How to Find Rest
Even when there's too much for too long
It started with the alarm going off, 4:30 in the morning a few weeks ago.
(In which it started long before that, if we’re being honest about it. It started before and it continues long after now, this much I know.)
I am ripped awake from the deepest of sleep by the hallway fire alarm whose battery decided to die one week after my husband left for a month. Thoughts fly through my mind, mostly circling around desperation and annoyance. I don’t know how to deal with fire alarms, that’s Lane’s thing. I don’t know how to get the beeping to stop, but I must stop it before it wakes the kids. It is no longer Lane’s thing, it is now my own.
I race to the kitchen to get a chair to reach the alarm on the ceiling, beeps assaulting my senses. I run straight into the streamers I forgot I hung up all over the night before, it’s the morning of my girl’s birthday, after all.
One thing to another, and so the story goes.
I press enough buttons, twist enough times, pull enough cords that somehow I get both the battery out and the whole alarm removed from the plate on the ceiling, silencing the monster.
I lay back in bed, try to get more sleep.
20 minutes later, the other fire alarm in my master bedroom starts going off. Everything is breaking once he has to leave. Lane’s jobs are now my own, lather, rinse, repeat.
20 minutes later kids wake up for the day, birthday excitement too great to keep them peacefully asleep.
One thing to another, and so the story goes.
I’m so tired. A soul-deep kind of tired from too much for too long.
My girl is turning 13. Her Daddy is having to log the 4th time he’s missed a birthday of this particular kid. I feel the deep responsibility to make it special, overcompensate for the shadow.
I bring donuts into the kitchen with candles sparking and confetti poppers ready and we sing the song and she opens the presents and everything is magic.
Mission: Accomplished. They don’t even know how tired I am.
When there’s too much for too long, is there a way to ever find rest?
We keep rolling from one thing into the next, I know of no other way to make it through than one thing at a time. I sign school forms and get 3 kids to school and get myself to work and get them from practice and to the play performance and remember to get them to the dentist, too.
I check the news and follow my husband’s guidance to not worry until there is actually something to worry about.
It’s seeming like there could be things to worry about.
When a husband is gone and the world is on edge, is there a way to ever find rest?
It becomes comical to me, in the vein of if you don’t laugh you’ll cry, how much seems to conspire against me in finding rest when I need it most.
I remember it, viscerally, from the newborn years- the days that bleed into days with a baby crying at all hours, any hour, of the night.
I remember it from the years when my girls were young and my husband was gone - always - and one would be up with bad dreams and one would next wake with a hurting tummy and the next would wake because it was time to wake up and I never laid down.
And now, in these years, I feel it in a different yet familiar way.
Three girls and one mom filling three different-sized needs on behalf of both parents. I’m doing it all once again but it’s another stage of one thing after another. I long for the weekend when I might catch a break. Then one of them has a medical procedure on a Friday and the next morning wakes up with redness and swelling where there shouldn’t be redness and swelling. A weekend of respite turns into monitoring her symptoms without my husband to help me make the call- Urgent Care situation? ER visit? Wait and see approach? I have her sleep in bed with me both nights so I can keep an eye on her, no rest for either of us.
I long for Monday morning once all is well and I can get them to school, have some time to write.
A kid misses the bus, an email from an event planner comes in that I need to reply to, the school calls me saying I forgot to pay for the 5th grade field trip. I race to the school, fly into the front office with cash money in my hand, make it back home with just enough time to pick up a kid for her ortho appointment.
One thing to another, and so the story goes, for me and I’m sure for you.
I keep thinking rest will come in a full nights’ sleep, in a long morning journaling session, in a bath. I keep thinking I’ll find restoration in a walk, in a moment where I can complete one task without interruption, once I have my husband home again.
I keep thinking rest will come tomorrow, in the next thing or the next. It keeps not coming because something else keeps filling the space that relief was going to take up.
It hits me one morning in the way these things do: I’m looking in all the wrong places.
Self-care is necessary, walks outside are needed, spiritual practices are good. None of them are the actual goal, though, but simply put us in a place for God to be the one to restore us, heal us, hold us. That is the goal, that is where rest comes.
Here is what I have come to learn: This is able to happen no matter where we are, no matter what we do, no matter how little time or bandwidth or energy we have. Thanks be to God, it doesn’t rely on us.
We can find rest while we shuttle kids to practice, when we’re awake at night when we should be asleep, as we work and discipline and take out the trash. We can find rest when one thing bleeds into another, when the fire alarm goes off in the middle of the night, when we need to make magic out of shadows.
This means that we can be okay even when everything around us doesn’t feel okay, when it feels like it all relies on us, when we have to keep going even when we’re exhausted.
All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well, after all.
Another word for all of this: Peace.
And I think this is exactly what this exhausted and weary world needs.
I have a feeling it’s what you might need as well.
May we be people who believe this can be so, even now, even in this. May we be the kind of people who are settled on the inside and carry rest with us wherever we go. May we know not every day is going to be like today, and may we believe-
We’re gonna make it.
With you in it,
xo,
Sarah
P.S. If you’re new around here, I am so, so glad to have you. I write a monthly letter full of things I need to be reminded of, and believing I’m not the only one thinking/feeling/living through something, I write stories about it. They’re stories told through the lens of the military experience, looking at our connection with God and our connections with each other.
So much love to you as you find rest within your actual life. Take care of each other, take care of each other, take care of each other.
If you know of someone who might be encouraged by these thoughts too, feel free to share away!
P.P.S. :) Readers financially supporting my work helps me be able to do this! Thank you for partnering with me in spreading the light