The season my family is in at the moment is not an easy one.
Let me fill you in. My husband is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree while working full-time and is also completing a 2-year training for said job, which requires him to be away for a week at a time sporadically. On top of all of this, there’s also basic life to account for: sleep, exercise, his spiritual life, being a dad, and being a husband. Unfortunately, no matter how much of a priority family is, there are regrettably only 24 hours in a day. Inevitably, despite him doing his very best to spread himself thinner than he should, I always end up feeling like I’m last on the list. Does that mean I’m needy or invalid? No. Does that mean he’s a bad husband? Emphatically NO. Everything he does is for the good of our little family, and I am beyond grateful for him. But does that mean it’s easy? Also no. I can honestly describe my life at the moment as ‘being a single mom with the best husband ever’. Seriously, how contradictory a single statement, but it fully sums it up. Even as I write this, my husband just got home from traveling for the past 10 days and is already holed up in his office doing an exam while I’m left with all the other responsibilities, per usual. But I write this not to complain, but to hopefully help you feel less alone if you’re in a similar season and also to share some wisdom I’ve learned along the way over the past 5 years on this journey, which is this: we need people. God created us that way.
My husband and I have always been independent people who only relied on ourselves and refused to depend on other people. And then, when we found each other, we only leaned on each other. But then life shifted so much over the past couple of years, particularly having a baby, that it threw us into a spiral where we quickly realized that we needed support. We needed a village. And since that time, God has been teaching us what that really means. It means you share burdens: you share theirs, and they share yours. That’s what it’s supposed to look like. To have a good friend, you have to be a good friend! You can’t expect people to drop everything and be there for you if you never do the same for them.
When I first became a mom, postpartum hit me much harder than I ever expected it to (I’ll write about that experience in another post at some point), but the hardest part was the sudden isolation of it. It was a huge shift in my life, and I no longer had any sense of ‘normal’. One day I was working a full-time job, as I had for several years, and then suddenly, I had nothing to do, nowhere to go. No one. Nothing. It was a painful lesson in needing people. I decided then that I needed to invest in the people around me and the friendships that I had neglected for far too long. You build a village, brick by brick, person by person. You have the God-given privilege of hand-picking your circle, of choosing friendships that are likely to become closer than family. I know, in my case, God brought people into my life at the most unexpected times, and those people became the most surprisingly beautiful friendships. I encourage you: need people! Allow yourself to accept help. And when you do, suddenly the season you’re in isn’t quite so hard because you have people who hear you, support you, and are sometimes just simply present. And then, in turn, those friendships give us the privilege of loving others the way He loves us.
“The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The only way to have a friend is to be one.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
