Today my dad stopped in for a short visit.

It’s always good to see his smiling face.

Last month on one of his pop overs he gave the kids an art assignment – they were to draw a picture inspired by a song he loved.  It is a song that imagines what the Garden of Eden might have looked like before sin entered the world.  (It’s called “When Dragon’s Hearts Were Good”, hence the dragon themed art it inspired.)  The kids had a time period in which to complete their artwork and they all worked hard, to varying degrees.  On this trip he swooped in and judged the contest and gave out the prizes – all monetary based.  (Where was this generous cash giving man when I was fourteen?)

Then we looked at photos from his recent trip to New Zealand to visit my little brother.  (What on earth? My brother lives in New Zealand??)

And after those photos we ended up looking at every photo on my dad’s phone – which turns out isn’t all that many.  They date back about three years and there were several photos of a visit together to Washington DC with me and the kids and my brother and sister-in-law and my dad.

You guys.

The changes in everyone were so obvious.  I mean, of course a kid shifting from 11 to 14 looks a lot different.  London and Mosely have added inches and a maturity to their faces.  And Otto and Piper and Berg have made gigantic changes too.

But there was another face with a change so obvious that the kids even all commented.  “Mom,” London exclaimed, using the wonders of modern technology to zoom in closer on our large screened television for proof, “You look like you were so young here.  You look like – well, a kid.”

Again.  You. Guys.

This was not a picture from my childhood or from my college overall and flannel wearing days.  It was a picture from three short years ago.  Three. Years.  That’s all.

And she was right.

My face looks different.  My hair was shorter.  (Maybe I need to chop it all off again because that might make a difference.)  My face was thinner.  (Who knew that stress and chaos and a world tilting off its axis could wreck so much havoc on the rise and fall of numbers on a scale and numbers in the tags of your jeans.)  But I just looked younger.  Less …. troubled.  Less tired.

The difference was certainly visible.  Crystal clear.

Goodness, what these years have cost me on so very many different and deep levels.  Maybe I’ll never know.  I don’t really think I want to entirely know.  Although of course I know too much already.

It pained me to see the physical difference.  To look in the mirror and see the increased lines.

I’m not sure how to right it all.  Where to look for the fountain of youth.  What special face cream I can invest my life savings into that will turn back the hands of, not just time, but of stress and worry and burden and fear.

While Dad was here today we went to look at a home for sale.  Someone was looking at it before us.  Two families were in line to look at it after us.  I’ve never purchased a home before but I’m guessing this isn’t your typical market.

The weight of it all all the time is almost more than I can breathe though.

It requires a steady preaching of the gospel to myself and lots of minutes of lots of days I’m not up to the task of sermon making.  (In the preaching to me attempts I fell across this post from eight years ago.  Why can I not remember my own lessons?)

And the silly thing is – you can go through all this stress of deciding – should I make an offer and what should that offer be? – and then someone can out bid you by $100 and your energy and time and worry and extra wrinkles and higher heart rate was all for naught.

That’s the part that I struggle with most.  The payout is not worth the hassle.

There’s a sermon from this weekend trying to break through in my mind but I’m struggling to remember the points that would help me most right now.

I’ve expressed this in person to several of my friends.

I feel like I’m a basically competent decision maker.

But for some reason, when it has come to making home buying decisions, I feel paralyzed with fear.  I’m consumed with fear of immediate regret for whatever I might decide to buy.

I think it’s like so much these last few years.  There’s been incredible work and grace and healing and happiness.  But there’s equal amounts of dying to dreams I held dearly.  Of having another reality thrust in front of me that isn’t the reality I assumed I’d be having, the reality I had actually been laboring for and working toward.

A transferring of dreams and ideas.  A shifting of the farm house I thought I’d be welcoming my kids and their friends to.  A change in all that I thought would be and in all that I had hoped would be.

I don’t think I’m offering my kids a terrible reality, a broken down life.  It’s not as dramatic as all that.

I’m just not bringing to the table what I thought I’d be bringing to the table.

It’s so much less Little House on the Prairie than I had hoped I could offer to them.

So much less idyllic than I wanted for them and for me both.

It’s been a heavy day and I’ve let my shoulders sag under the weight of it.

But I sat with my kids tonight before bed.  After reading our novel together and jotting down our family journal and nature notes entries, we talked about some of this.

I don’t ever want to be guilty of dumping adult problems on their kid shoulders.  And I equally don’t want to be guilty of coddling and over protecting them from opportunities to do hard things and to see God’s hand working for us and through us.  So we talked about this house.  About our days.  About things that are actually hard and things that just seem hard to our cushiony lives.  I sighed and shared how I am wildly short of having all of the answers.  How I had certain hopes and ideals when I thought about being a mom, when I thought about being their mom.  And how the life we are living no longer matches the image I cradled in my heart.  And how I actually love our lives.

They reminded me and I reminded them that what I like best and most every day all day is the six of us together figuring this mess out.  That they are home and we are home and that the house we stash our stuff in doesn’t hold a candle in importance to the people inside.

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