It’s been a busy few months, and I finally have a morning with nothing on my calendar, so I am taking this rare opportunity to sit on my sofa with a hot cup of coffee and a warm cozy blanket and write. After an especially long hot summer, in a days time winter has suddenly made its appearance.
It. Is. Cold. Y’all.
Not sure what happened to fall, it seemed to show up for all of a few days here and there, but never quite stuck. It’s been a crazy busy few months since I last wrote. We’ve gone out of town nearly every other weekend since August. Which has been awesome, because I love to travel. But it has left me little time for cleaning, writing, spending time with friends, and the million other completely necessary, absolutely ‘have to get done or things fall apart’, things on my to do lists. So I feel like I’ve been scrambling to get things done and not quite hitting the mark.
I have a senior in high school this year, and the weekly to do list for that alone seems endless. There’s the yearbook ad that had to be created. Which was actually kind of fun even though I waited til the very last day to get it done. We spent a whole evening going through boxes of old photos, trying to narrow down the perfect ones to include, and it was fun looking back, and being reminded of all the fun memories we’ve made. Seems like just yesterday she was this sweet little angel face baby.
There was homecoming court. There are multiple junior guild parties requiring costumes to be created, formal dresses and tuxes to be bought, and the scheduling of hair and makeup appointments. There are senior photos to schedule, college/high school dual enrollment forms to fill out and classes to be registered for. Then there’s college financial aid forms for next year for both girls to be done. It was also time for open enrollment for medical insurance, which I barely met the deadline for. Literally got locked out of the website and finally got it done the night before enrollment closed. Whew. There were car registration tags to be renewed. So many fall birthdays to plan for. Oh, and in the middle of all that, we refinanced our home, so there was what seemed to be endless paperwork to be done for that, and then a whole bunch of decisions to be made about the improvements we will be making to our home. And y’all know how I am about making those kinds of decisions. Lol. So hard to choose something that is hard to envision and that you know once it’s done there’s no going back. It wouldn’t be quite so hard if it weren’t for the original a-frame design of our home, with the old style gray flagstone rock around the bottom that has to stay, requiring me to figure out how to work the updated look I would like to have around existing things that I can not change. The colors and styles I would normally choose just don’t really work with the existing structure. I know I don’t want the bluish gray we currently have. But I do like a dark Navy blue. However, perhaps a true gray would work best with the rock. But then, do we go with light, medium or dark gray. And is that too monotone? Would white look ridiculous? And now I’m suddenly considering a color that I wasn’t considering at all before that looks light grayish but has a green hint to it. And then I go back to, “probably safer to stick to one of the basic grays”. Ugh. So complicated. Jeff says, “Whatever you pick will be fine.” But in my head, I’m thinking “What if I choose wrong and it looks terrible and then we are stuck with it and I’ve ruined our home and one day when we want to sell it no one will want it and they will say “why did she choose that color, and that trim, it looks terrible!”
There’s a quote out there that goes something like, “My decision making skills closely resemble that of a squirrel crossing the street.”
Yep. That pretty much sums me up.
So. Much. Pressure.
And all this, while also working full time. This mom thing ain’t no joke y’all. And it doesn’t end after they graduate. It gets a little easier yes, but the to do list doesn’t get all that much shorter. At least not for a while. But we are almost there!
I got through another September 10th, anniversary of our D-Day. We’d been so busy, I’d hardly given much thought to it at all, so going in to it, I honestly felt like this one would be pretty easy-peasy. I wasn’t feeling bad about it, or worried about it, or having any anxiety about it at all. I knew it was coming, but things are good these days, really good, and so I thought, I’ll just try to have as peaceful a day as possible, and then it will be over. Then the day came and I woke up and there it was, the heaviness and weight of the day, like a weighted blanket on my body, but not in a comforting way. I wasn’t even having bad thoughts really, there was just that physical sense of heaviness.
With trauma, the body sometimes “remembers” and reacts, even when you are mostly in a good headspace. It’s weird, but it’s real.
It wasn’t that bad though, I’d experienced this cellular memory before, and knew I could push it off. So I just told myself that I wasn’t going to let the memories of this date weigh me down, that all I needed was to try and make sure I had a peaceful, low stress day, and that I’d be fine.
Well, it turned out to be the absolute opposite of a peaceful day. It was a stressful busy day at work. Then there were things that came up with the appraisal and inspection for our home loan that had to be straightened out. Then there were issues with an online math class that Kate was taking that if not worked out, could have affected her being able to graduate on time. As these things came up, I just pushed through, did the things I could do to straighten them out, and decided to just try to have a peaceful night at home. But I did not come home to peace. I came home to an irritable, stressed out husband and child, and an immediate barrage of pointed questions as to why and how I had or had not handled one thing or another and what was I going to do about this or that to fix it, and let’s just say my resolve to have a good day crumbled under all that pressure and it ended in a stressful puddle of tears and defeat. All these circumstances and stressful situations that had absolutely NOTHING to do with what happened 4 years ago, still brought forward all those same feelings of fear, anxiety, disappointment, and the feeling that I just wasn’t enough.
So I ended the day with a bit of a breakdown, and the words, “all I needed was for today to be a peaceful day.”
The devil tries really hard to keep us stuck in that feeling of defeat I guess. And I suppose he knows that particular date is a weakness for me. So he used every circumstance and every person around me that he could to break me down. And he may have won the day this time around.
But it was just a day. And we got through it. The day passed, and September 11th was a new day, and when it comes down to it, no matter how my mind or body reacts to September 10th rolling around on the calendar, what it really represents now is another year of surviving what was meant to destroy us. Another year of goodness. Another year of hope for the future. Another year filled with blessings and a life we never imagined 4 years ago that we could dream of having.
Yes, this season has been a busy and sometimes stressful one, but it is also so, so full of goodness. Full of opportunity, and time with each other, and time spent with family.
And while those never ending to do lists can feel overwhelming at times, how blessed are we to have the things that bring these to do lists? To have the cars that need registering, the home that we can make improvements on, the marriage that nearly disintegrated, all the birthdays that mean we got to spend another year with the people that we love the most, the extended families that support and love us, the children that we can help shape a wonderful future for. And despite the busy-ness of all that we have had going on, we have had SO MUCH FUN.
So, there may be a pile of laundry on my sofa, mail scattered on the kitchen table and dirty dishes in the sink.
I may have gotten wayyy less writing done that I had intended.
And I may get something on my to do list done mere minutes before the deadline.
Or I may forget to take care of something completely.
You may hate the color I choose for the exterior of our home.
And we may just take off on another weekend getaway, just because we can.
And everything will be just fine, because we are blessed beyond measure.
So as this busy season continues, I’ll continue to try to meet it with gratitude. Gratitude for what God has brought us through. Gratitude for how he used it for our good, to bring us to this very place we are in life now. Gratitude for all the plans he still has ahead for us, and excitement for all the goodness it will bring.
And I will hope beyond hope, that I choose the right siding color. 😂
❤️
– Amy Thurston Gordy
notmystory 