Yet another thing I am still learning
On rest, restoration, wild places, and the smell of the earth after rain
Hi friends,
It was May Long1 this past weekend here in Canada and all we did at our house was work. There are many things that can make a marriage flourish over the long term, but one that has served my husband and I well over twenty-four years of wedded bliss is that we match each other’s freak - and by “freak,” I mean “work ethic.” We are the do the things and keep doing the things people. My husband Brian is a Protestant prairie kid like me and while, yes, believing that hard work fixes everything is certainly an efficient way to run a household/business/family as well as numb any and all unpleasant feelings, it does mean that we are rather terrible at, well, restorative rest.
This weekend, it poured rain for two of three days and we worked on projects around the house in a house-that-Jack-built fashion, as one thing lead to another which lead to another. I put in long hours for a book project that was wrapping up and more hours for a new one that is beginning (I do love this part). We chored around: loads of laundry, cleaning the house, managing inboxes, groceries, basketball practice, hosting playdates, attending church, caring for the spring colds for snotty kids. The two youngest girls power-washed the back deck (with such great characteristic gusto that we now need to repaint one of the railings since all the paint was blasted off but hey! the deck is clean!). Brian finished sanding a wall he just drywall-repaired in our bedroom. When the sun returned in patches, he built platforms for his rain barrels out back, mowed the lawn, changed the winter tires off our eldest daughter’s blue Corolla. I washed sheets and made beds and cleaned up drywall dust.
There are so many things I am still learning. There are things that may never come easily to me because of my base code settings, installed by genetics and family systems and Enneagram nonsense and culture and place and religion and media and the ongoing battle against despair or chaos and all that forms us into how we earn and experience love. But seeing rest as a steady practice, rather than a reward I must earn, is one of those things.
On Monday evening, in the last waning moments of our long weekend, the sun was finally breaking through the clouds, our evenings are growing long and longer. After we ate our roasted pork and potatoes, we were cleaning up the kitchen and Brian was gearing up to go back outside to keep working when we realized what had happened: we had worked, been productive, all weekend, a long weekend that was meant for a bit of resting, too. Again.
We would start work on Tuesday morning, a bit drier, a bit emptier. We would send our kids back to school, we would return to our jobs, and we would have missed an opportunity to restoratively rest together.
At first, I was resigned: things need to be done and who else but us will do them? Welcome to being a person etc. It is our life, our home, after all. A family of six is a full-time job and we also have actual full-time jobs and a world we love that is breaking our hearts often.
But wait. Wait.