Welcome to at last she said it. A podcast where women of faith come together to

acknowledge that it's complicated and support each other while we figure it out.

Hello friends, it's just Cynthia here today,

recording a quick little bonus episode for you.

I'm going to be reading for you an essay that I wrote several years ago when I

was going through a really difficult time. I felt like I was grieving so much in

my life. Everything that was normal was no longer normal for me. Does that sound familiar?

That's why I thought I would read this today because it seems like with this pandemic,

so many of us are grieving the life that we used to have and what's going on now and I keep wondering when are things going to get back to normal

but even when they do get back to normal is it going to be a new normal is it really ever going to be exactly the way it was before? So I hope

you enjoy some of my thoughts today and I'm calling this episode, Grieving and growing. When my son was a toddler I told him that I was heading to the nursery to buy a tree for our yard.

Up until now we had only installed a sprinkler system

and some struggling hydroseed for our lawn.

Buying a new home in 1997 was great.

We happily picked out our cream carpet and blue countertops, but it also

meant landscaping in the desert. When I came home from the nursery a few hours later, my

son took one look at that sapling of a tree, no thicker than his little arm and with disappointment exclaimed,

Mom, I wanted the kind of tree you can climb.

Fair enough. I wanted shade, and he wanted to climb. Sadly neither of us would get what we wanted for many years to come.

Well, we moved by the time my son was eight, so he never got to climb a tree in that yard, nor did I enjoy any shade whatsoever at that house, but I was determined to make both happen in our new house. Once again we bought a home that

required the arduous task of landscaping a yard. Before I had even unpacked our

boxes I went off to the nursery to buy more trees.

...