30
image by Sonja Lyon
Whoa, this is 30. A parent to three, three years into marriage, and barely just starting to figure out how to take care of myself… if I could tell my younger self anything, it’s to not equate a number (in this case, age), with any type of status, success, or mile marker in life. (Preaching this to myself at this very moment, because at 30, I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing and whether or not I’m doing “it” right and I’m anticipating that at 35, 40 or even 50, I still won’t know.) Every one’s got their trajectory and all we can do is encourage one another in moving forward. I’d tell myself to stop the comparison game, because everyone’s got hard things going on in their life despite what they may project or what we may project on them, for that matter. And even though it may not seem hard to us, it’s hard on them and in these instances, we have the opportunity to empathize and simply listen and love. I’m not one to openly share the daily struggle on social media… but man, life has been harder on me this past year.
This last year has been a game-changer. I started to really consider what it meant to take care of myself and how healthy that is, because if I’m not doing that, then everything else in life would follow in chaos. When I hear the term self-care, I naturally think of outside things like getting a massage or your hair/nails done, maybe even going on a vacation… But in this particular year, I mean a deeper self-care… pursuing counseling and following through on that; facing things I’ve shoved away for so long and learning how to parent myself. It’s been something (counseling) that I’ve thought about for the past 7 or 8 years. I saw a mom-friend post something the other day on Instagram about reminding her kids that she, too, is also still growing up and that really resonated with me. I think that even as we grow up, and I might have written this somewhere else before, that we are still the ages we have “outgrown”. There are moments when we are 8 again, or 16 again, or 21 and on and on. And when those occur, depending on what happened then, we may have to again mourn or grieve what it was we experienced or lost. When I started counseling, my therapist asked me if I had grieved the loss of a certain hope that I had had. And I didn’t quite know what she meant by that. I thought that once I was able to grieve, that it would be done, that I could move forward and that was that. But that is so far from the truth. Grieving is a continuous thing. In a sense, rinse and repeat. Acknowledging the loss, the grief, telling yourself that what you feel is valid and true for you… Reminding myself to be patient with myself, to be patient with my kids, to have grace… in hopes that they could also have grace and patience with me. Us adults don’t have our shit together, if anything, we are just learning to unravel and face the facts because apparently you’re supposed to become more responsible as you grow up. Ha.
There has been a lot of unraveling the temporary bandages I’ve managed to slather on myself throughout the past three decades of my life… and it has been painful, learning that the boundaries I put up for myself and my family may not be understood or recognized by those who are supposed to be closest to me. Paving a new way of how we want to raise our family and our kids in this and in this particular part of the world is very counter-cultural to the way that I grew up and the way that my parents grew up. Where is the line between respecting and honoring my culture but also respecting and honoring myself? Where is the line between ‘family is everything’ to ‘self-care and having boundaries’? How do I teach my girls to stand up for themselves and be strong women, but also to be soft towards everyone (men included), even though I have been looked down upon because I am a woman, and because I am not as outspoken as others may be?
Overnight this past summer, Aaron and I became “parents” to two more girls, my cousins ages 9 and 11, in addition to Libby. Another huge life change that came quickly and as a surprise. No one could have prepared us for what we were about to experience. I won’t go into detail what my cousins have endured in their decade-ish of life… but I can tell you that it has affected me in ways that I couldn’t have imagined, moving from cool cousins to ‘parental’ authorities… undoing and reteaching their coping mechanisms and learning how to gently call out the ways in which they are wrong. It has not been pretty. It has been messy. I’m not saying we are perfect. We have undoubtedly messed up, stumbled with our words, wondered if we made things worse… I’ve had so many moments of frustration, feeling my body tense up, shake, curse… it’s difficult. Putting my own selfish desires out of the way to put their needs ahead is near impossible sometimes… I have to remind myself so very often that they’re just kids and they don’t know yet and even when we tell them, ‘you will see when you are older why this is important or whatever else’, I’m not sure it actually helps because they are still young. All I can do is be consistent, present, faithful, even when I feel like giving up sometimes. Another good friend reminded me that this ‘suffering’ makes us more like Jesus, but sometimes I feel like it’s making me the opposite of Jesus. Aaron laughed and said that it only exposes where I’m not like Him and that made me feel better.
It’s been a hard year. I wish I could say that at 30, I feel confident and sure of myself… but I’m not so sure. Sometimes it feels like I just exist and everything and everyone is moving around me and I’m just going through the motions. I am confident that Jesus only gives me what I am capable of and He must really think I can do this or something because I really don’t know sometimes. This all sounds depressing.. but I’m okay. I know what I’m doing and what I’m learning are all good things. I know that I’m in the valley right now, but the best days are coming. And they’ll be all the more glorious. I am grateful for a warm home, Aaron, kids who can laugh and are healthy and a Savior who knows me.