Thankful

As part of their final grade, I required my sophomore college students to complete three essays this semester.  Their latest essay was a simple question based on our Thanksgiving lesson:  "What are you thankful for?"

I'm an easily moved person, and I didn't really think I was setting myself up to sit at home tonight, grading papers with a red pen and a box of kleenex crying my eyes out.

The sweetness of some of these young college students was just too much to keep to myself, so I thought I'd put a few excerpts here. 
Be blessed.

"I love my mother very much. Like many other Chinese women, my mother is diligent. She is engaged in agriculture but she is good teacher of my life........Every child is surrounded by the deep mother love.  However, we often turn a blind eye to the love.  One day, I deeply felt that love.  I hurried home for lunch after school because there would be an exam in the afternoon and I had expected to go back to school early to prepare for the exam. But when I got home, the lunch was not ready yet.  I felt unhappy. When the dishes was served, I found none I liked. I ran out of my house angrily and wandered on the street for a while hungry.  Then I walked to school.  When I got into the classroom, I saw a lunch box on my desk.  One classmate told me that it was my mother brought it here. After opening the box, I found my favorite food inside.  Mother gave me her love without asking for return. How deep my mothers love is."

"I was the second child in my family.  Because of the One-child Policy, my mother was forced to accept an injection which was given to my mother to accelerate her delivery, not to kill me, just so that I only stayed in her body for 7 months.  After I was born, she always worried about whether I could live.
When I had no appetite, my mother would cook pickles for me.  I was crazy about it.  My mother insists on working hard to afford my expensive college expenses.  I appreciate my mother.  She suffered many unexpected hardships, but I assured my mother that I will give her well-off life after I graduate from college."

"Thank you Lord for everything.  Even though my country is not a nation of faith and Ch-------'s are still persecuted, Thank you Lord. Here has your gracious peace and you are making the way in China. There are many people who have never heard the g----l. Even though my family is not perfect, Thank you Lord that I can see my mother, father and sister.  There are many children who have lost their family."

"Dear Mrs. Christine,
I'm writing to express my thanks for your help in learning English.  During these days in your class I have learned much from you and it is very helpful to me. I find that learning English is not a boring thing as before and I'm interested in studying English. Before, English was just a necessary task to pass examination."

"I would like to thank my parents, thank them for giving me life.  Thank them for cradling me, more importantly, no matter what, they didn't abandon me because I'm a girl."

"I'm most grateful for my father.  He is my hero.  When I was a child, he played with me. No matter how busy he was, he was willing to be my company. When I grow up, he taught me how to be a real man and how to live a meaning life. Now he is getting older and his grey hairs make me feel so sad."

"My elder sister. I love her so much. She always accompany me. When I felt sad, she comforted me. When I confused, she led me. She play mother role in my young age. Every time when I felt sad, I will call her and cry like a child. I didn't know I cried for what, but I feel relaxed."

As the saying goes, "A drop, the smallest favor." [Chinese idiom] However, parents, relatives and friends as I say are not just a "drop" but a "vast ocean".

And I have only gotten through two classes essays!  So many more talk about losing their mother or father at a young age, or waking up and coming home to an empty house because both their mother and father were working for 12 hours a day just so they could afford their high school tuition.  Some had to live with their grandparents because they were the second child born in their family and their parents were given a heavy fine for not having an abortion, and to pay for the fine, the parents would work all day and through the night to make ends meet.

I'm just in love with these students.  I have the usual, expected trouble of cell phones, plagiarism and tardiness- but that's easy to ignore when I get this rare glimpse into their secret lives and see such tenderness!

This little monkey went to market

Joelle loves to play "This little piggy" on my toes, but insists that it is, in fact, a monkey that is going to town, staying home, having roast beef or having none.

I don't argue.... it just fits, as she is so monkey-like herself.

 

 

she is just delightful.

peekaboo.

 

 

 

 

this one loves her daddy!

 

 "Our God is so big so STRRRROOOONG and so mighty..." 

she really flexes the muscles for this song!

 

oh be still my heart.  I can't believe the stork brought her almost two years ago!

My favorite new thing she does is her "goodbye" routine.  Scott leaves to go to work and she runs after him yelling "Huuuug!" and then "Kiss!"

and then after he closes the door, she freaks OUT and opens the door to run after him for "one more kiss, daddy please?!" before he gets on the elevator.

 

 

She had her first hair cut today! Just had to trim some run-away curls that were longer than the rest in the back.

 

clippings from her first real hair-cut! I couldn't bring myself to cut much, I was afraid I'd cut out the curls and they'd never come back. I know, silly me.

 

 

 

International Dance Party

Last night something happened that I'm officially filing under my "Top Ten Favorite China Memories".

I'm here at a spa/resort away from home with a few other expat women, and last night a few of us were asked to lead the group in some dances. It was pretty warm inside our villa, so we took the dance party outside.  We did the Cupid Shuffle, electric slide (of course) and the Cotton Eye Joe dance- and when our legs were burning from all the hop-skips and criss-cross's and walk-it-outs, we decided just to have some free dance.  It got pretty silly- and we were having such a good time that we didn't even care that some Chinese people had come to their windows just to stare at the white girls "getting down". 

We were pool-side and a few other vacationers were there just trying to enjoy the nice weather by the pool and seemed to enjoy the free entertainment- and one of my friends (who maybe is even sillier than I) went over to one of the onlookers and grabbed her by the hand and dragged her over to our dance party. 

That was all the invitation that they needed!  She and probably five others gladly raced over and we danced together, mixing Asian and American styles and our faces were on the verge of splitting in half from the huge smiles on our faces!

After the music died down we all formally introduced ourselves and just had a good time making small talk.

Later I went back to my room and couldn't stop smiling to myself and thanking God for this unique culture we live in, and for the brief time when something as simple as the joy of dance brought two cultures together!

When Chains Are Gone

About six months ago I started feeling like I was not myself.  I began to feel easily irritated (I know what you're thinking- how much worse could that get?), stressed over day-to-day things, extremely angry at culture issues that I've already gotten used to and worse of all, stated feeling a kind-of despair about being a wife and mother.  Weird, right?

I tried to find cause of these new mood swings and for some reason decided to take a look at the information on some fertility medicines I had been on just a few months prior to all this.  (We tried 4 fertility procedures within the span of about 7 months last year).  Well, whadda you know? A side-effect of the cocktail of fertility drugs I was on said they could cause depression or mood swings.  Well.  No baby AND depression.  How did I feel about that?  ...depressed.  Is that irony?


I tried to take flour and sugar and rice out of my diet as much as I could and I began roller blading every day (when it wasn't raining) and I began to feel a little better- but it wasn't a huge change and it wasn't a "sustainable" life-style.  (We live in the land of rice and noodles... and I love sugar so....)

So back to square one. I had hormone levels checked, said progesterone was too high and estrogen was too low. Talked to some doctors and finally went to Shanghai to see a GYN about a possible hormone imbalance but after asking some questions the doctor said it wasn't a hormone imbalance.

It was depression.


What.
No I'm not.
I have nothing to be depressed about.


Sure, we live in a foreign country far from our family, we probably can't ever get pregnant again, we're in the process of adopting three or four children from two different countries, and I have the duties of staying at home with an almost-two curly headed tornado and teach four classes a week at the local college.

Ok I have a lot on my plate.

BUT... on a normal day, I feel very supported, I regularly skype with my amazing, encouraging family, I manage to keep it all sorted because we have great friends here who will drop anything to help, and I'm a very happy mostly-stay-at-home mom and a very spoiled wife.  Sure there are days I miss my family and all I want is a Chick-fil-A sandwich and a strawberry-lime slushy from Sonic.  But depression? 

 So she gave me a truckload of Zoloft and told me a little bit about depression. So I took a half a dose for two days until I could get home and read up on Zoloft.

Although it is an amazing drug and works for a lot of people, I simply didn't feel comfortable taking it.  I wanted to be seen by a mental health professional (I think a lot of my friends want me to see a mental health professional, too. ha!) before committing to such a serious drug.

So I stopped after only ingesting one whole pill, and asked a few friends and some family to pray that this just be taken away so I wouldn't have to be medicated.   I sent a few emails about finding a good counselor near us, but then a funny thing happened.

I went three days without feeling any mood swings or despair.  Then five days.  Then a whole week.  Then two whole weeks had gone by.   Now almost three.

It's gone, at least for now. 

God answered my prayer and just took it away.
I feel like I can't express enough what it feels like to be healed from this.  I can only liken it to being in the throws of labor pains and then the epidural kicks in!

Some days I would feel so exhausted I didn't want to get out of bed, the sight of dirty dishes in the sink would send me into an anger tail spin, Joelle would grind my nerves and I would lay awake wishing I had never come to China, wishing I had never had Joelle and wishing I had never married Scott.  One day I was crossing the street and half-way across a guy came to a complete stop in his car to stare at us. I urged him to hurry up and continue so I could finish crossing and then along comes a maniac driver was speeding towards us and was going to swerve around the stopped car- where Joelle and I were standing.  He stopped just in time to see us (the onlooker still hadn't moved) and all hell broke loose from my mouth.  I yelled at the first car for stopping to stare at us like we were animals and then yelled at the second car for speeding and now everyone in the intersection had stopped to see the foreigner yell.  I walked Joelle to the curb and kept yelling, now in English, for when I am so emotional I can only think in my mother tongue, except to yell "YOU'RE ALL CRAZY" in Chinese.   I was literally in the grips of insanity.

My friends at the drink- stand nearby still like to tease me about it and several of my friends have said "Hey, I heard you were scolding people in the street!"

I had began looking for an excuse- any excuse- to go back to America.  One day Joelle was abused on the playground by another child and I told myself "One more time, and that's it.  I'm not standing for this."  (As if kids in America aren't school- yard bullies)  I began seeing that our apartment was simply not fit for human occupancy.  I pounced on Scott about every sock on the floor, every time he was a minute late, every crunch of potato chip grated my nerves.

And now all of that is gone and I'm back to my regular, only slightly irritable self.  I praise God because some people live with this terrible condition for years and find that medicine only gives them slight relief.  Mine lasted only half a year.
The mind is so precious and yet so frail.

Sometimes I wonder if God lets us experience physical chains that bind us so that we can understand the depth of what it means to have our spiritual chains unbound.  May I never forget the pain so I can thank Him every day for how He heals and protects.