The Commitment

Ok. It's on. I have got to get a serious grip. I have been on auto pilot for what seems like forever. I don't put away laundry. I don't eat right. I don't exercise. I am never on time for anything. I leave my keys everywhere but where they are supposed to be. How can one seemingly intelligent person be so disorganized?? I am making a commitment today to expect more of myself. I don't know how, but I am going to get my act together (except maybe the exercise part).

Omnipotence

Have you ever sat down and opened your inbox to discover that God sent you an e-mail? Well, I just did and I thought I would share what He had to say. (What I mean is I received a new edition of a blog to which I subscribe that was exactly what I didn't want to hear, but instead, was what I needed to hear). Maybe it will strike a chord with you. http://theologyforwomen.blogspot.com/2009/11/helping-wounded-husbands.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FDTlt+%28Practical+Theology+for+Women%29

The Big Move

So let's go back to the beginning...

As Mandy said, we've been afraid to talk about it because it might get jinxed. So the things that I feel like everyone knows may actually only be known to a few.

In 1981 I was late getting registered for Kindergarten because it didn't occur to my dad to register me until several weeks after all the other kindergarteners had started. So here we go off to find Kindergarten. My granny dressed me in a blue plaid dress with a white pinafore and black patent leather shoes. I was wearing yellow crayon barrettes in my hair.

The first place we stopped looking for Kindergarten turned out to be the Acme boot factory on Adkisson Street, but it looked like a school... Soon we found Ashland City Elementary school and were given a tour by Mr. Sapp. Then Dad left and I found myself in Ms. Duggin's kindergarten class. It was already nap time by the time I arrived. I didn't have a kinder mat yet, so I napped on a cot provided by Ms. Duggin.

In the darkened kindergarten classroom, Sandy Moore lay beside me. We whispered greetings so as to not attract the attention of Ms. Duggin.

Why, you might ask, is this the beginning of a story about my family moving into a new house in 2009?

Sandy introduced me to Mandy Smith. She, Sandy, and I would become lifelong friends. There would be many sleepovers, scooter rides, pool parties, creek capers, out house adventures, and more to follow over the next 13 years of school. Even today the three of us are still in regular contact.

Recently, Mandy's mother passed away. I noticed a For Sale By Owner sign in the yard bearing Mandy's phone number. I sent her an e-mail telling her that I work at a title company and would be honored if I could help her with the process and threw in that we were looking for a new place for our expanding family if she were interested in owner financing. One thing led to another and here we are, moving into our own home.

While the blessing is bittersweet due to the circumstances under which the house became available, I think this is going to be good for both families. My family gets to venture into the world of home ownership and Mandy's family gets to know that a very greatful friend will be caring for and loving her mother's home.

I'll keep you updated on the process. Keep me in your prayers - change is hard for me!

Gruesome Thank You Card

Where do you find a thank you card for dead dog removal?

Here is a truly gruesome bit of info from the Sherbert household. When Rob was home over the weekend he ran over one of our dogs - not Amos, the pitbull, but a 6 month old Shepherd mix that we found dumped on our road.

The dog ran off into the woods. We tried to find her to no avail. We were afraid that she might come home and get under the house. The boys looked under the house later in the day and didn't see her.

Well, two days ago I knew she had made it under the house - July summer heat, you get the picture.

The next morning I started looking around and pulling away underpinning and found her, but despite your best effort, being 38 weeks pregnant limits your ability to deal with some things - this being one. With Rob being out of town, I had to call my dad. After work that day, he took care of it for me.

It's weird when you realize that even though you have been married for 14 years, have three children that you are raising, have two advanced degrees, etc, sometimes you still just need your dad to come to your rescue. But it's really great when you realize that he will without a moment's hesitation.

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

If I am going to be honest, and I usually am, there have been many times over the past 14 years that I have WANTED my husband to pack his things and walk out the door. Obviously, we have managed to get over whatever the issue was at the time and have stuck it out. Well, today he did pack his things and walk out the door and I didn't like it one bit. He is going to pour concrete in Tacoma, WA, and won't be back until July 1st. We have prayed for work and prayed for work. We have applied for job after job from craigslist (I'm not sure that they all aren't fake anyway). We have even applied for jobs overseas. We have said if someone's pouring concrete anywhere, he will go. So now we have to put our money where our mouth is. I didn't think it would be that big of a deal. He would just pack his bag, head off to work, and life would go on. You have to do what you have to do. Marina cried last night when telling Rob good night, I cried this morning as I put his toothbrush in his bag. We'll be fine of course. It's only 15 days and it's only pouring concrete, but in 14 years, we have only been apart for a couple days max. He went on a hunting trip once for about 5 days and he went to help is grandmother once for about 4 days. And at least I had time to think about those trips. This opportunity came up Saturday and he left this morning! I am NOT a spontaneous person! Further, those were trips to uninteresting places doing uninteresting things. The kids and I want to go to Washington!! Anyway, he promises to send photos back throughout the trip, so we can all live through him. And I made him promise to be miserable and endlessly pine for home...

Golden Retriever Gets Neutered

This will be the headline next week...

Golden Retriever Attempts Suicide

I am baby sitting my sister's Golden Retriever. He is a city dog. He just learned to pee standing up a few months ago. For about a year, he has not been around any other dogs except some little yapper belonging to my sister's former roommate. His name is Chubbs (because he was so chubby as a puppy, I think).

We have a male pit bull mix. Here's a picture I pulled off the web that looks kind of like our dog, Amos, except Amos is a little bigger, not so compact. Also, Amos doesn't have his ears cropped like this dog does.

We named him Amos because, even as a puppy, he acted like an old man, just laying around and wanting to sleep all of the time. Right now Amos calls a cable in the front yard home. We let him off from time to time to run around the yard. Sometimes we take him with us places, but he doesn't like to be left alone in the car if we have to go in somewhere... So, when the Golden got to the house, we took him on his leash to meet Amos on his cable. They were basically nose to nose, but not really able to get to each other. Amos fairly ignored the Golden and mostly wanted us to come closer to love on him. Chubbs tried to get tough and started growling and puffing up. I pulled him back and that was the end of it. So I thought. Friday the kids and I left to pick up Robert's report card, leaving Chubbs in the house. When we got home, Gwen's dog darted out the door, down through the yard, and straight at Amos. Of course, Amos wasn't going to have that. So a dog fight ensued. I ran down there and grabbed Amos' cable and pulled him off Chubbs. Chubbs ran off into the woods. Knowing that I couldn't leave him out there, Marina and I took off after him. Robert stayed by Amos with a golf club in hand to scare off Chubbs should he return before we could catch him. So Marina and I are down in the woods and I hear a dog fight start up and Robert start yelling. Chubss had circled around and ran back at Amos. I take off running (8 months pregnant) up the hill through the woods. I get to the scene, but by now this is a legitimate dog fight. They have had at least a minute to get fully involved. We are all yelling, Robert is swinging at both of them. I grab Amos' cable again and start pulling. The cable was slippery from being in the grass, so I wrapped the cable sort of around my wrist to get a better grip. Then I slipped in the grass and was now sitting down and pulling Amos toward me with all my might. I am thinking at this point that at the least, my dog is going to rip off an ear or a floppy lip of Chubbs. I yanked on the cable once very hard and either I pulled Amos loose for a split second or he just decided to let go of Chubbs. This time Chubbs ran straight for the house. Chubbs had only a tiny cut on his ear, no puncture wounds, no dripping blood, etc. I know that Amos could have done much worse to this insolent Golden Retriever, but he didn't. I, of course, didn't fair so well. I have a bruised wrist and forearm from where I wrapped the cable around my arm. I jammed the ring finger of my left hand and bruised the area around my finger nail and I bruised my ankle when I fell in the grass. And not to mention that my children are now traumatized and scarred for life; well, not really... So I come to work today and relate this story to my coworkers and all I heard was how it's because Amos is a pit bull and you know those dogs are unpredictable and blood thirsty. Huh? He was minding his own business and didn't even really break the skin of Chubbs. He didn't "lock" his jaws, as people believe. He didn't yank his head from side to side, attempting to shake Chubbs like a rag doll. This irritated me and got me to researching pit bulls and pit bull myths. If you're interested, read this article from the SPCA http://www.la-spca.org/dedication/talk/t_judge.htm or this from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_bull. I read that a lot of times when there are attacks by "pit bulls," they aren't even always pit bulls. Look at this web site to see what a legit pit bull looks like http://www.pitbullsontheweb.com/petbull/findpit.html. So, hhmmmph. That's my crotchety old person article of the week. I read a slogan that I liked: Judge the Deed, Not the Breed. The only dog that I have had biting / nipping trouble out of is my inlaws Pappillion. So from now on I am going to brand all Pappillions -- "you know those Pappillions, they are unpredictable..."

The Flood

My life has recently taken some twists and turns that I had not anticipated. I feel compelled to write about it and figured this was as good a place as any. I have fairly ignored this space since last winter. I have been consumed with finishing school, getting the baseball season up and running, and generally avoiding anything else that required any thought or effort. Some already know this about us, but my husband and I have managed to fill up every square inch of our life. Five years ago I was homeschooling Robert and working part time from the house. When Marina was born I decided that I would take that opportunity to go back to school. You may be thinking, how would a new baby provide an "opportunity to go back to school?" I don't know. It made some sort of perverse sense to me at the time. I would obviously be lounging around and should use that extra time to go to school. I knew I would not be working full time because of the new baby. And my dad's motto is, "If you're going to be poor, you might as well be a student." Well, it turned out that there were no student loans available for my school of choice, Nashville School of Law. Therefore, as I was paying off a land note of $400 per month, I picked up a school note of $400 per month. Around the same time as this, my husband took over as President of the local youth baseball league. We played ball at a run down municipal park which needed some serious renovations. The organization itself needed some renovations. We threw ourselves into this endeavor whole heartedly. For just over three years we worked at the park non-stop. We attended city council meetings, wrote articles to the paper, applied for grants, begged for money and volunteers, etc. All the while, we never once turned away a child due to an inability to pay. We took a struggling organization and grew its numbers by 30%. We took a run down park and fixed all of the major issues. I say all of this not to pat ourselves on the back. We took this as our mission, our ministry. God gave me the ability to speak and to write well. God gave my husband the ability to read people and discover hidden agendas and the ability to conceive and implement construction plans. Combine those two God given talents and you have an effective administration of a park and baseball league. Then somewhere along the way, I recognized that law school alone wouldn't be enough to make me able to operate in the legal world. Learning the law from a book and applying the law in a real life situation are two completely different things. So I started working part time for an attorney. We put Robert in public school and Marina had a grandma circuit that she kept. This has been our life for the past 3-4 years. Law school 2-3 nights per week and on Saturday. Baseball meetings all year round. Baseball games AND meetings during the season. City council meetings. Mid terms, finals, papers due. Church on Sunday. Always, always, always some place to be, something that needs to be done, someone needing something every time you look up. I felt like I had handed off the raising of my children, one to public school and one to grandparents. I believe that the grandparents have done a fine job and I am very happy that I have them, but that didn't calm the sense of unrest that began to fill me regarding this and every other aspect of my life. My husband opened a legitimate business in this period as well. He and two partners had over $500,000 worth of contracts in the works when things started to fall apart. One of the partners had secured the financing and Rob and his friend brought the knowledge and contacts in the construction field to the table. It seemed like things were finally going to come together for Rob and his friend who had worked so hard. Then we began to see signs that the financier was stealing money from the company, but had no hard proof. There were secret meetings between the money man and employees in the company. In the end, it turned out that they intended to force out Rob and his friend and keep the company for themselves, including the contracts that Rob had personally secured through his friends in the industry. Rob and his friend took what was truly an insufficient buyout just to get away from the business before the contracts soured due to the stealing. So this put Rob back to working for a GC. Then in August, he got laid off from that. And since then, he has barely worked. Only tid bits here and there. He has been out on the street looking for work for several months. Nothing. Several companies have told him as soon as they find something, they will call. Unfortunately, you can't take a promise of a call to the electric company. Oh, then just before Christmas, we found out I was pregnant. This was an unexpected event. When we did the math on it, we realized that this third child would be born just 5 days before the Bar Exam, the biggest test of my life. I fully intended to press on and take the test. Finances more than anything prevented that. To take the Bar Exam, first you have to apply ($500 plus the cost to pull your DMV record and credit report). Then you have to take a Bar Prep course. Current bar exam materials are about $4,000. Last year's slightly outdated materials run about $1,500. I just didn't have the money. And I could feel the steam running out of me. I didn't have the energy to track down the money (beg family), track down the information for the application, go through the review, keep my job, run the baseball league, and have a baby all in the span of about 90 days. So we decided that I would put the Bar Exam off until February. That adds an additional 6 months to my time as a non-attorney, but what can you do? I forgot to mention that back in June of 2008, members of the baseball league took half truths and innuendo and put it through the gossip mill and attempted to say that my husband and I took over $12,000 from the league. This was, of course, seen for what it was, but only after much hardship on me and my husband. The people that said these things about me were people that I thought were my friends. My child had spent the night at their house. Then these same people attempted to hijack a board vote allowing my husband to coach. He has been a coach in that league for 6 years and has a devoted following. That is the whole reason we became involved, to teach the children that there is something more to life than the poverty and drama that so many of them experience every day. Throughout the year, we dealt with repeated snickety comments from these two or three people. Absolutely no respect was shown for what we were doing at the park, only derision for what we weren't getting done. I started to feel sort of strange about two months ago. I felt like the Artic Ocean. I was so tense and overwhelmed. But I have been trained by my dad to put all of that drama aside and just get the work done, no matter what. He would sleep overnight in his car at the factory if he thought there would be bad weather that night which would prevent him from making it back the next day. This was the legacy that I needed to live up to, get the job done no matter the cost. If you committed to it, get it done. So back to my Artic Ocean analogy. I felt like icebergs were beginning to break off. Something was coming loose. I knew my life was not on track, it was out of balance. I was not living the life that God intended. I had been giving away far more than I sought for my own family. We were out of money. No phone service, truck about to be repossed, student loan in default, judgments threatened, etc. So far we had managed to keep the lights on and food in the cabinets, but just barely. I knew the end was near when I recieved a snickety e-mail from a baseball board member about concession scheduling. Bear in mind that this was an e-mail sent to everyone (board members and coaches) pointing out my shortcomings. I offered a solution, but that wasn't enough. I blasted her in an open e-mail. That stopped the BS for a brief time. Suddenly she was my best friend. Ah. I see. We had applied for a grant which expired on April 30. On the afternoon of April 29 as we finished the paperwork on that, best friend. On May 1 after paperwork turned in and money on the way back to the league, snickety e-mail about rainouts. (If you're waiting for the punch line - it's coming very soon I promise) So, a board member sent us an e-mail saying that he was having a real problem with a particular coach and didn't know what to do. One of the primary roles of my husband as President is to make sure everyone follows the rules. He visited one of this coach's games to observe. After the game, he asked the coach to talk to him for a minute before he left. Rob's intent was to tell him that he needed to get himself, his parents, and his players under control. There was unsportsmanlike conduct in all of those areas. Well, the coach went ballistic and yelled at Rob and the umpire in front of everyone. A board meeting resulted to discuss this coach's future with the league. At the board meeting, those people who started trouble for us almost a year earlier showed up and proceeded to tell me that I was lying about what I saw and heard at the game where the coach acted so poorly. I stood there in the middle of the pavilion at the baseball field. I saw this man looking at me, shaking his head at me as he called me a liar. I saw the other board members looking at him and sitting there saying nothing in my defense. A little piece of me broke off. It's like those cholesterol commercials where the little platelets are flowing through your arteries. A little tiny piece of me broke loose. The only problem was that once one broke free, another one followed. Then another and another, until there was a flood of me pouring out onto the floor of the park pavilion. There was nothing left in me. I don't really know exactly what I said after that. I do know that it involved some words that I would never say in church and involved slamming my notebook down in front of my primary nemesis and yelling, "I quit" in her face. I am glad that she didn't say anything back or attempt to stand up. I don't know where that would have led. I know this may all seem trivial to you. But this was so out of character for me. I have smiled through it all for the last year. I have tried to work even harder to show these naysayers that I was only there for the league, not my own glory. I have tried ignoring it. I have tried asking their opinion. You name it, I've tried it to no avail. So now here I sit. I feel like I am empty. This isn't just baseball. I think in the last few years I have given away so much of myself to school, work, and community that I am just empty and cracked. Now this summer I am going to try very hard to put myself back together, to reconstruct the life I either once had or that I should have had. Of course, I don't really know what that looks like since the face of my family has changed while I have been on this path. All I know is that I have learned some important lessons about balance, time management, and making your home a priority. Hopefully I will not grow forgetful and can keep my focus from this point forward. Thanks for sticking with me while I got this out of my system.