Daily Archives: February 16, 2011

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Choice

You don’t choose your spouse on the day you receive/make a proposal of marriage.

You don’t choose your spouse on your wedding day when you make vows in front of God Almighty and your friends and family.

You don’t choose your spouse on anniversaries at a posh bed and breakfast where your every whim is waited on and you have peaceful time to enjoy eye contact and deep conversation and love-making.

You don’t choose your spouse at the
moments that you think you do.

You choose your spouse every day.  Every day.  You decide, “I’m in it – we’re doing this – no matter what.”

And sometimes that “what” happens.  And you want to make a different choice.  Admittedly, a bad choice or a stupid choice, but you want to go the easy route and quit.  Or just stop trying for a short while… just to catch your breath.  You’ll come back later, right? Or maybe your spouse can just choose you for awhile so that you can take a little break from making so much effort.

It is in those moments that you choose your spouse.  You choose them, not because it is easy or simple.  And not even just because it is the right thing to do.  You choose them because you are bound in love.  You are united and you have a history of choosing them every single day.  So you do it again.  And again.

Sometimes it is so easy.  You love to choose your spouse!  And sometimes it is painfully hard.  But this is your person – your other half.  And if you can trust God to help them choose you every day just as He helps you choose them, the reward is being whole.  Two but one.  No severs, no tears.  Just a series of choices wrapped around and through and inside and out so that you are together.  Really together.

That’s love.  Making choices every single day.  And it is worth it.

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Rissa’s First Haircut

I was ridiculously productive on Valentine’s Day.  I was happily back at home and with the kids and it was our first weekday together after my trip.  I organized and decluttered sections of our house (this is a bigger undertaking and accomplishment than one sentence can portray).  I did the dishes.  The kids and I went grocery shopping.  I did laundry (and not my usual “it’s all clean and piled on the couch… if we don’t wear it all in the next week, I’ll finally put it away” method).  I folded AND put it away!  And I took the kids to get haircuts for the twins.

You may remember Zach’s first professional haircut (I cut his hair multiple times before that and I have cut it since).  It was a bit of a debacle, to say the least.  My favorite part was the timeline of his responses.

Total terror -> screaming -> using his words to yell “I feel very mad!” -> using his words to repeatedly tell the stylist “No dank you.  I’m all done.  NO DANK YOU.” -> silence -> pissily accepting his lollipop reward -> enjoying eating his lollipop (first ever!) and excited to pay for the haircut himself (with my credit card) -> all smiles as he announced, “I got a haircut and I was SO brave!!!”

During the six months that have passed since that day, every time we drive past Bo Ric’s on our way to Schnuck’s, I say, “Do you guys want to get your hair cut?”  And they both politely assure me that they don’t but thanks anyway.  And we talk about how we don’t have to yell when we get a haircut because it is fun and we can be very brave and we will like it!  (Parenting propaganda is my bread and butter.  EVERYTHING gets reframed… both my memories and theirs.  Our memory is designed to fuzz over the difficult things and I try to help that along.  I have an excellent memory and I am capable of remembering every detail, but that just leads to bitterness.  I’ve been through enough trauma and pain to know that I don’t WANT to remember all of it!  And hey, if I allowed myself to remember all the nitty gritty details of what really happens in my life while I care for 3 tiny kids, I’d probably need a straight jacket and a fetal position.  It’s ALL about the reframing).  And the lollipops!  We only have lollipops for haircuts (that was their first lollipop ever).

On Monday morning, I announced that we were going to go get haircuts!  I used my most enthusiastic voice and talked about lollipops and being brave.  Zach said that he didn’t need to yell because it would be fun (I’ve programmed him well, hmm?).  And Rissa said, “No, I don’t get one, just Zach.”  Because that has always been true.  I trimmed her bangs several times when she was 1 and 2 years of age, but she has been growing them out for over a year and we’ve never cut the length of her luxurious hair.  At 3.5 years old, it was time!

We had a rough start to the day… I think there was some anxiety all around about the haircut after Nathaniel woke from his morning nap.  We finally managed to get in the van and head over there and several of us were yelling, especially me.  As we drove, I collected myself and realized that it was my job to be the model of serenity and “this will be fun and okay!” that my kids could follow, so I had better get on that pronto.  I talked them through the process and we remembered what a good job Zach did last time and we got inside smiling and excited.  Whew!

They did GREAT!  Rissa never stops dancing and twirling and moving unless she is nervous.  When nervous, she sits extremely still and just watches everything around her until she feels comfortable enough to be herself.  She sat like a statue in the salon chair!  Zach felt like an old pro and remembered everything as it happened, so he was telling his stylist, “I’m very brave, you know.  I’m a fireman.”  She told him that firemen get haircuts too and his eyes just lit up – he IS a fireman because he is doing what firemen do!!!  Rissa quietly whispered that she is a doctor, but she didn’t want to talk much because she was busy holding still.

I was prepared to deal with tears or tantrums or fear… instead, my angelic children sat calmly in the chairs across the aisle from one another so that they could look at each other and see what was happening to the other one.  Nathaniel sat in his stroller watching them carefully, as he always does, and I hopped back and forth getting pictures of the process.  SO proud of my kids!  And wow, 6 months makes a HUGE difference in the life of a 3 year old.  They are far more self-assured now and they tend to approach new situations with the belief that either a) they’ve read about this in a book so it will be familiar, b) they know someone that did this and it was fine, or c) the announced reward is so amazing that even if they don’t want to do it, they know it will be worth it.