroom windows pull open like a disney movie.   We're going to re-do the kitchen so I've been losing untold hours to pinterest and kitchen stalking. I'm adding some of my finds to my CURATION page if you want to follow along with me in my distractions. Just as a side note, all of the images I use on my blog posts are Trever's suggestions.  So if the images are creating some sort of illusion that I'm more cultured than a goof from Victorville, we can all just let that go. 

Also I make jam now.  Remember in Friends when Monica makes all the jam after she breaks up with Richard? This is me, except less funny.  I was trying to find a natural Strawberry Jam recipe and I couldn't find one.  Everyone likes to add lots of sugar and pectin.  Pectin is like active yeast, it's a store bought products that makes a natural process happen a lot more quickly.  Jam gets its thick quality when the sugar, fruit, acid and heat work together for the good of those who love it. We speed this up with sugar and pectin, and really the sugar is just because it tastes good.  

So I experimented.  I made several batches of stawberry jam made with just the fruit, honey and lemon.  It takes longer to cook down but then when I lather it on my toast I don't have to feel bad. Also when it's hot off the stove before I bottle it I drizzle over vanilla ice cream.    

So...I chop up 5 cups of fresh ripe strawberries and place in a saucepan.  Then I add 1 cup honey and the juice of a lemon and let the jam simmer for close to two hours - until the jam sticks to the back of your spoon. That's it.  Then we consume it like ice cream. Yum

Mercy

I’ve never being great about reading the Bible but recently I’ve been reading the Psalms all the time. For most of my life I read the Bible because I was supposed to and I felt guilty if I didn’t.  Then later in life I did it for intellectual and academic purposes.  Now here I am and reading the Bible feels like breath.  The Psalms give me words for parts of me that I hardly know how to articulate.  They give me prayers when I’m speechless.  They help me grieve when I’m tied up in knots. They offer solidarity in the full range of emotions.  They’re a bit of clarity in the chaos.  

It appears I have learned something in all of this pain.  I look back at who I was in early pregnancy before everything went south.  I had just found a newer and deeper sense of faith after a year of intensive spiritual practice and study.  I had chosen to believe. Then we got our baby’s diagnosis and I saw my minds ideas for the thin beliefs that they were.  I got mad at God for a while, I wrestled with the notion of his goodness, muttered wordless painful prayers, sustained the shattering of the delusions I had about my future, and then finally at some point, belief found me.  I was suddenly believing in a very deep part of my soul, it was something that felt profound, something that felt given to me, and something that felt unaffected by life’s cliffs.

I’ve been doing a lot of work to understand God’s involvement in our world, his intervention if there is any, and his goodness and power related to pain and suffering.  In the middle of it all and in my darkest place I had a perspective shift that I wrote about earlier which released me from figuring it all out.  I have found some clarity in the bigger picture of God’s sovereignty, but I have stopped trying to find out the minutia of how it plays out today.

I heard this quote from David Bentley Hart, who wrote an essay in the aftermath of the 2004 Tsunami. 

…of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines…Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred…As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy.  It is a faith that has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. 

That last line of Hart’s quote – It is a faith that has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead – it’s all my inarticulate thoughts encompassed. 

We are released, potentially via pain, from the clenching of our fingers around this life.  We no longer need to fight for the perfection of our tomorrows, which will undoubtedly fail us. And once we finally and truly see this, it has the effect of offering a hope that is unaltered by circumstances.  It frees us into joy, and moves us from wishful thinking about our future and into an unshakable hope that exists beyond this life.  But first, we must be pealed back from our optimism, we must have our expectations shattered, and that shattering changes us. We no longer have the luxury and the delusion of the plans we make, so that even when life gets a little easier, our scars will forever remind us that we wait for something more.  Another’s pain we no longer objectify while thinking how grateful we are that at least it’s not us, and instead their pain reminds of what has always been true - that it keeps hurting until the day we’re rescued and then suddenly it’s somehow worth it. 

I was laying on yet another ultrasound table staring up at those ugly square ceiling tiles.  We were doing a follow-up cardiac ultrasound and they were meant to be confirming Colette’s diagnosis of DORV and looking to see if there was another heart condition our doctor was concerned about.  This second condition would mean immediate surgery and likely working with Stanford’s cardiac surgeons due to the complexity of the issues.  Earlier that day I was at breakfast with my Dad in the morning and when Trever picked me up to head to the appointment he had a song blaring from before he got out of his car.  He turned it down but it was a blast of a chorus that says, “for endless days we will sing your praise, Oh Lord, Oh Lord our God.”  I hardly noticed it until I was staring at the tiles waiting for our results and singing the song in my head over and over. 

It was representative of a heart change in me that was given to me and nothing I earned.  I sang it waiting for a doctor to tell me that my daughter would have low chances of survival. I sang it anyways.  I sang it without contingency of a miracle.  I sang it until the doctor interrupted us to finally give us the news, which is a moment we have learned to deeply dread. Then the doctor told us that he had misdiagnosed her and that the first condition was no longer present, and neither was the second, and that she had a narrowing of an artery that may require surgery but is significantly less concerning.

And so what do you say? I weep in gratitude and find myself wordless.  

But certainly God has heard; He has given heed to the voice of my prayer.  Blessed be God.  Who has not turned away my prayer nor his lovingkindess from me.

A Mere Breath

We had an echocardiogram for Colette yesterday.  The doctor told us it would take between 20 and 40 minutes and 40 minutes later when he was still silently staring at the ultrasound monitor I figured it wasn’t great news.  He came back from reviewing the results and said, “you’re baby has congenitive heart disease.”  I don’t remember what else he said except that he kept drawing on this large illustration of a heart.  He said the condition isn’t life threatening and she’ll have a normal life expectancy but then our other doctor, who is likely the most depressing person I have ever met, told us her prognosis isn’t good have both omphalacele and this heart condition.  This doctor is a big advocate for termination so he really likes to lay it on thick.

I spent some time researching and am hoping to move up to CHLA for her treatment as it's much higher in ranking than CHOC.  I found a woman online whose child has the same combination of diagnosis.  Unfortunately her daughter didn’t make it because she was also born early.  I sobbed when she told me. I sob all the time right now.  Then I met another woman whose child has the same combination and just brought her six-month old home from the hospital.  She sent me photos. When I imagine our future I have two narratives playing out in my head.  One where we’re in the hospital a lot and one where we’re home alone.

We fell into our routine of grief.  We sobbed in the office, drove home in a daze, sobbed in the living room, then I went sleep with the TV on and Trever did something productive. We both cancelled all our plans and I thought about quitting my job, moving away, and finding any way to escape life.  Then I remembered the pattern.  Yesterday is the worst, it’s all a blur and shocked grief.  Today we wake up with headaches and puffy eyes, stay home most of the day, cry less, go out to dinner and start to let it settle in.  Then I’ll slowly need the TV on less, we’ll probably see people in a couple of days, we’ll start re-entering life and we’ll start accepting what is. It does get better, I know the pattern and now I know how to ride the wave.  But this time I’m holding her with an open hand, not because I want to but because life has pried my fingers flat. As for that part of it, I’m not sure it follows the pattern. I don’t know if one can make peace with the looming potential of losing your baby, I’m not sure that pain will ever dull.

I met with an former professor of mine this week.  He has been through so much suffering in his life and I needed some perspective.  It was an interesting meeting because I left really encouraged and yet looking back he didn’t say a single encouraging thing about this life.  He has what they call, an eternal perspective.  I think it’s what we’re meant to have, and I wonder if we only are truly capable of one when life becomes too painful to cling to. He genuinely finds hope alone in the belief that the pain of this life will be unworthy to be compared to the joys of the eternal.  He’s banking his life on that, that restoration will make the pain of today no longer worthy to be noticed. 

He didn’t encourage me with talk of miracles (although we keep praying), he encouraged me by agreeing that life is hard and then you die.  And yet true hope cannot be squashed, because although we pray for miracles today, our true peace and belief and promises lie in the hope of what is to come, that whether we live or die we are the Lords.

Because, surely every man at his best is a mere breath, so we have hope only in what is to come, and yet pray for mercy today. 

Blueberry Granola

I've been trying to figure out a healthy granola recipe.  Most recipes have some unhealthy oils and use a lot of sugar. Instead I used coconut oil and honey to make a really healthy and yum version.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees

Combine in a large mixing bowl:

10 c. oats // 1 1/2 c. unsweetened shave coconut // 1/2 c flax seed // 1 c. slivered almonds // 1 c. sunflower seeds // 3/4 c. chopped walnuts // 3/4 c. chopped macadamia nuts // 1/2 c. ground flax seed // 3/4 c. wheat germ // 3 tbsp. cinnamon // 1 tsp. nutmeg

Combine in a sauce pan and warm until blended:

1 c. coconut oil // 1 c. honey // 1/2 c. molasses // 2 tbsp. vanilla extract// 1 tsp. almond extract

Pour the ingredients from the saucepan into the mixing bowl with dry ingredients and mix together. 

Spread the granola across two baking sheets and bake for 30 minutes, stirring halfway through. 

Optional: Add 1 c. dried blueberries to cooled granola 

The Soundtrack

I read this article the other day from a prominent Christian author who, within a span of a few months, had divorced her husband, come out as a lesbian and had her partner move into her home with her children.  I’ve done a lot of studying on the issue of homosexuality and Christianity, but it’s not the issue I really want to write about. 

What was most interesting to me was her strong rhetoric about being 'your true self', which is what she feels she is doing.  There was so much positive encouragement for her on social media, as this was the brave thing to do in the eyes of her readers, and it was. But that was what intrigued me, unrelated to her sexual orientation I was most interested in the bravery theme. I haven't got the foggiest idea what it must be like to be this woman so I'm not making a value judgement about her choices - you do you - ya know?  But it's always interesting to review our culture's narrative and direction. 

I find this 'be your true self' language to be very interesting.  It is very clearly culture’s soundtrack right now and there are elements in this way of thinking that can be truly liberating for people.  The pendulum is swinging from the days of suppression, of keep calm and carry on, of immovable moral and behavioral structures, to something meant to be more honest. So, now we are in a time where the highest thing we can do is be true to who we are. 

I see why culture prizes the true self and I applaud those who have made difficult counter-cultural decisions to be honest.  I suppose it’s an issue of defining terms though.  If we actually mean our 'true selves', the truest thing about us is the person we are meant to form and grow into, it is our best self.  But my suspicion is that when people say, “true self” what they mean is, "do what feels right," the phrases have become almost interchangeable. 

With the latter understanding of the phrase as "do what feels right," it is interesting to me how powerful this message is in religious communities.  I generally think that doing what feels right is rather simple to do.  Most of the time it’s not brave, it’s easy. And although bravery is really important, especially when instilled in children to combat all those school age expectations, but it has to be lived out in tension with other values. From my understanding of Christianity there is a belief that we are broken and made for more, if so, then I think what we should be striving for is our best self. Of course there is grace for the fact that we'll never truly arrive, and we need to be sure that our best self is formed from true heart change and not suppression and behavior modification, but I think we should all be aiming for something better, not the depravity of our basic being.  

I would imagine this 'true self' grows out of our therapeutic culture that bases all understanding of the self on feelings.  They are the dominant theme of talk therapy.  This is my field, but I was trained to think differently and after years of experience I agree with my professors.  When feelings drive decision-making we can value the easy choice over the discerning choice, our desires over true wisdom, and often times the self over the other.  This isn’t to say emotions don’t matter and that sometimes they lead us to the right decision, they do.  We need to understand our emotions, recognize them, utilize and listen to them, sometimes set them aside and sometimes work to adjust them.  But that’s just the point, we can’t always take our emotions at face value as being true wisdom, they very rarely are.

My sister and I were talking about her parenting the other day.  She teaches her kids to have self-control over their emotions.  We talked about the balance of suppression and self-control and how we can teach children to understand their emotions and yet not be solely driven by them. We can teach them self-efficacy and to embrace who they are even when it doesn’t fit the cultural square, and yet to teach them to be truly good we teach them how to change, we teach them to do what is right not just what feels right. 

I’m reading the book Bringing up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman right now. Druckerman is a journalist who moved to Paris with her husband and later had children there. After living in the country for so long she has been able to make some interesting distinctions between common parenting themes in America vs. France. It’s a great book, but what I found most interesting was how few French women she interviewed were able to articulate why they parent the way they do, even though they all carry the same strong themes.  I gather that this is the case because it's very difficult to critique the culture we are immersed in.  When we’re outsiders or foreigners themes are so clear, and yet when we’re within, our norms are unseen like the blue of the sky. It’s good for us to review the background noise sometimes, if for nothing but to stop and listen to what we are hearing. 

Tiny but Fancy

I’m working on some crib research and Trever and I are on VERY different pages concerning the nursery.  Trever prefers wildly uncomfortable and very hip looking housing products. We recently switched out our metal wire chair for a wooden chair that is so deep it necessitates 3 pillows stacked against one another in order for one’s legs to make it to the ground.  Plus as an added bonus - the edge of the chair is a cornered piece of wood that is so sharp, if the chairs current resident doesn’t understand the need for said pillows they will have a very red and painful mark at the mid-point of their calf.  The cats don’t even like it and they like sleeping inside plastic bags. But daaamn if it doesn't look good in that space. It's like a piece of art, for looking not touching. 

I should have known this registry kerfuffle was coming.  When we got married we tried to register together and it was not cute. We weren’t that little engaged couple floating around West Elm squealing over our new home together. No, no, I was walking around trying to figure out what we needed (which was everything) while Trever gave a distracting background narrative the entire time, while constantly articulating the things he was convinced we did not need - not a big fan of clutter. 

It's all deja vu related to baby paraphernalia.  We apparently need 4 grey onesies, some diapers, and a crib (read: dresser drawer pulled out with some blankets). Trever does not feel ok with a chair that rocks, unless of course it’s Eames or some other painful hard material. He would also like to buy the IKEA crib, thus the debate.  I’m pretty sure it’s made from scrap wood and likely gives splinters to any unlucky passerby, one of whom will be our newborn baby.  As a note, I have put together enough IKEA products to know what they’re like when completed, many times they need to be propped against a wall for a source of support lest they collapse like a teetering jenga tower. Yes the ones I like range from $600-$1200, and yes she will not be in it THAT long, and yes that costs more than our bed, but the gold one is just so pretty.  No I don’t manage our budget, why do you ask?

Also I’m going to betray his trust and tell you about Trever's new inventions because I'm not overly concerned about you taking the idea.  You know the soundproof blankets made out of hazardous materials that they use on the walls in sounds studios? Well the world needs a baby version of these so parents can cover themselves and our crying babies on planes and it will silence the noise, potentially via suffocation but that will be left out of the marketing copy.  Also, a one day diaper.  When a child’s diaper needs changed parent need not remove soiled material, clean and replace, they just twist off the bottom of the diaper that contains waste and it will reseal the diaper (think diaper genie directly on baby bottom).

Who knows, maybe we’ll be millionaires off this one day. Ooooh, then maybe we can buy the fancy crib.

Also if you want to follow along on my shopping escapades, you can do so on MY CURATION LINK

Until it's Part of Me

I heard a sermon the other day that wrecked me.  He started out by saying, “I wanted to speak really quickly about sadness.”  He went on to explain the intense experience of sadness and its great presence in the life of eternal beings, as we spend so much of our life ultimately letting go.  He discussed the use of sadness and grief and what it does to our souls, and yet how easy it is to let that turn to anger because at least in anger we feel like we have control.  Of course anger is generally unproductive as an emotion and keeps us from true growth and true comfort and mostly it keeps us from the capacity to see God.

Well if you have read my previous blogs you might have gotten a small teeny tiny sense of anger weaved within them.  I didn’t want to delete them out because they’re part of the process, but it’s there for me to look back on and see with clarity what becomes of me in sadness.  I couldn’t pray really, I couldn’t be gracious with people who wanted to me to find peace in God like they do, I couldn’t really sustain what I thought I learned all this year.  I thought I became a person of faith, and maybe I did to a certain degree, but it’s not until the real pressure comes that we see the depth of the faith we maintain. I don’t regret the wrestle with God because I think that is often necessary for true belief, but I did see my faith for what it was and can do nothing but decide to respond differently now. 

In difficult seasons of life I find that a world ruled by chance seems easier for me to believe.  Without divine involvement the cruelty of life can land on no one except itself.  And yet there are a lot of other reasons I believe, things that make sense of the world and this life, things that bring hope to a wretched place, and those things are still true in pain although maybe a little less clear.  I still want to live my life in light of belief, and although God may not feel like a real source of comfort at this point, I’m doing my best to choose faith.  Hopefully that choice will ultimately seep into my soul and bring me peace, but for now it’s just a choice. 

I learned a lot this year about how we cannot educate ourselves into faith, we can only participate our way into it.  Here I am in a different place and yet still learning the same thing.  I will never understand how pain exists in a world ruled by a good God, except for what I learn from C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain.  No one will sufficiently answer it for us and yet what may seem irrational to some is the only way forward for others - the will power to stand in faith even when nothing makes sense.  At some point it's simply a choice.  The decision to maintain belief is just that, a decision.  My soul aches and I still hate when people try to comfort me with “God’s great plan” but whatever his involvement I’m trying my best to believe he is good. And I supposed I’ll just remind my soul of what is true, until over time it becomes an accessible part of me again. 

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