Surrendering

I’ve been deep in a development stage.  I heard recently that the hard part about balance is the constant adjusting.  Walking up on a balance beam requires your muscles to constantly adjust and recover imperfections as they appear.

Homeschooling is definitely a state of constant adjustment.  Now finishing up our 6th year, I’m starting to feel like I know what I’m doing.  I still try new things, and we still constantly adjust.  I never want to reach a point in my life where I feel like there is nothing left to learn.  How depressing that would be!  There is freedom in learning, and freedom in the ability to adjust.  It’s pretty much the exact opposite of legalism, which does not require our muscles to stay alert and adjust as needed.  It requires we be stiff, even when we are tipping over.

I have been loving our morning hour, which we started this last semester.  We’ve been getting some great, quality studying in like never before. I think that will be a new staple in our home, and I’ll blog more particularly about that later.  I’ve been loving our family quiet hour.  We are all more sane and focused for it.

This last year has been a year of surrender for me.  Surrendering to the fact that there are only so many hours in the day, and if we are going to homeschool moving forward, I’m going to have to give up even more than I have already.  Silje is moving onto the middle school/logic phase of our classical homeschool.  That just requires more of me.  Elias needs more time from me as he is now in 1st grade, not just kindergarten.  Solveig will be coming up the ranks next year too.  David…well, David always needs me tons during school.

I just had to decide that if this is what we will do, then we will surrender to it.  I surrendered to David’s new diet this last year.  I’m just going to be cooking all the time.  It’s just the way it’s going to be.

My kids are thick in this activity stage that I have been digging my heels against for years.  I surrendered to it finally, and realized that it has actually enabled me to an hour by myself at the YMCA twice a week.  I see clearly now that this phase is terrifyingly short, and I just have to surrender to it.  I’m still very strict about not over scheduling, and making sure our family has white space on the calendar.  But I can’t keep them home forever, and it can’t be about me, and what I like to do.

I surrender.

And yet…

My brain has been stuck.  I have 4 knitting patterns that have been nearly ready to publish for over a year.  For one of them, I just need to do final edits.  I have sat down to do it more times than I can count, and my brain just can’t grasp it.  It’s like the numbers and equations just swirl in my brain.  It’s like whenever I try to turn on that math portion of my brain, it blinks back at me: “FULL CAPACITY.”

Besides our read alouds that I do for the kids during our homeschool day, I haven’t read for me besides non-fiction books that help me do my job better.  Things that help me be a better mom, a more focused teacher, or helping with therapies or recipes.

Fiction has pretty much been gone from my life.  I’ve tried to finish the last book in Kristin Lavransdatter, and I always end up falling asleep.  That probably means that my brain just needs more sleep, and less fiction.

As I’m thick in the day to day life of meal planning, lesson planning, and having a million talks a week with my preteen daughter who “just wants to talk” about things on her heart (I don’t miss being 11…at all!)  She and I are now doing a Bible study together every week, just the 2 of us.  There’s just no easy way to grow up, and she’s needed me a lot lately.  More than I could have imagined.  I know some older women have told me that teenagers need you as much as toddlers, but just in a different way.  I never understood that until now.  Not that she’s a teenager, but I see what that tunnel looks like now.  I see what they mean.  They just need you.  But differently.  (Someone needs to come up with a better way to explain it.)

I’m still in this position of surrender.

But I have learned the secret to surrender, and survival.  I am not accomplishing this secret with great success yet, but I see the truth in it, and I see the goal.  I have more clarity in my current stage than results.  In other words, I haven’t arrived, but I see where I’m going now.

The secret to surrender as a homeschooling mom of almost 6, is to not surrender to your family, but to surrender to God.

It feels like I’m surrendering to my family a lot.  My family is demanding.  There never seems to be enough of me to go around.  There is always something to be done.  Always.  I am never caught up, I never make everyone happy at the same time.  There is not a meal I make where everyone is happy with it.  Someone is always crying about the food I make, and that’s just the reality of it.

One of my kids is always struggling with something whether it is a bad temper, lying, entitlement, or just plain meanness.  I’m character training constantly, and when I have one kid settled in the truth of God, and their identity in him, the next kid pops up with selfishness galore, and my life feels like one giant game of character-training-wack-a-mole.

And I’m surrendered to it.  Not because my family has overpowered me, but because God has.

When I surrender to my family, I experience burn-out.  I experience total exhaustion.  I hurt, both physically, mentally, and emotionally when I surrender to my family.  They’re a bunch of sinners, every one of them.  They probably got that from me.  I seek a picture of perfection that is not from God.  His picture looks different.

But the ever so subtle but incredibly dramatic difference of surrendering to God is that he cares for me.  He cares for me.  He makes me lie down by green pastures.  He restores my soul (Psalm 23).  And he enables me to keep going with this family that requires so much from me, and gives me the wisdom to understand what to do, and what to left undone.  That is sometimes the hardest part.

God has been addressing my stuck brain lately, as he cares for me.  I think that is a portion of why I have been nesting in my house like a madwoman lately.  I need some brain clarity.  I want to do some projects and organizing that I haven’t had the resources to do in past years.  I’m working through my mending basket like crazy, just cleaning out all of these unfinished projects in my sewing room.  I got an old china cabinet off of Craigslist for my birthday from Knut, and I’m painting it a Annie Sloan “old ochre” mixed with some extra “old white” from another project to lighten it a bit more.  Then I’m going to take my gorgeous wedding china out of it’s yucky storage spot in the old part of our basement, and moving it up to a beautiful cabinet.

I have 2 books on my reading list, now that I have finished The Life-giving Home.  They are unlike anything I’ve read in years.  The first is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society which my mother-in-law actually recommended to me first, and I’ve heard about 5 other people recommend it to me since then.  It’s light and funny enough fiction that my brain is having to relearn to relax reading it, and it’s the literary culture I was around in college and after that I miss so much, and that’s been good for my heart.  I feel like I’m reading about my people, my friends.

The other is a part of a book club I joined online.  I met a group of book lovers, many of them homeschooling classically as well, and they started reading Leisure the Basis of Culture  which is a philosophical book.  I feel like while this is not fiction, but a book I would have picked up when I was in college to feel more intellectual, it isn’t about homeschooling, or auto-immune diseases, or parenting, or recipes.  It’s a book on the importance of leisure on your brain.  This is a book for me.

I have to just share some of the back of this book.  It sounds glorious:

In Leisure the Basis of Culture, Pieper destroys common misconceptions about the idea of leisure and it’s relation to work  Leisure is not idleness, but an attitude of the mind and a condition of the soul that fosters receptivity to both physical and spiritual realities.  The author points out that sound philosophy and authentic religion can be born only in leisure–a leisure that allows time for the contemplation of things, including the nature of God.  Leisure has been, and always will be, the foundation of any culture.

This book is classic work, talking about when we are constantly working, constantly be consumed, constantly doing something, and leaving no space for leisure (not idleness) we essentially are ripping our culture to shreds.  You cannot have religion, art, beauty, or community without leisure.  Even though this book was written years and years ago, I think it’s one for today.  I can’t wait to dig into it.

And I’m surrendering to it.  Because I’ve learned that surrendering to God means that I’ll have to be there for my family in the ways that are hard for me, but it also means I have to obey when he tells me to rest, even when I see more work to be done.  It means to rely on his wisdom, rather than my schedule or to-do list.  It means keeping my eyes open to all of the disruptions to my day, and seeing them as a gift from him…opportunities to do things, and teach things that I would not have otherwise had.

And it also means letting him pour into me.  Because surrendering to the truth of God means that He needs to pour into me before I can pour out to others.  It means I will no longer attempt to pour out of my dry pitcher.

While my children seem to take and take and take, (therefore surrendering to them feels an awful lot like being a doormat) surrendering to God is distinctly different because He does not take from me.  He requires nothing of my strength.  He pours his strength into me, so that I can accomplish his will, and I am left not feeling empty, but left with the abundance of what is leftover when I have poured out all he has asked me to into my children.