Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

faith & spirituality

Margins

I’m never sure what to do with a week like this. You know the kind, the ones where nothing goes according to plan and everything seems chaos and you sigh with relief that this week is O-V-E-R. (Except it really isn’t when your husband works Saturdays. Sigh.)

Next to me is a girl home from school with a fever. She shuffled off the bus last night and said she couldn’t keep warm at school, but she didn’t have a fever when the nurse checked her. She was feverish by the time she got home, so we nursed her a little and sent her off to bed, and my “plans” for today became laced with contingencies.

Of any day this week for her to be home from school, today is a good one. I didn’t have concrete plans and I wasn’t meeting with my first-ever writing client (squee!). That was yesterday. I was dressed and ready to take a jog/walk when we made the call that she wouldn’t be getting on the bus. In the hour she was awake this morning, her fever rose by a degree or more, so I did the grown-up thing and decided she’d stay home.

She’s missing apple day in her class and I’m on the fence about whether I should let her go trick-or-treating tonight if she’s feeling better. And even though her presence in the house today won’t be a bother, part of me is still selfishly annoyed that my day is not my own today.

I’ve gotten a little too used to this kids-being-in-school-all-day thing.

But it doesn’t even have to be a sick kid to throw me off. I’m not the kind of person who leaves space in her days for the unexpected and unplanned. If I have a calendar, I want to fill it, even if that means filling my time with reading or writing, not necessarily appointments and coffee dates. I start the day with an idea of how things are going to go. It’s a control issue, I think, or maybe something deeper. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll talk to my counselor about it.

Today is just one indicator of how chaotic our week felt. On Sunday night we discovered a patch of carpet in the kids’ room that was soaked. All along the wall their room shares with the bathroom. We knew there was a small problem with the shower but further investigation has led to the revelation of a bigger problem. Monday, on my husband’s day off, was spent clearing out the kids’ room, removing all the furniture against that wall and clearing the floor of all the kid crap that accumulates unwanted. It was exhausting, and the work isn’t done yet and our house is extra messy because we have furniture and books in places they don’t normally belong.

We alerted our landlord. We’re still waiting to hear from the plumber. In the meantime, we discovered that we can’t use the shower unless we want to rain water into the basement on top of all the stuff we have stored down there. So, baths it is for the foreseeable future. (And don’t get me started on the mold potential.) Four years ago, in our last rental, we survived three feet of water in our basement but our souls are still recovering from that ordeal.

It is emotionally draining for me when I have to handle the unexpected and I think that’s because I don’t plan for it at all.  My basic assumption is that everything is going to go exactly as I think so there’s no need to allow for other possible outcomes.

Unrealistic, I know.

I don’t know how to plan for what I don’t know is coming except to keep my schedule free in spots and my attitude open. I know I need to slow down and not always be in such a rush. I don’t have to tick off a dozen things on my list just so I feel like I accomplished something today and am a productive member of society.

My value as a person is not in how much I contribute but simply in who I am. [bctt tweet=”My value as a person is not in how much I contribute but simply in who I am.”]

—

In the midst of this week, there has also been beauty. We had a lovely visit with friends we haven’t seen in years on Sunday. Our son lost his first tooth, which was stressful at first because it was so close to falling out but he wouldn’t let my husband pull it. But it was fun to see him embrace the magic of the tooth fairy this morning.

And it’s the peak week for fall colors around here so every tree is bursting bright with oranges, reds and yellows. I feel like the colors are especially vibrant this year, and the beauty makes me pause every time.

On the way to the bus stop yesterday, I caught a glimpse of the moon lingering in the morning sky, perched just above the trees whose leaves are changing. And later I read in a devotional how a busy schedule makes us miss out on important things.

chaos quote

I wondered what I had been missing this week. Or really my whole life.

There are busy seasons, I know, some more than others. But I know that if I don’t leave margins, if my schedule doesn’t include empty days and white space, then life will become overwhelming when an emergency or unplanned event strikes. If the mantra of my life is “I don’t have time for this”–and I’ve said those words more times than I’d care to admit–then I’ve got it wrong.

I want to have time for this. For quiet snuggles on the couch on a sick day. For a long look at the moon or the stars or the autumn leaves. For the chance to help someone in need. For the stopping and the pausing and the lingering.

How do you make room in your life for what’s important? How do you know when your life is too chaotic?

Wait for it

“Stay to the right.”

I would repeat these instructions a thousand times over the course of the day. We were on our first family bicycle ride, sharing a well-used trail on a school holiday, practicing with our youngest, especially, how to ride confidently without training wheels and with respect to others on the trail.

It was emotionally exhausting for me, the parent assigned to him. I followed him at his pace, offering encouragement and correction when necessary. Occasionally freaking out when he tried to pass his sister and run her off the trail into the woods or, God forbid, the river. (It wasn’t really that close, but they come by their drama honestly.)

Before this day, it had been eight years since I’d ridden my own bike for any amount of time. I remember one trail ride Phil and I took just after we were married, but not long after that I was pregnant and then there was a baby and another pregnancy and two little ones and well, bicycle riding seemed like a thing of the past.

Then they got bikes and mastered riding them with training wheels and then we parents decided that the day before school started this year was the day the training wheels would come off. The kids learned quickly and practiced well and we saw the possibility of family bike rides become more than just a dream.

The actual bike riding trip was less romantic than I imagined because of the constant instruction and correction. But I remembered that this was a day I had long been waiting for.

In those early years of parenting, I thought I wouldn’t survive it. Seasoned parents told me to make it through the first five years and things would get better. I thought they were lying. Five years seemed so long. My son’s next birthday, he’ll be 6, so “five” will no longer be in our birthday vocabulary.

We’re in a season now that is better in some ways and not in others. There’s no more potty training or changing diapers or constant night waking, but there is homework and spicy personalities to manage, more grown-up things to come.  (Adolescence and puberty scare the you-know-what out of me.)

This bike ride, I’d been waiting for it, the days when we could go on an outdoor family adventure together. We passed other families with older children on rides that day, and I took note: this constant instruction will prepare us for further family adventures when we will all be fully capable of riding our own bikes in our own space.

That’s the way I envision it, anyway.

—

The World Series starts tonight. (That’s baseball, if you’re not aware.) And the Cubs won’t be in it, which is not news except that this year there was a better chance than they’ve had in a long time.

Cubs fans are long-suffering and know well the waiting game. I won’t bore you with sports statistics but let’s just say that a lifetime is a long time to wait for your team to reach the ultimate success.

We will keep waiting, this time with more hope than despair.

—

What if you don’t know what you’re waiting for?

By Lukasz Saczek | Hanoi, Vietnam | via Unsplash

)By Lukasz Saczek | Hanoi, Vietnam | via Unsplash

It was a question I hadn’t considered until recently. I was talking with my therapist about change and my difficulty adjusting to change. She asked me to illustrate it using her sand table (more on this in another post).

So I did.

wpid-20151020_110304.jpgI told her that for me, change or a dream or whatever is like a seed you can see in your hand and then you cover it up with dirt (or in this case sand) and you wait for it to grow. Eventually, you see what you’ve planted.

With our garden this year, we knew which plants were tomatoes and which were peppers and we had to wait to see what would come from each one. We planted some flower seeds that we didn’t know what they would look like when they popped up through the dirt and bloomed, but we knew they were flowers.

But right now in our life, we’re not sure what’s been planted or what’s going to grow or bloom. That’s vague, I know, but if I could explain it more to you then I’d have some clarity myself.

Phil and I have dreams, a vision for our life, but it’s kind of hazy. It’s like we have a pile of puzzle pieces but we don’t know what the picture is supposed to be when it’s done, and some of the pieces might not even belong to this puzzle. Frustrating. Immensely.

So, we’re waiting. But we don’t know what we’re waiting for. (Maybe it’s not that important, but I still want to know.)  Or how long we’ll have to wait. When I see people standing in groups along the bus routes in town, I know that they’re expecting the bus and probably soon. They’ve read the schedule or have been this way before. They know what’s coming and when.

Me? I’m not certain of the what or the when. Sometimes I don’t even know why.

Except that I know that some of the best things in life take time. Home-cooked food is always better than fast food. A Sunday drive on the backroads to see the changing colors is more fulfilling than zipping down the highway at 75. The things I think about over a couple of days are better composed than the tweets I post in the heat of the moment.

As we talked about the waiting in my therapist’s office, I remembered that waiting is an active process. While our vegetables grew in the garden, we still had to weed and water. Farmers fertilize and prepare the soil when the crops aren’t growing. I don’t know exactly what it means to weed and water and fertilize in the waiting season of life, but I know that there’s hard work involved. (And fertilizing is a stinky job.)

There’s work to do in the waiting.

What are you waiting for? And if you don’t know, what are you doing while you wait?