No Regrets

“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