“So what about you? What have you been up to for the last 30 years?” Little did my well-meaning friend know this is the question that would freeze my brain and induce an old, familiar anxiety and sense of my own inadequacies. To be fair, we haven’t seen each other in 30 years, having been friends in college, our husbands having kept in touch through the years and following each others’ Army careers, and now we were sitting across the table having dinner since they happened to be in town for another event and kindly wanted to meet up and touch base face-to-face after all these years. An even sweeter meet-up since our school’s team had just secured the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship the day before, and so we were already feeling college nostalgia. My sweet friend was just being nice, it was a fair question designed to draw my quiet self into the conversation and reconnect and she had no way of knowing how vulnerably that question hits sometimes.
The answer to the question is, “I’ve been raising three
amazing people to adulthood, and now I’m feeling a little unmoored with the
first year of empty-nesting in progress.” Not that I dumped that on my friend
who I haven’t seen since we moved away from Florida all those years ago. But in
giving the answer I did give, it set me down a familiar path of feeling like I
am….well….boring. How does one sum up all those happy years of the mundane, yet
oh so fulfilling days of raising littles, shuttling kids to youth sports,
church activities, band, school, conversations with teenagers in the car and in
the kitchen and wherever they wanted to talk – all the things that filled my stay-at-home
mom days, and all the mundane yet fulfilling things that still fill my days as
a stay-at-home empty nester without sounding like it’s not much at all? Thirty
years, and what have I to show for it, really? But what’s even more angst
producing is, through the years, I’ve felt that little sense of inadequacy not
only when a working friend asks what I do, but also from my church communities
too, because, though I stayed home to raise my kids, we didn’t homeschool. My kids went to public school, no less. And they thrived. But I always have felt that
I didn’t really fit in anywhere – with my working friends and with my
homeschool friends. With both I suspected I wasn’t quite up to snuff.
All of that is faulty thinking and I know it. I’m not
defined by what I do or don’t do, what career I did or didn’t pursue, how we
schooled our kids, or any of that. I’m defined by who I am in Christ. I know
this.
When this question comes up, I always feel this need
to justify my choice not to finish my graduate degree. I didn’t know myself very well back in the
day, and the pre-professional major I chose wasn’t a good fit. I still don’t
know what I should have chosen to study that might have been a better fit, but I
ended up quitting graduate school when we got back from our honeymoon, and even
though my husband and I both agreed it was definitely the right choice for me,
I’ve battled through the years with feeling I may have wasted my college
education. I didn’t. There were a lot of intangibles that enriched my life just
from spending that time studying and graduating and I’m better for it.
Would I change my decision to stay at home with my kids and
never pursue a career? Do I even have the desire to pursue more of a career
right now? Absolutely not. I have loved
being a wife and mom. With how often we moved through the years, it was a joy
to make our home and family a safe, warm, loving environment that was stable
for my husband and our kids, no matter what house in what state of the country
we were. Home was the people, not the location, and I am convinced it helped
keep all of us sane. And it was good work, even if the world doesn’t see it
that way. I have been able to read good, gospel saturated books and listen to
excellent Bible teaching podcasts that have deepened my walk with the Lord in a
way I would have missed had I made different choices, too.
So anyway, while I was feeling that familiar angst and sense
of boringness, I talked to a wise friend about it the other day when we met for
our weekly prayer time together. She
said, “Do you believe you were doing what the Lord wanted you to do?” “Yeah, I
do,” I said. “Well, ok then,” she smiled and said she’s felt so much of the
same things. Sometimes, it’s just nice to feel heard and understood, you know?
I am so thankful for Christian sisters who come alongside us in each season of
life and encourage us and put us back on our feet when we need reminding,
aren’t you?
Spending almost thirty years raising children to adulthood,
keeping the home, supporting my husband, and helping and supporting my church, this
is good and important and life-affirming work. It is not boring, it is not
wasted. It is beautiful, and truly I do not regret a bit of it. These amazing
people we spent all these years raising still want to talk to us and spend time
with us when they can, and they love Jesus and have found their own church
families where they live. How can I ever let myself think this is boring? It
may not look like much from the outside to try to relate what I do each day,
but in eternal perspective, this is the good stuff. And I’m grateful for the
beautiful life God has given us.
“Charm
is deceitful, and beauty is vain,
But
a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” – Proverbs 31:30
