Skeletons

Well, here I am in Texas, after a very fun, very exhausting motorcycle ride all night long. We actually began looking at stopping for the night somewhere near Dallas, but in my honey’s true fashion, we stopped at several hotels, but none of them appealed to us — too far away, too expensive, won’t let us check in early — the list goes on and on. Finally, we made it all the way here to Austin, only to find out that there some basketball Big Event going on, and all the hotels are filled up for the week.

Oh, the horror. My husband had gone to work at 3:30am the morning before, and by the time Jesus miraculously turned the water into wine for us, he’d been up for almost 30 hours straight. I’ve never been so happy to climb into a 1 star bed in my life. I slept for a whopping two hours, and now I have to kill about nine more before he wakes up. Thank God I brought my computer.

There isn’t much to do on the back of a motorcycle other than think, pray, and sing. I literally will only sing aloud when we are travelling on the motorcycle. I am terribly tone deaf, and yet the roar of the bike seems to hide that fact from everyone, including me. Most of my praying is pretty much done quickly, except when I am freaked out about someone nearly killing us. And thankfully, this was a fairly freak-out-free trip for us. That left the majority of the time to think, think, think.

One of the things I thought about was my Ambien induced blog. I have always had a problem with insomnia, and about 4 years ago, my doctor prescribed Ambien CR for me. I know I’ve done odd things occasionally on it, but recently, I woke up to find that I had written this whole post that I remembered nothing about. It was weird. It didn’t sound like me, it was manic, and I evidently was cyber-stalking some blogger….I have no idea why. It creeped me out.

After I straightened out that fiasco, I used my web history to see if I’d done anything else so odd, and I found this:

http://exploringcybergraveyards.tumblr.com/

I’d found that I’d set up a whole other blog called “Things Better Left Unsaid”. It was strange to read what my sleeping self was doing. I changed the name of it to “Things I do on Ambien”. I pretty much hadn’t figured out how to wipe the whole thing out, until my daughter Rebekkah saw it. And laughed and laughed.

Bek has been having some hard times lately, and as she sat on my bed laughing at my foolishness, I thought — “My embarrassment is totally worth it.”

On the back of the bike, with the cool night air blowing like a hurricane in my face, I thought I could see the lesson in all of this. I am a whole person. I have my good days, and I have my bad. Sometimes, I say the wrong thing, or make the wrong decision. My motives aren’t always pure, and I know I can be a bad representative for the God I love so much. My Ambien-soaked brain starts blogs that seem bizarre, and I often owe people apologies, with no drugs to blame my words on.

That being said, I’m unveiling my embarrassing blog. I think I’ll keep it and add stuff to it that I think will make my kids laugh. I’m letting this skeleton breathe!

— Bird