Browsing Category: Marriage

Ten Years in the Making

It has been a year! A decade even.

We started 2010 with the birth of our first child a month before…four years of waiting and wondering if anything we were putting ourselves through would result in being parents.

Ten years later…we have 5 kids. Didn’t see that one coming! Whenever anyone asked about how many children we would have (WHY DO PEOPLE ASK THOSE QUESTIONS?!) my response was “we will take them one at a time” *face palm* We know how that one turned out.

Ten years ago I was a VERY different person.

How could I have NOT changed in the past decade?! No matter what as time marches on things happen and we change with them. In all honesty, I don’t remember much of the past ten years, they’ve all blurred together in a wash, rinse, repeat cycle of babies and bills

I don’t remember what I was even like ten years ago. I was, in some ways still very full of hope and optimism for everything, despite having realized how hard life can hit us and how much it can hurt (hello…infertility and a husband that was sidelined for two years due to severe back pain, and then back surgery).

I still didn’t know what our family would look like, and didn’t really dare to dream. I still saw homeschooling in our future, and definitely not public school. Matthew was still working for my parents and there was nothing in our minds as to that ending.

If anything I have realized the importance of being able to stand on my own two feet. In someways I have become jaded and hardened about the world, and I don’t think of that as a bad thing. I have realized that while I want friends and family around me,  I need to be able to distance myself and do what needs to be done for myself, and not in a selfish way.

I have seen too much to be content to sit with my blinders on, unaware of what is going on around me. I have seen too many families pulled apart, women left scrabbling to provide for their children, too many women sacrificing themselves and who God created them to be, for the idealization of some image as a wife and mother.

For myself, I have made it a priority to grow, to distance myself from the relationships, ideas, and things that are harming me. It isn’t easy: People especially don’t like it when you refuse to play their game by their rules, and there have been a lot of players in my life.

What does the decade of 2020 look like for me?

I have not a clue. The past year has taught me that. I’m sure some would advise that I “vision cast” and write my “5 Year Plan”, but I can’t. All I can do is move forward on whatever path I choose at that moment.

Maybe I’ll finish my Master’s, maybe I won’t. Maybe we’ll move a few towns or states away, maybe we’ll stay right where we are. Maybe I’ll be working full time as a librarian, maybe I’ll be homeschooling a handful of my kids. 

Whatever pathway I’m on I can promise you this; there will be books, there will be quilts, there will be food, there will be my children growing up and out, there will be traveling, there will be making and meeting new {online} friends. There will be struggle, and heartache, and tears, but there will also be growth, and joy, and love.

In 10 years I will be almost 50…I can’t wrap my head around that.

For now though, I wish you all a wonderful New Year, and I will see you in 2020.

Life Happens – Where I’ve Been for the Past Year or So

I know I kind of fell off the face of the earth for the past, umm year, is it? It’s been a while since I posted anything of any substance, anywhere, longer since I posted anything about my family. I still have drafts I wrote last Summer that I have every intention of publishing…someday. In all honesty, life has been a bit of a struggle for me, the past few months, the past year.

I read something about stress-levels post multiples and how post-partum depression hits later than with singletons. I don’t know if 6 years later is feasible or not. Maybe it is. At just the time they say it hits (2-3 years of age), we had Peter, which didn’t give me the chance to breath…life marched on. There was no time to feel “depressed”.

There’s still no time, but it’s there. The tired, the not caring, the overwhelmed. 

And this is where I always freeze up when it comes to sharing, because no one knows how or wants to admit that they don’t really like themselves or their life sometimes. At least I don’t. And there’s another part that if you are liking who you are becoming or what you are doing, there’s a problem with that too.

I love my husband. I love my kids. I love our home. Sometimes it’s all too much though, too much noise, too much stuff, too many personalities, too many to-dos. And all the too much means there’s not enough of other things…quiet, clean, brain power, focus, clarity.

My mind gets swept along the raging river, bashing into rocks and being sucked under the waves. Sometimes, I’m able to keep my head up, manage to keep afloat amidst the debris, and other times I’m sucked into one of those underwater crevices of a rock and the panic sets in.

They tell me that this is normal, that it’s just “motherhood”. Then why do I feel so alone, despite opening up to others, that no one really is drowning in this as much as I am. I don’t honestly think I’m failing at this, I think I’m doing a pretty darn OK job at mothering these 5, but why does it feel like I’m the only mom that wants to walk away from it, from them?

Last summer my book club read “The Awakening”, and most of the responses of the other moms was how could she leave her children, that she was so selfish for all she was doing…and all I could think was how I “got” what she felt. She would do anything for her children, except kill her “self”.

I’m sure there are many Christian moms that would read this, clutching their pearls, at the very thought of not dying to self, of not living solely for their children. I’m sorry, I can’t, and I don’t honestly think that God wants me to become a shell of a woman for the sake of my children. I don’t for one minute believe that I am supposed to entirely relinquish my interests, identity, or any part of me for my role as a mother.

That said, it’s finding my self, finding the time to remember who I was before any of this, that feels impossible. The part that makes it so impossible is that I’ve always lived for someone else and what they expected of me, so it’s not just FINDING my self, but actually LEARNING who I am, and in that there is a struggle.

When you start figuring out who you are, what your interests are, who you want to be, you have a tendency to piss off people, to disappoint people. You become no longer willing to just make every one else happy, to be a doormat. Suddenly, there’s a whole other part of you. Your interests and opinions and feelings don’t line up with what people expect you to do and be. And that can be a very hard place to be.

It’s very often pointed out that the marriage/husband should be the focus of a family, because after the children are long gone, that will still exist…and it’s true. Your children are your’s for a season, your husband will be your’s until death do you part (baring anything else). But here’s the thing, YOU will be you until forever.

What happens when a spouse dies? You’ve lived your entire life for that person only to not know how to function when they’re gone. I don’t want to do that either. I don’t want to curl up in a ball and not be able to live if something were to happen to my husband, and I know he wouldn’t want that for me, just as I wouldn’t want that for him, no matter how old we were.

Now that I’ve taken this whole big thing to explain what my mental state has been for the past year. I have been in a constant struggle between taking care of my children and husband and taking care of myself. I don’t have an answer on how to manage it. I don’t have a solution.

Sometimes I feel like me. Sometimes I don’t want to get out of bed (I d0 anyways). I’m not sure that there is a way to find a balance between the two, because as soon as I feel like me, I’m hear that I’m failing my family. It’s lovely really *note sarcasm*.

I think the hardest part of my writing and being active on social media, is that I don’t want to be open with certain people in my life. I honestly don’t want to share my struggles with nosy relatives, the neighbors who are just going to gossip, but I don’t know how to cut those ties without insulting someone. So I shut myself up instead. At the time it seems easier.

That said, I am seriously considering going private again as a blogger, because I know I need this space. There are a lot of things that I want to mull over and share and process here, and hopefully in the near future I will be sharing more about things that are going on in my life.