About me: KendraKay

The short list...

I'm a minimalist, was born in Oregon but love Nebraska. I'm a protestant, but not in a right-wingy kind of way, old house renovator, recovering perfectionist, thinker, designer, mamma, green enthusiast, believer, wife, survivor, artist.

And the longer story...

Long ago, my parents told me I was lucky. Lucky to be living in a 35 foot trailer, trekking up and down the west coast. Lucky to be homeschooling so we could move to the Midwest with a few weeks' notice. Lucky to have seen so much of the country by age nine. After all, they'd say, most kids are born and raised in the same town, never having the opportunities afforded my sisters and me.

The opportunity to be weird. Ohhh, how I wanted to lead a bored life. Normal house, normal school, friends who weren't related. I wanted the color-by-numbers version of life but my parents were comfortable with big, abstract strokes. They believed in adventure and lived outside the box of societal expectations. But I liked boxes. Or I thought I did.

In my little girl world of black and white, there was a certain amount of dysfunction, which I lumped with being eccentric. I didn't know that on cul-de-sacs with window boxes, marriages went under too. I didn't know kids who sat in a classroom with a desk felt that who they were was not okay. Or that girls with common names like Jessica or Sarah thought of themselves as nuisances too. So I dreamed and steered myself toward box-tight bliss.

My life-saver was letting God come along. Beside the path more traveled, he gave me Brian who's a phenomenal match to my soul. Through the college degree I was hell-bent on earning, he taught me that color goes out of life if I'm not creating. I learned a lot spending time in Brian's wonderland of unconditional love. The nuisance feelings and thinking I wasn't okay had to take a backseat while I tried taking care of myself. Home got cozy, what with everyone there loving me, so we had babies. A boy named Chandler and a girl named Cadence. At the same time. It was amazing in every sense of the word. 

Five years later, I got a handle on our family's doubled size. Maybe as early as four years, but no longer mind-numbed by survival or energy-sapped by depression, I started choosing a direction for myself and our family. I'm rethinking the boxes and exploring the outside. I gain bravery from things I learn and start poking around at the edges of me, pushing past limits I thought I had. I want my life to be a good story, and I want to invite my kids into a better story. What I want after all, is anything but ordinary.