Found My Rhythm...

As my son approaches 3 this year and my marriage approaches the tender age of 4, I can happily say that I am glad to finally have found my rhythm in all of this. Funny thing is, I didn’t even know how to term this balancing act, soul-searching need of finding how life now “fits for you” once the license is signed and the babe is born. All I knew is that life was forever different- no more consideration for just me, I now had 2 other people to think about.Go on a cruise for a week with your girlfriends with a day’s notice? Nope, not going to happen without checking schedules for the week with my hubby and determining the baby’s care for the week. Want to join Brand New Work-out Class XYZ that meets every evening at 5 pm? Nope, not if I want to have dinner on the table and a kid whose well “wound-down” by his 7:30 bedtime. For me, these matters were akin to common sense. However, what I wasn’t prepared for, was the the almost primal need that I had to find my “own place” in what was now this new life in which I was grateful, but inexperienced.So in an effort to find “people to share our lives with,” we uprooted our little family and moved 7 hours away back to the place in which both my husband and I grew up. I remember agonizing before the move on this being the right or wrong decision. We had great jobs, my husband was up for a promotion, we had developed a great sense of community and had people who we loved AND LOVED us where we were. Why were we doing this to ourselves?The first month and a half was great- reconnecting with old faces and familiar places was comforting at first, but it wasn’t long before we begin to realize that we left what was “our home” only to come back to a place that we were only “from”. Now don’t get me wrong, having family and a place to return to that gave you the grit that you have to be who you are currently is great, but what isn’t great is trying to refit into a mold that no longer is applicable to our lives.I now had to fly out bi-monthly to my job in which I only drove a few miles to before- see my July post “No more corns…,” I was still in nostalgia land then. We had less of a support system than we had before because our families lived an hour from us and operated on such different work schedules than we did. Not only that, we removed our son from a community of friends his age only to move back to cousins and distant family members who were a lot older in age and whom he had to get to know.I was blessed to meet this sweet lady in church who had made the decision with her family decades earlier that I had made and she gave me a book to read daily. I had been reading it a few months before a I reached a daily reading about finding rhythm in routine. That’s what I had where I was, no wonder this move had been so tough on me emotionally and physically!Needless to say, we’re relocating back to where we were, it’s a beautiful thing to realize that rhythm is needed whether you’re a family of 10 or family of 3- like mine. You set the tone in your home- what your kids will eat, where they will learn, the friends you will make, the friends you will let go, where you will worship, the rules of your household, etc., etc. No one can write this story for you, but you. Your parents can’t set it, your 3rd grade teacher that you loved so much and hoped would teach your child too can’t set it, only YOU.So while things are still fresh and new, before the pages on the calendar change too much, I challenge you to identify anything in your life that is out of rhythm. Spending too much time with extended family and starting to feel distant from your own? Change it. Work situation is causing too much stress and taking priority over your role as wife and mother in the home? Change it. You really just want to spend holidays at your own home, cooking your own 5 star (or 2 star) meals rather than running around from place to place? Change it. Change the way you think, act, and feel this year and watch new things develop in your life. On this note, I’ll be taking my own advice and packing very soon!