Category Archives: homeschooling

filling the lake: thoughts on rest from a mom of seven

Posted on by October 17, 2022

It was cruel. No doubt about it.

Right in front of the kids, I scooped vanilla ice cream on top of two fresh biscuits with strawberries. It was for me and I wasn’t sharing. And to add insult to injury, two of the kids can’t have dairy and one is fasting from gluten.

I ate it right in front of them, shameless, because a) my own lunch was two hours late, and b) they do similarly cruel things that I’m jealous of all the time, like going to the bathroom by themselves.

filling the lake: thoughts on rest from a mom of seven

I don’t want to push them away, I just want to breathe my own oxygen every once in a while…and eat ice cream for lunch.

But my body isn’t cooperating with this and I need to rest from sugar once in a while. I haven’t had ice cream in months. No sugar in coffee, no jam on toast, and aside from a half-eaten brownie a couple of weeks ago, no chocolate. No cookies. Not even a stinking animal cracker. When we eat pancakes, mine are topped with tears and self pity.

(Kidding. Please don’t eat pancakes around me.)

One day in desperation I threw together some no-sugar, banana-oat-raisin cookies. Too impatient to bake, I fried them in a skillet like hoecakes and they were so divine you could hear angels singing the Hallelujah Chorus. I immediately thought, These would be perfect with vanilla ice cream, then mentally slapped myself and poured whipping cream over them instead.

curbing-sugarMy body needs to rest from sugar. I can’t ignore the symptoms no matter how much I want to eat everything on my Pinterest board.

But I am learning that it’s not just my body that needs rest; my mind and routines need rest, also, beyond a weekly Sabbath. God and I have been talking about this a lot lately. Just as I over-do sugar and have to cut way back, I over-do…well, a lot of things. And He’s telling me to cut way back there, too.

I’m not very good at it. My idea of “rest” is to check something off my list, revel in a brief four seconds of exhilarating freedom, then move onto the Next Big Thing that has to be done. Somehow I think this isn’t what He means by resting.

What is rest, anyway? Is it to stop doing something, as in, “resting from your labors?” Because there’s no rest from mothering, housework, discipline, the tasks that hound and hang over us and are never done.

So it must be that we are to also rest in those labors that we can’t rest from. We must rest in motherhood. We rest in our homes, in the midst of washing dishes and sorting piles of fermenting laundry. It must be the difference between sautéing and scorching – which is what I did to my soup veggies while Instagramming about rest. Scorching, that is. Because I told you, I’m still not very good at this.

All the behaviors, all the needs, all the stuff on my list drains me during the week, and yet I feel guilty for taking quiet time to rest. My lake runs empty but I neglect filling it, thinking it’s my job to fill others until all I give are the dregs of what churns up. The simple, white-space-filled life of several years ago is now covered in scribbles of nine different colors of handwriting.

p1040154

And I love the colors, but somewhere we lost our ability to keep clean margins. I don’t recognize my own handwriting in the midst of everyone else’s anymore. I live for the weekend, pushing through full, frantic days until Vince carries more of the burden of diapers, cooking, discipline, and consequences.

What if you lived like I was home with you, Love, and I carried the burden? God asks me.

But You don’t make dinner or change diapers, I argue. He does not strike me with lightning, ground me, or take away my car keys.

Those are less of a burden if you let Me do the heavy lifting, He says. Trust Me with your kids. Trust that I’m speaking to them, growing them, and transforming them. That’s not your burden to carry.

p1040173

We feel nothing when we’re on empty – no pain, no pleasure, no up or down, no nothing – just a numb plodding on from one day to the next, a flatline of exhaustion in a stagnant wasteland. The same thoughts, the same words churning up from the same sludge at the bottom of the lake.

It’s where I’ve been. To be honest, it’s a big reason why I can barely keep up with one post a month lately. My thoughts feel repetitive and I hate to think I’m boring any of you or wasting your time. I don’t want you to come here for the view only to see the same muddy water at the bottom of the lake.

But we know relief and comfort because we are first acquainted with pain and discomfort, and to be refilled after being sucked dry for so long is like a rebirth.

Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.

– James 5:11, ESV

So He gave me a new to-do list. It includes reading, journaling, processing things out that need hard thinking, and making time for those neglected projects that keep getting pushed to the backburner. It also includes writing down dreams I’ve been afraid to look in the face, to see what they really look like and if they’d like to come into existence.

But mostly, it means viewing these things as non-negotiable. They are just as important as making sure everyone has breakfast and clean underwear.

This new army doesn’t get tired. You know why? They know how to lie down in His presence. They know how to rest in His arms. They know how to lay their heads on His chest and listen to His huge heart. They weep with Him over the dying, the crying, the broken, the abused and the lost. Do you really think you can work hard and start a revival? Just run out there and get them? Sorry. You can’t. But when Jesus shows His face and He breathes life into the dry, dry, bony Church, and that Church stands up full of His presence, carrying His glory, nobody can resist anymore!

– Heidi Baker, There is Always Enough

I’ve been coming upstairs in the afternoons for my own refilling whenever Finn is napping. The kids who aren’t napping are under strict instructions to not knock on my door unless a) someone is injured, b) something is on fire, or c) they’ve shot an intruder (which should technically go under “a,” I guess).

I bring my tea (with cream, no sugar) and sometimes write a page or two. Sometimes I work on those projects, sometimes I read a little. Sometimes I just goof off on Instagram. And sometimes, I cry like a woman in labor while we wait for God to birth this new season out of us.

Then I go downstairs and pour out with joy, rather than serving on empty and feeling sorry for myself. Our location on the spectrum between drudgery and joy is determined by the depth of water in our lake – and our rich overflow comes from rest, when abundance bursts out of a life filled with His water.

…

This is an excerpt from Work That God Sees: Prayerful Motherhood in the Midst of the Overwhelm.

an accidental feast

Posted on by June 16, 2023

The almost-ten-year-old: Afton’s looking at the largest baking bowl we own, full of flour and some other white ingredient…which, from the look on his face, is probably called “regret.”

I ask him what it is. He says it’s four cups flour, and four teaspoons – or was it tablespoons? – of baking powder. Uh oh.

an accidental feast: how we rise when we think we've made a flop

“What are you trying to make?”

He points to the cookbook. “Jalapeño cheesebread, but it’s a double batch.” And that sounds awesome, but he’s using a cornbread recipe and he’s actually quadrupled it. I try to explain that he’ll have to switch recipes and make the cornbread instead, and it’s okay, because I can help figure out the ratios and such…but, no, he says. It’s not okay. Panic is setting in, and he starts speaking desperately, without punctuation:

“I needed four cups but I was using the half-cup scoop so I did eight scoops but I don’t want any cornmeal and do I really have to make cornbread because I want it to be like French bread but I don’t want to have to wait for it to rise!”

The rising thing always gets me, too. But no, I tell him, you can’t make French bread, cheesy or otherwise, with baking powder. It needs yeast; it has to rise.

There is a quiet, tense pause. Then he says:

“I think I can separate the flour from the baking powder with static electricity.”

And this, my friends, is why people are afraid to homeschool. They say it’s because they can’t teach high school math, but the truth is they’re terrified their nine-year-old is going to blow up the kitchen by separating flour from baking powder using static electricity.

(That night during dinner cleanup, we asked him where he heard about that. He shrugged and said it was from a science book. I turned to Vin and said, “That does it. No more science.”)

But four batches of cornbread later (perfect, cheesy, drool-worthy, jalapeño cornbread…), he learned a lesson that we all get eventually: things don’t always work out the way we expect, and we don’t always end up where we planned.

We’ve lived here for eight years, but we never expected to end up in Wasilla. Initially, we resisted moving at all and justified it with reasons that sounded good – but it turned out that what we were staying for in Anchorage was exactly what God was trying to get us away from. He had something so much better for us, if we’d trust Him enough to let go.

IMG_6386

IMG_6397

And we did let go. But we thought we were supposed to move to Eagle River, and when we started looking, there was nothing available there. We searched and prayed and eventually went with plan B: we found land in Palmer. We made plans and a million phone calls, and hired subcontractors to build a house, and ten days before we were supposed to break ground, our bank went under…so that didn’t work out, either.

Sometimes when things don’t work out, fear starts to take root: What if this is the beginning of a pattern, and the next bend in the road is even worse? What if we think He told us to do this, but we heard wrong? What if we’re just waiting for the next shoe to drop?

But…what if none of those scenarios are the case at all?

What if the things in our lives that aren’t working out only seem that way because they’re not finished yet?

What if we are judging the end product by the messy middle phase? Like cake or cornbread that needs to bake for an hour, but we pulled it out of the oven when it’s still doughy and unset – we followed the recipe, used all the right ingredients, but we checked its progress too early. It’s not done yet because there’s no shortcut to waiting for it to rise.

IMG_6385

I still don’t know why He didn’t just tell us right out to move to Wasilla nine years ago. Maybe He knew it was too far off our radar and we had to warm up to the idea; maybe there were timing issues; maybe He knew we were stubborn (no way) and wanted to test our obedience. Maybe it was a million different things.

Maybe He wanted to teach us that even when life doesn’t go the way we plan, it still works out. He knew we would need to remember that in the years ahead.

The end product might not look at all what we signed up for. It might not be what we wanted at all  — no one plans ahead anticipating disease, disaster, divorce, or other heartbreak. That’s fair; He doesn’t want those things either and He grieves with us. But He is the master at taking the most screwed up recipes — all of our accidents, failures, and near-misses — and even when it feels like we’re having hot water for dinner, He’s redeeming it all into a gourmet feast.

Life needs yeast in order to rise.

And sometimes, things are hard simply because that’s the nature of expanding our comfort zone, living and learning deep and wide. It’s not because we are failing; it’s because we are not those who shrink back…even from homeschool.

That same kid, a few days later, is right back at it — and this time he has a project he wants to tackle with the sewing machine. The fabric is stretchy, the machine is unfamiliar, and he looks up at me.

“I prayed first,” he says, and hits the pedal.

______

This is an excerpt from Work That God Sees. :)

the day of small things

Posted on by October 15, 2021

Our oldest is now a big fifteen-year-old. He reaches things off the high shelves, opens tight jars for me, and chops wood. He even (gasp) shaves. He was our smallest baby — now he wears Vince’s shirts that have shrunk in the wash.

the day of small things - Copperlight Wood

On his big day, Vin took him and four of his siblings on a birthday outing and left me at home with the other two kids and the task of making clam chowder for lunch. Piece of cake.

The two boys who stayed home played close by while I chopped potatoes and onions. They spun gears in the dining room, wearing the varnish off the table. Maybe I should’ve stopped them. Maybe I should’ve told them to simmer down, just a little. But I didn’t – it was a beautiful moment, them playing together like normal kids, making noise and messes and laughing memories. We need more of this.

P1020480

P1020473

The music was loud and the sun streamed in, and the house was completely still except for the shrieking activity around the table and the flames under the soup pot. Maybe that doesn’t describe stillness to you, but to me it was like our house was in a coma.

What to do, what to do…I was at a loss once the soup was simmering. It’s astonishing how inspired you can be with three shots of espresso and only two kids in the house.

I could read. I could turn on the computer and open that file of 60,000 words I’m working on. I could wash the kitchen windows. I could re-pot the rootbound plant on the counter. I could do almost anything short of flying to the moon — but no, I only had a few minutes before they all came back home, and I needed to keep an eye on the stove to keep what was simmering from scorching.

I scrubbed the grime and grungus off the sink dropper – such a little thing. The hot water ran and the steam rose, and stainless steel started to shine again. The sun hit it and sparkled, and I realized this was the first day of blue skies after a week of dreary, smeary grey in the weary early winter.

We had our first frost last night – this morning the lawns are all grey, with a pale, bright sunshine on them: wonderfully beautiful. And somehow exciting. The first beginning of winter always excites me; it makes me want adventures.

– C. S. Lewis, Letters to Children

P1020446

The big boy and crew came back hungry for chowder and full of news about the new Lego store. This kid got his first Lego set when he was three years old. That was only ten minutes ago, and now he builds them into robots. Little things into big things.

…but who dare despise the day of small things, if it has proved to be the dawn of mighty ones?

– Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho!

westward ho

I’ve been working on this blanket for years – you can tell, because the color scheme dates it back to the sixties (kidding, but not kidding…) – and it’s finally down to just two squares and trimming left. In this day of imported department store specials, it feels both trivial and sacred to spend time on it compared to everything else going on in and around us. There’s always more to be learned, taught, cooked, written, cleaned, hugged, and disciplined; the dishes and laundry are never done. There are pages to read, and pages to write. And there is always more stitching to do – but the difference with stitching is that you can see exactly what progress has been made.

P1020466

A finished book can go on a shelf, but there’s no way to measure what was really absorbed in the reading. The hamper will be full again tomorrow. And you can teach and lecture and assign consequences till the cows come home but those kids are still going to tie fake spiders to the tail of their little brother’s favorite stuffed animal, and try to get the cat to walk on his front legs wheelbarrow style, and color their own body parts with green marker. I’ve, um, heard it happens. In some families.

But with this blanket, I can see exactly what’s been achieved. This row, that round of colors – done. And that is incredibly satisfying in the midst of all the other intangibles.

P1020465

P1020449

Our kids are big and little, busy and slow, high school and infant, and life right now is full of their needs and their changes and their noise. These days I often feel rootbound, spinning gears. I typed most of this one handed while holding this almost-four-month-old, who will be a big fifteen-year-old in about ten minutes. There are a million things I could do, but I don’t regret holding him. I don’t regret keeping an eye on these kids to keep what is simmering in them from scorching.

The dirty socks, the worn-down pencils, the minutes that fill long and short days – small things, baby steps, leading to mighty movements. It is the sacred monotony of these early days that write history.

________

This is an excerpt from Work That God Sees, available here.