4.02.2013

quiet hours


tonight i'm up a little later than usual, despite my intentions of going to bed a half hour earlier this month. too nauseous to sleep. i remember this from last time i was pregnant, the long hours listening to bryan snore happily in our bedroom. baby june is kicking happily in my belly; sometimes she kicks hard enough that you can see it on the outside.

zu is sleeping and bryan works most nights now, so in the evenings i have a few hours alone between her bedtime and mine. used for grading, writing, reading, cleaning, preparing for the next day. alone but still surrounded by others, by all of the needs and wants and musts.

quiet restores me. when i was younger, and even in college, i loved to take long walks by myself. as a girl, i would walk through the woods and back fields behind our house, for hours. sometimes i would bring a journal and write things down, but mostly i was just outside, alone, listening to the quiet. 

sometimes i feel lost in the clamor. a friend told me recently that those times of quiet solitude with the Lord were a time of filling up, a time to prepare me for now, my life as a mother and wife. a time of pouring out.

i never understood what the bible meant when it said to give up your life as a sacrifice until i became both a wife and mother; how having so little time for yourself can either make you the most miserable or most happy person, depending on if you have Christ and if you allow him to create the right attitude in you.

as much as i crave it, time for myself doesn't have the eternal investment like time spent on others. even little things. little noisy things. they don't remember the day to day--i doubt anyone in my house notices the when and where of laundry getting done, just that it appears in their drawers as needed--but they'll remember that i was here, filling the crux of the house, the role of wife/mother.

6 comments:

  1. I was glad to see a new post from you! It's been a while. :) I still can't believe you do so much laundry/housework while working full time. I think you do more housework than I do! Tyson helps out more than he should, though - I feel guilty about it, but it's hard to catch him in the act. For example, I was in the middle of doing laundry this evening and I stopped between loads to take a shower. When I got back, Tyson had folded and put away the next load. Bleh! I actually get frustrated about it because then I feel like I don't get "credit" for doing laundry. ;) Guess the Lord is teaching me that it's not about keeping score. Anyway! It's very impressive that you're able to do so much on top of holding down a full-time job. When I was working, we ate takeout all the time and the house was only clean because we were hardly ever home except to sleep. And I didn't even have a kid then. So...well done!

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  2. i have a cleaning schedule that only takes 10-15 minutes a day and it makes housekeeping much more manageable! laundry is a chore i enjoy, so i don't have a problem doing that, and bryan helps me with dishes (my least favorite chore) and does the trash and litter boxes. we're working on him learning to cook--that is mainly where i tend to get stressed out, since it can be a lot to do all the meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking every week, and it would be good for him to be able to do some of that right after the baby comes. we'll get there eventually ;)

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  3. That cleaning schedule sounds awesome...did you find it on Pinterest? I agree...grocery shopping, meal planning, and cooking is a lot! We usually go on Saturday mornings or I leave Milo at home with Tyson when I go. Wrestling groceries and Milo is a nightmare period, much less being preggers. :) Meal planning is very time-consuming, too...I wish we could afford eMeals! Have you heard of that service? I think it's probably pretty worth it.

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  4. yep! i can email it to you if you want--its not bad at all to keep up with, it just doesn't include laundry and dishes (but it also doesn't have you doing chores on the weekend! i've never heard of emeals i don't think, i'll have to look that up!

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  5. This is a lovely post. I know exactly what you mean too, about wanting time to yourself. It's something I hardly ever get, unless I stay up entirely too late at night, which then just means I oversleep the next day and am grumpy and out of sorts. I love love the last paragraph of this post. I am going to remember it!

    Also, I would love to know your cleaning schedule. I am always stuck cleaning on the weekend, and I hate it!

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  6. thanks erin! its something God has been teaching me this year; that i Can't do what I used to do (especially when it comes to my writing). And even that its likely I won't achieve what I could've achieved if I had not had a family. Its hard to say that--and I know even as I write it, I want to tell myself "oh that's not true!"--but it is, it is a likelihood at least. working through that God has also been teaching me that this is Better, much much better, than what I had thought I really wanted. Anyway, I'm not entirely done working out all my thoughts on this--maybe I will write about it when I am!

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