When Jason and I met with our first social worker for our first ever home study, they asked us our strengths and weaknesses in our marriage. It sounds kind of like a Michael Scott line, but we said our weakness was over-communicating with each other. It was true though…we’d go around, and around, and around, and around making sure no stone was left unturned with all things, big and small. Every conversation was overly thorough, and mostly it meant that conflicts were never ending…never, ever ending. Ha!
Fast forward a handful of years and two kids and the days of over-communicating are long gone. Like, can’t see them in the rear view mirror at all. Last year in 2019, once wedding season hit and I was getting back into working after some time off from Grady’s birth, I literally felt like I was drowning. I’ve never, ever felt like that before — like I couldn’t manage it all. There was literally a day that I took the kids to the gym and put them in childcare for an hour or two and went and sat by the pool in silence…away from all people and all things. I even saw some friends from church and told them hi, but that I couldn’t talk and was escaping my children. It was rather rude, and if you read this, please accept my apology. I have never needed to do that before, and I’d be lying if I said that was the only time I did that last year.
What I realized in that season was not that Jason and I had issues, or even that my kids were ill behaved, it was just an overall lack of communication between, mostly Jason and me, but also our communication as a family. Brighten was old enough to understand when Jason was out of town and wasn’t home at night. I was pretending that I could manage everything and I was being stubbornly silent when I needed help. Jason was so busy with travel and work that he was exhausted when he was home, but wanted to spend time with his kids and wife, which perpetuated more exhaustion when he really needed rest. We were all holding our breath, afraid of what would happen if we said what we needed or how we felt. It wasn’t healthy, and we almost hit a breaking point.
Finally, Jason and I went to dinner and went to get ice cream one night without the kids. We sat outside on a quaint little corner and I spilled the beans — I needed help! I needed help with the kids, with our home, with all of it. It was so freeing, and in that 30 minute conversation we reconnected and our passion for communing with one another was revived. We talked about rhythms of rest, resources for alleviating some things that I didn’t feel like I could get to, and how we could be a team in this busy season to raise our children and support our family. It wasn’t perfect, but we walked away from our date night with a plan.
It’s been close to a year since that season, that summer, and that conversation. Since then we’ve walked through times of healthy communication, over-communication, and times of complete lack of communication. We’re about to enter a really busy season of life, possibly the busiest ever, and we can feel ourselves hunkering down in our communication — tightening the reigns to make sure we are giving each other all of the information we need to function well and in a healthy way. When I think about the months ahead, I’m excited for the opportunities we have, the fun things we have planned as a family, the growth each of our kids will walk through, and the memories we’ll make along the way. But if I’m honest, I can also feel my nerves tense up at a glance at our calendar. The stakes seem higher the older our kids get. The higher the schedule piles up, the harder it seems to do this whole thing well.
So as we enter this season of being busy, growing kids, budding businesses, and just life, I pray that we’ll rely not on our own strength, but on the One who is strong in our weakness. As we aim to communicate, to stay in sync, to live this life well, may He be most glorified in both our success and our failure.
