The Things That We Didn’t Want

My girls (and I) are obsessed with my daycare baby, Greyson.
Greyson is 13 months old.
His blonde head, fuzzy like a kiwi.
His smile feels like it can stop time.

I have watched him for about 9 months.
I, therefore, feel I have put in enough work now that his parents should just give him to me outright.

The sounds of my girls absolutely enamored with every facial gesture and noise he made on the way to school the other morning was the best way to start the day.
They squealed, and made videos.
They, his top fan club.

Like there was almost nothing more pure in the world than the way that we all feel about him.

A little over a year ago, before our move to our new home,
my plan was to quit doing daycare after 12 years of it,
and to just focus just on my actual family;
My plan was all laid out.
But then my mom announced she would be moving away, and we would be losing her help with the rent.

I knew there would be no way we could afford to live without me working at all,
so, I kept only my one daycare girl Linnae,
who was about to be a big sister to a baby boy we did not yet know.

To be honest, I had so much stress about taking on a baby again.
I felt like I’d put in those years and was done with them.
Starting over was something I really didn’t want.
Was I really ready to do the bottles, and diapers, and sleep training all over again?
My stress level rose when I thought of it,
but daycare had always been the way I got to work from home.
It’s the way we made our life work.

How was I to know then that the thing I was fearing would turn out to be one of my biggest blessings?
Greyson has become one of us now.
A perfect, squishy, ray of sunshine that feels just like he is my own.
I marvel at it every time that I hold him –
The love that took me by surprise.

I had wanted to focus on my family alone.
I didn’t know God would just expand who I considered my family.

And isn’t that just how it is sometimes?
When the thing that we fear becomes a necessary piece that we nearly chased away?
When you don’t realize until you’re in the middle of a thing,
just how important it really would become?

The other morning I woke still completely exhausted.
Not just pajama pants to the school drop-off line exhausted,
but full pajamas, not even wearing a bra to the school drop-off line exhausted.

Long week, late nights,
issues at home,
issues in my heart.

I had snapped at Paige as we left the house.
I had yelled in a way I regretted.
I apologized, but still trembled inside as I drove;
My frustrations stifled, but still there at a simmer.
I prayed no one would stop me to talk about a field trip, or art class help, or a slip I had forgotten to sign.

My friend Stephanie was in her car in the line before me.
She stood holding the car door for two of her kids, and for one split second, before I could stop it,
she made eye contact.
I raised my hand in a weak little wave.
She got into her car and started to drive as I, too, dropped my girls at the gate,
and as I also started to drive,
I noticed that she was now pulling her car over to the side.
Her window was rolling down. Her arm was flagging me down…
“Oh no. She’s motioning to me…”
She started to step from her car as I rolled my window down to hear what she was saying.
I was surprised when what she said was,

“Do you need a hug? I just feel like you need a hug.”

“Whoa. I must REALLY look bad if one glance at me has her pulling over and offering an embrace,” I thought, half-laughing to myself.
(What Alena and I like to call a
“Nestle Up In Here and Die” hug.)

But,
“No,” my mind said.
“I don’t need a hug.
I need for no one I know to be seeing me in a T-shirt with this dumb “Good things are going to happen”
saying with me looking like this.
After all, that’s all it takes to become a meme.
I need to have my eyebrows done before there is any kind of public viewing.
I need a massage,
and a hot tub,
and for no one to want snacks that require cutting.
I need for no one to EVER smell this car.
I need someone else to plan dinner.
I need for 6th grade girls to not be crying so often with their mouths open to the sky.
I need…”
And suddenly, there she was,
in the middle of my mind’s rant,
leaning in through my car window, pulling me close.

She held me tight, and long.
Her hair smelled good, and as I sat there breathing it,
I suddenly felt seen at a deeper level than just two moms in a school drop-off line.

Fear had whispered a hundred reasons I didn’t need that hug,
but as I sat there cradled in it,
I realized how much I really did.

I could hardly believe it when I next heard myself unloading the weight of my stresses.
She didn’t let go until I finished.
And then, just as quickly as she’d appeared,
she was gone.

I drove away feeling so much lighter.
Like a pressure valve had just been released, and every thought making me tense had just been let out.
“I guess I DID need a hug,”
I said out loud to myself.

I drove home with my whole day made different
because of that thing I thought I didn’t need.

We think we know ourselves oh so well.
Our plan, it’s always the best.
But sometimes we use that excuse to let fear and insecurity keep us from the surprising things that could help us feel much more complete than if we’d gone without them.
Things that will give us joy,
and a relief from burdens we don’t realize that we carry.

Fear loves to tell us it knows best who we really are, what we want, and what it is that we need.

We have to tell it we know who it is, too,
and who it most often is

is a liar.

Mom Outnumbered

Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.