It’s the dead of winter in Tok, Alaska. Actually, if you are so brave as to venture out into today’s -50 degree weather, you will feel anything but dead. Your nerve endings will tell you just how alive you actually are for a short period of time, after which you’ll probably die, but you won’t actually feel dead until you are. Now that I think of it, I take issue with the phrase “dead of winter”.

I decided to use today’s forced down time to categorize my blog and refresh the look of it. It’s still a minimal layout, but this one is compatible with mobile devices.

I need to be more interactive with readers, so to kick off my new mission, I’m holding a contest. The first person to correctly guess my new layout’s header gets something hand made by me! I will give you a hint: You can look in the MIRor to gain a lot of INSIGHT and REFLECTION into your own purpose.

PS. While you’re here, you should enter your email address and subscribe to my blog so that there is more than one follower.

When I was seventeen and about two thirds of the way through my pregnancy with Kody, I had a dream.

I don’t remember very many of my dreams, and if I do, I only remember them for a short period of time before they become distorted or altogether forgotten. Throughout my lifetime of sleeping and dreaming, I can remember three dreams with distinction and vividness. One of those dreams is the one I had when I was seventeen. I was sitting down on a very comfortable sofa, and I was holding a tiny baby. I glanced from one angelic face nestled against my chest, to several other angelic faces standing in front of me, in order of height. Some of the faces were framed with manes of dark, glistening hair; the others framed by red tendrils. For some reason, the conscious me picked up on the subconscious suggestion that all of these kids were somehow connected to me in very profound ways. These faces were the faces of my children.

The conscious me also awoke from that dream laughing. I told myself there was no way possible that I was sure I was able to handle one crying kid, let along several. I told myself that, no, this baby that was residing inside of me right now would be my only baby, because I was a one-kid mom. Because I had no business having kids at all, let alone a gaggle of them. I laughed about that dream every time I thought of it (several times a week for years). I chuckled to myself about this dream when I had two kids, and when I had three kids. And when I found out that our fourth child was actually twins, I stopped laughing about that dream.

I don’t know if we have really come to terms with the fact that we are parents to five little self-discovering souls. I know that my grocery bill is aware of this, and I become keenly aware whenever I hear ignorant, benign comments about overpopulation. I know that there are times that I pray out loud for silence in my house, and on those days I can’t help but know that we are responsible for five people.

Tonight, I was picking up random toys and stuffed animals, and cleaning up the bathroom, when I heard a woman on the TV show that Kody was watching. She had experienced major bodily trauma, had suffered the consequential survivor’s depression that I am all too familiar with, and she had obviously come out on the other side of her ordeal. I crossed the living room just as I heard her say, “What we are here for is not for what’s outside. We are here to work on what is on the inside. We are here to be loving people, so that when we die, we can take that with us. When we die, what we take with us is the love that we’ve given away our whole life.”

I don’t know why, but the dream that I had while pregnant with Kody came back to the forefront of my mind at the precise moment I heard that total stranger make her declaration. Her learning lesson was my lesson. At the tender age of seventeen, having made the very difficult decision not to abort my pregnancy, I had made a lifestyle choice. I had given up my entire life in order to be a parent, a wife. At that time, I felt nothing aside from fear, and loss, and cowardly. I felt out-of-place in the mommy groups, out-of-place among my peers, out-of-place in general conversation. For years I harbored self-pity and resentment for my sacrifices, and I lashed out at a lot of people for it. I felt like a bad mother, a bad wife, a bad person. A perpetuated cycle of self-pity and guilt that reset about once every six months. For years.

Sometimes people can reach you by using simple words, and sometimes, people can be profound without being deeply meaningful. I feel like what I had done for so many years was look for validation in the outer world. In the superficial. Also, I believe that I already knew the purpose of living is to be good and humble and all of those things. Like I said, I think sometimes hearing those profoundly simple words makes the thoughts that hang out on the fringes all come together into one conscious knowledge base. It’s not like I haven’t already learned this lesson the hard way, and that I haven’t spent the last year of my life following exactly the path of fulfilling myself so that I don’t need to seek it in superficial ways. I just haven’t been able to put it so….eloquently.

I have waited for years for that premonition of a dream to come true; for the day when I can write that what I dreamed about 13 years ago actually occurred; that I was sitting on some piece of furniture somewhere, and looking up at angelic faces while holding a new baby. Obviously, that time never came. But this time did, and I am very appreciative of it.

Yesterday as I was loading my groceries into the car, Maurice called.

Maurice: Are you on your way to pick up Josh from summer school?
Me: As soon as I load this watermelon.
Maurice: Be sure to check his pockets as soon as you get there.
Me: Okay….
Me: …….
Maurice:”One of the snakes is missing.”
Narrator’s note: I told Maurice three weeks ago when he came home with two baby albino corn snakes that at least one of them would disappear within a month. I am now regretting that I did not wager something on this. I could be ordering myself a new pair of Loubs right now or something.
Me: …..
Maurice: I know, I know.

I did not find the snake among the various other items (read: DS charger, old iPhone, two broken watches, a compass, some candy wrappers, old keys, a slingshot, a deflated CapriSun, a decapitated worm) in his pants, by the way. This meant that for the rest of the day, Maurice interrogated random kids in pursuit of how the snake disappeared like magic from its habitat.

I give you the evidence: The heat lamp knocked sideways, the lid placed haphazardly back onto the cage, as if this all were done in haste. Intermittently, everyone searched for the snake and got interrogated by Dad. (Except for me, you see, because I swore off any and all responsibility for those stupid snakes when I was outvoted on the purchase and like a real brat, I refused to search for the lost one, too, because I was certain I was going to wake up in the middle of the night with him coiled around my neck.) This was all to no avail, because our kids are, apparently, too conscience-less to come forward with the truth, and too smart for us to detect who the culprit was.

I would like to add that also as of yesterday, my cat, Finn, is missing. I am deeply worried about the state of his existence. Last night, I was fearful that he ate the snake and became deathly ill and went off to die. Or, like two cats before him who refused to stay inside, he has fallen victim to a wild creature. Also, Bosley has been acting very weird; waking me up at 6:00 with his incessant creepy howling and whining and pacing. I don’t know if it has something to do with Wren, our new female puppy, and the fact that Bosley is a dirty old man who is seemingly addicted to sniffing Wren’s hind-regions, or if something certain-doomish is about to take place and he can smell it with his dog sense.

In any case, the snake made a magical reappearance last night around 10 p.m., coiled peacefully around the skull decoration in his cage. Maurice, in true stern-dad fashion, is bent on finding out who stole and then returned the reptile. He has revoked various privileges en masse, in hopes that eventually the culprit will either have an attack of conscience for being the inadvertent denier of his/her siblings’ liberties, or get sick of his/her own being revoked and come forward with the truth. I, on the other hand, have resolved myself to the notion that one day, when all of the kids are adults, we will be sitting around some Christmas gathering and several bottles of wine, and the truth will come out. I am easier to please than my life partner; I am satisfied with the knowledge that I will not be choked to death by a snake in my sleep.