When I graduated college, I really believed that I was on the path to a huge career. Early on in our marriage, Lee and I sat down and wrote out a list of 100 dreams – because those are things you do when you’re young and married and feel certain that the world is yours for the taking.
My list included such items as:
“Backpack across Europe with Lee” (should’ve taken care of that one before kids came along…)
“Go on an Alaskan Cruise” (should’ve done that when we had income to spare, and practically no bills, and no kids…)
“Own a boat” (we’ve learned it’s much better to be friends with people who own boats…)
“Have 4 kids” (hey look! dreams do come true!)
There were also a lot of ridiculous things on the list – things like, “Be in a commercial, live in the Bahamas for a year, and own an island.” You know, like I actually wanted to buy an island.
Ah, youth.
It’s actually really hard to come up with 100 dreams if you think about it, and for good reason.
This life is so much more than simply living out our wildest dreams. That’s not to say I’m against dreaming. But when you set a task for yourself to write down 100 dreams?
You’re bound to let yourself down.
My career dreams were even more ambitious than my life dreams. I wanted to write and publish ten books and be on the New York Times Bestseller List before age 30 (again, I may have wanted to edit this list when kids started showing up at age 25).
I was going to do all this with my perfect, angelic children by my side. And somehow my life would be spotless and easy throughout the process.
In short, I believed the biggest lie sold to women of my generation – the lie that said we could do, and have, it all.
I watched this video today, and I found myself nodding so ferociously that I thought I would get whiplash. It’s time more women stood up and acknowledged that having it all is just a myth.
I loved when Ally said, “You may have it all, but it will be in different season.”
YES!
Ladies – Moms – Life is messy beautiful. Motherhood is messy beautiful. Careers are messy beautiful. Marriage is messy beautiful. But you know what? Dreams are simply beautiful.
When we dream, we don’t see the messy. We only see the beautiful. And then the messy shows up, and the dream gets muddy, and we miss the beauty, and we wonder why it’s so hard to do all the things we dream of doing.
That’s because we can’t do it all – not all at the same time.
Everything we do – every choice we make – will require sacrifice. Motherhood will require a sacrifice of time, of brain power, of focus, of sanity. In the early seasons of motherhood, that sacrifice will be huge. But as your children grow, the sacrifice lessens to a degree, leaving space for new experiences.
Chasing a career will require sacrifice. It will require a sacrifice of time, of brain power, of the freedom to get up and go. And if you’re pursuing a career with young children at home, that sacrifice will be greater for a time. But as your children grow, the sacrifice lessens to a degree.
Do you see a pattern?
We can’t have it all at once, ladies. And if someone tries to convince you that you can, you should kick her in the shins and flee.
Make no mistake, that woman you’re watching – the one that you think has it all and balances it so perfectly – is making a sacrifice. She is sacrificing something, and that’s okay. We can’t judge one another, because we’re all doing it. We’re all sacrificing in some area of life so that we can provide in another area of life.
That’s what makes womanhood, motherhood, life in general, so beautiful. And so very messy.
So can you have it all? No, you simply can’t. Not all at the same time. But string the years together and walk faithfully toward the things set before you in each moment, and you just might be surprised when you get to the end and look back and see that you had a great many things.
You may even see that dreams you never dared to dream came true.
Tia walked into the kitchen and opened the cabinet, pulling out a small bowl, which she filled with a little oatmeal. I watched as she got out the formula, and together we mixed just the right amount in to make the oatmeal the right consistency.
“Should I give her Pears or Sweet Potatoes?” Tia asked.
“Um…” I was so baffled by what was happening that it took a minute to register what she said. “Sweet Potatoes.”
She mixed the food together, then picked Annika up, put her in her high chair, and proceeded to feed her the entire meal.
As she did this, I cleaned the kitchen, because sometime over the course of the day it had exploded, and I wanted to see if we still had countertops under all those dishes.
After dinner, Tia changed Annika’s diaper (with a little help from me when it was discovered that her sister had had a bit of a blow out), and then put on her pajamas.
“Do you need anything else?” Tia asked.
“Only a promise from you that you will never leave me, ever,” I replied. She laughed.
She thought I was kidding.
This time last year, I was still in freak out mode. Every time I thought about having another baby, I’d have moments of intense panic, followed quickly by moments of intense excitement, which were usually followed again by panic. And round and round I went.
Here’s the deal: I was set to have all my kids out of the house by the time I was 48. I’d be under 50 and have my husband all to myself again, and we had plans, man. Most of the plans included travel, which when you think about it is quite laughable since we’ll have three kids in college at the same time for at least one year.
So realistically, we’ll probably be living off Ramen Noodles again when we get those three out of the house. Good times.
It’s not that having a fourth kid was ever a huge surprise. I mean, we weretrying to adopt a child. We knew we wanted four. But when we adopted, we would have brought home an older child, which is like buying yourself time.
So starting from scratch with number four set us back in our big plans (of eating Ramen Noodles so we can pay for college). But you know what?
Annika is the greatest thing that ever happened to our family.
I don’t say that just because I think she’s awesome (which I totally do), but also because seeing our older kids with a baby is quite possibly the sweetest part of bringing home our new addition.
As Tia scurried through the house helping me get her sister settled, and make all the preparations to head out to Sloan’s baseball game, I couldn’t help but think what an amazing mom she will be someday. She’s getting so much practice right now, and she’s just a natural with her sister. It floods me with warm fuzzies to watch them interact.
There are so many wonderful things about this surprise fourth addition to our home, but the biggest surprise of all has come in watching her brothers and sister fall madly in love with her. And when they speak to her and her face lights up in a smile? Hands down, the best part of this entire experience.
It totally makes up for the fact that Lee will be almost 60 by the time we finally get the house to ourselves again.
I’m distracted today. We have visitors. The house is a bit of a hot mess. The laundry wants to strangle me in my sleep. And the baby keeps smiling and cooing at me, begging for interaction, which I cannot deny because of this:
See what I mean?
But I’d be remiss if I didn’t document our weekend, or at least the beauty of an unforgettable Easter. We have Lee’s mom with us this Easter, and it is bitter sweet. We miss Herb. We wish he was here with her. All the firsts after someone you love passes away are just so hard.
This is the first Easter. The first visit without him. It’s weighty, and we feel the weight.
But there’s so much in which to rejoice, too. The kids are happy. The baby has teeth, is close to sleeping through the night, and couldn’t get cuter if she tried.
Lee got a new grill and we have so much food in our fridge right now, we won’t need to grocery shop for awhile.
I mean, that’s reason in and of itself to do a happy jig.
And yesterday morning, Landon walked into the bedroom, his brand new Bible clutched in his hands, and he told his dad he wanted to know Jesus. He’s asked questions for months, trying to grasp the weight of Christ’s sacrifice and how that applies to him. He’s told us he believed, and I know that he did.
But yesterday, his faith was made sight.
He arrived at church hours after I did, since I was leading worship, and he grabbed my hand, pulled my face close to his and whispered with a grin, “I asked Jesus in my heart.”
So much pride. Such grace for this freckle-faced little boy of mine. It’s an answer to prayer, and now the prayers continue. Prayers that he will grow in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. Prayers that he will truly grasp who God is for Himself. That his will not be a blind faith, but one in which he really seeks to know God deeply.
There is something so marvelously joyful for a mother to see her children grasp faith and make it their own. There will be trials as they grow, and there will be more testing of the faith. I expect it, and even welcome it. Because I want my children to know God, and to know Him you have to look for Him.
Easter 2015 was special in so many ways – ways that far exceeded the pain of our recent loss. And I couldn’t help hoping that maybe, somehow, Herb got to experience the joy of his grandson’s salvation as all of heaven rejoiced. I don’t know how that works, but there’s comfort in knowing that he may have gotten the ultimate view of yesterday’s joy.
I am not a curse word kind of girl. I know that there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, some would actually laud that as a good thing, and it is. I’ve told my kids that curse words are really just lazy words. We can always find a better word to describe how we’re feeling without dropping a four letter word.
Unless we can’t.
A few nights ago, Annika woke up at 12:30. I had been asleep for about an hour and a half when she woke, and my sleep was good. It was that heavy, REM-style sleep that makes you feel kind of magical.
I was tired down to my bones, so when she woke up in a full out scream, I leapt from bed, heart racing, and the first word out of my mouth was a lazy, four-letter word. So unlike me, but in the moment I could think of nothing else to say. And after my heart stopped racing, I fed her and got her back to bed only to hear Lee chuckling beside me.
“That was funny,” he laughed in the darkness.
I was too tired to elbow him in the chin.
Knee-jerk reactions tend to bring out the worst in all of us, don’t they? When we’re surprised or frightened or quickly angered, we find ourselves reacting in a way that may be atypical to our normal operating behavior. When I put Annika to bed that night, I planned for her to sleep all night. I didn’t plan on her scooting into the corner of her bed, bumping her head, and waking herself up in a wail.
What do we do when life doesn’t go quite as planned? How do we react? My vocabulary indiscretion is a lighthearted example, but all of us can point to moments in our daily lives that leave us weary, exasperated…perhaps a little loose-tongued?
It’s exhausting being mom. It’s exhausting hearing how exhausting it is being mom, as I right? But the good news is there is Hope. There’s hope for all of us, and that Hope is alive even at one in the morning when the baby won’t stop crying.
That Hope is alive when the children threaten to tear one another’s eyes out. (Well, Hope and the belief that someday they will grow up and maybe be friends again…or at least be tolerable to one another.)
That Hope is alive when the dinner burns, the car breaks down, and the schedules require one person to accomplish the tasks of six.
Even more – Hope is alive when life doesn’t go as you planned. And this…this is the true beauty of Hope.
It’s been two and a half months since we said our final goodbyes to my father-in-law. As the days stretch into weeks, we’ve begun to really gnaw on the permanence of death, and there have been moments when we wished with everything we had that the outcome of his cancer battle had been different.
But then I think of Herb standing at the foot of his Savior, and I remember that if he were asked to return, he wouldn’t want to, and really I wouldn’t ever ask him. Because in that trust I find so much Hope.
There are so many moments in life that make us feel hopeless. The swell of our days rushes over like a tide, and we’re left out of breath, frustrated, and utterly, completely spent.
But Hope.
If you’re bogged down by the mire of your days, feeling hopeless to dig out from under the rush of routine, of anger, of disappointment, of grief, of simply feeling overwhelmed, then I encourage you to pick up the book Hope for the Weary Mom.
There is so much grace and truth sprinkled throughout this book. It’s like a breath of fresh air in a smoky room. Each page is filled with nuggets of wisdom and peace that you can tuck into your heart, saving them for the moments when life gets to be a little too much.
(And maybe these truths will spill out of your mouths my mouth in times of frustration instead of those pesky four letter words.)
We are coming down off the mountain of Spring Break this week. It’s been a truly lovely week together as a family, and I’m grateful for every moment of it.
I’m also grateful for the return of our routine.
One of the things Lee and I are working on is living life with intentionality. We have a lot of goals for our family – things we’d like to do and experience with the kids while they’re all living under our roof.
Unfortunately, neither one of us are planners, so we tend to fly by the seat of our pants more often than not, and life is screaming forward full speed ahead. I’m starting to feel like we’re going to miss it.
We have eight summer vacations left before Sloan goes to college.
E-I-G-H-T
Just typing that makes my heart nearly burst with trepidation. I don’t want to miss a single opportunity to make memories with my kids, because the time is so short, and it goes by so quickly.
So we made a plan this year for Spring Break. Rather than sit around the house and kill brain cells watching the Disney Channel, we booked a few nights away in St. Augustine.
We ate too much, laughed a lot, broke up fights (apparently vacation is not a magic formula for keeping the smaller people from tearing each other’s eyes out), and simply enjoyed being together as a family.
And now it’s time to go back to school.
Vacation is fun, but so is routine. The return of routine is necessary to maintaining the peace and order inside the home. In the absence of routine, the natives become restless. And in the presence of all that togetherness, restlessness leads to mutiny.
I always have these fantastical ideas of what family together time should look like. And, indeed, most of the time our togetherness truly is fantastical. This past week, despite the arguments and the little sleep, we had a grand time. But was it fantastical all the time? Well, if you follow me on Facebook, you might think it was. But the truth?
All that togetherness was actually exhausting. It was a happy, poured out sort of exhaustion.
I returned home from St. Augustine feeling tired in a way that words can’t really describe. It was a down deep in my bones sort of tired; an I’m-gonna-need-you-people-to-give-me-some-space sort of fatigue.
Here’s the thing, though. I don’t take pictures of those crazy moments when taking a family vacation seemed like a bad idea. I’m not going to take and post a picture of my children having a knock down, drag out fight. I won’t post video of the multiple times Annika woke through the night because the room was cold, and the Pack ‘n Play uncomfortable.
I don’t talk openly about the rickety pull out couch I had to sleep on so I could be near the baby, while Lee had to try to sleep with a child who flails violently when she slumbers.
And I definitely didn’t photograph the moment a glass got broken in the hotel room because people were fighting…again.
Those things happened. The few days were exhausting.But the fun outweighed the challenges. There was more laughter than there were tears. We were happy to be in one another’s presence more than we weren’t.
That’s what it’s like being part of a family. You love one another fully in the fun times. You tolerate one another in the challenging times. And you document the smiles and the laughter, so at the end of the day when those children leave the house and head to college, they can look back on the photos and remember the good times above all else.
Unless they read this blog post, the kids probably won’t remember the broken glass, the tears of fatigue, or that moment when one of them climbed on top of the wall at the top of the Castillo de San Marcos, and I yelled in horror for him to get down prompting tears of embarrassment for yelling in front of all those people.
(Sorry again, kiddo. Mom panicked when she pictured you plummeting over the side to your death. Some day you’ll understand.)
With any luck, our kids will look back on Spring Break 2015 and they will remember only the laughter. It will have been the best, greatest, most fun time we’ve had as a family. Because that’s the story that the pictures tell.
The photos document the majority, and they shape the memories. Through them all the stress of family trips will fade away, leaving the good times highlighted.
