In mid-October, I passed my Biomedical exam— the first of three national board exams required for my acupuncture license. We also stopped homeschooling, and enrolled our two oldest kids in our neighborhood school, where they are making friends and learning and having a great time.
My kindergartner asked me, shortly after his first week of school, “Do we have to have weekends? Why can't we have school all the days?”
I am so happy they're thriving in their new routine, because school all the days is what homeschool had begun to feel like for me. Trying to teach a third-grader and kindergartner while also caring for a toddler and baby, and also trying to study during nap-times and four brief hours of childcare per week, and also breastfeeding, and attempting to work out and eat well, and get enough sleep, and and and...it was all sort of impossible.
Or, for me at least, it was only possible at the total expense of my mental health and of healthy family relationships.
In other words, it turns out I have limits.
This probably seems obvious to you, but to me it was a revelation. Again. It was like waking up after a long, strange but familiar dream. In trying to do many things, I couldn't really enjoy any of them. Learning at home had become something to “get through” each day, and it still didn't fit into the neat boxes of a schedule that theoretically provided me with study time, but which in practice was usually (and easily) derailed by a missed nap, a fever, a spilled tub of kinetic sand. I wasn't enjoying my kids, because if I wasn't “on” as their learning coach, I was “on” as household manager, snack procurer, and chauffeur, which left zero minutes for just being their mom. Let alone resting. I had stopped resting.
And so I was exhausted, yet even as the decision to enroll them in regular school filled me with relief, I was also disappointed. I wanted to do both— homeschool and become a licensed acupuncturist— and it felt like failure to have to give one up, though my kids seemed content either way.
The lifting of that disappointment has come slowly and quietly, with wisdom from unexpected places. One day while doing one of the short strength-training workouts I love, my girl Lindsey Bomgren didn't make it through all of the reps she had set for herself. She had chosen to challenge herself with heavier weights, and she hit “muscle failure” before the clock ran out. And do you know what she did? She celebrated.
Muscle failure is a new term to me, but it seems to mean that she chose the right level of challenge. “Failing” to complete the set meant she had pushed her muscle to the point of fatigue, where it could no longer perform the exercise. It was the kind of failure that was actually a success. I can't remember the exact words she used, only that I suddenly saw my own experiences in a new light.
What if I hadn't failed at homeschooling, hadn't made a mistake in trying to do both, but had actually found muscle failure? I had found the point of fatigue, a place where I could no longer perform the action, and I succeeded at putting the weight down. I pivoted, and responded to what my family actually needed. (Okay, it's not a perfect metaphor, but it worked for me in the moment.)
On a bulletin board in our homeschool space, there's a sticker of Ms. Frizz from The Magic School Bus (old-school version) that reads, “Take chances, make mistakes, get messy.” I put it there to remind us that learning equals risk. Learning means trying something even if you're not sure you can do it, and being okay with picking up the pieces when a plan or a block tower falls apart. It's the same whether you're 5 or 40. I took a chance, and things got messy— but I learned so many important things in the process.
I have limits.
Taking care of myself is part of taking care of my family.
It's human to mess up.
There is so much grace.
None of this is new, but (I hope) it's settling deeper into my bones. My lifelong lesson seems to be about becoming gentler with myself. Softening my expectations, this time around, has helped me look at some of my unstated assumptions about mistakes and failure. I hate, for example, when I run out of patience and end up yelling at the kids. Over the years, rather than beating myself up for it, I have learned to practice mercy for myself, regroup, and repair. I know this is how we model for our kids the art of the apology, the humility to admit our weaknesses and ask for forgiveness.
But I think I've also thought of repair work as the consolation prize. Second best. As if the real goal is just to never mess up. And while I do think it's essential to make an effort to do better (in this example, to keep practicing self-regulation and reduce the yelling over time), I find such freedom in viewing repair work itself as first prize— a way we participate in God’s work of mercy, restoration, resurrection.
Or maybe it’s like the Japanese art of kintsugi— “golden repair.” A broken vessel repaired with gold is not simply half as good as it was when whole— it is a whole new vessel. Its flaws are made not only beautiful, but essential, integral, through the gold fill. We are human and we make mistakes. We break, and are made whole again through love.
My favorite saint, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, was adamant about this: “Do not let your weakness make you unhappy.” Our weaknesses, our failures and mistakes, she said, are the spaces where we meet mercy face to face. Without them, how would we know our need of God? How would we know God at all?
It's both a relief and so painful to come to terms with my limits. There is so much I want to be able to do, so much I want to fix. As I get older it is becoming clearer to me how little we can really do. But also how little things— our small efforts— can sometimes, through grace, be enough.
A dear friend came over after I made the decision to stop homeschooling. Can I bring you some hugs? she texted, true to form. Maybe you have a friend like this— someone who knows what is needed, as if by magic, without having to ask. She sat on the couch with me, listened while I cried, and offered a few affirming words. It was too much. This is going to be great for them. Everyone has limits.
The next day, she dropped off freezer bags of homemade burritos to fuel me through the weeks ahead, plus an enormous jar of soup. (You should know that burritos are often the remedy for many types of stress for me.) She gave me a warm squeeze, and went home again. Her presence was a balm to my frazzled nerves. Her peace in the face of my suffering helped me find my own peace again, so I could pick myself up and dive back into mothering and studying.
Maybe that's all we can offer one another in hard times: our presence. Our ability to be with each other when we hit a new low— something this friend of mine is exquisitely talented at. She has walked with me and so many of her friends through difficult times. Now she is facing her own difficult time, and along with her other close friends, I am hoping to help her in the same way she has helped me. Or, at the very least, to not cause harm with my desire to help.
"Never be hurried by anything; nothing can be more pressing than the necessity for your peace before God,” St. Elizabeth Ann Seton said. “Commit everything to him that passes through your hands; you will help others more by the peace and tranquility of your heart than by any eagerness or care you can bestow on them.”
I find this hard to believe, let alone practice. Is it a kind of magical thinking, this tendency to cling to worry and hyper-vigilance and things to do when faced with suffering, our own or that of a loved one? If I read the right books, if I listen to every single podcast about this, if I just worry enough, it’ll be okay. It makes no sense, but I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way. There is so little— maybe nothing at all— we can actually control, and sometimes it's comforting to think that worrying and busying ourselves can change that. Maybe it cushions us from the stripped-down experience of simply being with someone else in their suffering.
Yet I also know, from my experience as both a patient and a practitioner in community acupuncture, that peaceful accompaniment is often the only thing that helps us bear our suffering. When nothing else relieves sadness or anxiety or chronic pain, it can be healing just to have someone acknowledge how much it sucks, and be willing to try to make you a little more comfortable, if only for an hour or two.
As Lisa writes in her most recent letter over at Acupuncture Can Change the World: “Sometimes acupuncture can be part of a process in which people take whatever awful hand they’ve been dealt and create good lives for themselves anyway. Getting to witness that process up close is a privilege. Practicing community acupuncture is a lot like being invited to a celebration of (apparently) ordinary people’s capacity for dignity, courage and humor in the face of suffering.”
This morning I went for a walk around dawn. I started at my usual pace, trying to get some zone minutes in on my Fitbit, barely seeing the unfurled morning. But then I took off my headphones and turned down the volume on the stream of worries and to-dos in my head. I tried to get quiet enough to let peace find me, something I expect I will also be learning about for a lifetime. It seems like it is entirely a work of grace, not something I can master or achieve or cause to happen. Today when I asked for peace, my heart swelled with pictures from my life these past few weeks. Just ordinary moments of beauty. Peace, this morning, felt like allowing myself to feel gratitude and joy, even though the world still seems to be breaking apart at the seams. Even though sometimes, the good things seem like they barely stack up beside the darkness.
I saw myself rocking our baby to sleep in the nursery, her fuzzy head nuzzled under my chin. I remembered my son's delight in helping his grandpa with yardwork, walking the dog, building a bonfire. And the little streaks of silver in my husband's hair, the spark of mischief in his eyes as he cracked jokes while we folded laundry— how in that moment I had felt like no time had passed since we first met, yet I could also feel the depth between us, like silver catching the light.
I let those pictures settle in my mind's eye, and I watched small birds lift from the top of a bare maple, turn together, and settle in the grass. They neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns. (Mt. 6:26) I want to be like them, trusting grace to multiply my small life, to make it matter in whatever way it can. There's no reason for beauty like that, yet there it is, all over the littlest birds just being themselves, right where they are, on an ordinary morning.
Photos:
Walking to school (my own photo)
Coffee cups by Izz R on Unsplash
Giving key (my own photo)
Kintsugi plate by Riho Kitagawa on Unsplash
Sparrow by Brandon Green on Unsplash
Let’s Love our Community by Mike Erskine on Unsplash
This was beautiful, Melissa. Thank you for writing ❤️
This is such a beautiful and brave reflection on a season that would surely push any mother well beyond her limits. I deeply appreciate your honesty. I also needed the reminder that pivoting is not a failure, but a mercy.❤️