The wilderness years...

Yesterday, my husband and I were driving to church for the morning service - not our own church, as we were staying with relatives for the weekend. The conversation went something like :
Me: Who's going out with munchkin?
Him: Well if you go out, you'll have both of them and be a novelty, but if I have her and you have him..'
Me: 'Divide and conquer approach. Got it.'
So he got covered in paint and checked on munchkin's need to wee every 10 minutes and I handled a teething 4 month old due a feed and a nap.

That was an easy weekend too. At our own church, with my husband a deacon and me the worship coordinator, a Sunday morning is one of my busiest days at the office. We want to bring up our little'uns to know and love God, to have respect for other worshippers and to enjoy their time at church, so we do our best to help them engage with the more structured worship of a Sunday as well as the daily living with Jesus as our model. We want to live our roles within the church to the best of our ability, in tune with God and His will for our church. Both of us have a responsibility to help those around us engage with our Father, see Jesus more clearly, make space for the Spirit to work in His people. These wants and aims are a wonderful privilege. They do, however, leave very little space to engage with God ourselves.

The last time I listened to a speaker and took in all of their message was some time ago. The last time I worshipped without having an eye on the congregation or a child was a fair while ago too - and the last time I actually focused, in a prayerful attitude, on God's message for me or prompts in my life, I can't even remember. 

Away from church, we pray with our little'uns every day and we talk about Jesus, about how He taught us to be. I grab snatches of time to ask for help, to say sorry for losing my patience yet again, to be thankful for a beautiful moment. But it's like texting God rather than visiting him. I send out my messages, sometimes I check for a reply and partly take in what it says before getting sidetracked again.

I can't be alone in this. Often, men and women my age, with a young family, are hugely active in their churches. I can't be the only one who is finding that having young children means very little time for nurturing your own relationship with God. Surely others are also wandering the wilderness during this phase of life?

It has been frustrating me of late, this wilderness. I'm having times where I resent the work my role requires, especially when it cuts into, perhaps, time with my husband, which is also on the lean side. He and I have exchanged rueful glances when one of us tentatively asks the other what they got out of a service as we leave the church. I feel guilty that, as I sing most weeks in our worship group, he has to go out to the creche with our munchkin so misses the service. I feel guilty that my youngest gets chucked in a sling on my back and ignored, that my eldest spends an extra hour and a half trying to find ways to entertain herself as we prep for the service. And this guilt is no friend to the servant heart I want to offer my God and my church.

Then, yesterday, after we agreed to divide and conquer, something occurred to me - or maybe I finally heard it... 

My family is a blessing from God and for this time, right now, we should be meeting with Him as a family, with all the disruption and mayhem that implies. We can't find the space to do more than that at the moment and maybe that's ok. Maybe texting God right now is fine, maybe he knows that I'll try and visit as often as I can and he'd rather hear from me in a few messages each day than not at all. 

My attitude needs to change. I might be in the wilderness, but why does that mean I can't find time to meet with God? Jesus popped off to the desert expressly to find Him!I need to find Him within my life as it is rather than trying to carve a space away from them to focus, because that space isn't there at the moment. 

Lent is on the horizon, and that's a time of wilderness; an opportunity to strip back in order to understand more. I think my aim right now is to embrace my wilderness. I want to accept it, to keep on trusting that God will seek me out in it, to keep trying to walk his path, and to keep an eye out for the rare oasises that are sure to be found here and there, if I walk it for long enough.

A life without sticky stars - what a learning curve

I didn't realise that I was a kind of girl who needed validation until the validation stopped.

In life, there is a clear grading system available, if you're the kind of person who likes a grade. Or maybe needs one. At primary school I worked hard to get my body weight in sticky stars, which progressed to the rows of neat ticks, the certificates, the A's, a First... Work was no better - there was the standard ladder, plus publications, presentations, little ego boosts and rough proof that 'the girl done good'. But always, always, the validation. The thing to aim for, and then the knowledge that achieving it meant I'd done well. Was on track.

At the time - as in, for the majority of my life - I didn't realise that my aim to do my best was so strongly linked with the need for someone else to notice my best and acknowledge it. I'm not enjoying admitting this, but it would seem, on closer inspection, that my pushing to always be better at what I do, or who I am, isn't just about self-improvement. 

I like the sticky stars.

Now, I'm a wife and a mum. There's no grading system. There are no sticky stars. And I'm completely thrown.

When I think back to how ingrained this sticky star quest has gone, I zip to aged three or four where my mum used to make me maths sheets, and give me lists of words to turn into stories - at my request. I'd complete them instantly and hand them back to be graded. I loved doing them, but I loved being told how well I'd done too. I can't really remember a time when there wasn't a marker to aim for, and someone telling me 'well done' once I got to it.

It was last night, after pregnancy hormones and tiredness turned a routine scrap with my husband into a full on mental breakdown, that I took a moment to try and talk myself down and I realised why the breakdown had happened.

An innocuous comment, thrown in a lighthearted way, had been tossed into the breech by my husband and I hadn't seen the funny side. The reason? I heard the comment and immediately felt like I was being given - not a sticky star - a black mark. Not something I have been accustomed to all that often. Don't get me wrong, 3 years of creative writing workshops culminating in the immortal words 'never has anyone written so eloquently for so long about nothing at all' will enable you to take criticism with the best of them.

However, neither wifing or parenting have right or wrongs. As far as I can see, it's just a big old blur of possible options which may or may not turn out to be positive in the eyes of your family and the unique characters therein. There are no manuals (that should be really taken as such anyway), no tried and testeds and no sticky stars. This, I could probably cope with if there was some clear black-and-white-here-is-the-answer or with-the-right-research-it's-likely-this-could-be-correct stuff elsewhere in my life, but right now, there isn't. I research and research to try and get the right fit for us, and am managing to largely stumble onto stuff that seems to sit right, but it's pretty nebulas. If the plan goes to plan, this is it for a while. I am me, wife, mother and owner of a spaniel with anxiety issues. In no part of life is anything a clear cut 'do this to achieve X'. That means anything that goes well is a good day, anything that goes wrong is my fault. (Ok, in a healthy mind, maybe that's not the case, but in mine it is.) And it wasn't until last night that I realised this. And it's a bit of a problem.

So firstly, I admitted all this to my long-suffering man, who needed no confirmation that his wife has a few issues. He pulled his usual 'oh dear, love', sighed, gave me a hug and told me I was a Nellie. As is to be expected. So that's good, because now he can tell me when I'm being silly before I go supernova on him over nothing. (And sometimes telling me might make things better, not worse. Sometimes.)

It's mostly me that needs to try to reprogramme, and that's going up take time. Interestingly, this has all coincided with me looking into non-rewards-based parenting. I'm far from done with my reading and thinking phase of it, but I think the self awareness moment I've just had helps to add another dimension to it. It's not just parenting, all these decisions we make about how to raise our children. It's a potential programming of how they're going to think and define themselves in the future. I'm not for one moment suggesting my parents did it wrong. Not all children turn into odd driven beings with self-esteem issues. My munchkin is, so far, quite similar in attitude and temperament to me, though, which could indicate a following of similar patterns of behaviour if given the same parameters.

The biggest challenge for me with non-rewards-based parenting is that it's just so alien to me. My immediate response to anything the munchkin does is 'well done!' My encouragement of a well-inserted jigsaw piece falls into 'brilliant, now do it again with another piece!' This is not ideal verbal interaction, if the writers on this area to be believed.

What a beautiful thing...

More research needed, I can feel myself erring towards this form of parenting, which can only mean one thing. A big dose of relearning for me, and a life void of sticky stars in the future. Apart from on art projects, obviously. Maybe that's where I'll learn to get my hit.