My Journey through 2013: Spring Unsettling

When Spring came, the yard work began.  And just as the earth around us was being upturned and unsettled and resettled in other places in the yard, my heart did just that.

I longed for answers and schedules to answer my inward yearnings.  What was right for my children? for me?  Where were the boundaries to protect my priorities? The lines to draw us in to the warmth of the hearth?

As Katrina Kenison wrote:

"Whenever I find myself in conversation with other mothers, we always ask one another the same question: 'What's your schedule?' We want to know how other women manage, what they fight to protect, what they've decided to let go, where they draw the lines.  The stories we hear may not tell us how to rearrange our own lives, how to raise our own children, how to find fulfillment.  But they remind us that we do each have choices.  And they may even inspire us to examine the choices we have made.  Ultimately, we each have to decide where the balance lies--between work and family, between doing and being, between acquiring more and accepting what we have, between simplifying and taking on, between the world beyond our walls and the lives that we create within them.  And, at some point, we may begin to ask ourselves: Just whose standards am I living by anyway? Only when we stop long enough to figure out what we really care about, and begin to make choices accordingly, can we create lives that are authentic expressions of our inner selves."

I remember conversations with friends and family asking these very questions, and at the end of it all, I finally learned that I can never be something that I'm not.  But I can make a pretty good me.  I knew deep down, that all these years I had been trying to live up to other people's standards for what my life should look like and how I should raise my family.  Not that these standards were forced upon me, but rather, I enforced them upon myself.  I thought if I was to be a good mother, I must do everything that good mothers around me were doing or had done.  It led to many years of discontent and discouragement.  But Spring brought this new mothering heart for me and a longing to live authentically.  I knew that I will never be perfect, but someday, I hoped I could reach authenticity.

Finding my authentic self took months, and hasn't even completely materialized to this day, but in the Fall I progressed much farther on this path to creating my very own family culture.

During this Springtime growth in my heart, I also began feeling a bit trapped and helpless.  I felt the bare walls of my home close in around me like prison walls rather than offering the inviting "open space" they had only months before.  Our home was here, but our house was so far from being finished.

I felt the itch to decorate and make sense of my new world.  The snow was melting, and my heart was melting into a new dawn, a reawakening.  And I sensed something wondrous in the air.  Almost as if just around the corner, I would find a miracle.

But Spring was also a season of waiting with a profound lesson in patience.  With hours and hours of backbreaking labor on our part, and with the merciful help of our wonderful families and kind neighbors, our yard slowly progressed from a mountain of dirt and rocks, to a leveled-out clod pile, to a parking rock garden, to piles of raked dirt clods scattered everywhere, to bare dirt, to rock retaining walls, to trenched rows, to PVC pipe and blue-purple glue, to roughly covered up trenches with black funny pipe sticking up every few feet.  And this is where we still sit, but thankfully it's all covered up now with the winter snows and I can forget about the ugliness underneath.

Next Spring will be the finishing.  I can feel it.  Because last night I had a dream that I ran some errands for an hour and when I came back, I was given the most wonderful surprise of my life!  Patrick was standing there in our beautifully finished yard, complete with grass, trees, shrubs, flowers, rocks bordering my gardens, a fence, and even a swimming pool (which is not even in our plans).  I was shocked.  Both of our families were there wandering around and playing in our pool.  Even our sweet dog Pola was running carefree and chainless through the grass.  I slowly surveyed every part of our beautiful yard, that somehow strangely resembled the yard I grew up in (because dreams contort things sometimes), and I thought, I must be dreaming.  But then I knew I wasn't and so I swiftly pulled out my phone and began snapping pictures everywhere to prove to myself I wasn't dreaming....And then I woke up.  And I was sad that it really was a dream.  And our neighbors down the street hadn't really given us an old leftover wood fence with weathered, peeling red paint.  It was all so picturesque and I missed it.

Until I realized that this dream will come true.  Maybe not the part about the swimming pool or the red wooden fence, or the fact that it was shaped like my backyard from long ago, and especially the part about Patrick finishing it all by himself in an hour.  But nonetheless, I know it will come true.  Someday.  And in just a few months we will bring in the fill-dirt and the grass and finish the rock borders and hopefully even plant a few trees and flowers.

But this past Spring unearthed parts of me I have always known existed but have never been able to be expressed: an unsettled earthiness to get in the dirt and get my hands dirty, an unleashed interior decorator ready to plunge in and organize, design, and beautify every surrounding surface of my new house.  It was an exhilarating time, but I recognized the need to pull the reigns and wait for the right timing for everything--waiting upon the Lord to do the unfolding of His great work in me and my home.