Sand in My Sandwich , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - Parshall Perry Sarah

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99 pages

English

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You know that thing when you're in Walmart at noon before you discover you haven't brushed your teeth? Sarah Parshall Perry gets that. She also gets weird things showing up in her bed, her daughter asking for war paint, and her son crawling into a giant blue sock on Christmas morning. Mainly, she gets that conflicted feeling of finding her kids hanging out in the dogs' cages and happily realizing they have stopped getting into trouble for a minute.According to Perry, "The hardest stuff is the quickest way to God," and readers get to watch the systematic destruction of her carefully planned life, laughing at her missteps, aching at her tragedies, and recognizing themselves along the way. A mother of three children, two of whom are on the autism spectrum, she has experienced plenty of ups and downs, but from the chaos of her "ordinary" life she pulls the universal truths of motherhood, addressing them with humor, poignancy, and a naked honesty that will make the reader think, That sounds a lot like my crazy life. Perry helps mothers realize they aren't alone, even if they've fallen off the straight and narrow of their intended path and are instead lying in the ditch next to it. Life's a mess. But as Perry reminds us, it's all for a purpose. Perfect for mothers, this book will encourage, inspire, and enlighten.

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	10 mars 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441223081
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0432€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

© 2015 by Sarah Parshall Perry
Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www . revellbooks .com
Ebook edition created 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4412-2308-1
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Scripture quotations labeled ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2007
Scripture quotations labeled NLT are from the Holy Bible , New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007, 2013 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
Author is represented by WordServe Literary, Inc., www.wordserveliterary.com
“Brokenness is part of our humanity and Sarah Perry gets it. Sand in My Sandwich is her story of living with transparency, grace, humor, and hope. Wife, mom, attorney, writer, Sarah is every woman. No matter your challenge today, you will find yourself in her story. This book is a must-read for every woman and the man who loves her.”
— Shannon Royce , president and CEO, ChosenFamilies . org
For Noah , Grace , avnd Jesse , who make the very best messes .
And for Matthew , who reminded me it was always possible .
Contents
Cover 1
Title Page 3
Copyright Page 4
Endorsements 5
Dedication 7
Acknowledgments 11
1. The Beginning of the End 13
2. Angst and the Type A 21
3. There Must Be Some Mistake 51
4. Sibling Misery 73
5. I Get Paid for This, Right? 95
6. Sandy Sandwiches, or How to Be Embarrassed in Public without Even Trying 121
7. Fortune Favors Anyone but Me 141
8. Leaning Towers and Other Structural Improbabilities 165
9. Mind Control and Major Mom 187
10. Exit Strategy 211
Notes 217
About the Author 219
Back Ads 220
Back Cover 223
Acknowledgments
I extend my deepest gratitude to Lonnie Hull DuPont, who turned editing into the highest of art forms, and who was patient with someone for whom things sounded better in her head than they did on paper and had a predilection for inappropriate comma usage. I also want to thank Twila Bennett and Lindsay Davis for approaching marketing with the kind of fervor that an author knows will result in the dissemination of her passionately held message. I also want to thank my parents, Craig and Janet Parshall, who have weathered their own challenges with aplomb, perseverance, and an unwavering faith that the best is yet to come. I am also thankful to my friends and extended family for whom “You should really write a book about this” was a recurrent theme in our conversations, Revell Books for believing I was a viable literary risk, and my agent Alice Crider for pushing a product in which she had confidence from the start.
I also want to thank my brood—Noah, Grace, and Jesse—who were living real life alongside my writing of it, and who were as tolerant as they could be when Mommy sequestered herself in the office. Every day in this life I am privileged to share with them is rife with material for multiple books and future embarrassment. I will undoubtedly be the mother at the rehearsal dinner regaling their future spouses with stories I’m sure they will prefer I not share. In that case, I will just hand out copies of this book. They love me miraculously. They are my great reward.
Final and greatest thanks go to my husband, Matt, who began this chaotic journey with me, and to whom I can say my only wish is that it all had started sooner.
1 The Beginning of the End
He lifted me out of the slimy pit,
out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock
and gave me a firm place to stand.
Psalm 40:2
I am not famous. I am just a mother, and a writer, and ordinary in about every way imaginable. I write most days in my pajamas facing a fine view out the second-story window of a sprawling, elegant property I do not own. That is actually part of this story: the story of a life, and a messy one at that.
Then? My life was neat and ordered and under control. Now? My life’s a mess. Ask my friends.
Actually, don’t. They won’t see it through the veil of forced perfection. I am the one who still sometimes suppresses the urge to fly hysterically through the house with the Windex when I hear from my husband—the guy who doesn’t believe in charades of any sort—that we’re about to have houseguests. He will greet you at the door in his pajamas, sporting slippers with holes worn through to the floor, and hair of the most profound bed-head variety. I, however, have learned to course-correct with little more than an hour’s notice, and by the time we open our door (if I am lucky), the floors might be swept and there is food on the counter. This food might be nothing more than a half bag of tortilla chips I’ve unearthed in our pantry, or a cup of questionably fresh mixed nuts. Please don’t look in the closet. You’re likely to be hit by the avalanche of unhung coats. And for the love of Pete, don’t smell the carpets. The dogs are in some kind of territorial “pee-off.”
Mine could be described as a typical mother’s life: the life of a typical mother with a typical control problem, and a pretty swell grasp on how to “out-Jones” the Joneses. Think Stepford Wife with fewer mechanical gears; a wife and a mother who could never stand the mess.
Let me set the stage.
Imagine an ever-so-slightly uptight lawyer with vacuum lines in her carpet, an immaculate Toyota, and an apartment that smells of orchids. Her spice cabinet is arranged alphabetically. Her taxes are finished in January. Then, imagine a small-town hero with a giant Ford pickup, sheets he can’t remember washing, and no college degree. Now, imagine a brief courtship, a hastily set wedding date, and the lawyer thinking to herself, “I can change him.”
Don’t ever, EVER think this about another person.
Once, when things were orderly, when I was a single girl with a singular fixation on controlling everything, I took a trip to Jerusalem and placed into a gap in the city’s ancient Western Wall a folded note telling the Lord that I’d had enough of the incessant striving, the deep soul unrest that was keeping me awake at night. I told him I needed patience to wait for that right man, someone who, in my partnership with him, would nudge me closer to God. His response was something like, “You sure about this?” Six months later, the man with the blue pickup and a wild, impassioned faith showed up. He also had food on his shirt. To this day, the man ends up with as much on his clothes as he does in his mouth.
Matt and I bonded quickly and married within a year of meeting. This is where things stop sounding like a Nicholas Sparks novel. It was, in fact, the beginning of the end. It was the first step toward termination of a way of life to which I’d held fast for two decades.
It was very clever of God to use someone handsome to help get the job done.
In the first ten years of our marriage, Matt and I experienced trials that some people never see in a lifetime. Our theory was that the bond was made strong because the challenges would prove likewise formidable. The two of us? Well, we must have looked to everyone else like a sinking ship. And you have to be pretty committed to going down with the vessel to ignore the part of you that’s fighting the urge to scan the deck for the life rafts. Yet from those crevices, those gaps of hardship between the quiet, prosperous periods, a precious and essential faith has sprung. Essential faith. Essential to my not making off in the Honda with a suitcase full of chick flicks and a bag of dirty laundry. Essential because our life is a mess. But then, God loves messed-up people.
In addition to a raft of deaths, illnesses, job losses, and financial devastations, we’ve had yet another series of trials to endure: those packaged neatly in the form of three tow-headed, blue-eyed, dimpled children. These are children who look as though they’ve fallen straight from a Michelangelo tableau. These are also children who enjoy locking both themselves and each other in the dogs’ cages, partly because they find small spaces comforting and partly because they find it comforting to torture each other. They are both typical and extraordinary at the same time, a blessing and a challenge both, very much the accessories of any mother’s life, but perhaps more uniquely so.
My oldest son Noah has Asperger’s syndrome—a form of high-functioning autism. He is also a “puker.” I used to think that his overactive gag reflex was simply a sensitivity we needed to cure. It appeared to us, the autism uninitiated, that he just had to toughen up a bit. But at many dinners, Noah insisted there was sand or “fuzz” or dog hair in his food. One small gag would lead to a giant mess in never enough time for me to fly across the kitchen and hurtle him into the bathroom. And Lord help us if we were dining out. How do you convince the poor teenage waiter with his jaw on the floor that “no, the cheeseburger is perfectly fine, but my son believes someone dropped it in a sandbox on the way to the table”?
On one such occasion, Noah was in the height of his foot aversion. If there was a naked foot—or even just a manicured toe—within arm’s length of his dining chair, the end was near. My daughter Grace found this sensitivity to be highly pr