Sometimes life is just hard. But you know what isn’t that hard for me? Love. I mean, I know that is supposed to be the most complicated, messy part of life, but it just isn’t for me. I love hard and I love easily. I forgive hard and I forgive easily. The hard part is when love doesn’t manifest the way I want it to. When somehow I am supposed to be a responsible adult and put boundaries in my life that help me love myself as much as I love the people around me, and somehow figure out a balance of what is most important or what is good for who, and all kinds of mature emotional stuff that is just so GRAY and not black-and-white.

This Christmas was a challenge for me. I mean, it was full of love and family, and Beau and I were blessed to fly FOR FREE (holla!!) up to South Dakota and spend several days with my parents and grandparents and siblings and niece and nephew. I got to hear my dad preach at his church’s Christmas Eve service for the first time in so many years. And he preached the most beautiful message about how Christ is the Prince of Peace, and I choked back tears most of his message, as he talked about Jesus reaching out His hand to Peter to pull him out of the stormy water when Peter faltered. It was perfect. I don’t take time with my family for granted. I stayed up til 2am with my brother and sister and bro-in-law and Beau playing games and laughing hysterically. I listened to my Grandpa tell my Grandma, after almost 60 years of marriage, that she was the most beautiful part of his life (you can imagine how us Wheeler sisters reacted to that….I mean…we are very stoic, unemotional human beings. HA!) It was an amazing holiday. Please don’t think that I didn’t soak up the awesomeness of being with the Wheeler/DeCook fam – because if you know them, you know how special they are.

But Faithy wasn’t there. And I had done everything possible to emotionally prepare for it. In fact, when people in my EliteInnerCircle had encouraged me to try to work out custody so she could fly up with Beau and me, I drew a hard line and took a firm stance on how I felt about it. I won’t get into it on here. But she was in Illinois and I was in South Dakota and I had 2 months to prepare for it.

I woke up early on Christmas Eve morning to work on my freelance work, and nobody was awake yet. I got my laptop running and realized my mom was out of K-Cups for her Keurig so I had to make regular coffee. And I know it ain’t rocket science, but I have NEVER been able to figure out how to translate the instructions for how much coffee grounds to put it in vs. the amount of water in a regular coffee pot. I mean, the numbered lines on the coffee pot…are those CUPS or OUNCES or WHAT?!??! The stupid instructions say like 1 Tablespoon of coffee per 6 fluid ounces of water, BUT HOW DO I MEASURE THE WATER?! With a measuring cup or can I use the coffee pot markings or what? I am aware how ridiculous I sound. Anyway, that was racing through my mind as I attempted to make coffee. I grabbed a mug and sat down and glanced at the mug before I tried to swig the nasty coffee-mud….and I saw that I had grabbed my mom’s “Faith” mug that my best friend Ashley had given her when Faith was born.

AND THAT THING HAPPENED WHERE I CAN’T EVEN MAKE THE LUMPY THROAT GO AWAY. There I was, Christmas Eve morning, Ugly Crying at my parents’ kitchen table. Alone like a giant loser. I was angry at myself for not fighting harder to bring her with me to South Dakota, sad that she couldn’t be there to see her cousins, partially fighting vanity knowing that I would be all dressed up for church that night and not get to take a cute family Christmas picture with her in it, and just stressed out that the tissue box was nowhere to be seen when I am trying to be a grown up lately and actually blow my nose instead of wiping it on my sleeve.

And then my own little Christmas miracle happened. I heard a door open quietly, and all of a sudden, Beau was stumbling into the kitchen, walking over to me. Okay, I get it, you don’t see how this is a Christmas miracle. But he came into our trip with a night of 3 hours of sleep after 90 million hours of work, and hadn’t gotten much sleep since we arrived, and it was 7:30 IN THE MORNING and nobody else was awake and I just KNEW he was gonna sleep til at least 9am…but he DIDN’T.

He came over for a hug and then he saw my perfectly beautiful, flawless, movie-star HIDEOUS MORNING CRY FACE. I mean, part of being married to a Wheeler girl is recognizing the CRY FACE. I am sure my Dad and brother-in-law have it down pat too. But Beau looked at me and instantly assessed the damage.

“I just…I just…I just miss Faith,” was all I could crackle out before I did the Even Uglier Attempt To Choke Back Tears Cry.

And you know…I needed him so bad(ly) right that minute. He found the tissue box that had been laying INCOGNITO right in plain sight on the kitchen table and sat me on the couch and let me cry until I was done being a giant baby. He didn’t try and rationalize anything or remind me how much fun I was having or try to fix it.

Then my mom woke up and walked out and saw me curled up in the fetal position next to Beau on the couch and I quickly blubbered out , “I miss Faith and I made really bad coffee and that’s all.”

She saw I was using the Faith mug and got all weepy too, and then told me she was sure the coffee was fine. But she didn’t drink it and she made new coffee.

I was so excited to get home to see Faithy, and it was wonderful and perfect when I picked her up. And I woke up SUPER EARLY on the next morning to decorate our hall area and make it special for Faith. Guys, you know what? It wasn’t that fantastic of a morning. My kid is being shipped from house to house for the holidays, and she is a little bit sassy and struggling more than I have seen her struggle EVER. There was a moment when she cried and then I cried – and not the “I love you so much, I am gonna happy cry” – we both cried out of frustration. And B sat next to me on the couch and told me how much he loved my decorations and how proud he was of me for the Christmas morning experience I had made. And then he just stopped talking and held my hand.

Life is hard. For all of us. But when I take a look around, God CARES ABOUT THE LITTLE THINGS. He inspired my Dad to preach about the Prince of Peace when my heart was battling the stress of divorce, He dragged B’s exhausted butt out of bed to help me find the HIDDEN tissues, He continuously picks up all of my broken pieces and puts them together and somehow manages to make me look like some kind of (Picasso-ish) masterpiece to the people in my life, and they LOVE me.

Guys, LOVE ISN’T THE HARD PART. It’s learning how to handle the consequences of love without going crazy – that’s the hard part! Being vulnerable with people means you open yourselves up to the chances of being hurt, and then you try and figure out how to put other people’s needs before your own, but still protect your heart, but still put Christ first, and WHO KNOWS HOW TO BALANCE ALL OF THAT?

Whether it is marriage, divorce, parenthood, friendships, family relationships, or whatever… we all have our Ugly Cry moments where loving someone or missing someone makes us all sorts of wonky. But as this year winds down and fresh starts on the horizon for all of us, I hope I can remember to hang on to the love, even when it hurts. Ugly Cries just reflect a heart that REALLY CARES. Don’t lose that part when you try to become a Better You in 2015. Find a way to be a Better Lover – not just of others, but of yourself. Set boundaries. Just don’t sacrifice the sensitivity of a heart that feels things. Because there will be a hand to grab yours to help you get through the Ugly Cry moment, without stripping away the vulnerability completely.

Find a hand to hold in 2015. Better yet…BE the hand to hold! (Cue: "Lean on Me" music).

My Faithy...

This past weekend, B and Faithy and Vader and I piled into our spacious Volkswagen TDI and trekked on down to Dallas to visit my grandparents and Aunt Brenda & Uncle Marty for the weekend. B had been working crazy hours for a while and, well, I always miss Faith, so I was super jazzed about this family road trip. I bought Official Road Trip Snackage (the most important part of any road trip) and we were on our way – 20 hours of driving in 4 days. No biggie.

I can count on one hand the number of times that Faith has met her great-grandparents. The sucky part of sharing custody is that for the time being, I live in a place hundreds of miles away from all of my family, so Faithy just has limited access to all of them. If you live in close proximity to your family, call them right this second and schedule dinner with them. You have no idea how lucky you are. Anyhoo, Faith really doesn’t know her great-grandparents or my aunt & uncle very well, so I was a bit hesitant on how the whole weekend would play out.

How silly of me. I forgot that she’s Faithy.

She’s Faithy, so her heart is as big as my mountain of worry, and her smile is as infectious as spring weather in Minnesota. (I don’t actually know how Minnesotans feel in spring, but I am guessing the Radiant Joy emanating from the half-thawed residents is pretty contagious.) The world is her oyster. Her view of everything is Opportunity and Glitter and Sunshine all rolled up into a giant ball of Happy, tainted only occasionally by a dash of Chaos. But her princess-colored spectacles are void of entitlement, and simply allow her to see her life as one of luxury. And I mean luxury in the best way.

“Mom, do you know that I am SO LUCKY because I have the BIGGEST family??”

Not sure that every kid would see it that way, but she thinks she is LUCKY to have four sets of grandparents – two sets biological and two sets by love. She has a mama and a Beau, and a daddy and a Sarah. She has lots of cousins and lots of aunts and uncles  and a whole PLETHORA of “adopted” aunts and uncles (friends who love on her like she’s their own flesh and blood), and the kid is just ecstatic.

After we got to Texas, she spent the weekend climbing up into any available lap she could find, giggling with Aunt Brenda like they were old sorority sisters, playing Daniel Tiger on the iPad with Grandpa John, cooking with Grandma Marcy and showing pictures to the neighbor’s toddler. No fear. Just uninhibited love for the people around her.

Sunday morning as I was getting her dressed for church, I told her we were going to a church we had never been to before, cringing internally because it seems like all I ever do is introduce changes to her tiny little mind. But her eyes lit up and she said, “OH!! So I can go to a new class and meet new friends?”

Like, seriously? She sees opportunity every place she goes.

I took her to a brand new preschool today, and as she walked in, one of the teachers exclaimed, “FAITH!” and ran up to give her a hug. I was confused and then the teacher told me, “She used to come to Club Fitness day care when I was a supervisor there. How could I forget her??” It has been 8 months since I took Faith with me to that gym. But the way Faith embraces her surroundings and loves on the people she interacts with has a lasting impact.

What if I lived my life that way? Not bogged down by fear of the unknown, not consumed by competing loyalties, not afraid to embrace change….

I have spent so much time stressed about how my decisions have impacted my daughter and how she will pay the consequences for my past. But the truth is, she belongs to God, and He has given me a gift in her. She is HIS daughter before she is mine, and that much is clear. She radiates hope and joy where I often prefer to analyze and fear. She gives hugs to strangers on airplanes while I pretend to

listen to my headphones in order to persuade others to leave me alone. She carpe’s the diem when many times I let the diem carpe me.

I have done nothing to deserve this kiddo. But that’s just how He works, isn’t it? James 1:17.

So thankful. So inspired.