Staying In-Season

It all started when I was old enough to understand the concept of prayer. I was living this love-filled, carefree childhood. I didn’t know what a gift that was. Yet as I emerged from my toddler years, I noticed other families had more than one child and it became my nightly prayer that I would have a little sister. For years, while my mom experienced ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages (unbeknownst to me), I prayed faithfully for a little sister. I thought everything would be better with one. And then one day, towards the end my seventh year, my parents called me into our living room, sat me down and joyfully announced that we would be adding a member to our family come January. My response wasn’t quite as exuberant as they had envisioned...and after I went to my room and thought about having to share the attention, share the workload and miss out staying out later with my parents at parties and such, I came back in and informed them I had changed my mind. I was happy with the way things were. They could give the baby to someone else after it's delivery.

Yet when she came, I was smitten. I didn’t know that her birth was also an answer to my mother’s prayers after years of repeated losses. Two years after that, another sister came along and I had two little sidekicks who found themselves under the reign of a big sister who was at the cusp of adolescence. Lucky little girls, they were given front row seat to my teenage angst and all the drama that comes of a young girl pining to be in the “cool” crowd on the arm of a hot boyfriend. It may be very hard to understand how I none of this came easily ...ok, came AT ALL for me. Apparently, there were a shortage of guys looking to run their fingers through a helmet of hair encrusted with Rave {Level 5}.

As I moved into my twenties, my teenage angst was replaced with deep longing. I remember the lonely feeling as I had not gone to a four year college, but worked my way up to a decent job in Human Resources...and all my old high school friends had moved on and were living fun and adventurous lives (in my mind's eye, anyway). The suggestion of going to a singles class at any given church was, quite honestly, depressing. In those days, being a single woman walking into a singles class was akin to a meaty angus steak walking into a room of shriveled hot dogs. Again, may not have always been the case, but that was my feeling on it.  I remember sitting in my cubicle -when I wasn’t holding flowers delivered by my sweet cousin- wistfully staring out the corporate office window, dreaming up scenes of a domestic future that seemed only part of mine by a sheer miracle. I pictured standing at my sunny kitchen window, pulling aside the yellow and white gingham curtains to watch my children playing contentedly under the old Oak tree in the backyard...one child reading Little House books and another lazily moving to and fro on tire swing hanging from it’s sturdy boughs. Deep in fantasyland I would hear my boss coming, and I’d quick snap out of my daydream to swivel my chair back into a reality I was wishing away. Life would be so much more meaningful if I’d ever find a good man to share it with. When my boss would walk away, I’d resume recreating scenes out my office window.

As it turns out, miracles happen….and even though he did not meet all the 345 qualifications of my hand-written “Dream Husband” list composed and revised several times since age 18), he met the qualifications I didn’t even know I needed. He also came with a bonus---his (then) young son, Rick. The engagement filled with several very hard things, including a debilitating concussion that caused him to “forget” we were getting married. It was certainly not not allow for the rosy "falling in love" story my imagination had written out for me.  Six weeks after we were married, I discovered I was pregnant, but by way of debilitating pain that led to an ectopic pregnancy. A few weeks after laparoscopic surgery, I took another pregnancy test and was thrilled to see a positive sign. At twenty weeks, we went in for our ultrasound, excited to see the progress inside my growing belly. We left in shock. There was no progress, only the prospect of loss of life. Our daughter Hope was born, still, at 26 weeks. That is an entire other story which I have shared on my blog. A few months after this huge life event, I got pregnant and miscarried again and this time I thought “Ok, then. I guess I am not meant to  be a mom.” I grieved and threw away each and every baby shower invitation I was sent. The domestic dream scene  I had envisioned was not coming true.

And then came the "big bang". Within a three year time span in which I was perpetually pregnant, we had five babies crawling around.  In a surprising twist to our lives, we had four perfectly normal pregnancies, one of which delivered us twin boys. Those years of baby and toddlerdom are now  but a blur, but I know they happened because of the amazing (and amazingly loud!) posse I have living under our roof. This brings me to last week, when I was standing at my kitchen window, sipping lukewarm coffe. There are no yellow and white gingham curtains, but we do have a tire swing hanging off the boughs of big old oak tree. I stood there watching my tenacious middle child giving the swing one.last.twist as my youngest and least risk-taking child sat perched in the center of the tire precariously high off the ground. Before I could call out, she let go. I witnessed as centrifugal force carried my son's body perpendicular to the ground, legs straight out and his little hands holding onto the tire for dear life. Piercing screams of terror ricocheting off the window and the sight of the ride operator doubled over in hysterical laughter. I slapped my coffee cup on the counter, running out the back door like a (truly) mad woman and yelling "WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU??" to the one heaving with laughter as I scooped up my shaking son who was likely seeing stars. This brand of experience is standard fare here at our home and my tattered nerves are proof of it.

This was NOT what I had envisioned, and quite honestly and embarrassingly, as good as I have it, I am finding it very hard to really THRIVE in this season of motherhood. I thought I would be there by now, at the place where survival portion of parenthood  is done and now it’s thriving as I gently teach and instruct and seek one on one time with my children. Not happening. As I’ve been writing these last two paragraphs, there were multiple interruptions, several of which were temper tantrums, children coming to me with repeated offenses even though they know I will most likely tell them to go work it out themselves and for the umpteenth time I thought to myself “How am I going to survive this summer?!”. Technically, I’m confident we will. It will get hairy at many times, but I’ve come to know my limitations and our family dynamics enough to loosely have a “game plan”. But even if I have a flawless game plan, disciplined follow through and bathed myself in vats lavender daily to de-compress my stress, the results would be short lived and I would go back to the pattern I’ve been in for as long as I could pray.

Lisa Yancy is a friend who has inspired me as a woman and as a mom ever since we met through the friendship of her son and my stepson. There are  times I’ll see her Facebook pictures with all her cool, college-aged children, or hear that she’s running a marathon and think “Wow. I can’t wait until my children are old enough that if I would have have the desire to put my body into a state of shock and start running, I could simply go!” And yet, she has said that during her difficult moments, it is easy to look back with rose colored glasses and wish for the times she had greater control of the lives living under her roof and she is mourning that too soon, they will all be out from under their roof for good. 

As you can see, I've always been very good at struggling to stay in the season I am in. God is has been a kind and gentle teacher for me, a slow learner. The practices needed to replace this unhealthy tendency are quite simple, and require no new books, programs or coaches. First, there needs to be continual ceasing.

…Cease looking back and pining for the days when I had the freedom to go and do (at any given moment!).

….Cease looking towards the future before it gets here (and for me, it’s this coming fall, when all my little ducklings will waddle off to the school down our street.)

...Cease trying to jump before or in front of the season I am in. Everything I need for the moment I am in is available in unique ways. I won’t find it someday, it’s here now.

It is not enough, however to cease.

The best chance not simply surviving, but also to thriving, begins and ends in abiding.

John 15: 4 reads:

Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me.

The word “abide” in the Greek dictionary means to stay (in a given place, state, relation, or expectancy. To abide is to continue, dwell, endure, be present, remain and stand).

Let’s discuss grape vines for a quick minute.

We have a small grape arbor on the side of our house. Every year I watch as the interwoven, straggly branches come to life, cascading down so far that this morning I walked out to our van and had one of it’s curly ends snag my hair. In spring, tiny buds gradually begin to appear, powered by the carbohydrates found in the roots and within the branches. Photosynthesis does it’s thing and within four weeks, the shoots are growing at about 1 inch per day. "About 80 days after bud break the process of flowering begins with small flower clusters appearing on the tips of the young shoots looking like buttons.A few weeks after the initial clusters appear, the flowers start to grow in size with individual flowers becoming observable.It is during this stage of flowering that the pollination and fertilization of the grapevine takes place with the resulting product being a grape berry, containing 1-4 seeds.

Following the harvest, the vines continues the process of photosynthesis, creating carbohydrate reserves to store in the vine's roots and trunks. It will continue doing this until an appropriate level of reserves have been stored. At that point the chlorophyll in the leaves begin to break down and the leaves change color from green to yellow. Following the first frost the leaves begin to fall as the vine starts to enter its winter dormancy period. The following spring, the cycle begins again."

The reason I share these few highlights of each season in the life of a grapevine is to illuminate the importance of each individual  season...and how growth cannot be rushed...fruit can not be produced in any other season but summer, and when even when summer comes, ripening is not immediate. It takes time. The process cannot be reversed nor can it be rushed.

We are all approaching summer at various seasons in our lives. There may be those of you struggling with your singleness, feeling as though the few good men left are living in a tribe deep in the Amazon, making it very unlikely you'll meet over steaming lattes at the coffee shop. Perhaps you are married, and you watch as young girls carry around their babies on their hip like a sak of potatoes, seemingly taking for granted a miracle that elude you and your husband month after month and after month...and you long for the day in which your body can carry your dream that feels so distant. Perhaps you are in a very difficult financial situation, making vacations that so many others seem to take as a summer given, a distant dream.  Maybe you’re like me, and you look at yourself, with all your weaknesses and wonder how and when the “joyful spirit” you so long to have will settle in over your home amidst life with “spirited” children. The truth is, we ALL have moments when we pine for aspects of the past or long to jump to a future season of our imagining. The truth ALSO is, that once we get to that "next" season, it rarely looks like the one we projected.

LIVING OUT OF SEASON makes it impossible to abide...and absorb. It not only takes up valuable energy needed for the present, it stunts the growth of the fruit God intends to develop in THIS specific.

I invite you to join me in imploring our true Vine, the one from whom joy, contentment, peace and acceptance comes, to show us individually ways to discipline our minds and rest our hearts so that we can better abide and stay in-season.