Fourteen years ago, the phone rang, piercing the silence inside my tiny apartment. Lee was at work, and I was preparing dinner, because we were newlyweds, and making food was still exciting to me back then.
I answered the phone, and her voice came across the line all buttery and warm.
“I hear you like to take tea,” she said, and I could hear the smile behind her words.
That was the beginning of one of my most cherished friendships. For the next year, Wendy was my confidant, my cheerleader, my prayer partner, and my sweetest friend. Our love for tea and scones wasn’t our only commonality, either.
Photo by Tammy Labuda: TammyLabudaPhotography.com
We both shared a passion for encouraging other women through our creative pursuits. I was a writer and a singer, she an actress who penned poetic prose in her spare time.
In those early years, before children rounded out our families, Wendy and I dreamed of all the different ways we wanted to work together in some creative capacity. But as time marched on, babies entered the picture, and our husband’s jobs moved us to different coasts, the dream of working together felt a bit lofty and ambitious.
Until last summer
At our 4th Annual Creative Retreat, Wendy and I began to speak earnestly of our dreams to work together creatively. We spoke in depth of our heart for creative women, and for mothers living this creative life with little ones in their midst, and the time felt like now.
We put together a book proposal, and we met at the Allume conference in October where we found an audience with an agent who caught our vision and agreed to represent us in our writing pursuits.
So we started writing and praying for the right publisher, and the right timing, and the right audience, and…
This week Wendy and I signed our first publishing contract with Kregel Publishing, with a release date set for September of 2016.
A book.
A real book!
A real book written for women…
Written for creative women like us…
Creative women who are wondering if their creativity has a place in this intense season of motherhood.
Our book (which is tentatively titled at this point) is coming together beautifully. It’s been as much of a journey this past year writing this book as the past fourteen years of dreaming and living it have been.
Our goal is to encourage other creative moms to use their gifts and talents to make an impact in the world.
We’re writing this message as we live it ourselves, seven children between the two of us, while our husbands travel, and the intensity of living creative passions next to the hustle of growing families sometimes overwhelms us.
Next week, Wendy and I will be together again for our 5th Annual Creative Retreat, exactly one year after this long-held dream took root. Our goal is to finish the rough draft of our manuscript, and after our week together is over, our husbands and children will join us, and we’ll all celebrate as one unit.
Because they are friends who have become family.
I’m not going to lie, my friends – this has been such a journey, and it’s not over yet! This is only the beginning of the exciting things to come. Because not so long ago, I surrendered this longing I held in my heart – a longing to see the words that flowed from my fingertips in print – and I committed to write simply for the joy of it.
But still I hoped. I longed for the day when I could sign my name on the line that validated my gift of words. And I realized that it’s okay to want it.
[Tweet “It’s okay to toil toward a dream, because there’s beauty in the journey, and victory in the labor.”]
Today I placed the signed contract in the mail, and a long held dream finally grew wings.
There is a lot of work still to be done, and so much to learn, but isn’t it exciting? This life of living and dreaming all wrapped up tight with friends and family is a privilege, and I’m thrilled to share this journey with so many of you as well!
Creative Moms, don’t miss the release in fall 2016, sign up for email updates here at kellistuart.com, or over at wendyspeake.com, and we promise to joyfully prime the pump in the next 15 long months with posts purposed to bless your creative hearts. We are really excited about the community of creative moms that God is going to knit together in the coming days!
The baby’s cries pierced through the walls for the third night in a row. Just when we hit a stride in her sleeping patterns, she enters a new growth spurt and the nighttime feedings start again.
I’m weary. So weary.
I stumbled to her room and lifted her from her bed. Her warm, doughy cheek pressed into my neck, and the moment was everything I could hope it would be, except for the fact that it was two in the morning.
Yawning, I stuck the bottle in her waiting mouth and leaned my head back, mind running through the laundry list of things that needed to be done once the sun made her way high up into the sky.
So much.There’s so much to do. On any given day, I’m not sure how it is I manage to accomplish all the tasks in front of me. And for all that I manage to get done, it seems I forget half as much. I’m forever a step behind in life.
I stumbled back to bed and fell onto my pillow, and before I knew it the alarm jarred me, yet again, from my slumber. I had work to do, but first.
First.
I’m trying to dig into my Bible before I open my computer. I’m not always good at it. Some days, the pull of work is just too strong. But on this morning, I pulled out my Bible and started reading. I landed in Proverbs and flipped to Proverbs 31.
This passage of scripture both inspires and baffles me. How does she do it, this Proverbs 31 woman? I know that this wasn’t the picture of a single woman, but rather the composite of a woman. But still. I’m forever dropping the ball, and I don’t even have to sew my children’s clothes from woolen materials!
But on this morning it hit me. As I read through this passage for the hundredth (thousandth? millionth?) time, my mind wandered back to the Maasai women in Tanzania. I thought of the hut built by a woman’s hand, and the village of women who birth the babies and raise the children, kill and prepare the food. What strength they possessed.
Then my mind drifted to the stories of the German women who picked up shovels and rebuilt their cities after the war. And the women of America who entered the factories and kept the country running while our men fought.
I thought of the Ukrainian girls and women sent to slave labor camps, forced to build artillery for the enemy.
And then I thought of my own mom, faithfully raising and loving two children. I thought of her bringing in her sister’s kids because that’s what family does, even when it’s hard. I thought of the way she flew half way across the world to stay with my children for eight days so that I could have an adventure.
Photo by Tammy Labuda: TammyLabudaPhotography.com
And I read Proverbs 31 again with hot tears dripping from my eyes because it finally hit me.
Proverbs 31 isn’t the story of one woman, nor is it a composite of all the things I should be.
Proverbs 31 is the story of women – of womanhood. It is everything that we are, the collective whole of us. It is the strength that God knit into the very fiber of a woman’s heart.
This is the strength that carries a woman through back breaking labor, through childbirth and child rearing, through midnight feedings, never ending schedules, and days that stretch into nights with little or no opportunity to rest.
This is the strength that gets a mother through the year-long deployment of her soldier husband. It’s the strength that allows a woman to get up each morning and dig her heels into all that life has to offer – the good and the bad.
Proverbs 31 isn’t the unattainable goal of womanhood. Oh, no.
Proverbs 31 is a celebration of all that God has made us to be.
Sweet friend, are you weary tonight? Do you feel like you’re failing at every turn? Does life feel like it’s just a little too much?
Take heart, dear friend. He has knit into you a strength that cannot be explained. It can only be lived, one step, one day at a time.
You, dear woman, are stronger than you think.
“She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come.
She speaks with wisdom and faithful instruction is on her tongue.”
Summertime is ripe for creativity. When I think of summer, I think of adventure and exploration, of trying new things, lazy mornings, books by the pool, and popsicles at all hours of the day.
Summer is for creating. It’s for stepping away from the every day mundane that dictated your life, and stepping into something new and exciting – even if only for a time.
I try to offer my children a long creative rope in the summer. If I’m honest, there are times when I wish we lived at the edge of the Wisconsin woods, but those times are only in the summer months when the Florida sun is merciless, and the flat terrain leaves little to the imagination. But then we have evenings like the one we had Friday night, where we swim as a family in the great, big ocean, and I decide Florida’s not so bad after all.
But I do long to see my kids explore. I wish I could send them into the trees with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a roll of toilet paper, and firm instructions to stay outside and enjoy this beautiful day.
I may not be able to shoo them outside for an entire day, but I can offer them plenty of places to escape. Exploration isn’t limited to the forest. It can happen right here inside the walls of our home. Here are a few tips for widening your children’s creative scope this summer.
1.) Build Forts
Basically, when summertime rolls around, I take a deep breath and remind myself that it’s okay for the house to be messy. I like order. I really, REALLY like order.
But I have four children, so order is a laughable concept. Instead of sweating out the ever chaotic house, I choose to embrace it in the summer. And there is nothing more chaotic to me than a bedroom transformed into a fort – blankets strewn this way and that, kitchen chairs pulled into the room to hold up the “walls” of the fort.
It’s enough to give me an eye twitch.
But they love it. Reading books is boring…unless it’s done so lying back on a pile of pillows under the canopy of a bedroom fort.
If I’m willing to embrace the chaos, a bedroom fort is a heckuva way to celebrate summer.
2.) Keep Painting Materials Handy
Like fort building, watercolor painting makes my heart race, and not in a good way. The paint brushes that need to be cleaned. The drips of paint that find their way to my countertops and floor, the gigantic “masterpieces” that I must find a way to display – it’s all stressful to this orderly Mama.
But…
The other day, my concrete, typically unimaginative second born pulled out the paints and tore off a giant piece of art paper, and she began to create. With her tongue stuck between her lips in quiet concentration, she dove into her painting, and when she was finished she held up her paper proudly.
It was gorgeous.
There’s something very calming and magical about putting a brush against the page. When the kids are arguing, painting is one of the first activities I suggest because is requires a deep breath…and minimal talking.
Win-Win.
3.) Read Good Books
I don’t have readers. I wish that I did, but I simply do not. My children don’t like to read books. So I do what any good mother would do.
I bribe them.
Yes, I pay my children to read in the summer, but really I like to think I’m training them to enjoy the gift of words. There is nothing I love more than seeing my kids light up over a good story. And so we spend time in the library during the summer where they’re given the freedom to choose their own adventure.
This discipline of reading is two-fold, as I must also make myself slow down and read with them. I want to show them the beauty of getting lost in story, so I read as much as I can in the summer.
As much as I love reading, slowing down myself to do so is harder than it seems it should be, because usually when they’re still and quiet, my first response is to start cleaning up some of the messes.
LET THE MESSES GO!
That is my summertime mantra.
Summertime can be stressful with everyone home at once, all the live-long day. This is where our Summertime Agenda of Awesome comes in handy, as well as a willingness to let go of my need for order and control.
A little bit of chaos has the potential to produce some magical days. I’m looking for the magic this year.
We say goodbye to elementary school today. It’s bittersweet. As Sloan prepares to head to Middle School, and I plan to homeschool Tia and Landon, I find myself nostalgic a bit. I have loved their school. I leave with no hard feelings. In fact, loving the school is what made the decision to homeschool so difficult.
A lot has happened since the kids started this school year.
Where once there were only three of them:
Now there are four!
Where once Sloan had no braces:
Now he’s a metal mouth!
Tia’s has gone from this (those shorts don’t even come close to fitting her now!):
To this:
And Landon had teeth when he started school!
It’s been a heckuva a year. I’m looking forward to the next year. It will be challenging, yes. But I have a feeling it’s going to be full of so much fun.
I have this image of a younger version of myself – ten, maybe eleven – and she’s tramping through the field behind our Wisconsin home. Just beyond the line of tall grasses that liked to tickle my waist stood the forest, thick and green, and begging for adventure.
This little girl me loved to walk through those weeds, stepping high to avoid ant piles and other potentially hidden creatures. I loved to run my hands over the tops of the orange grasses, and step into the clearing of the woods where the cool air would nip at my skin.
There was a half built tree house there, a long ago abandoned project that was no more than a platform high in the trees with a few boards nailed into one of the trunks for a ladder. I’d scramble up to the platform and sit close to the edge, my feet dangling over the side, because I liked the feeling of emptiness beneath my swinging feet, and also because the boards in the middle of the platform were beginning to rot and I was never quite certain they would hold.
That girl had a lot of imagination. Great stories were acted out inside the canopy of those trees. And many days were spent up there with a notebook or journal and a pen, writing down all manner of thoughts and desires and dreams.
After watching The Secret Garden for the first time, I imagined that place in the woods to be my own secret garden. It wasn’t a well-kept secret given that it was the neighborhood hang out, but when I was there alone, I let my mind wander.
Sometimes I wonder what I would tell that girl if I could go back and visit her. Would I warn her of some of the bad decisions she would make and tell her to avoid them? Maybe, but probably not. Bad decisions are character building, after all.
Would I tell her to just enjoy every moment, because it all goes by so quick? Would I tell her not to take advantage of loved ones being near, because in a heartbeat life can change, and loved ones can leave your side? I might tell her these things, but it probably wouldn’t matter.
That girl was fanciful and imaginative. She was idealistic, and the innocence of youth followed her like a breeze. She would have heard me, but she wouldn’t have understood.
I don’t know what I’d want to tell that younger version of myself. Hold on to your dreams no matter how long it takes, because you never know what’s going to happen?
I think that quality was knit into the fiber of her being – of my being.
Today is my birthday. Another year has passed, and what a year it’s been. This time last year, Lee and I were frantically making plans to visit his parents in Conway, to be there when his dad went in for his first chemo treatment. We got seven months and one day with him after the diagnosis.
Yesterday, I was cleaning out a book shelf and I found a recordable book that we had his dad read last year. It wasn’t working well, I’m hoping it’s just in need of new batteries, but when I opened it up and his voice rang out strong and clear, my heart skipped.
Sometimes I miss those days in the Wisconsin woods when all that complicated life was the requirement that I make my bed daily. But really, despite all that life has brought our way, it’s only sometimes that I miss those days.
Because the girl sitting high in that unfinished tree house with the rotten boards had no idea what was waiting for her. She couldn’t even dream it up. She didn’t know the love that waited in the wings, or the laughter. She didn’t know that dreams would come true, and that one day she’d grow up to have so much more than a Secret Garden.
She didn’t know that with the sting of death came the reality of heaven, and the sweetness of living with both of those realities was something almost indescribable.
I think I’d leave her alone up there in the trees. I’d give her the dreams and the dancing visions of fame and fortune. I give her the peace that she so loved sitting on that platform in the sky.
The girl in the trees is still here, all wrapped up in my memory. She’s still a little fanciful at times, and imaginative, and perhaps even a bit idealistic. There’s no more innocence of youth, but there’s the wisdom that comes with age.
I like how the two versions of myself have merged.
