Category: Family

A Real Good Story

I spent 2 decades pouring over charts and planning meals and choosing curriculum and new starts and new systems and tiny budgets and to spank or not to spank and far too much fussing loudly.  I still go to church and clean the house and fuss and homeschool and organize and go to therapy.  I travel more and worry about new things.  The next big thing is no longer just around the corner because I learned for this season that all of it mattered.  The big moments, the laundry folding plans, the dishwashing schedule, the curriculum choices, the grocery budgets, and weird meal plans all mattered.  It was no one big thing. It never has been.  It is all a real good story.  All of those moments and lists and hopes and routines are what meant survival and beating the odds and crossing finish lines to only face the next shotgun start.  I have spent the last 24 years with one shotgun start after another while eeeking over the last finish line and every line in the sand has been washed away just as I was expecting my ribbons.  The ribbon is that it is a real good story.  A story where the bigs are making it and making their way and finding love and themselves and Jesus all in their own relationship to the world.  I am in a new season of watching my own prize ceremony while they start their own races.  I see that I didn’t mess it all up.  Most of the choices were ok.  We are still a mess. We are still safe.  We have actually beat some odds while I was looking for the perfect system of beating the odds.  Most of it came in the next best thing next.  So many finish lines to go in the race. More unknowns than ever and sweating it out with less fear and more wondering and wandering because that isn’t so scary.  This season I think that teaching them it is ok not to know and we really never knew what we were going to do and it wasn’t awful is the best lesson.  It is possible to be as shattered and broken as a box of mismatched china that has been rattled through decades of racing with no direction and fear and still do the next best thing next and love well and serve strong and tuck littles in without shattering them.  Shattered isn’t contagious and it is a real good story.

Could it be Day 8 of 31 Days. I’ll think about that tomorrow.

More than the sun and the stars and the moon on every leg of the race……

This is part of an ongoing series 31 Days of Being Present

>well let us just catch up on here…..shall we?

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I realize that it is July, but feel the need to take you for a walk back to see a Saturday morning in May, May 15th to be persact. That was the Saturday I woke up in a puddle of tears, disolving my very carefully flavored coffee in to a hot mess. For me this was time for a melt down of an important sort. My kids had obviously started growing up……yes that is the melt down moment. Maci and Marti turned 12 on that friday, Sarah finished up middle school and made it clear she wasn’t looking back she is intending to be a freshman, DJ my last child to be doing pre-school is now in first grade and let us not fail to forget that Zachary my eldest snot earned his drivers license and rode off in his bought and paid for car (almost). I had tears to cry and I felt that I deserved them(did I fail to mention that all of these realizations hit me the last day of achievement test for the kids)

FASSSSSSSTTTTTTT Forward to June. June, June, glorious June….June is the month we prepare our precious little darlings for Camp Highland the best week of the entire year for many of us for all varied reasons. The diffrence for me this year is that I would have only one of my 6 kids left with me for almost an entire week…..just us and him. Oh, the things we could do, how would we fill all the time? I didn’t know and still don’t. What do families with just one child, God bless them, do with their time, please I need to be more productive and make better plans for our future.

This brings me to JULY, where I have now found myself squarely in the place of a momma with a son traveling on ministry trips that are getting further and further away, Paragould,Arkansa/Atlanta,Georgia2x’s/Independence,Belize….WAIT stop the presses THAT is in Central America, he has never even ridden in a plane before and now we let him drive a truck and ride a plane all in the same season. This is just to stinking ridiculous for one parent to handle, so why aren’t two of us handling this. Oh, my sweet Donnie you say? He is napping, sleeping well, and trusting that this whole parenting gig we have been doing for almost 17 years, just may take shape after all….the audacity of it all, him trusting and not worrying. I am not sure how all this is gonna turn out, but I need more kleenex and I will share the rest of the story when I can get it together enough to think clearly through a cotton commercial.

These are my original thoughts posted with all sorts of funnies, hurts, happiesat http://www.himhimthem.blogspot.com please honor that they are owned by myself (Suzanne Pike) and don’t share them without attributing where they are found and who they came from in the material you share.