It’s amazing how often my kids are teaching me things.
On our recent few days away during school holidays, we took the boys fishing. ‘We’ being my husband organised the gear, bought the worms, found a good spot and I quietly enjoyed watching the going’s on from my fold out chair. There isn’t a lot I don’t do as a mum of all boys, but fishing……well, I have to draw the line somewhere.
Anyway, it was sunny but a chilly wind was blowing. The boys took their casting lessons from their Dad and then it became a waiting game. And waiting….waiting…..This is a pretty big deal for my ‘always moving’ boys.
After using all our worms, and by the time we were feeling cold and hungry, we packed up into the car and started driving home.
Just as I was about to apologise to the boys that it hadn’t turned out as planned and I was sorry they hadn’t caught any fish…a voice piped up from the back seat.
“I love fishing so much. That was the best ever.”
So apparently in their mind, it was never really so much about the end result of catching the fish after all.
In the same week, I came across these beautiful words in a book “Raising Kids with Character that Reallly Lasts” by John & Susan Alexander Yates. I am yet to read the whole thing, but this part made me sit up and listen.
We will never ‘arrive’ in Family Life.
When I was surrounded by small children, I thought, ‘If I can just hang on until they are older, I can relax.’
It was as if I viewed life as ladder rather than a garden.
I was always struggling to get to the next rung, the next season in life,
So focused would I become on simply making it to the next stage that I often missed out on the blessings of the moment.
And at the next age, more challenges were waiting.
There were different character traits to work on and new circumstances in my own life that revealed weaknesses.
Would I ever ‘get to the top?’
Life is not a ladder to climb, but a garden to enjoy.
The gardeners joy is in his work, a job that is never finished.
He delights in the process of the work.
Our work in families is never finished.
We will never perfect character, nor will our children.
We are people in process.
Yet there is joy in the process if we relax, knowing that the blessing is in the journey rather than the completion of the job. When we relax, the atmosphere of our homes will become less tense and more joyful and we will rely more on the power of the Master Gardener.
I remember like it was yesterday the day I collapsed on my kitchen floor and couldn’t get up.
It’s almost 9 years ago.
We had just moved house, my husband had decided to quit his very stable and well paid job and start afresh in a new career that paid nothing for at least the first 6 months. My 3 yr old was struggling with constant respiratory illness and my 6 month old baby had came out of the womb pale, small and screaming, and 6 months on, was still pale, small and screaming.
I think I should have known something wasn’t quite right a few weeks before this, when I had calmly placed my screaming baby in his cot, shut the door and started walking to my girlfriends house, in my pyjamas. Or maybe I should have seen a warning sign, when I started wearing baseball caps to the local shops to buy the milk, absolutely terrified of bumping into anyone I knew.
The day I collapsed on my kitchen floor was the first time my body had physically given way on me. I remember much later on my mum saying in her wisdom “unless God took your legs out from under you Em, you would never have stopped. You needed to physically stop, before you could start to get better.”
So, there I was. Lying on the kitchen floor. My 3 yr old brought me my phone and I managed to call a beautiful girlfriend who had known me since I was a little girl – “I am on the kitchen floor and I can’t get up” I whispered.
I think from memory she arrived 40 minutes later from her house near the city.
And there it began.
I remember thinking ‘this is what it feels like to fail at life.’ I had gone from being an over-achieving wife and mother, highly capable of running her home, involved in ministry at church, caring for friends and family, to sitting in a chair, staring out the window and incapable of feeling or doing anything.
I lost the ability to speak on the phone, entertain visitors, reply to emails, go to church or the shops or even read my bible or a book.
It was the beginning of Autumn. My favourite chair was placed near a window where I could see the trees changing, and that is where I stayed, for close to 4 months.
My beautiful GP, with tears in her eyes diagnosed me. “You are exhausted Em. Burnt out. Empty. And it’s okay. You will get better. But for now, you need to step back from everything and just rest. Be still.”
I prayed a pretty desperate prayer to God in the early days. I begged him for the ability each new morning to be able to do that which had to be done for that day for my family. Nothing more.
I went from being an OCD control freak who loved planning things in advance and ticking off my to do list, to begging God at breakfast for just enough strength to make it to dinner.
And God in his beautiful faithfulness, each day, did just that. In the first months, I actually would get to bedtime and not be able to tell you much about what had gone on in the day. I was so numb. But my boys were alive, and so was I, so we had done okay.
The hero of this story was my Heavenly Father, who proved his faithfulness in my time of emptiness. I am a ‘doer’ and all of a sudden I could do nothing or offer nothing to him or anyone else it seemed. I remember having a sense that it was okay, for the first time in my life, to just be.
It’s funny what happens when we take away all of the noise and business and life gets stripped back to basics.
God’s gifts to me during that time were the autumn trees, praise and worship music and an audio devotional a girlfriend made me, after I realised I was too sick to even concentrate on reading my bible.
He also cared for me through my mum and mother in law, who came in and quietly cared for me and the boys while I sat in my chair. Not every day, but often enough to help us get by.
A handful of close friends would visit in small doses and sit with me, not saying much, but just being there.
And I remember feeling a little surprised and over-whelmed that my husband still loved me so much when I could do nothing for him and offer nothing to him. He was so patient during that time. He never placed a time line or expectation on me to get better. It felt like unconditional love.
Over time, I slowly started to heal. My sick screaming baby didn’t actually get better at this point, and we still searched for answers as to why he was so unwell, but because I stripped everything else away, I was able to deal with that situation a little better.
Time and sitting still was working. I couldn’t believe it.
After 4 months I was able to slowly re-enter life again. It was a scary thought at first. To begin with I would make short errands to the local shops, still with my cap on and be so proud of myself when I made it back in one piece.
There were many things that I used to do or be involved in, that I would never actually get back to. That was okay. Times like these are often a pruning. As God had proved himself faithful in my brokenness, he was also faithful as he slowly enabled me to start living more fully again.
What I didn’t know then, was that 5 years later, I would walk an even harder journey with our third son. But this time the journey didn’t break me. The lessons I had learnt in stillness, resting, trusting God to carry me and my family, came back to me with great clarity and I remember thinking ‘this is why we went through that. He was preparing me for an even bigger journey. But this time I dealt with it differently.
So, 9 years on from those life changing events, I still need to stop sometimes and remember….
I am not what I can DO. I am His beloved daughter, regardless of what I am or am not achieving in the worlds eyes.
I need to consciously push back the noise and business sometimes and re-learn the discipline of ‘being still’. This doesn’t come naturally to me, but it’s often only in the stillness that I really hear what he’s trying to teach me, learn and grow.
It’s constanty re-learning the He has made us all different. What one woman’s capacity for life is, will be different to another and that’s okay. As women we need to stop thinking ‘I don’t know how she does it’ and instead celebrate our differences. None of us really know each others intimate journey, her internal battles, her home life. Of course most of us only see everyone’s ‘coping’ moments.
He let my legs collapse out from under me that afternoon in my kitchen. I couldn’t stand if I had tried. Gently, but not without pain, He lifted me up, gave me rest, refocused my heart and mind and taught me to depend on Him again and not on my own strength.
I look back thankful for that time and try to keep making space in my life to not forget those important lessons.
We were sitting in the doctor’s surgery waiting room, my eldest son and I. I was flicking through a magazine and he was watching the Morning Show on the TV screen with subtitles on, so despite the noise in the waiting room, everyone could follow along. The news story of the day was Ashley Maddison. On and on it went, and my big boy sat mesmerised by this story.
We got in the car a while later and it came out. “Mum, who is Ashley Maddison and what does cheating mean?”
It’s in these moments that I wish my kids were still 3. Blissfully unaware of the messed up world we live in and concerned only with what craft they are making on Playschool that day, and not the latest news headlines.
I answered his questions with the facts and ended by saying “Mate, it’s a crazy, messed up, broken world we live in. People make dumb decisions all the time and the consequences are always painful and never worth it. But right now, all you need to know is that Dad and I are committed to each other and love each other very much.”
This conversation nagged at me for most of that day and into the days that followed.
So here is what else I would have said to my son if he was old enough to hear it.
The reality is we’ve hit middle age with a big loud thud. There, I said it out loud.
Long gone are the innocent days of kitchen teas, white dresses and bouquets of flowers and romance-filled honeymoons.
We’ve woken up and found ourselves and many of our friends, treading water in a rough ocean of raising kids, building careers, illness, mortgages, homes to keep, financial stress, study, ministry, staying fit and the general ‘crazy busy-ness’ of keeping up with the speed of life these days.
The world around us keeps getting louder and louder and it’s getting harder to drown it out…..
“You’re not where you thought you would be by now” it screams.
“You’re messing your kids up, everyone else is doing a better job raising their kids than you.”
“Your home isn’t enough.”
“You are not as successful as the rest of them.”
“Everyone else is having more sex, more fun and better holidays.”
“Her husband is around way more and just so supportive and romantic all of the time. You must have married the wrong person.”
“His wife is perfect, she’s always got everything under control, she’s alway patient and loving. You’re the only one married to the one who is finding life hard. Maybe it’s time for a change.”
Even though most of what the world is screaming is a lie, the truth is that It Is Hard.
Choosing To Stay Married. Choosing Faithfulness and Commitment when the world says the grass is greener somewhere else.
15 years of marriage has taught me that it’s not a walk in the park, and it doesn’t happen by accident. It takes energy and effort, and this is hard, especially in a stage of life where most of us are lacking in spare energy and effort and some days, we are barely just surviving.
If you had told me when I was first married that I would one day say to the man I live with “I feel like I haven’t seen you in weeks” I wouldn’t have believed you.
If you had told me that having children would completely empty me out at times and there would be days I can barely speak when he walks in the door from work, I wouldn’t have believed you.
But this is where the rubber hits the road in being a grown-up.
I chose to say ‘I do’ to my husband all those years ago, before the kids came along, before earning a living became all so consuming and life just got bigger and more complicated. The choice back then was a no-brainer, it seemed easy even. I could have screamed ‘of course I do and I will forever until death do us part” during our wedding ceremony, I was that certain.
But now the world says, its getting harder, it takes more effort, it isn’t like it used to be, so maybe it wasn’t right after all and you need a change?
Well to that I say no. And as marrying my husband was a choice, staying married to him is making that same choice, over and over and over again.
The kids have finally gone to bed, which seems to be getting a little later now that they’re getting older.
We sit on the lounge together at the end of the day, if he’s not at work or church or a meeting….
Just him and me. And the computer, iPad, phones, bills, unreplied emails, unfinished work, laundry, ironing, unopened mail, decisions hanging in the air about the kids, their school, their health, their friends, our families and their needs, a pile of books not read on how to do it all better, stress from the day that was, anxiety looking at the schedule for tomorrow. If there is any conversation at all, it is mostly about any of the above things. Hardly romantic, but just two people managing life, family, home and a business together.
We’re physically together but there is so much between us it can be so hard to really see and hear each other anymore.
From memory I think it was after the birth of our second son, when we were going through a particularly hard time due to my husband starting a new career, money being tight and me recovering from a break down (for another post at another time) that we realised going out on date nights together was going to be almost impossible.
How on earth were we going to carve out time together when there was no money, not much time and not always a babysitter available?
So the Home Date Night concept was born.
Basically, we started choosing a night in the diary and blocking it out. I would feed the kids sandwiches or something simple for dinner earlier than normal and try get them to bed. When my husband got home from work, we would have dinner on our own, (something we love to eat!), either a favourite meal of my husbands that I would make, or my favourite takeaway that he would bring home with him. If I had time, I would try and make his favourite dessert, Creme Brûlée or Tiramisu. If it was up to Andrew, he would bring home Almond Magnums or my favourite chocolate treat for dessert. It’s always good to know what each others favourites are.
The one rule for this night that made it different to every other night was that everything else had to be set aside. No phones, computers, work, study, laundry, mail, major decisions, controversial topics. We both had to commit to that or else it wasn’t going to work.
Pretty simple really. The 2 of us, a meal, a candle and usually a favourite movie or tv show, on the rare occasion a game, or just listening to the music we love. Not a great deal of fuss, but the important bit was what wasn’t there – the kids or the rest of the world.
This was a choice we would make and we keep making it, over and over again. Shut everything else out and just be us again.
It has become essential to us surviving. Carving out the time by putting it in the diary, and to the best of our ability, sticking to it. By doing this we are saying “You matter, you are still the most important person to me.”
Yes, kids get sick on Home Date Night. Yes, last minute work things come up on Home Date Night. But as far as is possible, we stick the dates in the diary and stick to it.
I am so thankful to God that we started this tradition years ago. The reality is that life seems to be getting harder, not easier, and it’s simple habits like this that are becoming essential to us staying connected to each other in a world that seems hell bent on tearing us apart.
We are a constant work in progress. We are constantly starting again and each new season we hit seems to bring a new set of challenges and pressures.
In this season of life, it’s a little easier to actually get out on a real date, so we try and prioritise that too. I am sure there are a thousand more ways we can keeping working on ‘us’, but our very simple, very small Home Date Night concept is going to be around for a while yet…..just me, my man and an Almond Magnum and I’ll be a happy girl.
I love to plan EVERYTHING and ANYTHING. From the big stuff like 5 YEAR PLANS and holidays right down to my weekly meal plan, to what I will wear to that dinner next week and then right down to ‘after lunch and those 2 phone calls I will clean Child Number 1’s bedroom.’
Some of you will be nodding in agreement. Some of you will probably think this is bordering on an illness and I should get some help.
It is who I am and always have been, but then I became a mother.
The best role of my life by far, has been the one that has really messed with my obsession with planning. I somehow wish, as I birthed each child, a new found ability to just GO WITH THE FLOW would have washed over me and I could have become one of those carefree, take each day as it comes, skipping through the meadows, spontaneous kind of mums.
But no, that didn’t happen.
My family often joke with me that the reason I have a bad memory of things that happened in the past, is that I am always living in the future in my next plan. I think there may be some truth in that statement.
This brings me to today.
Our holiday plan lies discarded amongst the tissue boxes and Nurofen bottles.
This sinister flu season has gripped our family and today, we end our second week and move into our third week at home.
On one hand, it’s just the flu. It will pass and we will be well again. This I know to be true. We also shouldn’t be surprised, this is quite normal for our family, and not just in winter. In the last 6 months alone, all 3 boys have been quarantined at home for weeks with Whooping Cough, multiple chest infections, pnemonia and now the real flu. When I look back over the last 12 years, the picture is the same, so we really should be used to it by now. But when your boys look up at you and say “Why is it always us and always the holidays?” that it catches in your throat and you can’t seem to find an answer other than “It’s just the way it is my son.”
I know many families walking much more difficult and permanent paths with their families health, that I almost didn’t write this. Really the flu shouldn’t even warrant a mention.
But, then I think maybe it’s good to write about the very real, not so nice and disappointing stuff. That maybe others will be encouraged to hear that 95% of my life is not worthy of a Facebook status update, but is indeed just every day, normal home life.
As a parent I have to help my kids learn how to process disappointment and also teach them from a young age that Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. One of the challenges of parenting is trying to teach important life lessons to your kids that you are still struggling to learn as an adult.
When you strip away friends, outings, adventures, work, study, excitement and say NO to whatever the rest of the world seems to be doing, you are left with REAL LIFE.
The every day cycle of rise, wash, eat, drink, sleep and repeat life that is so very normal and yet so very monotonous.
In busy seasons I crave that simple domestic scene. But usually I only need a couple of days of it to refill my tank and this extrovert is ready to be OUT LIVING AMONGST IT again.
Doing it for weeks at a time and being the one responsible for keeping the family spirit high and coming up with new ways to fill each day in our home does not always come easy to me.
I go from cheerily saying ‘Boys, let’s all sit by this window and look at the rainbow the sun is making on the windowsill’ moments to the ‘it’s every man for himself’ moments where I can cheer and cajole us no more. I go from ‘I am so lucky to be able to SIT ALL DAY by the fire’ thoughts to ‘If I don’t leave this house soon I think I am GOING TO SCREAM’ darker thoughts.
So, the sun rises and sets, and every few days we’ve changed our PJ’s, just to keep things interesting.
And because I HAVE SO MUCH TIME TO THINK, I find myself reflecting on what may be one of the lessons my very faithful and patient Heavenly Father keeps trying to teach me, over and over and over and over again.
Be Faithful in the Small Stuff.
It’s not glamorous, world changing, dynamic, exciting, popular or even all that interesting some times.
Stay at it anyway.
The every day, very small, often insignificant, sometimes boring, repetitive stuff of no frills every day home life.
Keep on keeping on.
I’m not sure if this is eye-rolling or encouraging stuff to you reading this.
But even just typing the words has helped me to remember that in our not so exciting seasons of life, we are called to remain faithful and diligent with the task at hand, even if it’s not how we would choose it to be.
E x
This bare tree at my front door will soon start budding again. A beautiful reminder that Winter does not last forever.
In the grand scheme of things, I know I am not that far along on the journey that is ‘motherhood’, but I do feel like a different person today than I was the day I brought my first son home.
As I reflect on what motherhood has taught me so far, I realise that ‘motherhood’ needs to be lived out on your knees.
Kissing scraped legs, tying shoe laces, checking for monsters under the bed, cleaning up spills, searching for the favourite car under the lounge, applying band-aids, sitting beside the bath, sitting beside the toilet, kneeling beside the cot or the bed.
But then I realise I am on my knees for many other reasons.
These lives. Entrusted to me to raise alongside my husband. What a gift and a privilege. I am on my knees in gratitude for the chance to be called mum by these three.
These lives. Entrusted to me to raise, alongside my husband. Sometimes the enormity of that task overwhelms me at every turn.
Am I enough for them? Do I smile enough, listen enough, am I strict enough, fun enough, tough enough? Do I love enough, forgive enough, teach enough? Am I wise enough?
So I find myself on my knees again. Seeking wisdom and strength for the days where I just don’t think I am enough for them on my own.
It doesn’t take long in my reflections on motherhood for me to start thinking about my own mum.
No doubt she had many of the above thoughts herself at times. But when I look back and think ‘what was her secret to being a mum?’ I see a cycle of Love, Service, Sacrifice and the Seeking of Wisdom.
I am beyond thankful for that example of motherhood in my own mum, and in these later years of my life, that I’ve also found in my mother-in-law.
