What are the anchors and propellers that keep you centered as the beloved? What happens when you lose sight of whose and who you are?
I feel like I have to answer these questions in opposite order because only in exploring what happens when I lose sight of who and whose I am can I access my anchors that center my belovedness.
Nothing sends me into a shame spiral like not being able to catch all the balls that I have thrown into the air. I am a doer by nature, and I have unfortunately staked my identity in being able to produce. So when the balls that I have tossed in the air start hitting the floor and my ability to juggle them all results in a mess, I become an angry and violent tyrant to those closest to me. When the job is more than 40 hours, the meals won’t make themselves, the teacher sends the email that homework was missed, no one seems to pick up their own messes, someone gives two weeks notice, friends are coming over on Saturday, and the call comes in that one of the girls is sick and needs to be picked up. All the expectations I put on myself to perform, handle, stay steady, and care for all the things reaches a boiling point. My inner voice urges me to be the best wife, mom, boss, host, friend, all at the same time. My body gets so tight my insides feel like they might break. I fight for control. I fight to prove I can do it. I fight to prove I don’t need help. I fight and fight and fight.
Because of this way of being I don’t have many people who I’ve allowed to care for me or help me carry the load. For the first 6 years of my marriage to Kelly I didn’t really let him carry my burdens. I think I genuinely thought that if I was able to orchestrate our lives in a way where I never inconvenienced him then we would be happy. So I never really asked for help, never complained, tried never to let him see me fail. All of that facade came crashing down in 2020 as my job expanded, the girls got older and needed more, and we had to navigate the unknowns of the pandemic. Everywhere I turned was an obstacle or situation that completely overwhelmed me. More responsibilities meant I couldn’t hold it all by myself, and it pissed me off.
While I put on the mask of a task master, I am a deeply relational person and many of the truths I learn about myself come from the mirror held up by those closest to me. This is why my marriage in this last season served as an anchor to my belovedness. Not perfectly and certainly not every minute of every day, but I have experienced a deep unconditional love from Kelly despite my craziness. Through the last three years he’s spoken many truths about who I am and whose I am that have nothing to do with what I produce. He has noticed when the hustle is overtaking me and invites me to rest. He pulls things from my plate and offers me places for stillness. The photo above is from the deck of our family cabin where we go and experience true off-the-grid stillness. It’s a place where I feel so much peace and care from God. Where nature and relationships are centered. Stillness is the main event and rest is required. There, I feel deeply beloved.
5 comments
Thank you for you post. I resonate with the desire to do it all and meet all the expectations. I am drawn to your anchor of stillness. Have you found way to incorporate a rhythm of stillness into your schedule? Are there moments of stillness that you carry with you into your daily routine?
It is a really fair question to ask Ben, thanks. I know I need to cultivate a rhythm of stillness in my life, but I have not quite figured out where that lives inside my normal schedule. Our cabin is wonderful, but I recognize that I need to figure out how to get stillness without having to be in the middle of the woods without cell service….
A metaphor I’ve become a fan of for the juggling of all the many things is that of glass balls and plastic balls. The idea being we all juggle a lot of balls, and we’re bound to drop some. Ideally, we can do a good job of discerning which balls are plastic and which balls are glass to let the plastic balls drop so that we can pick them up when ready and minimize the shattering of the glass ones. It’s not a perfect metaphor in my view because I wish it didn’t take for granted the juggling of so many balls as reality of life… but it helps me settle down my inner lava monster. I hear you using different descriptors than “lava monster” here but I resonate with how you’ve articulated your interior life.
I delight in your description of the ways Kelly serves as anchor for you and in the naming of the ways he reminds you of whose you are without calling upon that which you produce. I wonder if there have been moments you can take from your experiences of stillness and belovedness to draw upon in your daily life to invite you to that experience of belovedness – and to extend my previous metaphor, to treat your belovedness and the relationships that call you into your belovedness as glass balls rather than plastic balls
I hear you saying that you become anchored in propelled by your belovedness in the stillness. In the care of a cherished relationship. Perhaps even in the honesty offered here. I wonder how embracing a ritual of sacrificing quantity for quality in the chaos of the tasks would also contribute to our sense of anchoredness and propulsion.
I hear both of you (Jer and Meredith) suggesting that there is an editing or prioritizing process that could be possible (glass balls vs. plastic ones! I love that). It leads me to think that perhaps a practice of belovedness for me could be saying no to good things to care better for the best things. To believe I am beloved even if I don’t do something I could do. Sounds easy–super hard for me in practice. Something to noodle on for sure. Good thoughts.