There’s a sort of existential panic that usually sets in for me around this time of year. Everything is too much and it all feels very noisy, including my own brain. We haven’t quite gotten up the umph to get back into routine. There’s all sorts of back to school chatter, but unlike the moms rejoicing that they’ll get their free time back with kids in school, I’m grappling with the reality that I need to both create and implement our homeschool structure. I am feeling the effects of my husband’s longer summer hours, my kids are bickering, I’m cranky and people still want to eat dinner every night1.
Having done this for a few years I know it will pass and in a few weeks we’ll have adjusted. But right now I’m tired and hot and sticky. More than that, I’m grappling with how to let go of this unhelpful thought that keeps popping up:
“I don’t have time for this.”
What is it that I don’t have time for?
Any of it! All of it! Panic! Go faster!
I almost didn’t send out a newsletter last week, and maybe I shouldn’t have. What I did send out felt a bit piecemeal and all over the place. Afterwards I felt preoccupied with the number of people who’d subscribed and how they were responding. I noticed myself grasping tightly to numbers and feeling stressed by my self imposed schedule. I tried hard to shove all that discomfort down. I did it, and it was fine. I’m fine. But I also noticed myself scrolling through Notes a bit more frantically and struggling to focus. I was preoccupied and distracted and trying to fix my weird feelings with a dopamine hit. It’s harder to do this without Instagram and therefore it was more noticeable that I was trying. And all the while, in the back of my head an annoying voice reminded me, “hey, hi. psst. this is what you do when you’re not doing well”
“I don’t have time for this.”
It’s what I’ve been telling myself when I need to journal, exercise, eat breakfast, nap or do any of the things that I know make me a human being instead of a human doing. I’m caught up in my busy-ness, running hard to get away - from what I’m not sure. My first impulse when I get stuck in the mud is to floor the gas. Spin those wheels harder!
There is objectively a lot going on in our life: the busyness of back to school and lots of kids, I’m getting my tongue tie released tomorrow and looking forward to stitches in my mouth and several days of soft food. We’re going out of town for a weekend right before our co-op starts. I’m still trying to finish writing a history and literature syllabus and there’s books strewn everywhere. But none of those is really the issue, it’s just all of those things plus everything else.
Frankly, the timing is terrible.
“I don’t have time for this!”
Remember?? I am a busy and important human doing!
Yesterday one of my kids clogged the toilet. (When asked, he told me he might have used “half the roll” of toilet paper 🤦♀️) Try as I might I could not unclog that dang thing. And as the water started to rise, a soupy mess of pee and disintegrating toilet paper I felt rising panic. I was working as hard as I could to fix it, but a big old mess was about to slosh onto the floor.
I don’t know if I can say that God audibly spoke to me while I was plunging the toilet, but I had the distinct sense that this was a picture of what I was doing with my own life. In this metaphor I’m the clogged toilet and I’m barely keeping the mess off the floor. Every time I try to act like nothing’s wrong it’s like flushing again and hoping nothing will spill over. It’s panic inducing.
I couldn’t fix the toilet. We needed a new toilet plunger, so the best I could do was to tell everyone to use the other bathroom and to leave it until my husband brought another home. It needed some time to settle and better tools to help. My oldest helpfully taped a sign that no one but him could read, “DO NOT USE”.
“I don’t have time for this.”
You know who doesn’t care if it’s a good time? Life.
Sometimes you don’t think you have time for things. But they happen anyway and you can make time to deal with them or you can have a lot of sewage on the floor.
Hopefully this analogy is not breaking down as much as all that toilet paper did.
My point is that dealing with things never feels convenient, or like there’s enough time to do it. It’s going to require you to sacrifice some things - and they might be good things - in order to attend to what’s in front of you. You might need to put a sign on yourself that says, “DO NOT USE”, even if you’re the only one who can read it.
I’ve been fighting it hard for a couple weeks. I’m superwoman! I’m FINE. Someone says I’m amazing for doing x,y,z and it feels great but also I want to say - “actually I’m over functioning because doing things manically makes me feel sort of in control but the truth is I lost my temper at my kids way too many times today and I’m still reeling from something someone said two weeks ago but I haven’t admitted that to myself yet.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
That statement is actually true. But I’m picking the wrong this. I don’t have time for everything, but some of it can be dropped. There are things that will bounce2. Things like this newsletter, my time on my phone, how clean my house is, whether things are perfectly organized… There are things that can’t be dropped entirely but must be juggled: physical therapy, time with my family, time to write and process the stuff that’s come up, my garden, finishing school prep I already committed to, and prepping for our trip. But even within all those things, there’s a lot of wiggle room if I’m willing to admit I can’t do it all, delegate, ask for help, etc… All the things I fight the hardest when I’m white knuckling. I hesitate to write all this out because there’s part of me that gets high off my martyr complex. There are people in my real life who read this newsletter and might ask me about what I write, and I’m not sure I know very well how to talk about it. I’m still working on peeling the automatic smile off my face in my real life interactions. Old habits die hard.
A couple days ago,
posted an article from talking about the danger of putting unhealed vulnerability out for consumption. I read it, thought it was spot on and commented:Oh my goodness. Yes. Trauma porn is so bad for all of us. And I get it. That need to be seen can feel like you’re being powerful until the hangover sets in. There’s a very fine line I think of sharing without exploiting yourself. Michelle Cushatt gave a talk I listened to about sharing hard stories. She had a whole checklist for whether you’re ready to share something - “it’s always time to write, it’s not always time to publish.” One of the checklist items was to ask if felt you needed the reader’s response, and if so, then you weren’t ready to write about that because it was still to raw to handle the potential criticism . It’s such wisdom.
Then I started really thinking about that comment I left. What good advice. I think I should probably take it. “It’s always time to write, it’s not always time to publish”
It seems like wherever I’ve gone this week, I’ve bumped into the same message. Sometimes that biblical “hedge of protection” feels a little more like the crib my toddler fights at naptime. The other day I sat on the floor while he screamed at me then finally laid down and looked at me through the slats of the crib until he fell asleep. I thought how ridiculous it was that he didn’t want a nap when he was so tired. And then I thought maybe God was trying to speak to me through an object lesson again.
“He makes me to lie down…”3 - is it possible that sometimes the sheep do not want to rest? I don’t know enough about sheep to know what that dynamic is, but I know enough about myself to suppose there’s a reason it says, “makes me lie down” instead of “asks me nicely”.
I’m being made to lie down.
Practically this means I’m taking a little Substack break, and I’ll be back in a few weeks. It’s hard because I like it here, and I’m GrOwInG mY pLAtFOrm. I would rather write and have someone tell me it’s great than do hard work in a journal. But if the writing for adulation means I’m being less of a person in my real life, then what’s the freaking point?
As I was sorting through all this I remembered a quote from Elizabeth Elliot that I both love and hate:
One reason we are so harried and hurried is that we make yesterday and tomorrow our business, when all that legitimately concerns us is today. If we really have too much to do, there are some items on the agenda which God did not put there. Let us submit the list to Him and ask Him to indicate which items we must delete. There is always time to do the will of God. If we are too busy to do that, we are too busy.
Elisabeth Elliot, Secure in the Everlasting Arms
I’m submitting my to-do list for deletion, trusting that if this is work God wants me doing he’ll give it back when I’m ready.
Reading: I started Like One of the Family by Alice Childress this week and it’s hilarious but also poignant in its race commentary. It was suggested by someone I used to follow on Instagram as an “own voice” alternative to The Help. I really enjoyed that one too, but reading them both I can see the difference created by the narrator’s point of view. I just picked up Last Child in the Woods and A Severe Mercy from the library, but I’m holding all my reading plans very loosely.
Listening: This podcast about time and using it well was both encouraging and convicting. I was thinking about it today and pondering the fact that acedia does not mean necessarily mean idleness, but is probably encompassed in the two extremes they talk about: an antinomian view of time, or a utilitarian view of time. Both of these err in viewing time as strictly ours, not God’s. If you listen I’d love to hear your thoughts. Email me at annelise.r.roberts@gmail.com if you like!
Life: I’m writing this letter one day early because as you read it I’ll be getting my tongue cut with a laser. After having five tongue tied children I’m dealing with my own in the hopes that it will help with more functional breathing and less TMJ and headache pain. I’d appreciate prayers, especially that my decision to forego opioids so I don’t have to pump and dump is not a foolish one.
Lastly, I wrote this little blurb on Notes to go with this picture. Life is hard yes, but it’s still good. All will be well. I just need a little more breathing room.
Still life
It’s anything but still.
But still,
aren’t you glad it’s your life?
Why is it that making dinner every single night is one of the most soul crushing tasks that a mom faces? I think this is exacerbated by being a food allergy family - there is not an option for takeout. But when everything else is out of control AND my kids still want to eat I sometimes just want to run away.
This idea of balls that will break and balls that will bounce is Nora Roberts. When we’re juggling the key is to remember what is glass (what will break if we drop it) and what is plastic (what will bounce).
Psalm 23
The hedge of protection being a toddler fighting his nap...I chuckled. I can so relate, especially right now, with a nearly-two-year-old who has been jet-lagged for a month.
I love to write but gave up my blog over a year ago because I realized that the complete silence my brain needed to write and publish was not at all compatible with having two (and now three) little kids. I’d stay up too late and be irritable/exhausted the next day. Even just writing this comment, I have been interrupted a comical number of times. I’m writing this while drinking coffee, eating oatmeal, and nursing my five-month-old. I put it all down to change a diaper and put shoes on two kids before picking up the baby again. You get it.
But without the pressure to clean up all my thoughts, edit, and publish them, it’s easier not to resent my babies for being babies. It’s easier not to bemoan the lack of complete silence. I’m sure I’ll look back and see this time as really hard, but also really joyful and wonderful. I try to take notes, aware that each day is full of so much beauty and humor and life! and I’m okay now with the fact that I’m really busy just living it: it’s all marinating, there to be sifted through and written about some time in the future. I hope the Lord is honored by my conscious choice and I also hope to write again some day-as I grow, or my kids do, or both. (I’ve deleted social media a month ago so that’s a start as to getting my brain back.)
Always enjoy your writing!
30 years ago I was homeschooling my five children and my journal entries were similar to what you’ve written here. Even though I wasn’t doing any other writing, I constantly felt I wasn’t doing well in the “time management” department.
As I got to the end of this post I was relieved for your sake to read that you are taking a break from Substack. I love your contrast between Human Being and Human Doing ❤️
Of course, we can’t completely stop doing all those things that God has given us to do, but you are wise to unburden yourself of as much as possible for a season.
God bless you!