The Best Things Found are Free

As mothers, I think most of us are looking for rhythms and routines to order our days. We crave flexible schedules to help us anticipate what is going to happen next. There is so much that is new and unsettling and unpredictable about life with a baby. Whether you are a rigid schedule maker or a loose schedule maker, we are all looking for stability and comfort from the routines and rhythms we create and find.  And most of us find ourselves in a constant state of tweaking and experimenting to perfect these daily schedules.

I am no exception.  In the past, I tended to seek constant variety with little repetition.  Life with a baby has found me groping for more consistency and evaluating everything I do more closely now that I have someone else to consider, not just myself.

On this intoxicatingly delicious Spring day in Virginia, as I strolled down the street, meandering away from my in-laws brick two story, wearing my baby in a front carrier, I was reminded how much happier and healthier I am when I'm outdoors.  My baby is happier and healthier too.  She sleeps better and eats better outside in the fresh air.  I resolved, today, to spend at least a few minutes every day outdoors with my child from now on, closer to the rhythms of nature.  This is, after all, one of the best ways to live the theme I already chose for raising this particular little girl.  When she was in the womb, I sang to her every day.  I sang various songs befitting the mood of the day, but there was one song I sang every day, a little didly I made up, adapted from a song I learned as a child, and it goes like this,

"Samantha, Samantha, look round and you will see,

God's treasure is everywhere,

the best things found are free."

I do love buying toys and new props for her education at each stage of development.  But my fondest wish is that her favorite toys will be the ones she discovers outdoors in God's great big beautiful creation.  Today I am reminded that I want to start cultivating this love in her now, even at four months old.  The weather does not always make it easy to be outside all day long, but on a day like today, it would be a great misfortune to be indoors.  So we're not.  Today, Samantha and I are eating and sleeping and playing outside all day long.

More Revelations from Samantha Grace

As I said, there were three particularly poignant moments in the first three months with my new baby.  The second two were revelations that hit me during conversations with her as she and I played together.

One day, as I cuddled her, I said, "Samantha, do you know your Daddy loves you?  Even though he is not around as much as I am, he loves you just as much as I do."  As those words left my mouth, it dawned on me that this is similar to the Holy Spirit telling us that the Father loves us just as much as the Spirit does.  The Spirit is WITH us, as our helper and our comforter.  The Father is in heaven preparing a place for us.

Samantha's Daddy works hard, preparing a place for her.  Which leads me to another topic... in a few months, if all goes according to plan, you will see photos of our new house, a house just down the road by the lake, a beautiful location to raise a beautiful daughter.  We plan to move in May.


The second revelation came as I played with Samantha on the bed a few days later.  I was overtaken by how wonderful she was and said, "Oh Samantha, you are SO cute and SO sweet, I can hardly bear it.  My heart can't take it.  My heart is aching from just looking at you.
That's when it hit me.  I gasped and exclaimed to her, "Samantha, if God is MORE sweet and MORE perfect than you, then NO WONDER no one can bear to look at Him!"

I've always wondered why people in the Old Testament kept dying just from catching a glimpse of God.  He was too Holy to look at?  I didn't understand it.

Now I think maybe I understand it at least a tiny bit better.

Lessons from Samantha Grace - Part One

So about that baby in this story...

After 10 years of waiting, praying and hoping, she arrived on December 8, 2012, cuter and more precious than any dream we ever conceived: Samantha Grace Sherman - which means "God hears."

I'm already dreaming of the things I want to teach her; the books I want to read to her and the places we'll go. But in these first few months of life, her presence has been teaching me far more than I've been teaching her.

There were three particularly poignant moments these first three months. Today I will tell you about the first.  It happened the first week home from the hospital. My husband and mother both left to run errands, leaving me alone with my baby for the first time ever. Before pregnancy, I prided myself on my vast experience with babies. Yet NOTHING could have prepared me for the weight of responsibility that came with the arrival of my very own baby. I was SO stressed. The delivery and c-section, left me weaker and more vulnerable than I have ever felt in my life. It baffles me, even now, to think that God entrusts a woman with the most precious task on earth, caring for a helpless newborn at the very time when we are at our weakest and most helpless ourselves. Mentally, emotionally, physically broken. I honestly don't know how I would have made it through those first six weeks without this promise from Isaiah.... "He (God) gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young."   I recited this to myself dozens and dozens of times those first weeks.

But back to that first poignant episode during week one: First, you have to know that my greatest fear that week was Samantha choking.  In the hospital there was a moment in the middle of the night when she silently started vomiting and choking on amniotic fluid and I was unprepared for it.  I happened to turn at exactly the right moment to see her choking, but I had no idea what to do and she started turning blue.  I turned her over and somehow she got through it, but I came away from the episode thoroughly traumatized and gravely afraid of being left alone with her.  Nonetheless, the moment came later that week when everyone left the house and I was alone with my baby.  I had just finished feeding her.  I sat her up to burp her and I said aloud, "Jesus, please help us not to be scared by ANYTHING."  What I meant to say, was, "Please don't let anything scary happen."  But that's not what I accidentally said.  I said, "please help us not to be scared by anything."  So what did He do?  He expertly allowed the thing for which I was most afraid to happen at that very moment.  Literally, as the last word left my mouth, Samantha projectile vomited for the first time, splashing the bassinet, two feet away.  Milk came out of her mouth AND NOSE!

We lived through it and I smiled.  He could not have more clearly spoken into my life to say, "We are not going to avoid all scary situations.  Instead, I will be WITH you and you do not need to be scared by ANYTHING.

For those of you who think a baby vomiting is not a scary thing, it is humbling to share this story with you.  Indeed, it does seem a bit silly to me, looking back on it now.  But we all have fears.  Insert a different fear and maybe you can relate.  What fear do you carry that you can let Jesus be WITH you to overcome?

Homemaking - My Choice

As I said, there is a baby in this story...

Two nights before her delivery, I was awake at 4 am, sitting on a big blue exercise ball, trying to stay comfortable through contractions.  The following journal entry is what poured forth from my pen that night. This was the night I re-connected with my life as a homemaker in a deep way.

December 5, 2012 – 4:30 am

It’s in a moment like this that it becomes crystal clear to me that the life I have chosen for myself is exactly the one I believe is my personal calling.

The countercultural nature of my lifestyle has tempted me to insecurity many, many times.  I defend myself, I hide myself, or I try to compete with other people by rules that don’t apply to me, rules set by a very different lifestyle choice.

Tonight I am proud of my decisions and I vow never again to apologize for them or hide them.  I will celebrate this life.

I was a single woman with no job outside the home.  I was provided for financially by my father.  I learned the art of homemaking from my mother and I learned to care for children.  My time was free to pursue any project inside or outside the home to be productive.  Work was a value and laziness was not excused.  Yet this type of work was flexible.  I could put down a current project at a moment’s notice to serve other people, especially other women.  At 17 I spent 5 weeks in the home of a woman who just gave birth and was unusually sick.  Her husband was also sick and she had 6 children to manage.  I went to her side to help her for over a month.  This is only one example out of dozens where I was free to serve when others were tied down by careers.

If society does not create at least a certain percentage of women, like me, to do this type of work, who will do it?  A paid nanny or paid companion?  Few can financially afford such a luxury.  And will a nanny or companion, trained only in a classroom, be as good as a woman who lived and breathed this lifestyle from girlhood?

I’m married now.  I’ve been married for 12 years without children.  Part of the philosophy behind a life of homemaking and serving during my single years was to prepare me to be a wife and mother.  When I didn’t become a mother soon after marriage, I often lost perspective and wondered if I should have pursued a career to “stay busy.”  I could have had any job I wanted.  I was a smart child.  I could have gone to college to be a lawyer or a nurse or a business owner.  I had the brains for any of those options.  But that is not the life I chose.  At a young age, I saw the value of a homemaker and I embraced the training my parents and others were willing to give me.  I could blame my parents for “pushing me into this lifestyle,” but I can’t do that.  Plenty of other girls were encouraged by their parents to live the life of homemaking I was living and many girls chose not to go this route.  The choice was mine. 

I could have pursued a career and I might have enjoyed it very much.  But if I had pursued a career, I would not have been free to serve the people I have served as a married woman without children these last 12 years.  Tonight, my only regret is that I didn’t serve more people and make the most of the time.  I regret the times I spent feeling lost and useless and paralyzed.

I am about to have a baby.  I will still be able to live this life of homemaking and serving other women, but my time will be more limited than before.  I am now the woman in need rather than the woman who is free to go.

Tonight I am lonely.  I'm wishing there was a single woman in my community who would come and sit by my side as I go through the days and days and night after long night of childbirth pains that lead up to final labor… or even a married woman to at least sit with me during the day while our husbands are at work. 

Where are these women?

Our society has eliminated most of them.

Let me say that I fully support and applaud women who's heart's desire is to work outside the home with a vibrant career. I'm grateful we live in a day and age when women are respected and free to do so.  At this point, the problem isn't that women who want a career can't have one.  At this point, our challenge, as a culture, is to make sure women who chose homemaking feel equally productive and respected even though their productivity is measured differently than in the corporate world.

I want to end by saying thank you to Jaime and Amanda; two women who were there for me at the hospital during the most challenging moments of my entire life.  Jaime is a homemaker with 4 children.  Amanda is currently staying home with a 7 month old baby boy.  That night, these women embodied the true spirit of homemaking and women helping women.

I have many stories, but this is the story of me and Florida.

When I married in August of 2000, I told my husband, "I don't ever want to live in Florida."  I was a Virginia native, raised in Vermont and, in my estimation, Florida was too hot, too flat and too far from my family.  This is the attitude I took after I had secured the husband of my dreams and we were starting our married adventure in Colorado.  In my mind, all roads eventually led back to Virginia, MY home state.  NOT to Florida, his home state.

Rewind history by three years and you'll find a very different attitude on the same girl, intoxicated by love.  As she meandered her way, alone, down a sleepy country road in small town Florida, shaded by ancient live oaks, she reached up to pull down a strand of hanging moss and, inhaling the deep scent of jasmine, she envisioned a life here in Florida with her childhood friend, the boy now becoming a man, currently attending college at UF.  She liked the vision.  She could see herself here.

Love colors everything.  It makes us see good in everything.  It makes us see potential.

On the other hand, Love also keeps us tied to our roots..... it keeps the good aspects of our past interwoven with our present.  So which road led us to Florida instead of Virginia?  Homesickness.

Homesickness for the East Coast, and a shorter drive to family, made me agree to the first decent job my husband was offered.  It happened to be in Florida.  "I don't ever want to live in Florida" turned into "it's better than Colorado."  I enjoyed my time in Colorado, but I didn't like it as much as I thought I would.  At 21, eager to strike out west for adventure, I had not factored in homesickness. 

Chris adores Colorado and could have stayed, but as family is important to him too, he was happy to move back east.  We packed up and drove cross country for the second time.  Arriving in Florida, Chris buckled down to an interesting new job and I breathed deeper.  (The air in Colorado was thinner.)

For 8 years I said, "this is temporary.  We will settle in the mid-Atlantic states."  Somehow, during those 8 years, Florida wove her way into my heart.  Somehow, Florida became my home.  How did that happen?  Is it because I've been here so long it's become familiar, for better or worse?  Maybe.  I AM tired of moving.  But there's more.  After 8 years in Florida, we moved to Switzerland for a 2 year adventure.  When it came time to return "home" to the U.S.A., it wasn't Virginia I wanted, it was Florida.  At that point, I let go of past ideals and went home to Florida with open arms.

This brings us to the present day.  We've been home for a year now, renting a house and growing a baby.  Yes, that's right, there's a baby in this story...

Today there is a two month old baby, sleeping next to me in a cream bassinet beside my bed as I talk to you.  I look over at her now; the most beautiful baby I've ever seen.  Her Daddy is hunting for the perfect house in which to raise her.  After renting for over a year, we are getting ready to put an offer on a house to buy.  But I have cold feet.  It's a suitable house in an ideal location, so why do I have cold feet? I already told myself that Florida is my home and I want to stay.  I think there must be a little corner of my heart that still doesn't want to commit and buying a house is a form of committing.

Isn't that always the way it is with committing?  Commitment doesn't ever come without a shred of uncertainty.  At some point, you just have to pick a plan and start walking, embracing imperfections and making the best of it.  So that's what I'm doing.  I'm inhaling the deep scent of Florida jasmine and I'm celebrating the woman I've become; a woman in her 30's, finally at peace with the life of homemaking she chose 15 years ago.....

COMING SOON!

Stay tuned for my return to Florida!