Make Room for Growth

I redid the front of my house this spring. Then I went upstairs and redid that too.

It wasn't really about the house. It was about clearing things out, old paint, old layouts, things that had been sitting there for years just because I was too afraid to make a design mistake. You can't make room for something new until you actually clear the old thing out first, and that's true of a house and it's true of pretty much everything else.

My daughter and I almost never fight. We got into it hard this spring, the kind of fight that surprised both of us.

She'd committed to her high school dive team, and the team needed her points, and one day she just said she didn't want to do it anymore. I told her, you made a commitment, you follow through on it. She pushed back. And somewhere in that argument I said something I hadn't planned to say. I told her, there have been a lot of things in your dive journey I didn't want to do either. I didn't want to sit in a hotel room in West Virginia for ten days. I gave up time with my other kids. I gave up time for myself. Raising a D1 athlete is not for the weak, and it took everything in our family of 4 to get her here.

She got quiet. Not because she was in trouble. Because she was hearing, for the first time really hearing, that her excitement about her own journey and her plans for herself sat on top of a lot of other people's sacrifice. She wasn't wrong to be excited about where she's headed. She just hadn't turned around yet to see who was standing behind her to get her there.

I think about the two clear-outs that happened around the same time. One was physical, old carpet, old paint, a house that needed space made in it before anything new could move in. The other was emotional, an old way she'd been looking at her own story that needed clearing before she could see who else was actually in it with her.

As moms we give up so much of ourselves, quietly, and rarely say it out loud. Not to guilt anyone. Just to let the people we love see the full picture of what it took to get them here. So I'll ask what I had to ask myself this spring. Where have you not spoken up for your own sacrifice, out of love, not to make anyone feel small for it. And where in your life has the pattern just stayed the same because nobody decided yet to clear it out.

Becky