We’re Ready to Begin
This week, for the first time since we moved back to Tennessee, our family sat down and watched videos from our time in Wisconsin. What struck me the most was how little our girls were back then.
I am not sure why I was surprised, considering our firstborn was two and a half and our middle daughter was eight weeks old when we moved.
I don’t believe it’s any coincidence we watched those videos three weeks after my husband’s second brain surgery. In some ways, it feels like those two surgeries, four years apart, book-ended an installment in the series of our life: Little House in the Cornfields, perhaps, followed by In the Warehouse Next to the Creek.
Now, I’ve turned the final pages of that story, and I look up to see that life is much the same, and yet . . . it’s not.
I’ve lived with a weight strapped to my back for four years, and within eight hours, when I rounded the Intensive Care Unit and saw my husband there, in bed, but with his wavy brown hair barely touched, someone clipped the straps from my back, and the burden fell, and now I’m learning how to walk all over again without that weight.
Now, sometimes, I look over at my handsome husband, who looks like surgery never even happened, and I wonder to myself—What’s next?
In my spirit, I feel that this part of our story is over, and that our identity has shifted along with that loss of weight.
Sitting on the couch, watching those videos, I was reminded of the woman I was back then, those eight weeks before surgery and the two years after it took place. She was fearful, stressed, utterly loved and loving, though she didn’t seem to know it.
There was one video of my eldest daughter, who’d gone down to the food plot to gather turnips, and my husband saw her from his office in the barn and began videoing her with his phone even though she remained unaware.
She finally spotted him and chatted with him happily, her blond girls fluttering in the sun, her arms holding a bouquet of turnips. I remember that day, but not because I was there. I remember that day because I was tired, and my eldest daughter and I were having a hard time.
I remember being relieved when she went outside because she and I needed a break.
But watching that video, I didn’t see the little girl who challenged me back then. Instead, I saw this precious child, and I wanted to get down on my knees and hug her against me—hug her so very hard, because she was, in fact, just a child, and though I was trying my best, I didn’t know how to be her mom.
Love has since unlocked my fretful heart, allowing me to be a different kind of mother, and now my daughter is a different kind of child: she’s more relaxed about her environment, more trusting, or maybe, all this time, my sensitive girl has simply been mirroring me.
My husband and I are ready for a new story, a new identity. He told me once that it’s like we’ve put up our sails, and we’re waiting where the wind will take us, which collaborates perfectly with what I’ve felt, because you must shed your burden before you can fly.
This doesn’t necessarily mean a physical shift (we plan to continue building our house), but more of a spiritual shift. For four years, we’ve lived in the shadow of an overarching story, and now that that chapter’s closed, the pages are unfurling again before us while the pen hovers over the page.
And our family of five is waiting there, linked hands, faces lifted to the sun, and our hearts whispering, “We’re ready to begin.”
Enjoy posts like this? Sign up for my newsletter here >>> http://bit.ly/JolinaNewsletter
Don’t forget to enter our giveaway! Only a few days left!
How the Light Gets In and Church Street Designs Art Giveaway!
