There has always been something.
To set me apart, to make me feel different, to weigh me down in a way that I was sure that other light-footed women weren’t and to remind me that an invigorating life (the kind that fills your lungs yet leaves you with space for more) evades me.
I’d find myself thinking: why does this always happen to me, as I looked at women who sailed through life’s mile-markers with poise and sassy shoes and advice for the rest of us who couldn’t or didn’t.
But I only looked at them long enough to presume, to fuel my frustrated looks of comparison back at myself and my own story.
Had I looked longer, I may have noticed more similarities than differences.
We all have that something, that nagging thing that leaves us thinking: if this thing [insert yours here] would just change, I could get my full eight hours of sleep and feel the words I sing in worship and touch joy, not just put it on a sign in my house.
In my twenties, it was an empty womb and an empty bank account and a marriage that landed us in a counselor’s office. Turning the corner on thirty it was a father with brain cancer and a delayed adoption. We brought our two home from Africa and it turned, quickly, to managing life with … two! We adopted two more and I was sure having four children, in such a short amount of time, was the equivalent of training for the Navy Seals. Then, when I’d see women with four children who had somehow managed a shower and I was certain it was adoption that made it a feat for me to get dressed – four children with broken histories, that was the thing.
And those are just the broad strokes. When we couldn’t pay the bills I wanted my husband to crawl right out of entrepreneurship so I could sleep at night and when my children had health issues I thought the end of trouble-shooting those mysteries would give me breathing space.
It was always something.
Something that I called circumstance and that {continue reading over here —>}
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