Our Cabin on the Creek

I had a relationship with a house. Like so many significant others in our lives, I didn’t understand how much I appreciated it until the end.

My family and I returned to America somewhat suddenly and unexpectedly, after 17 years of living overseas, when we realized my husband was suffering from depression. Coming back to America for a time of rest and healing, we all felt a sense of trepidation. “United States” might be embossed on the outside of our passports, but our home had been overseas. We needed a place to call “home” for a year.

Hunting on the internet we found a modest house to rent. Tucked down a long driveway on a flag lot, the house itself was nothing too striking, though gratefully adequate for our family of six. The lot, however, was the selling point. Sitting privately and peacefully along a green space with a gentle creek cutting through it, it hinted at being the perfect place for a year of rest. We quickly dubbed the place “Our cabin on the creek.”

Moving in during the early weeks of spring, we lived four full seasons there on the creek. We gradually filled the house with our things. We celebrated a years-worth of birthdays and holidays. Our kids ventured into their first experience in American public schools, coming home each day to share how strange the ‘native behavior’ of middle and high schoolers seemed. (They were going through a form of culture shock.) The inevitable array of emotions were felt and expressed inside those walls.

My husband and I sat by the cozy fire in the winter months after the kids left for school to discuss our lives, sharing our reflections on this odd stage of ‘sabbatical’ in our lives and the path we must take out of the darkness and the pain. Rich conversations – sometimes full of raw emotions, sometimes daring to hope for the best of outcomes…mostly very honest and intimate.

And always this house, with its big windows looking out into the green outdoors, gave us a place to be and to behold beauty in its natural form.

So almost like clockwork, the year was up and we were making a move into a purchased house – only a mile away. Reluctantly we knew we had to give up our cabin on the creek. After days of preparing the new house, moving our furniture and boxes, the final process was left – to clean up our cabin and return the keys.

As with much of married life, my husband and I devised a sensible “division of labor” strategy. It seemed only natural that I would take on the two bathrooms and the kitchen, since I had so much experience cleaning those places. So there I was in the kitchen, scrubbing the stove top when I realized I was in the midst of a labor of love. I was relating tenderly to the stove, as if it were the wounded limb of a friend or a pet. From deep inside me I sensed the desire to “care” lovingly for this house that had given to us over the last year.

Like washing the body of a loved one who has passed away, I was preparing this house for its burial in my heart. It would no longer be a part of our lives, but it would pass into the memory of my heart. It seemed an honor to scour its sinks and mop its floors. It was the last time I would touch it.

The final good-bye was the next day, when my husband and I went back to clean up the outdoor areas of the lot. Taking a few moments for lunch we stood on the deck and looked out into the woodsy surrounding of the creek. A lone mallard duck sat peacefully on the surface of the still water. Multiple birds could be heard chirping their unique calls in among the trees. The house with its trees, creek and wildlife seemed like my friend. Saying good-bye seemed silly, yet I felt its tug deep down in my being. Gratitude and sadness swelled around me. I didn’t want this to be the end.

Thank you, house…little cabin on the creek… for being home to us. God the Father gives good gifts. And you dear house have been a very good gift.

My Ideal Family

I am going to reveal the sick side of my nature. When my husband and I had two sons, we began to consider our options: stopping at two or going on to have a third child. My husband was leaning towards sticking with the nice, solid, balanced number 2, but was open to hearing arguments for 3.

Here’s where I get ‘sick’. I didn’t want to have just 2 kids, because that seemed “manageable”. Sick, right? I mean, what’s wrong with manageable? But somehow that just didn’t feel right to me.

I didn’t want to be able to pull off the perfect little family, with everyone always looking neat and clean and wearing just the right clothes with all the wrinkles ironed out and all the colors or styles perfectly matching. I didn’t want my house to always look clean and orderly. I didn’t want a place for everything and everything in its place.

I knew I was going to invest myself heavily in this mother role and I didn’t want to overwhelm my husband and kids with the amount of energy I planned to give to it. I had stored up energy for this role. I would over do on a few. I needed to spread it out a bit.

Now it’s not that I wanted a complete disaster area to live in and my family looking like neglected slobs or abandoned orphans either. I wanted something in between. I wanted a healthy challenge. I wanted life to error towards abundance, towards fullness, towards almost beyond my ability. I wanted a creative, slightly skewed look to life - not an uninteresting, perfectly symmetrical design.

Of course, I didn’t really know what I was looking for or the fact that every family is out of balance in several ways, regardless of how many people are in the family. Personalities bring an incredible array of creative non-symmetry in life. Challenges abound in raising children and establishing a family whether you have one child or twenty. I was young.

But I was also convincing! And so my husband and I decided to add to our little brood. A daughter came on the scene and it felt as if a complete family was born. The door could be shut, because everyone was in. This third child was up on all fours, rocking herself back and forth in the crawl position as if about to blast off at the age of four months! She was walking at 8 months and climbing up on and over every barrier we constructed for her safety (and our sanity!) We knew right then and there that “adding” a child is more like “multiplying” your work load. I had arrived at that place I thought I was looking for: Happy chaos! You know it looks so cute in the movies! I was busy, but in an enviable way, it seemed to me.

However, I guess we hadn’t shut all the doors or someone else reopened one, because we discovered one more blessing was on the way. Surprised, but not dissuaded, we regrouped in our minds and imagined an even sweeter family dynamic.

Again, this was not addition. It wasn’t a matter of 3 kids + 1 kid = 4 kids. No. This meant multiplication. There were unknown exponents, like x and y, a and b, that were factoring in with every child. 1x + 2y + 3a + 4b = ????? Exponents like individual personalities, compliant or strong-willed dispositions, learning styles, strengths and weakness, not to mention birth order influences, were a part of each child’s make up. Not only was each child a unique, and still not totally known combination of factors, but each “combination” was interacting with the “combination” of the others. In fact, what once seemed to merely be a matter of figuring out a quiet math equation on a squeaky clean white board, now felt more like trying to control the potentially explosive results in the chemistry laboratory of a passionate scientist.

My desire to not be fully in control of this family experiment was met…and beyond. I have never tamed the beast…but I love it just the same. It, our family, is more than I can handle. Not a one of us looks like the flat, 2 dimensional image that will grace a parenting or family magazine. I haven’t cleaned us all up, haven’t got everyone dotting all their i’s and crossing all their t’s. I’m still working on convincing them that some “polite manners” are more than just show and that learning to compromise with their siblings will have big pay-offs in their future work and relationships.

But here’s what I hope they take with them: The undeniable, deep-seated sense of being loved for who they are and the confidence and ability to love others who are less-than-image-perfect.

Open Windows and Random Tides

There’s a small window about to open. As a family we’ve been talking about this “event” for a couple years, anticipating it like one might have anticipated the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens…though ours has a predetermined date attached to it. At the end of May our youngest daughter will turn 13, becoming an official teenager. The window opens. Three months later, at the end of August, the window will close when our oldest son turns 20. For a season, a brief one, we will have four teenagers in our family.

While this event has occurred in other families before us, thus not making it newsworthy elsewhere, it is a significant moment for us. And though my kids might see this approaching season as a great chance to celebrate something unique that will never happen again for us, for this mom, I find myself dreading the beginning of the end. Not the end of life, but the end of childhood life. Gradually, each of our four will pass from childhood to adulthood. Teen-hood seems to pick up our babies and escort them through this passage, delivering them at the end to the world of adult attitudes and responsibilities.

Officially, legally, my son became an adult when that 18^th birthday arrived over a year ago. And some might argue that he is henceforth an adult in every regard and should have gotten off the Childhood Express right then and there. Though I am excited for him to arrive at that wonderful destination eventually, I’m also glad there is a period of a couple of “teenage years” at the beginning of adulthood.

Like the tide coming in and going out, we become aware of its intentions but see that it takes quite some time to achieve its goal. And sometimes, after several steady waves that show the tide is on its way out, one “out of sync” wave will wash up on the shore much higher than the outgoing pattern of the others, both surprising us and reminding us of the ocean’s right to be random in its steady approach towards its goal. If we’ve been around the ocean much at all, we know that occasional “out of place” wave is not an indication of a tide that is failing, but rather a normal occurrence in an organic system: systematic and yet not totally uniform.

As my son moves out, I’m glad that it is gradual, that his teen life disappears and then reappears again and again as he gently shifts to that goal of “adulthood”. Occasionally an exceptionally “childlike” wave will wash on our shores, and will startle us as we were getting adjusted to him being less and less a child. It races up and surrounds our ankles. Oh, the thrill to be once more, if only briefly, surrounded by his sweet youthfulness (even if sometimes it is the somewhat sour side of childhood immaturity). He is letting go, but it is a process – a process each of us has gone through.

Though "twenty" officially marks the end of my son’s teen life, and a window closes in our family, we know we may see that window re-open slightly, unofficially, to let in a few random waves. We won’t be fooled. We know which direction the tide is going and we’ll just rejoice in the pleasure of watching as it gradually moves out.

Are We There Yet?

Parenting young children, has kept me plenty busy. From the hardest job I’ve ever had (aka potty training), to trips to emergency rooms, assisting in building something amazing out of Lego, reading favorite story books, the many nights of trying to figure out homework assignments that I only vaguely remember studying at some point in my youth…to praying with them for friends, listening to them vent their teenage emotions, to starting the college application process… It has been full, and rich! Would not trade this in for all the adult-only resort vacation spots in the world!

Over time, however, I begin to see out on the horizon something else approaching my life. Or more accurately, I am approaching it. Parenting is not a stagnate state of being. My kids have not stayed two or six or even sixteen years old. Their needs and interests and relationships with me have continued to change, sometimes faster than I can keep up with. Just when you think you have it all figured out and can sort of relax, they bump up to a new stage! And we all have to shift a bit and there’s a new learning curve to conquer in parenting them well. I have never been bored in all these years.

Yet, as the first one begins to take those concrete steps out of his childhood home, that hazy thought way out there on the horizon, the one that so many older women have spoke of, both with a sense of warning and a sense of hope, about the “after life” (life after the kids all leave the nest), suddenly seems so much nearer and clearer. Like a mountain that once only appeared to be a slight, bluish mound way off in the distance, after traveling for quite some time in these parenting years, the time when my children’s daily lives no longer occupy my daily life is now so much nearer and showing itself to be more than just a mirage.

Am I ready? I’m not sure. But I do know that it is not an exact line between “this life” and that one. There is a gradual climb and long before I actually am there completely I am already sensing change on the inside. Not necessarily with excitement, but also not necessarily with dread. There are times when I so envy the young mom with her toddlers. How I miss the days (at times!) of plopping down on the floor to assist the creation of a great toddler architectural feat or sitting on the couch to read again “Frog and Toad” adventures to a rapt audience or being held onto by a sleepy one who has made my shoulder her pillow.

But I also see other women stepping forward, developing abilities that perhaps lay dormant in them for years while they functioned as “mommy”. There is something very exciting about the thought of getting to unearth and polish abilities in my own life. With my kids all the way past those toddler and early years, all moving into or out of the teenage years, not needing me to tie their shoes, all capable of reading on their own, should I make my move now?

Traveling towards that destination that so many women have traveled before me, from the back seat of my mind comes the question, “Are we there yet?” If the journey is part of the destination, then the answer is “Yes.”

And so these Mere Musings are offered as one woman’s pondered observations and meditations along the way.