Accepting the Unexpected Journey

When my daughter decided she was done with dance, it was the end of my own unfulfilled childhood dreams. But when she said she was done with piano, it felt like so much more than that. It felt like a rejection of one of the things that had been such a big part of my own childhood. But I know that’s not fair. After all, she’s never seen her mom lose herself in a piece of music, fingers flying up and down the ivories. Instead she’s watched her mom spend hours lost in her own writing, her fingers making words instead of music. So much so that she has taken to doing her own writing, creating stories and drawing pictures to match, convinced that someday she will create something worthy of other’s praise. Her stage is the page, not the baby grand.

Traveling days are not the most exciting, but that’s not the point. Sometimes we have to have travel days so we can get to the places that we really want to see. But even though we didn’t have exciting stops along the way, we saw all the beauty of the desert changing into the foothills and then the Rocky Mountains in the distance.

With that, I planned a trip to Arches National Park and back. So what has the last six months of planning looked like?

This past spring, as I made plans for our summer vacation and waited to see how much time and money we would have left to have our own vacation, all the while struggling to find a location for just the two of us that we could both agree on, I finally had an epiphany: We were still allowed to have our own new experiences that didn’t involve our kids.

We had found a compromise that would allow our family to camp to celebrate the end of the school year and would be close enough for me to make it back for the graduation ceremony that always falls on Memorial Day weekend. I was willing to do the driving necessary if it meant that we got to go camping for a three-day weekend and temporarily unplug from everything.

I am more to my Creator than a wife and a mother. That is not all He sees when He looks at me and, no matter how important and significant those roles are, I don’t believe that is all that He has made me to be. I believe that women need to do what is best for their families and only they can know what that is. In the end, I know that I am being the woman and mother that my Creator made me to be, and that is what brings me peace.