Little Victories: #2

Victory #2: “Let no sin have dominion over me.”

We moved a little over a year ago. Ian was working sixty hours every week, and I was teaching a couple classes at the community college, and our girls were one and three years old. I thought the girls would have trouble transitioning to a different bedroom and household, yet for the most part they did fairly well.

I did not.

Ian was working so many hours that it was a struggle to get things unpacked and put away. He would help when he could, but I was home most of the time, managing the day-to-day stuff and caring for the kids and making decisions about where things should go. By nature, I am not a decisive person. It’s not that I can’t think of possibilities; it’s that I can think of several, all the time, for every decision, and I want to make the best one. Perfectionism is good for activities like editing. It is not good for household organization (at least when you’re not good at it).

So I made tons of decisions, in addition to all the little decisions made by me as a parent every day. The boxes and clutter in the apartment were driving me crazy. I was having a hard time, and was already frustrated by Ian working so many hours every day. And then… Alexandra got an attitude.

I’d heard it’s common for three-year-olds to test their parents; I was being consistently tested every day. She didn’t want to listen and obey; she didn’t want to be kind to her sister; she liked talking back to me and mocking me; she liked making huge messes and not helping to clean them up; she wouldn’t eat her food, which wouldn’t have been a big deal except that when she didn’t eat, she got even more grouchy and naughty afterwards. 

Also, looking back at my journals, I think that I was slightly depressed at the time and just didn’t realize it.

The combination of everything made me feel frazzled and harried all the time, and I started to lose my temper a lot. I would snap and yell at her, and though, by God’s grace, I’ve said very few things to my children that I regret, my tone and expression and my whole body, quivering with frustration, were terrible displays of how to handle anger.

It’s not that, in many cases, I didn’t have a right to be displeased with Alexandra’s attitude and behavior. She was genuinely being naughty. However, my response to it was completely inappropriate. I was out of control, angry every day, and throwing grown-up fits in front of my kids. Worse, I didn’t know how to stop. It’s true, I was feeling sorry for myself. But putting a halt to the pity party is easier when you have some time to regroup, to be away, to think and pray, and there was no time for that. I was too tired at night and I couldn’t get up early enough in the morning (my kids get up REALLY early). I would pray in the mornings that I would be patient that day, but somehow in the anger and frantic frustration of the moment, I would lose my temper again.

I think God helps lead us out of sin in different ways in different situations. Usually, when I think of conquering a specific sin, I think of prayer and self-control, of trying harder to be aware of what I’m doing. But this time, what God gave me was a verse.

I was reading in the Psalms one day and praying through my anger issues, and a particular verse stood out to me:

“Keep steady my steps according to your promise,

And let no iniquity get dominion over me.” —Psalm 119:133 (ESV)

Sometimes you are reading the Bible, and you really experience it as God’s living Word. That verse cut through all the circumstances and issues surrounding my anger and make me realize that although my sin had many effects, the deepest problem was that there was a particular sin, an emotion deep within, that was dominating me. I was unable to control my anger.

Anger in itself is not a sin, depending on why we are angry and how we handle it. In my case, the reason and the handling of it were sinful.

And here is where the gift of God lay, in that situation: God used His Word to help me defeat my sin. The verse that jumped out and cut right to my heart stuck in my mind for the next several days: “…let no iniquity get dominion over me.” More than just not wanting to yell at my kids in anger, I didn’t want any emotion to control my behavior. That verse got to the root of my issue and voiced a simple prayer. And I didn’t have to pray with more words or different words, and I didn’t have to exert superhuman levels of self-control. Those were not the solutions to my sin this time. Rather, throughout the day, every day, whether I was angry or not, that one verse echoed through my thoughts: “… let no iniquity get dominion over me.” It was a very spiritual experience, like His Word was communing with His Spirit inside me and they were working together to manage my actions. I honestly had to exert very little conscious self-control; it was like repeating the verse over and over renewed my mind and transformed my outward behavior, like it says in Romans. For that reason, referring to this as a "victory" seems inaccurate, unless I am referring to God's victory working in me.

I wish I would remember to do this more often, when I am facing challenges. While it’s good to pray and exert personal effort, to bring my struggles to God, it’s probably better to listen to what God has already told me in the Bible. If my actions come from my thoughts and my thoughts are dominated by my spiritual life, then letting God’s Word shape my spiritual life is probably the most important step of all to conquer sin.

And it’s not like I’ve lived a sin-free life ever since, or haven’t lost my temper here or there. But God helped me defeat that particular pattern of sinfulness that was taking over that season of my life, and, thank God, while I struggle with other things, that one hasn’t come around to dominate me since. 

Little Victories: #1

Victory #1: Figuring out who I am and what I’m meant to do. At least for one semester.

I went back to work full-time (okay, I worked part-time as a high school Spanish teacher, part-time as a college Spanish teacher, and went back to school as a full-time graduate student). My daughters were cared for by a combination of family and paid babysitters. It was tough. I had to be more disciplined with my time and perseverant than ever before, staying up late to do homework or finish grading even when I was tired; making the time at home with my husband and kids count even when I wanted to zone out and disengage. 

But I loved it. I love teaching Spanish; I love high school kids; I loved the mental challenge of taking classes and found the subject matter very interesting, even though, if I am honest, I did not find all the assignments to be meaningful or practical. 

Enjoying fulfilling days meant coming home happy. Having relatively little time with my daughters made me enjoy (almost) every minute of the time I did have with them. Truly being too busy to clean made me stop feeling guilty about how little I do it. If I am completely honest, I have always felt somewhat like a failure when it comes to household management. I did not finish my days exhausted and defeated, which is how I consistently felt when I was staying at home full time. (I want to write more about this later, because parenting is a challenge that seems infinitely deep and complex to me.)

But the biggest point I want to make now is that I quit comparing myself to other women. I absolutely believe that comparison is the thief of joy, as the quote goes; yet somehow its practical application has eluded me most of my life. After all, Scripture gives general principles about how we should live, but what do the specific details of living a life that honors Christ look like? Looking to others for ideas and inspiration seems like a natural place to start, but I could never keep myself from completely believing that just because someone else was doing something didn’t mean I should at least attempt to do it, or something similar.

That was the true blessing of this time: circumstances, prayer, and counsel had revealed a very specific path for me, different goals from any other woman I knew; a unique set of challenges for my life for the time being. 

I quit bemoaning the fact that I was not living up to their levels of cleanliness, organization, craftiness, success, homeschooling, child stimulation, wifely excellence, fashion or style, intelligence, drive, discipline skills, or creativity. Those were no longer my goals. For the first time in my life, I felt absolutely certain that I was living out who God made me to be—not what I thought other people would want me to be, or the idealized versions of Christian or secular womanhood. My life didn’t seem comparable to anyone’s, exactly, and that prevented me from comparing myself to others. 

But I knew I was doing what God wanted me to do, and I was working at it the best I could. It was so freeing. 

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.