Surprise, Surprise

It's funny that my last post was about life's unpredictability, because I have just found myself at the end of one semester, looking back at its beginning and realizing that the path I traveled with my family and the new course it set for us were far different from what I planned.

It's like I started out at one hill, looking across a valley at another hill and thinking, "That's where we're going." And then, as we started the journey, a different path leading to a different destination opened up. This other path looked good, so we took it, only to discover there were several detours along this new path, and we wound through different valleys and forests and maybe a meadow or plain or two, and now suddenly the semester is over and we're on top of another hill, looking back at our original location and the journey, and also looking across at the other hill, our original destination, and thinking how foreign it now seems, and how exciting it is to be on a completely different hill.

Here's what happened:

My husband quit his job back in August. It was a scary decision, but for us it was necessary. He was working more than sixty hours every week at a position that exhausted him, and I felt like we had no family life anymore. We prayed about what to do, and as we prayed, I got the opportunity to teach five classes between the university and the community college. Teaching five classes would make up for the lost income, though not completely. We would have to live on a much tighter budget, and Ian would probably have to pick up a part-time job eventually to make ends meet.

As we prayed about it, we felt like it was worth it. I've always loved teaching; Ian would get to see the girls more than an hour at the end of every day; I wouldn't feel so isolated and lonely being at home with two little kids. So... we took the plunge.

This was not a long-term plan; as a part-time instructor, it's rare to get more than two or three courses, so teaching a full-time college load was a short-term fix. In my mind, Ian would find a different job, go back to working full-time after a few months, and I would go back to teaching college part-time for the new few years until our girls were old enough to go to school. For now, we were making ends meet, week by week, but still unsure of what our future would hold.

And then we were re-routed.

I have long thought that I would go back to school and take classes to become a certified teacher. I can teach college-level courses part-time with an M.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures, but I can't teach middle or high school. But it didn't make sense to go back to school while my girls were little, I thought. The biggest obstacle, in my mind, was student teaching. Student teaching is basically where you pay the university for several credits and you work with an established teacher, slowly taking over their classroom under their guidance and later on giving it back to them. Basically, it's an expensive, unpaid, full-time internship.

Hence my plan to do this once my girls were older.

But, a day or two after I wrote about life's unpredictability, I got a message from a friend who teaches at a high school here in town. They had a half-time position open, and would I be interested? Initially I said no, as I had no teaching license and the time of the position conflicted with my university class.

But it stuck in my mind. I couldn't shake the idea; I wanted to take the job. I kept thinking that this was what I wanted to be doing eventually anyway, and perhaps if I took this job, I would have a foot in the door and an ability to keep the half-time position. Then, when I was ready to do my student teaching, I could complete it as a long-term substitute and actually get paid for it. So I started praying for guidance, keeping in mind my ultimate lack of control and God's good control over everything in my life. I also asked some friends to pray for our family. I hadn't planned to go back to school yet, and working so many hours on a long-term basis was scary to me. What if I missed my daughters too much? How would this mesh with any job Ian might get?

To shorten up a very long story, here's what happened next:

I talked to my supervisor at the university, who supported my desire to switch to the school district. I talked to my friend and found out that they were dissatisfied with their current long-term substitute, so I took the necessary steps to renew my teaching license. If I was going to use this job for a paid internship, I would need to complete go back to school to do all the classes required before the internship. Thus, I applied to a licensure program through the College of Education.

It seems so simple when I summarize it. But there were lots of steps, lots of tasks and paperwork to do while my kids were napping and after they went to bed. It took a lot of prayer; some of the decisions had to be made very quickly, and figuring out which one was right wasn't always easy. Our circumstance of simply needing the income helped me make many of the decisions. The entire process took about two and a half months total, during which I kept working at the university and community college as I prepared to transition to teaching at the high school level and taking classes myself.

In the meantime, after I had applied to the College of Ed and committed to teaching high school once my license came through, Ian and I had been praying about his future job. He knew he needed to work more, but didn't feel like God wanted him to look for work elsewhere. Two months of being home with the girls had strengthened their relationship with him. They no longer constantly preferred me for everything or relied only on me for their needs. Kaitlyn has always been a mommy's girl, and for the first time ever she would ask for Daddy as well as (and sometimes instead of!) Mommy. So we prayed that he would be able to work forty hours a week with his company instead of the sixty plus. After praying for a couple weeks, his boss asked him to draw up a forty-hour-per-week job proposal and schedule, which he did, and which the company accepted.

So... next year is looking really different from what I anticipated. Ian will be working full-time and I'll be working about twenty-five or thirty hours a week at the high school and community college and going to school as well. This isn't what I thought my life as a wife and mom was going to look like. I didn't know if my girls could thrive in this life situation. And the thing is, we are thriving as a family. (I am hoping the thriving-family feeling will continue once I'm in the middle of education classes.) God knows exactly what we need and has been providing for us, adjusting circumstances to lead us to places we wouldn't have dared go otherwise.

It's exciting to see how we ended up in a place completely different from what we had expected. God has surprised both of us with where He has led us in life. It's not where I thought we would end up, but I am very content that we are here.

The Reality of the Unpredictable Life

Last year, my husband lost his job. I wasn't scared that anything really bad would happen to us; we are thankful to have loving family close by, so there was never any danger of us living on the streets or our girls going hungry or anything like that.

But it was still hard, and for me, the hardest thing was feeling like life was floating aimlessly. I like to have goals and plans. I like Next Steps. I like to know the main things that are going to happen tomorrow and next week. But for the first time in a long time, I felt like my life was disconnected and lost. We were a tiny adrift-at-sea family, seeing possible landing places off in the distance here and there, but not knowing where we could end up.

We had so many questions: Where would he find a job? Would we need to move to reduce our expenses, and how soon, and to what type of housing? Should we move in with our parents in case our lack of income turned from short-term to long-term? Should I work, and should it be full-time or part-time? Where should we go to church?

These basic, practical questions entailed other questions and decisions that might have to be made at some point, but that we were not able to make at the time. Some of these were of a more philosophical nature. If we lived with our parents, how disruptive would that be to their privacy and ours? When was it going to be time to consider looking for a job out of state? What does it mean to be part of a church? How does the purpose of the Church work itself out in our culture? Are we a family that could flourish if the wife works full-time while the husband stays home with the kids? What, overall, should we be doing with our lives?

Everything felt completely unstable. It was impossible to anticipate the future more than one day ahead of time, because we had no way of knowing what the future would hold. For someone like me, who spends all day anticipating near and far-off future events, having to take things one day at a time was torture. I like to plan things based on long-term schedules. But nothing could be planned long-term, because everything that usually makes me feel stable was up in the air. Every day was looking, connecting, contacting, applying, waiting.

As I pondered things, I realized that in some ways, I was living closer to Reality than ever before.

We NEVER know what the future will hold. Yes, sometimes change slows down for a bit. Our lives seem to be going a particular direction. We anticipate upcoming events that actually happen. We are confident in our assumptions and our plans are realized. We get comfortable believing that we can control and thus predict our future.

It's astounding, almost dizzying to me, to stop and meditate on the reality that life in this world is never as stable as we think. Without warning, you lose someone; plans are canceled or flipped upside down; something happens that makes you question beliefs that you always held certain. You're forced to re-evaluate your assumptions and find your security elsewhere. Your tomorrow is not any more certain when you're planning and acting than when you're applying and waiting.

The security that comes from seemingly stable circumstances is an illusion. To a certain extent, we can control some aspects of our life. But our control is never ultimate. And for me, living in a reality where all the things beyond my control were so obvious, so present, so everyday, left me feeling helpless and frustrated and, because I didn't have a metaphorical hold on anything... scared.

I wish I could say that I got to a point where I was okay with it, where I accepted that God's love for me was the ONLY thing I could count on, ever, and learned to be content in it. I definitely came to a point where I accepted it mentally. But letting my heart rest in it was a different story. It was a struggle every day. And now, my husband and I find ourselves in a similar place, where we are having to make decisions for our family, and yet there are many factors beyond our control. And once again, I'm reminded that the only thing I can count on being the same tomorrow is God's love for me. Though I still feel restless, it's not quite as bad as it was last summer. I can remind myself of how He will always love me and never leave me, and how I've always had everything I needed from Him, and that helps the truth of my real Source of security sink into my heart a little bit more.

And even this, I think, is an evidence of God's grace and love for me. When a truth is difficult to accept all at once, He often gives me reprieve, bringing it back into my consciousness over and over, in a circular way, guiding me gently to rest in Him.

Taking it one day at a time and not holding on too tightly to your plans, trusting that God is in control, living out the steps that He has already given you (even if for a time that step is simply, "Wait"), is all you can do, whether or not your housing/job/family or any other situation seems secure. Nothing is predictable; we are in no way guaranteed control, happiness, stability, security, or anything else in this world. The only thing we are guaranteed is that if we trust in Him, He will be with us, and He will be enough.

"Advice" for New Moms

I have several friends who are pregnant or who just had babies, so I wanted to write something to encourage them. This is partly because some asked for advice about specific issues, and partly because when you become a mom, tips and tricks from other moms can be so helpful as you start navigating a new relationship with a tiny human who can't communicate by talking and who is utterly dependent on you.

So, I started thinking about what kind of advice would be helpful. It soon became clear that this was difficult to determine, because sometimes, as a new parent, you just want someone to tell you what you should do. At the same time, there is nothing more annoying than people who freely tell you what to do when you haven't asked. There are so many exceptions to every pattern, and so many different types of parents and kids.

I started thinking about the best advice I'd ever been given as a parent, which turned out to be "Take care of yourself" more than anything about my kids. (Obviously, this applies to pursuing spiritual wholeness and caring for my physical needs AS WELL AS the needs of my children, not at the expense of my children. Phrased another way, my children should not be the center of my universe any more than I should be the center of my universe.)

And I remembered an interesting thing that happened a while ago. A friend asked, on Facebook, for advice regarding a specific issue with her newborn. The people who were most anxious to speak up and give her advice were parents like me: young and relatively inexperienced, with one or two or three small children. The older parents had little to no advice to offer. They simply offered encouragement and prayers for the new mom.

I began to realize that all the parenting posts I read are written by people who have just a few more years of experience than I do. Of course, this is partly generational, but I started wondering, where are the parenting blogs written by people whose kids are in their forties? (I'm actually asking this question, so if you know of any, feel free to let me know!) So many of the blogs that offer advice and solutions are written by people whose kids haven't grown up yet. And simple, long-term observation will show you that you can't judge by someone's child at two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen, or even eighteen, what that child will be like as an adult. Observation will also show you that some responsible, kind people have irresponsible, terrible kids, and vice versa.

So I want to know, what advice comes from parents with grown children? It seems like the best people to offer parenting advice are those whose kids are already living their adult lives. It seems like those people would really have some insights on what to do or not to do, if parenting were a formula where you could put a certain parenting style in to get certain types of children out.

But older, wiser, experienced parents do not have many answers. They may give occasional advice, they offer encouragement, they offer community because they can relate. When you tell a mom whose kids are grown and gone about how fun and precious your children are, she can relate. She'll tell you how wonderful these years are and how quickly they go by, how you blink and suddenly your children have aged two, five, ten years. When you talk about how hard it is, how some days you wonder if you're actually going crazy or if you'll ever sleep again, and how sometimes being a mommy is the loneliest job in the world even though you're with people all day, the older mom knows. She sympathizes; she makes you feel like it's okay to be weak because she tells you that having small children is hard, and she reminds you that someday it will be over.

When you want to know what you should do, when you ask for advice, these older moms may offer practical suggestions, but at the same time they will say something along these lines: You just have to figure out what works for your family. Try different techniques. Every child is different. You're doing a good job. Trust your instincts about your child. Pray a lot, and remember that God is in control and He loves you. Or sometimes, older parents will say that they don't have any advice at all, but that they will pray for you. They do not offer solutions, in the way that we like to look for an X-step solution for every problem.

I came to the conclusion that being a good parent takes a lot of prayer and reflection, but there are very few one-size-fits-all solutions. My guess is that if you're the kind of person who is reading mommy blogs and worrying about whether or not you're doing a good job, you probably are doing a good job. The moms who are clearly NOT doing a good job, whose kids are candidates for state removal, are probably not reading the latest research about how to stimulate their kids' brains or wondering which type of discipline is most loving AND effective at curbing children's natural selfishness.

All that to say... I don't actually have any advice for new moms.

No, wait, that's not quite true (hope I don't look like a hypocrite now!). Here we go:

1) Take care of yourself as well as your kids.

2) Find other moms to talk to, ones in your stage who can rejoice and commiserate and offer tips and tricks because they're in the middle of it, and ones who are older and have the wisdom, peace, and perspective that come from life experience and time spent with Jesus.

That's all.

Life Update

Okay, it's been several months since I posted. I kept thinking to myself, "I need to blog," and not doing it, and feeling bad for not doing it. Finally I got to the point where I realized that I was actually too busy to blog and needed to not attempt to post anything again until July when I would be done teaching my summer course.

So, now we're in July, and here I am. Before I write about anything else, I thought a quick life update about the last few months was in order.

Since the last time I blogged in February, a variety of things took up most of my time:

1) Moving. 
Moving was the big one. Let's just say that I never want to move again. This dream is not realistic, since we are renting now but would like to buy a home eventually, but even the thought of moving again makes me exhausted. There's something about packing up everything you own that makes you realize that you own way too much stuff. There's something about unpacking everything you own that tempts you to just throw away about half of it, except you think to yourself, "I really should give away or sell what I can... someone is bound to want a rocking chair or dresser or baby girls' clothes, and eventually I may need these anti-diahrreal pills or more than two shirts." So you can't just throw it all away. I know, First World Problems. "I just hate it when I have an abundance of everything I could ever want or need."

Compounding the annoyance of putting All The Stuff away is the fact that I have no organizational skills and a hard time making decisions. (I think these two weaknesses are part of a vicious cycle for me.) When I'm not sure where the best place to store something is, or what the best way to organize a variety of items is, I just don't do it at all. If I'm honest, I'm kind of hoping a solution will just appear in my mind (it has happened before), or that Ian will get tired of the mess before I do and handle it. But then I eventually feel trapped in chaos when there are no cleared horizontal spaces. This chaotic feeling makes it even harder for me to make decisions.

This need to spend a lot of time doing what I like least and am least talented at is part of why I didn't have time to blog.

2) Working.
Ian's job had him working almost sixty hours every week. It's crazy when your husband is gone before the kids get up (and our kids are EARLY risers) and comes home basically one hour before bath and bedtime. I have a whole new level of respect for single parents. I really don't know how they do it.

On top of this, I was also working, teaching two classes at the community college here. Originally, I had lined up a babysitter to watch the girls an extra two hours a week beyond their time with my parents, but that fell through toward the beginning of the semester, and since there wasn't that much to grade yet, I never got a replacement. Thus, instead of blogging during nap times or after bedtime, I was grading or answering e-mails. These things take up more time than you would think, especially when one class is online and so homework and emails are the only available communication you have with students.

3) Small Children Thrown Off Their Schedules.
With our move, Alexandra and Kaitlyn started sharing a bedroom. They're both pretty good about taking naps, but the first two weeks when we lived in our new place, they did not nap. I think the change in place was a big part of it, but it took me several days to figure out that they simply could not take naps in the same room. Alexandra likes to sing herself to sleep, which would keep Kaitlyn up; when Kaitlyn talks to herself, Alexandra comes out to complain about it. We've had many instances of the following conversation:

Me: "Alexandra, what are you doing out of bed?"

Alexandra: "Kaitlyn's talking and keeping me awake."

Kaitlyn from the bedroom: "Ma-ma! A-je-jan-ja!"

Alexandra: "See?"

Thankfully, we were able to borrow my parents' Pack N Play, so when the girls each had their own room for naps, nap time started happening again regularly.

Of course, I don't have to explain to anyone who's had small children how sacred nap time is. It's a break, a time to rest and recover, a time to not be one-hundred-percent at the disposal of somebody else. And not only does nap time give a parent a small time to recover, nap time also (at least in our household) makes the evening much more pleasant, because the small children are rested and happy instead of tired and cranky. So in the two weeks without nap time, surrounded by stuff that wasn't put away and on my own for twelve hours a day, I became very exhausted and discouraged. I needed to spend any free time I had resting and not blogging.

But now, stuff is put away, our house is (mostly) organized, the kids are taking naps again, and my spring and summer courses are over. Let the blogging recommence!

What Love Looks Like When You Don't Celebrate Valentine's Day

Ian and I haven't really celebrated Valentine's Day the last couple years. I am usually down for any kind of celebration, and I remember wondering a few years ago why someone wouldn't want to celebrate Valentine's Day. I didn't want to become an old, married, unromantic couple. However, since we've had kids, things have changed. Valentine's Day just seems... unnecessary. A stereotypical Valentine's Day has little to do with the way our love has deepened.

Now, Valentine's Day IS special for us because it's an anniversary. It was Valentine's Day nine years ago when Ian left a single red rose and a Valentine's Day card (unsigned) on my car windshield. I discovered the gifts when I went outside to my parents' driveway to leave for sociolinguistics class. There were, in my mind, two guys who might have left the rose for me, and Ian was one. I really hoped it was him. I really hoped it wasn't the other guy.

Even though he was part of the group that had dinner later at In-N-Out and then went to see Hitch at the theater, I was afraid to ask him about it and be disappointed, so I didn't find out who it was for a few days. However, that was the start of being more than just friends, so Valentine's Day is special to me in that way. That memory lights up my soul. But last year, I was the one who suggested not celebrating in the traditional ways, because at this stage of our relationship, cards, flowers, chocolates, jewelry, or other gifts on a specific date of the year are not the primary ways that I feel love from him.

Nowadays, I know he loves me because he works sixty hours a week to support our family.

Nowadays, the four dollars I spend on a mocha when he stays home with the girls to give me time alone at the coffee shop means more than four dollars for a fancy card (although I do love the sweet things he writes on cards).

Nowadays, I'd rather he buy organic berries for our daughters than a box of chocolates for me.

Nowadays, I'd rather have a date night with him than jewelry or other gifts. I'd rather sit on our living room floor after the girls go to bed, eating cheese and drinking wine, than get earrings or necklaces or bracelets.

Nowadays, he says "I love you" by straightening up the house rather than by bringing home flowers, even though after working those sixty hours, the flowers would be a lot easier.

Our culture's view of romance promotes the idea that if you love someone, you will spend a lot of money on them and do out-of-the-ordinary things for them (and little special things aren't enough; the grander the romantic gesture, the more romantic it's thought to be). Many brag about husbands who bring home flowers every month, while not many brag about a husband who washes the dishes every evening. And I guess last year, we just decided that the time and money spent on a traditional Valentine's Day celebration wouldn't make either of us feel more loved.

I'm not saying there's necessarily anything wrong with celebrating a relationship according to stereotypical Valentine's rituals. Ian is surprisingly romantic, and I do appreciate that he brings me roses occasionally and gives me free jewelry that he gets from the store where he bought my engagement ring. (That may sound unromantic, but if you know how cheap I am, you know there's nothing I like more than a nice gift he didn't spend money on.) But all in all, the sacrifices he makes and his everyday love and patience mean more than Valentine's Day gifts.

He did give me a card this year, which was a total surprise (and definitely welcome). Maybe someday we'll go back to our traditional celebrations, but for now, I'm actually very content being that old, married, "unromantic" couple that doesn't celebrate, because nowadays, I've got a different view of romance.

Living the Dream: Baking Edition

Sometimes your dreams come true and you don't even realize at first what's going on, because real life looks different from your dream and takes more patience. (This is surprising and a little disconcerting when you never realized before having kids how impatient you actually were.)

I love baking, and growing up I always thought that if I had a daughter, one of the most fun things I could do would be to teach her how to bake. I guess I pictured that maybe she would be about six or seven years old, and we would talk about cups, teaspoons, and tablespoons, and she would measure out flour, sugar, salt, molasses, cinnamon, etc., and I would show her how to use my KitchenAid mixer and the finer points of each of its attachments. It was always very formal in my mind. I don't know why; maybe it's because I'm an idealist, and experiences are always wrapped up in nice, neat, perfect packages in my imagination.

About a month ago (three and a half years earlier than in my mind), Alexandra decided she wanted to help me in the kitchen. And I realized that teaching her, passing on life skills, probably wasn't going to be about formal teaching much of the time. It was going to be about spending time with her and enjoying letting her do things with me. (The enjoyment is important, because who wants to work/learn with a cranky, impatient parent?)

Baking with Alexandra is slow. It's slow because I have to drag a chair over to let her stand on to wash her hands, and also to work at the counter. It's slow because she can't measure things out yet; I measure ingredients and let her dump them in the bowl. If it's a liquid ingredient, I usually have to help her pour it in, either because it's heavy enough that she can't quite lift it on her own, or because she doesn't yet know how to pour liquid at a speed where it won't just dribble down its original container or splash out of the bowl and make a huge mess. It's slow because I have to watch her carefully and correct some of the things she wants to do ("No, we can't put the mixed dry ingredients back in the sugar bag." "We only need to crack two eggs, not three." "No, we shouldn't shake all the milk off the whisk when we're done using it."). It's slow because since she's only two-and-a-half years old, I don't let her use the sharp utensils and I need to make sure she's paying attention and not going to fall off the chair. And even though she can recite all the dangers of a hot stove-top to me, of course I watch her like a hawk when she's stirring a simmering pot.

Also I don't like cleaning up large messes. So it's slow because I'm trying to help her learn to be neat along the way... Just being honest.

But last night, we made cinnamon-raisin bread together. We went slowly, and I gave her many little tasks that she could handle on her own, and helped her with other tasks that took a little more finesse. I didn't worry about how slow we were going and how there was going to be more of mess than usual to clean up at the end. My little girl wanted to help me bake, and as we worked together, I realized that I was living my dream: Bit by bit, just by being myself and her being herself and letting her help me in any way she can, I am passing on life skills to my child.

And probably the most rewarding thing was when we were done and she was in bed, Ian said to me, "You should have seen her face. She was so happy to be helping Mommy make cinnamon-raisin bread."

I hadn't been looking at her face, because I was watching her hands and the recipe and my own hands. But that comment, added to the obvious pride she felt this morning when we pulled the bread out of the oven and she ate a breakfast that she helped make with her own two hands, confirmed that whenever it's possible, I should most definitely slow down and let my little girl help me.