Roots and Vision

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spelled out my email address for someone and they’ve heard “Mama Choose Joy”. I typically roll my eyes and then smile and spell it correctly for them. “It’s CHOSE”, I say. And if they’re female and definitely if they’re southern they say something like “that’s cute” and I can see them on the other end of the phone leaning their head to one side with a tiny smile and warm heart.

Joy isn’t a word we hear a lot outside of Christmas – or was that just me?

I didn’t grow up in a church that talked about the gifts of the spirit and other than Joy to the World at the Christmas Cantanta, I didn’t hear the word much. So when I was managing a large team at an apartment community and pregnant and then pumping and raising a toddler and making my own baby food, it confused me how someone could find joy in the busy when I was just barely keeping my head above water.

But as I looked out of my office I could see it on her computer screen. The screensaver said: I CHOOSE JOY.

I think at first it annoyed me if I’m being really honest. But it didn’t take long for it to really hit my heart and I remember starting to cry.

There’s a choice. And I’m making the wrong one.

That tiny shift in perspective made one of the biggest differences in my life. In a nutshell, once I realized I could choose joy in my life, things began to shift. Then, almost 4 years ago to the day, I almost vomited, felt God in a big big way, quit my job, and started blogging. You can read my very first post here and here all about it.

I knew I had to name my blog something about choosing joy. One day while nursing Everly in her bedroom in my “special place” I brainstormed with my precious friend “Clancy” and being the external processor that I am, it just came out: Mama Chose Joy. She had a name.

I reached out to an artist friend to ask him for help with a logo design and in exchange for a pack of newborn diapers, he drew my beloved logo. “I want something hand-drawn. A tree, with a dove, with deep roots and make it take the shape of a circle.” It’s imperfect and simple and unique, kind of like me.

Over the next four years, I blogged about everything from chiropractic to Sedona to having a baby to separation.

It was raw, real-life happenings that could make it easy to call me an oversharer. But you might also call me brave and inspiring and maybe you read my story when your world seemed dark and you thought no one could understand the pain of never feeling like you were enough.

I never set out to make money on this blog and have never made a single cent. I don’t even know how to do that and don’t have bandwidth to learn in this season.

I do know that I am starting to recognize that our hearts have muscle memory and like any good workout, it’s painful to just keep going sometimes. But we do, and we try to learn what we can along the way, and when we come to a familiar place, we use what we recall from last time to get us just a little bit further along this time.

And we accept that it still may not be enough but we keep going.

Nearly a year ago when the world seemed to be ending, I got a vision from the Lord. Many times, he uses garden references with me to speak and show me things. He showed me the garden of my life, and that he had pulled everything out of it and laid it to the side. He had me notice that they were pulled up from the root, and as I noticed the empty garden, he advised me to be very careful what I put back in when I replanted things. (Maybe you think it’s weird that God speaks to me that way, but it’s true. I think he speaks to all of us, it’s just that we are moving too fast to see. I certainly could not.)

Unenroll from public school.

Put the house on the market.

Move.

Cut back to one income.

Start homeschooling.

Talk about growing your family.

Start homesteading.

If I were a spool of thread, it was as if I’d been all spun out and had been exposed down to the spindle. And slowly, someone had their foot on the pedal to the sewing machine and the thread was going back on, but this time in reverse – to a familiar place, but in a different direction.

Toward the end of summer, things starting happening out in this sunroom, and I’m not talking about the mildew on the tile. God started moving in me. Tears were plenty and prayers were bold. Ideas would come. Plans were made.

Maybe this year I will write more about the relationship with my mother and how it’s shaping my role as a mother to my own daughters. Maybe I’ll write more about things I wish I’d known along the way or share more stories about my daughters that make me cry.

Maybe I will share about our homeschool journey or my homesteading failures or how I do not practice yoga or the Enneagram anymore.

My garden does look different, and it’s just how it’s supposed to be. I’m thankful that for once in my life, I listened to the Lord and didn’t just throw my plants back in and keep going at the sake of comfort and not wanting to make changes. The shifting and sifting was necessary to get the soil ready for the next round of plants, and this time we started with seeds.

Seeds take time to grow. So do people.

I won’t ever give up on writing if you promise me not to give up on that person you’re close to quitting on. And don’t give up on yourself, either.

God didn’t give up on you. He won’t.

Lean into believing that tonight as you close your eyes to rest. Let your heart hear it, and may it soften you to feel something you haven’t wanted to feel.

Choose joy, friend. It’s always been an option.

Did I Really Just Cry Over Netflix?

If the television is on in our house, you can almost bet its never for anything I voted to watch. There are plenty of reasons I say this, but it’s true.

Since we cancelled cable, we rely on Netflix and Amazon Prime and have really gotten some good use out of our Apple TV and Fire Stick. Normally if the TV is on, it’s Moana or Pee Wee Herman as of late; soon it will be football (foreshadowing to a great post, I’m sure <insert eye roll emoji> ), and lots of times it’s golf or Wheel of Fortune (always gets my vote). And I can’t fail to mention that we are big Big Brother fans, so Reid and I do make an effort to watch that together when we can. Thanks to our nifty wireless antenna, we can pick up a couple dozen local channels and haven’t missed cable a bit.

I could say what most would say – “I don’t have time to watch TV…” but the reality is I choose not to watch TV. I’ve enjoyed getting lost in books and writing posts like this, planning out the finishing touches on projects I’ve been meaning to finish for weeks/months/years, spending time outside or working on my business.

The way I see it, we have little chunks of space in our day, and we get the privilege of choosing what we do inside those spaces. The choices we make will create our life, over time. We control our time, our time shouldn’t control us, and watching TV always seems to take the reins of control when I give in to it. Much like scrolling through social media, I’ve learned to appreciate and actually crave the disconnect from screen time. It’s too easy to get sucked into a vortex of comparison and judgement when we compare our lives to someone’s best when we are potentially at our worst. But, I digress…

It came as somewhat of a surprise last Monday night when Reid suggested that we start a new show on Netflix together. He delivered a beautifully pitched invitation for us to “spend some time together after the kids go to bed”, which I saw appealing and agreed to, truthfully without even knowing what show I had just committed myself to watch.

Ozarks. Jason Bateman. Fair enough, I thought. And about 10 minutes in, I was hooked to the story line, or I suppose I should say, what I assumed the story line would develop to be.

We snuggled up on our over-sized couch with a warm blanket and watched quietly as the first episode of this Netflix original series played in front of us. I was into it.

And then, when the episode ended and I got up to use the bathroom, I noticed Sadler sleeping on the steps. Again (roll eyes, again). So, I carried her back to her bed and proceeded with somewhat of a bedtime routine to get her back to sleep.

Meanwhile, downstairs…guess who starts to watch episode number 2? Without me????!

I walked into the bedroom, and when I noticed what was happening, I saw red. I was so mad. Here I had been, duped into a TV show I didn’t really even want to watch in the first place, and was sold on the fact that “we can do it together”. And he is watching it without me.

I shared my frustration aloud with him, which seemed stupid to him. And then I realized how stupid it really was…I’m crying, over Netflix???

I woke up the next morning to think about what had happened, and it hit me.  A blog post I had recently read said something like this:

Our Expectations, minus our Observations, equal FRUSTRATION.

Having expectations is a tricky one. We can and should have expectations in life, right? I have expectations of myself. Typically, too harsh ones. When I managed a team of people, I had expectations of them, too. And when they actually did or didn’t do a task that seemed to correlate with my expectation, that’s what I was left to observe. And then I was frustrated.

I have expectations of my children, and how they should behave and what they should eat and how often they should try to pee throughout the day.

Clearly, I expected the Netflix thing to turn out differently. Never did I think I’d come back downstairs and see him watching without me. But, it was even more clear that I was so bent out of shape about it.

Will it matter in ten years?…doubtful. But the fact that I expected the situation to turn out a certain way, and then it just didn’t go down that way, I was left feeling…frustrated. Which led to sadness, which led to saying things I regretted the next morning.

This incident compelled me to decide that it was time for Reid and I to declare a few expectations, ones that we could hold each other accountable for. We decided to declare the pillars of our family, and what would be important foundations to raise our girls upon. You may be thinking: shouldn’t you have done that BEFORE you had kids? Maybe. And maybe we thought about it. But this time, we’re doing it.

Letting go of my expectations in order to make room for a clear plan is exciting to me.  A plan that will hopefully craft a life of purpose, with healthy sprinklings of Netflix time here and there…except, next time there will only be tears shed if we are watching Beaches.