Day Seven: Patterns
Ecclesiastes talks about the flow of our lives, the coming
and the going. We don’t need to look back too far in our own histories to see
it play out, to understand it. Dealing with change in the present is more of a
wrestle.
The year of Lu was
change for me. I published it, and I returned to full-time work for the first
time since the boys. I anticipated these as logistical changes only, and even
when they turned out to be much more than that, and the vulnerability set in –
of my name on a book all the time and my being away from our home all day – I
tried to hold onto old patterns. There was a lot I couldn’t do anymore, but it
wasn’t just a matter of pressing Stop – not if part of how I understood myself
was in the doing of those things.
I knew the Beth who wrote in the corners of her home before
everyone was awake. I knew how to be my only reader. I knew the Beth who saw
only the four boys of her family on most days. I knew how to structure those
days – how to do things like make chicken broth to break up the monotony and go
for runs to clear my mind.
My life was in that time for a long time. When the new time
cycled in, it was difficult for me to release my old patterns and say no to
marathons and chickens. They needed to go, but it was okay that letting them go
was hard. Women have a hard time with hard. I think we associate it with “bad”
or “wrong” when it can just be “hard” and nothing else. I think we also have a
keen sense of where we want to be, and we prefer to have arrived there
yesterday. It’s a warped sense of time – a game of catch-up instead of
progression. We feel guilty, and we pile it all on to make up for it.
But the first step in crossing that gap of who we are and
who we will be looks like letting go. It’s putting off what was. For what, we
don’t know. When it will arrive, we don’t know. The best we can do is make room and wait.
There’s faith in the wait, especially when that wait stretches longer than anticipated.
Last December I put off writing this blog. I thought it
would be until the Spring. If I’d known it’d stretch to over a year, I wouldn’t
have put it off. But I had and Spring became May, and I thought June. Then I
thought August.
Do you see the pattern? Me, too.
Feeling like you just busted into the middle of a conversation? Maybe you did. Let me take you to Day One of this series so you can begin at the beginning.
