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Kristen Anne Glover

Five in Tow

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Stuck

tag

My brothers and I used to play freeze tag on balmy summer nights when the fireflies dipped low across the grass and pesky mosquitoes delivered welts to our bare feet.

My older brother was just enough taller and faster to outrun me every time, and he tagged me down by the creek where the shadows of evening crawled into a hallow of trees and went to sleep. It was impossible for my team mates to see me there and even harder for them to sneak past his lanky arms to set me free.

I was stuck, frozen in some awkward mid-run stance while stars slowly blinked awake. The game continued on around me in squeals and shrieks while my feet remained planted in the cool, packed earth of the creekbank.

At first, being stuck wasn’t so bad. My burning lungs caught a breath; my muscles stopped screaming. I could notice the beads of sweat that trickled down my forehead and into my eyeballs.

It was a welcome pause.

But as the dusk melted into darkness, being stuck began to wear. I slung my body over my knees and squatted in the moonlight, wondering if anyone even knew where I was, or if I’d get a chance to play again before Mom called us in.

The longer I waited, the more I wondered if I even wanted to play anymore, if I wanted to run my legs into jelly and my lungs into fire. Trying to outrun boys was hard. Maybe I just wanted to read my Nancy Drew book and call it a night.

Probably no one would miss me anyway, I thought to myself. They hadn’t so far.

And clearly, I wasn’t the fastest runner, and I wasn’t contributing much to the game. In fact, I could see that everyone else was carrying on very well without me.

Stuck

That’s the stuff you think about when you’re stuck by a creek in the dark.

It’s also the stuff you think about when you’re stuck in real-life, when circumstances plow you over and tag you out, and you suddenly find yourself frozen mid-step and unable to move beyond the little space of ground right in front of you.

At first it can seem like a welcome reprieve, a chance for your soul to catch its breath. But after a while, even the rest can be wearisome. You spend your days warming the same spot of earth, head down and wondering about your contribution to life.

That is where I’ve found myself the past few years. Frozen. Tagged out. Stuck.

Within a few months of each other, three of my kids were each diagnosed with separate but significant learning issues. Their unique brains are mazes of strengths and weaknesses, and the older they grew, the more evident their challenges became. Our days were filled with trips to therapy, intense work at home, teaching and re-teaching the same material, and the daily effort of trying to communicate with kids who could not process language easily.

I found myself in a place that did not have room for much more than my husband and kids. I did not have the space to think or create or wonder. I had to step back from every ministry I had previously cared about. I did not have the capacity to invest in other people or even to let other people invest in me.

It was all I could do to manage the few things that mattered most.

At the end of each day, I felt as if God had taken everything I had, and out of my emptiness I had to trust that in the morning, He’d give me enough for another day.

I’d like to say that I did this really well. But I was often fearful and angry. I allowed impatience to fester where trust should have grown, and I made frustration my crutch instead of leaning hard on faith. I wondered then if God would ever allow me to use the gifts He’d given me, all the while failing to see how God was using me right then to do the things only I could do: be a wife to my husband and a mother to my children.

I felt like my feet were cemented to the ground, and every time I’d remind God that I was missing out, He would gently say, “There is no place more important than where you are right now.”

tagged

That’s a hard truth to swallow when you’ve been stuck in the same square of ground for so long, you wonder if you might be growing roots right into it. Maybe this is it for me. Maybe all those things I thought I’d do and everything I thought I’d be were just dreams and nothing more.

Those are the things you think about when you’re stuck, when little lies begin to creep into the slow and quiet.

You see everything that’s going on where you’re not. You notice how everyone else seems to be able to be and do and go while you’re just frozen.

You fail to notice that the little piece of ground you’re manning is holy ground. What felt like a punishment was really a planting, an opportunity to go to the deep places that busy doesn’t allow.

The truth was, I had not missed my calling. I was knee-deep in my calling. The God of the universe did not ordain me to be a writer or a speaker or even a stellar friend.

He made me to be a mother.

And a wife.

And a faithful child of God.

Those things are the irrevocable call of God on my life, the things that do not change whether I am standing in one plot of ground or running the field.

Everything else is an extra.

But those three things? Those things are worth getting stuck over.

Because it is in those moments of sacred stillness that God does the best work. My children are now reading. All of them. I could cry when I see Paul curled up on the couch with a book, voluntarily doing what used to be agonizing to him. Micah’s personality has come alive now that he is no longer afraid to speak in public. Kya is writing stories. Every single one of them has a relationship with their Father-God that is sweeter because life has been a little hard.

As for me, I would not have seen the hand of God unless I had been stuck up against a mountain that had to be moved.

And it has moved. All around me, the ground has shifted, little by little, until I realized one day that I am not stuck anymore. The days are not so hard, and I am not used up at the end of them. I have come to the end of my un-doing, and everything I thought was frozen is now free.

stuck
And to my surprise, I have not missed a thing.

Are you stuck? Do you feel as if your feet are frozen in place, and everything you thought you’d be and everything you thought you’d do are lost in an intense season of being a wife and mother?

Know this: There is a time and purpose for all things, even a time to be still and a little stuck.

But it is not for always.

One day, God will free up your time, your gifts, and even your dreams. And you will find that you did not miss a thing.

Faith, Homeschooling, Parenting 6 Comments

One Day, They Will Graduate

Metal pencil sharpener

One day, they will graduate.

But today, books sprawl open, brazenly soaking up a cool winter sunbeam that reaches across the middle of the table. A grammar worksheet waits for a red pen to check it. No less than twelve No. 2’s swim lazily in the carpet on the schoolroom floor.

Everything is exactly like we left it at 4:32 pm two Fridays ago when I inaugurated Christmas Break with a flood of relief and lots of hollering. As soon as that last assignment was completed, we evacuated the room as fast as we could.

No one has set foot in there since.

School will start again in exactly four days. Four days. My heart goes into spasms just thinking about it. I have lesson plans to go over and those final math worksheets to grade and a new science book to order. At the very least, I should go in and straighten up, I think.

But I. can’t. even.

Some mamas are anxious to get back into the routine. They spent their entire Christmas break wishing they could be teaching cursive and making their kids write thank-you letters in Latin, just to keep it up. Their schoolrooms reek of warm printer ink and fresh pencil shavings. Everything for Monday has been planned, printed, and organized since exactly 4:35 pm on December 18.

God love ‘em.

I feel exactly the same way, except for the parts about being organized and excited and actually loving this homeschooling thing so much, I can’t wait to get started again.

To be honest, we’re in a little bit of a dry season over here at the Glover Academy of “I Hope This Works Because You’re Not Living With Us Forever.” It all started the year my oldest was in preschool. So, it’s been a ten-year season, give or take a year. We should be over it any day now. Any day now, I’m going to love homeschooling.

After all, they’re going to graduate…one day.

At least, that’s what I’ve been told.

Colored pencils

But in the mean time, I’m slogging through over here, as much as I hate to admit it. I don’t really want you to know that homeschooling is an epic struggle for me.

What kind of homeschool mom hates homeschooling?  I mean, we’re supposed to love what we do, right? And isn’t it bad and toxic and maybe a little abusive to teach your kids when you do. not. even. want. to? Shouldn’t someone stage an intervention with the mama who can’t enter the schoolroom without dry heaving?

Of course, I’m being a tad dramatic. I do not hate homeschooling. In fact, I enjoy certain parts of it.  Like Christmas break.  However, it is the thing I look forward to least about my day, almost every day. It is the thing that makes me lie awake in bed in the morning, dreading getting up. It is the thing that makes me loath to call the kids in from recess. It is the thing I struggle and struggle and struggle with. Daily.

It is the thing that makes me look at the four days left in Christmas break and want to cry.

Maybe you know that feeling too, and it is lonely and dark and swishy with guilt. If there’s one thing I’ve found about mothering, it is this: it’s not okay to not be okay with certain aspects of mothering. If you’re a homeschool mom, it is expected that you like it. And if you don’t like it, it is assumed that you are doing it wrong. Well-meaning homeschool parents, whose pencils are always sharpened, will try to fix you.  They will give you all sorts of advice because it must be your method or your curriculum or your expectations, but it certainly can’t be that you just don’t like teaching your own children.

I mean, if you were doing it right, if you were a half-way decent mother, you would like it.  So you try and you tweak and you reorganize and you order another new math program…and your feelings don’t change.  You still don’t like it.

That must mean there is some fault in you, some bit of brokenness that peeks through every time you crack open a Level 1 Reading Book.  Because we all know God would never ask us to do something we don’t want to do, aren’t good at, and just plain don’t like.

Or would He?

I don’t know. Let’s ask Moses. Or Jonah. Or Elijah. Or Hosea. Or Peter. Or…anyone else in the Bible who was called to step out and stay in faith, even when their feelings weren’t up for it.

Webster's Dictionary

If you can’t even think of going back into that school room in four days, but you know God has called you to it, then rest in this: God often calls us to do things that are not easy, not comfortable, and not fun. It does not mean that you are doing it wrong. It does not mean you are a bad mother, or a bad teacher. It does not mean you are ruining your kids and their education and their ever-loving lives. It means that God has given you a job you cannot do without Him, and He fully expects you to depend on His strength, not yours, to accomplish what He has given you to do. And He will provide.

Even if the feelings never come with it.

(Now, if He hasn’t called you to this and provides a way for your kids to go to some awesome school with a small classroom size, an orchestra program, and free organic lunches, then by all means, stop the insanity and save yourself.)

((Send me info about said school.))

At the end of the day, it’s not so bad to have something in your life that you just don’t like doing, but that you get up every day and do to the best of your ability to the glory of God, so help you. There’s something in your sacrifice that is more glorious, more truly worshipful, than if you did it because you loved it.

And your kids will learn and grow and you will manage to still enjoy them even if you don’t like it, even if you drink too much coffee to get through the martyrdom-that-is-after-recess and never teach them a lick of Latin or paint anything or remember to tell them about continents.

When you can’t.even. but you do it anyway, God is glorified.

And one day, they will graduate.

I promise.

Homeschooling 14 Comments

I believe you can find grace for the mother you are and help to become the mother you long to be—a mom who has the freedom to choose the better things and enjoy her kids right now.

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