Faithful

 

A good place to start writing for the year is my word of the year. I never push a word for the year, it either comes to me or it doesn’t, if it is forced then it is probably not a good fit.

In 2020, my word was “enough”. This started with a little sign that said “you do enough, you have enough, you are enough”. I was struggling with expectations, largely those imposed upon myself to be and do more. I had no idea what was going to hit the world! What I learned from my word varied as we moved through that unusual year. Our family was enough when we couldn’t see anyone else. Our home was enough when we were in lockdown. My stamina was enough to be there for my children all day every day. I didn’t accomplish what I had set out to do, but what I did do was enough. I think that was the overall take away. I really was enough being just me.

As we walked through an ever-changing year, it was hard to feel peace about the future and plans were impossible. As I watched a child fall apart, again, it was faith that kept me going to the next day. God has been faithful before and he would be faithful again. One of the songs I listened to over and over this year was “Goodness of God”. I love this song because I know it to be true that “all my life You have been faithful”. God has never not come through for us. God has always been faithful.

As life for my family changed, as my husband’s job changed and my kids came home for school, my focus shifted more into my home, rather than the speaking and writing out in the world I was expecting to do. At first it chaffed a little, in the middle I was just trying to stay afloat so I didn’t even think about it much, in the end I realized I was being faithful to my family. The very job God had given me to do. I did a reflection and planning retreat a few weeks ago. I wrote about what I wanted my life to look like a year from that day. The result of my thinking and writing was that I am moving forward on the path I need to be on. Really, that I need to remain faithful to my family, my faith, and the roles God has given me. There was nothing especially profound that came out of my retreat. Or maybe it was profound simply because it was simple and quiet….be faithful.

There was my word for the year in two places. Faithful. God has been and will be faithful for our family. He will direct our steps, especially in a season of unknows (when WILL school start again, anyone?). I will be faithful. I will lean in to the roles of wife and mother and friend and encourager. When I am chaffing against what seems like a lack of progress, I will remember that God is faithful and I will be, too.

Changing perspectives: Leaning In

In early 2013, I had a toddler and had just found out I was pregnant with my second child. I owed a small business that did government consulting and, up to this point, had worked full time. But in that season, I was winding down some of my work and gear up to be more involved in the care and keeping of (soon to be) two little boys. I was thrilled with the direction my life was taking. As much as I loved my work, I loved being a wife and mom and running our little household.

At this same time a very popular book was released. It made all the morning talk show rounds. It was showing us a new way for women to look at their careers. It was a call to be more in the workplace. It was a call, as the title shared with us, to Lean In. Sheryl Sandberg’s book was a hot topic among my friends, especially working friends. It sent many of them in to a frenzy of how to, once again, figure out how to have it all. Whatever they did with their families, they better not “lean out” at work. To be honest, I didn’t read the book because what my friends were saying about it was stressful enough. I was clearly in the “lean out” group. It was where I wanted to be, but all of a sudden, with this new hit phrase of “lean in”, I was starting to question what value I would have should I continue down the path I was on to move more towards staying home with my babies.

Fast forward three years and I now had three little boys and had recently moved. Over the past year I had done very little paid work and was trying to decide if I would go back and look for more work. That decision was, in a way, made for me when we learned about Peter’s neurological condition and birth defect. I was definitely needed full time at home with all of his therapies and doctor visits so I closed the doors of my company. I had officially “leaned out”.

Lots of feelings and emotions and thoughts have filled the last 3 years since I closed the doors of my company. I love being a mom. I love being home with my kids. I miss making money. I miss interacting with the technical side of my brain. I don’t miss the politics of work or the stress of finding contracts. I still feel this little tug of guilt that I am not doing “enough” as a stay at home mom. How do you measure success? Accomplishment? Could another mom have “done it all”?

Then a trusted advisor handed me an article that reframed it all. On the day before Mother’s Day this year the Wall Street Journal had an article titled “Coming to Appreciate Stay-at-Home Moms”. It was written by a childless career woman who had recently landed on some hard times. She was amazed to find out that in her time of crisis it was her friends who were stay at home moms who had the time and space in their lives to help her, to listen to her, to care about her wellbeing. They were simply doing for her what they did for their families. As the writer put it “they were leaning in – to people, not organizations.” They were creating the most important ingredient for a better future…human capital.

Wow. That flipped my narrative from 2013 right upside down. I certainly had leaned out from the corporate table, but I have very much been leaning in to family. My last few years have been spent in countless therapies, preschool drop offs, playgroups, dinner making, Target runs, diaper changes, and many sleepless nights with, and over, the kids. I have been leaning in very very far. I have invested these years in my family, in raising good humans. And that is a very good and worth endeavor. I am leaning…exactly where I am supposed to be.

Everything's Not Awesome

I don’t know about your house, but mine has been taken over by all things Lego Movie 2. My older two boys have seen the movie, we have the Lego's (yay, marketing!), we listen to the songs every.single.day. You could say it is the “thing” of the moment around here.

There is a song in the movie that is supposed to get stuck in your head. It literally has the line “this song is going to get stuck inside your head”. However, that is not the song that got stuck in mine. Right now, I am in the middle of preparing to speak to a group of moms about motherhood. I am not totally sure I feel like I am the right person for the job but last week my mom said “why not? You are THIRTY-FIVE and have FOUR kids”. Thanks for the reminder, mom! So, as I think about motherhood, I keep thinking about a song from the Lego Movie 2.

It starts out with:

Everything's not awesome

Everything's not cool

I am so depressed

Everything's not awesome

Motherhood right now, anyone? Winter. Snow. Kids you can’t send outside. Health issues. Marriage in close quarters. Anyone? Please tell me I am not alone. I already wrote last month about given up. This is a rough season around here.

BUT that is not where the song ends and it isn’t how we have to live. It doesn’t have to be either totally awesome or totally not awesome. The song goes on (and this is the part I love)…

“Everything's not awesome

Things can't be awesome all of the time

It's an unrealistic expectation”

Did you catch it? Read it again. “Things can’t be awesome all of the time, that is an unrealistic expectation.” I 100% agree with that statement. It just isn’t how life works and if we want it to always be awesome we are going to be disappointed and that won’t feel awesome so we will be disappointed in our disappointed feelings and it becomes a WHOLE NOT AWESOME THING. GIVE UP! GO BACK TO BED! DON’T EVEN BOTHER WITH HAIR OR CLEAN PANTS. EVERYTHING IS NOT AWESOME!

STOP.

Read the next lines…

“But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try

To make everything awesome

In a less idealistic kind of way”

Oh, well, that is a different approach. We could try to make what we can awesome. We can just try our best. We can still try to be our best selves. We can wear clean pants. We can fix our hair pretty. We can get up before our kids to have some quiet space (I will harp on this until the day I die. It is my thing. Not even sorry.) We can try in a less idealistic kind of way. It won’t all be awesome. It just won’t. We don’t live in that made up world. We live here in the messy middle life. But we can still try to influence our families and world for good (or, for awesome) when and where we can.

And some days we need the last line of this verse….

“We should maybe aim for not bad

'Cause not bad right now would be real great”

Some days are going to be just shooting for “not bad”. Some days your husband will be out of town, and you will wake up to the sound of vomit, and then your husband’s flight will be delayed and you will end up sounding like Oprah after school…You get a Kindle and You get a Kindle and YOU get a Kindle and YOU get a snack and YOU get candy! And just give mommy a few minutes to pee alone! So we aim for not bad and that is real great right now.  We cut ourselves the slack we would cut our girlfriends and we make it through a less idealistic version of our day but feel awesome because we made it to bed that night.

One final point. The bridge of the song shares an idea of how to pull this less idealistic version of awesome off…”We can make things better if we stick together, side by side, you and I, we will build it together…”. Together. In community. Together with our spouse we can build an awesome family. Together with our friends we can build an awesome village. Going it alone rarely works. We can and need to depend on others. I ask my husband for help. We work together when things are not awesome to figure out how to get back to some version of awesome. We have even sought out help to do that. I have spent pretty much the entirety of my children’s lives seeking other mom’s (of all ages) to do this together. I support them and they support me. Building it together will ALWAYS make it more awesome!

So go be awesome, whatever that looks like, today!

Getting past the fear of shame

Four weeks ago I spoke in front of two groups of ladies on the topic of fearless motherhood. I spoke about shame and judgement and how we called to be those that lift each other up as moms and women. It was incredibly well received. I was told the feedback was great and that many women were uplifted and encouraged by my talk. My talk had been the culmination of months of writing on the topic. I was really excited to move forward, continue writing and trying to find more avenues to speak.

Just days after that event, more than one person made a comment on the grammar and punctuation in a specific Facebook post I had written. All of a sudden, I was front and center for that judgement I had just spoken about. Two things happened as a result of that.

One, I cried for close to two full days.

Two, I stopped writing. At all. I am confessing here that I am immobilized by fear. Fear that I would make another simple (and, I would have thought, forgivable) mistake and someone would decide I needed another lesson.

Just writing this out is making my heart quicken. Tears are forming behind my eyes. I have been told I have great composure and every single time I think about what happened and trying to write again I lose all of my composure.

And it hurts. It still hurts. I went from being so excited to hiding in a home improvement project….see, I don’t have TIME to write, there are walls to paint!...all an excuse. Mostly I am hurt and scared and can’t figure out how to move past it.

Maybe that is the biggest confession. I am caught up in the shame. The shame I have been trying to help others to not dish out and I am having a terrible time rising above it. I am stuck and I don’t like it.

I recently heard the idea that the first step is awareness. Awareness that something isn’t right, awareness that you are doing something destructive, awareness that you are on a path that isn’t getting you where you want to be. So, for a few days I have just been aware. Aware that this pain hurts.

Today I am taking the next step. I am going back to writing…by writing about not wanting to write anymore, of being afraid of writing. I am moving forward even as my heart feels anxious. Even as the tears are kind of making me want to give up.

I wonder why even keep typing? Why put myself out there? Why? Well, those ladies I spoke to are one reason. I helped them and it felt good. I like helping women. I think I have valuable things to share. I can’t let shame stop me from what I believe was a passion put on my heart by God himself. If I stop, the devil wins. I won’t let that happen.

But I won’t say it feels good today. It doesn’t. I hope writing does feel good again. I hope that by writing out how I feel about this shame and judgement I can begin to move past it. That I can move past the fear.

Because I know that the help I was giving others is bigger than the hurt in my heart. Even if it doesn’t feel that way today.

My 2018 goal

I set out at the beginning of the year to write more. Late in 2017, I read about the idea of having just one goal and focusing on that rather than several goals that might all get mixed up. I decided to try it with writing. For the first time in my adult life my goal list had just one item. That was to write an average of 500 words per week and to have 26,000 words written by the end of 2018. These would be journal entries, blog posts, and speech notes. Every week the top item on my planner was “500 words”.

I started strong. When I really sit down to write, I can often go far past 500 words on a blog post. The Spring was solid and I was actually ahead. Then Summer came and I had 4 small people to keep busy. I started to slip. I wasn’t hitting 500 words every week. But it was my one goal so I wasn’t going to let a few weeks slip stop me for the year. I had ONE GOAL. I couldn’t fail at just one. I could fail at many, but to fail at one? That would just be sad.

I rallied in September and found a new writing time. I wasn’t too far behind. I could still do this thing. It would just take determination. And then the Fall holidays began and it was hard to find the time again. But still, I wanted to do this thing and I wasn’t that far behind.

That brought me to early December. I had to write 3000 words by the end of the year. I started to wonder if I could really do it. That would be more than 500 words a week at a busy time of year. I told my dad I didn’t know if I could make it and he asked where I was on my goal. I said “3000 words away, I might just fail”.

His reply changed my game.

He said “You already are at 85% or so of your goal. You may miss the word count, but that is hardly a fail.”

He was right. Since when would 85% be failing? And more importantly, I have written more this year than ever before because of this goal. My husband has encouraged my writing more this year than ever before because he knew my goal. I am closer to be a “real writer” than ever before. My goal has moved me forward as a person and a writer and that is what goals are supposed to do. So even if I missed the 26,000 words, I would not be failing my goal.

And that, as it turned out, made my want to write even more. I wrote during naptime. I took my kids to the Y playrooms and never made it to the exercise rooms, I would just write in the lobby. I might miss my goal. But I was not failing and I was a better person for trying. I was at peace with myself regarding my goal, which can be just as important as meeting the goal itself.

That brings me to today. I am super excited to report that I have done it! I have written 26,118 words in 2018. I am crying as I write this. It was a stretch goal. I could have quit with 4 little human excuses. But I didn’t. I kept going and I did it!!

And here’s to 30,000 words in 2019!

It's July!

It’s July!

I have this odd affinity for the month of July. I can dress my baby in everything red, white, and blue and for a few weeks we don’t stand out. It is the start of the really sunny season where we live (that is July and August, for those of you who are not from Seattle). But it also is the longest month my kids are out of school. There are no family birthday’s in July. In some ways it could just be a “filler” month, but it isn’t.

See, I love calendars and dates and attaching meaning to dates. When I was a little girl, our phone book had pages with the calendar for the next several years. Yes, now I can pull it up on my phone, but at the time, I loved those pages. Full of possibility. Full of knowing when your birthday would next land on a Saturday. How do leap years change the day of the week Christmas will fall on when I am 10 years old. Definitely the best pages of the phone book.

I can remember many things tied to certain dates. I will amaze my family with “7 years ago today we were doing this or that” or “in two years Christmas will be on a Sunday and I wonder how that will impact our plans for church”. Ok, fine, maybe I don’t so much as amaze them as I annoy them, whatever, they love me. Almost as much as I love dates on the calendar.

Let’s get back to July and why July is important. When I was a child, we went on a family vacation one year to a resort not far from our home. On the Sunday morning of our visit, we watched workers pressure wash a deck (super exciting vacation times, I know!). Someone in our group wondered how often they did that job. We thought it could be every Sunday. But it was also July 1^st. So it could be weekly, or monthly, or quarterly, or even biannually! It was a fairly silly and inconsequential debate that I have remembered for over 2 decades. Why? Because it showed how many different time increments start on July 1^st (especially if July 1^st is a Sunday, like this year).

July is just full of starts!! It isn’t usually seen this way. January gets the big billing for starting new things, but July should be right up there in its possibilities! We still have half a YEAR left to do the things we wanted to do this year. That is exciting. We still have six more months. We have two quarters left. We have 26 weeks, people. There is so much we can do if we start right now!

If we had intentions in January that we didn’t quite get to, we are only at half time, we can start now and finish very well. If we look back on the first six months and don’t like what we see, we can finish the second half stronger. It’s JULY!!

For me, I am excited to report that my one and only goal I was planning to focus on for 2018 is going well. I cut back to one goal because it was that important to me and with that, I have successfully made the half way mark. I am celebrating and continuing strong on this in July.

But I also realize that there are a couple other things I need to not let slide. Instead of thinking “well, guess the year is a bust, I will get that started in January”, I decided to make some new goal charts. Add a couple new things. I can do this! I have the whole second half of the year to make these in to habits before we event get to January.

It’s July! A month of fresh possibilities. A perfect time to start something, to celebrate the halfway of accomplishment, to refocus on intentional living and finishing the year strong. What can you do with this possibility month to finish the year strong? Let’s go get it!!