This week my kids broke me. Actually, this week my expectations of myself broke me and forced me to see what was holding me down. Those expectations I do carefully constructed so I wouldn’t break.
I planned:
Meals
Lessons
Cleaning
Not one went right.
My meat for meatloaf got used for tacos on the day I was broken. My daughter trudged through 16 math problems over the course of the day that took five hours. The laundry I planned on being finished ended up being washed three times because it either got left in the washer or dirty wash made it stink.
When my husband came home he asked what was for dinner. I told him I’m broken. I don’t know. I need to go pay bills. So as I went to my little oasis of silence, my bedroom office/ closet, I was greeted by puppy poop. My internet wouldn’t connect. My bill was going to be late. I was done.
And then I realized my plans were broken, not me. I could conquer the bills by using my phone app. I could let my husband use the ground beef for anything he wanted because there was more I could get another day at the store. My laundry could wait. Lessons could wait. Optimal was no longer perfection but function.
Being broken forced me to look up and out. I went to go for a walk hoping to mend the break and ran into another mom who looked as defeated as I was. “I think my son did 45 min of school this week,” was how she greeted me. I put my arm over her shoulder and we both sighed. We didn’t have the resources to fix each other but we could sigh together. She told me about another mom she knew who was broken. The next day I took a walk and saw a little book of prayers for moms. I thought, this little book could bring a smile to my broken friends. Turns out I was right. That got me thinking maybe other friends of mine were feeling broken, so I reached out to them, too. We were all at the end of our plans and needing some love.
Love doesn’t break when you’re broken. In fact, love kind of ends up being the super glue. The cracks might show, but those are the things that reveal we faced defeat but put ourselves back together again.
Plans don’t hold us together.
Clean homes don’t hold us together.
Home cooked meals don’t either.
Love breaks the chains that held us and need to be broken.
Each time I break, I realize I just outgrew the chain that I once needed. I don’t know where you are or what you might have faced this week, but I’m pretty confident the thing that you think broke in you was probably something you once needed that doesn’t fit.
Don’t give up. Find your tribe who will take an honest sigh with you and breathe. If you’re still breathing, then you’re not as broken as you thought.
Be empowered to find the hope to rise again.
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