More Musings…..

I’ve been thinking lately…I’ve been thinking about normal and busy and balance and courage.

When Bella was so critical in the hospital, we survived.  That is all we did.  Life was what it was.  We got through each moment.  We lived in each moment.  It’s survival when the button is pushed and twenty people descend on your room with the crash cart and all you can do is stand back, watch, and pray.  And it’s a different kind of praying.  There are no words.  There are no concentrate thoughts.  It is simply opening a conduit up to heaven and waiting to feel something, anything of the divine to get through this moment, this second.

Then Bella got stable enough to come home.  We got used to another normal.  There are strangers in and out of your house all day and all night normal.  On a first name bases with doctors, nurses, paramedics, EMTs, RTs normal.  Rush to TCH normal.  Back to school for the kids normal.  Back to church activities normal.  A new normal.

Now a year of that has passed, and we are at another new normal.  Now we want the kids to have a normal life, so we are busy doing things:

• Becca: Orchestra, Viola lessons, HOSA, Latin Club, Mutual
• Sammi: Art Club, Garden Club, Piano lessons, Activity Day Girls
• Jessi: Girl Scouts, Piano lessons, Activity Day Girls
• Lizzy: Soccer, Piano lessons, Play Dates
• Joy: Preschool, Speech (2x a week), Occupational Therapy (2x a week), possibly re-introducing Physical Therapy
• Bella: Developmental Services, Physical Therapy (2x a week), Occupational Therapy (2x a week), introducing Speech

So now all we do is run – here and there.  We do homework, we read scriptures, we pray, we run down to the hospital.  We run.  I read a quote that said something like this:

  We get so busy that we anesthetize ourselves against thinking or feeling. 

When is the quiet time?  When is the pondering time?  When is the time to just be?  To listen, to open that conduit to heaven and speak no words, but to listen, to reach for the divine?   I think we have to find our balance.  But what is it?  Me, being a type A over-achiever wants so much for my children.  But me, having lived my life, has learned that there must be times for solace and healing or everything, especially your health, will unravel.

As I was walking out of preschool today, I was watching all the other mothers.  I was thinking of, and as I always do, longing for, the Millennial reign.  I’m hoping that then we will understand so much more.  We will have more of an understanding of balance and what normal is supposed to look like.  At least, I hope I’ve figured it out by then.  I’m learning that this life is about choices.  We choose the life we will lead.  I was reminded by something secular that I read last week that especially in the middle class, so much of our lives are made up by what we choose.  I have enough money to put my children in these programs.  If I didn’t, it wouldn’t be a choice.  I have the choice how to spend my time.  It’s an interesting thought and one I’m still mulling over.  I think it’s why my heart skips a beat when I read this description of life (click here).  But isn’t that me just trying to get out of making a choice and living with the consequences.  If there are fewer opportunities, there are fewer choices, life is easier.  My problem as a perfectionist is I want to do it the right way – and there is no right way.  I just have to pray for guidance  and do the best I can.  Then live with the consequences.  What does it say about me that I am scared to vary from the norm – that I want my children and family to appear to be happy and successful?  I don’t want to look back and regret.  I don’t regret with Bella.  Am I brave enough to be different from the norm?  Do I need to be?  Do I want to be?

Robert Frost (1874–1963).  Mountain Interval.  1920.

             The Road Not Taken

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

 

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,
       

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.
       

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.