“We have to take a picture tonight,” my friend said, as we settled into our cozy table in the restaurant hipper than we are. “We don’t have a single picture of the two of us together.” And of course it was true. Though we are neighbors and have been friends for more than a year, we had only ever been out to dinner once before. Our friendship has been built on counter-top coffee dates, in-the-thick-of-it text marathons and pre-dawn walks. The time has been hard to find.
 
Earlier that night, I’d tried to explain to my five-year-old why, in fact, it was fair that I got to go out to dinner. “Are you just my daughter?” I asked her. “Is that all you are?”
 
“Yes,” she replied defiantly.
 
“No, actually,” I said. “You’re also a sister and a friend and a student and a Tae Kwon Do almost-yellow belt. You’re a lot of things. But let’s say you only did Tae Kwon Do things. Then you’d be in trouble at school and not learning anything. Your friends would miss you. I would miss you. So it’s the same for me. I’m a mommy, and that’s great, but I’m also a wife and a daughter, a sister, a friend, a writer and a woman. So if I only do mommy things, I miss out on all those other things I am.” I felt like I was making good traction.
 
“Mom, when Mirabella gets out of dance class, can I have a lollipop?”
 
Good talk.
 
But it made me think maybe my little lecture was falling on the wrong ears all along. Maybe it was actually for me. And maybe it’s for you too.

When we returned from our nine-day trip earlier this month, I crashed. I’ve always been an introvert, but only in the last few years have I begun to understand what that means for me. Some personality profiles I had long avoided taking helped identify and name what being a stay-at-home mother to preschool and early-elementary-aged kids made glaringly obvious: I love time with people, but I need time alone.
 
Now that I know this, I’m usually pretty good about making sure I get it. But I started the year with a togetherness hangover.  All I wanted to do was hibernate.  I’m all for giving yourself grace and space and not “shoulding” on yourself and all of that. It’s my main mode of operation. But sometimes I also need to be shaken or stirred or something. Brought back into the fold.

On a recent Sunday, after a few days of travel for Daniel and of my daughters fighting seemingly non-stop, I had to get out—alone. But as we got home from church, enormous snowflakes started falling. It was chilly and slushy and gross outside, and I couldn’t bring myself to go. I pouted around, lamenting my lost opportunity for recharging until it was time to get ready for our dinner company.
 
Then, a funny thing happened. We hosted dinner for friends who are new to the area, but whose family is at home in my heart. Their wonderful parents, whom I’ve known since college, had come to help them move, and they carved a couple hours out of their exhausting work schedule to linger around our table. I made chicken and rice and tzatziki and gooey brownies and our five kids tore apart the playroom and the whole thing brought me such joy. I made a mental note.
 
Later that week, Deacon woke up earlier than usual from his nap, crashing my typically quiet afternoon. I grumbled, until I opened his door and saw his rosy-cheeked face. “Hi, Mommy!” he shouted. I brought him to the kitchen where he stood on a stool and “helped” me make muffins to surprise the girls. When the phone rang, an old friend, calling even though I never return her calls, I actually picked up (I’m not the only one who screens calls for no reason, am I?). And we talked excitedly and laughed and lamented our discomfort with this strange culture we’re living in, and when she had to go, abruptly, to collect her boy from school, I felt lighter somehow.

​I collected these moments and mulled them over, until I got a text from a friend I haven’t heard from in a while. She had read my words about how our worth and purpose are made up of much weightier stuff than the things we do. She talked about how lonely this life is. And I saw myself in her words. I talked about how loners, like us, sometimes have to force ourselves out, even though it’s scary and awkward and foreign. Because maybe we were made a little more introspective, a little quieter than others, maybe there’s a whole world going on inside of our heads. Maybe we crave space and order and solitude, and we should ensure we get those things that make us feel whole. But regardless, I am convinced that it’s not enough to keep us well.  

This life is too difficult to be lived all alone. We were made to live in community, woven together, walking alongside each other. When we walk alone, always looking down, we can only see our shoes, the ones that don’t fit like they used to, the ones that are scuffed and not as nice as we wish they were. When we only look down— at our shoes, our problems, our kids, our life—we miss out on the larger world around us. We miss our calling to help others, to listen, to be present for them, yes. But we also deny them the opportunity to do the same for us. And that’s not fair.
​
So that night over taquitos and sangria, we forgot to take a picture. We squinted at the menu because the restaurant was too dark, and we annoyed our adorably and obviously under-thirty blonde waitress—Brinkley or Berkley—by taking too long to order and not ordering enough drinks, and then we shut the whole place down,  got in the minivan and drove home to our sleeping people, hearts full.  And I made a promise to myself not to wait so long to do it again, because I returned to those sleeping people better prepared to serve and love them.
 
I’ll always need my solitude. But lately I’m so grateful for people who help pull me out of my self-dug rut. I’m glad I chose let them. There’s power and comfort in a life lived together, and it's worth every bit of the work and time occasional heartache it takes to get there.

"so, give it just a little time
share some bread and wine
Weave your heart into mine..."  
--Josh Garrels, Bread & Wine

It’s often been misattributed to Aristotle, and you’ve probably heard it—maybe you’ve even said it—“We are what we repeatedly do.” (It seems Will Durant actually said it, when writing about other things Aristotle said.) When arguing that, no, actually anyone can get up early or eat healthy or “insert whatever change you’re trying to make here,” I have probably said it myself. From a comfortable seat in the high horse’s saddle, it seems to roll right off the tongue, effortlessly. But when you’re grumbling and struggling with one foot in the stirrups and one on the ground, not so much.

These days, if I am what I repeatedly do, I am: a cook, a housekeeper, a tutor. A mother who gets exasperated too quickly with her children. One who fills found moments by scrolling on her phone entirely too often. Someone who can’t find a book she wants to read, so she just doesn’t read. A wanna-be runner who doesn’t want to run (it’s gotten cold in Virginia). Someone who responds to text messages in her head and not in actuality. A friend who doesn’t return phone calls. And, more and more, a writer who can’t find her inspiration, so she just doesn’t say anything.

Lately I find myself—a self-professed lover of words—speechless. At the end of a trying second half of the day with the kids last week, when they were down for the night, Daniel asked me what I wanted to do. “Not talk,” I said.
 
“Not even to me?” he asked.
 
“Not really,” I shrugged. My days are filled with gentle coaxing, reminding, correcting, talking off the ledge (literally, for my son, and figuratively for my daughters) and sometimes, if I’m honest, yelling. So I don’t return phone calls and I sit in front of a blank screen with nothing to say.
 
I love the idea of hitting the ground running, but this year it hasn’t happened for me. And I’m mostly okay with it, mostly okay giving myself time and grace. Mostly. To a point. And I’m wondering where that point is, when my permissiveness shifts to coddling and enabling. I don’t want to enable myself to fail and call it “grace,” don’t want to give myself permission to give up and call it “rest.”

"I've had those dreams too." It's what I texted my friend on the way home from our nine-day journey when she told me she thought she would have started the new year with more energy.

September and January: first I dread their coming, then I welcome them with open arms. I love their empty calendars and guard them jealously, even while saying,"Let's get something on the calendar!" to friends I want to make space for.

I adore a simple Christmas, slow and quiet, filled with wonder and held close. And though I loved this Christmas too, it was not that. On Christmas Eve, Daniel and I usually sit close on the couch with a glass of champagne and the lights all twinkly and get to bed at a reasonable hour. This year, I met two neighbors in the street after 11PM to collect tape that the elves in my house desperately needed. For the first time, on Christmas morning, our mantle featured nine stockings, plus the dog's. We had nine people I love, in their new jammies, around our dining room table for Christmas Eve dinner. And it was special and magical and...exhausting.

Our end-of-the-year trip was filled with treasures I will store up to keep me warm in the coming months. We spent time with all of our parents, four of our grandparents, and aunts and uncles and cousins we hold dear. The kids got to know their little cousins they don't get to see nearly enough. We sat across tables and in cars with each of our siblings, catching up, laughing and solving the world's problems. We ate and drank and connected and loved and gave and received. And on our nine-hour trip on Monday, we ached for home.

On the drive, Daniel and I mapped out our plans thus far for the new year. We have much more travel booked than usual, and we discussed our plans for that. But when we got to resolutions, I fell a little flat. I couldn't help but notice the things I want to work on this year are pretty much the same as last year. And though I had made great strides in all those areas last year, three-quarters of the way through, I fell flat and never recovered.

My friend who lamented starting the year with low energy texted me, out of the blue, to remind me of all I had accomplished last year. She didn't know I was struggling with feeling the weight of my relative failures, staring down a fresh new year. She didn't know I felt too ashamed to put my resolutions to paper, since I'd just as soon scratch out the date at the top of last year's page. But she spoke to my heart.

And so I greet this year wearily, and utterly exhausted. We spent 18 nights in houses with some of the people we love most in this world, but by the end, we had all started to unravel and yearn for solitude and the rhythm of daily life. Now, on our second morning home, I pad around my messy house that still features two haggard Christmas trees, bags of gifted toys we haven't begun to put away, and an obscene amount of dirty laundry. Though I long for order and organization, I resolve not to read any more posts about decluttering in the new year, starting the new year with a clean house, going on a Whole 30 diet in the new year, starting an exercise routine in the new year and, for heaven's sake, there will be no cleansing.