One of the things that I never knew I would be so grateful for, was the fact that our kids feel free to speak openly about all of the things. Even for my sons, it doesn't take much prodding before they realize that I am a safe person for them to trust with their most intimate thoughts, fears, and struggles. Elijah and I have always had a unique relationship. He was the transition child in many ways. Several life changes transpired when I became pregnant and gave birth to him. One of those changes was the start of my journey as a Stay at Home Mom. This would eventually morph into a few other roles including master's student mom, work from home mom, homeschool mom , boss mom , etc.
One day last week, I'm not sure what sparked the conversation, but Elijah and I were sitting down reminiscing about how 2021 came for the jugular and was an unexpectedly crazy year. We had all survived 2020, which was a complete miracle in itself . With the face coverings, lockdowns, and live streaming and the birth of our beautiful seventh baby, it was a year of historic proportions.
I remember posting on Facebook something to the effect of:
"2021, I need you to come in, sit down, shut up, and don't touch nothin!"
I believe we were all cruising into the year with some hope that normalcy would return. The year started out for us with our first family pet, Ali the turtle. Elijah wanted it so badly, and although Patrick and I joked about the kids misplacing the turtle somewhere in the house and waking in a panic; he gave in. A couple months later, Patrick wanted to up the ante and get a dog, so we got a cute little pit puppy named "Blue". The kids lost it, they were so excited, but of course I couldn't believe that I had another "kid" to look after. Patrick understood and did his best to teach the kids to be responsible and take care of Blue. In addition, we had decided to get our house ready to take advantage of the seller's market. We had built the house from the ground up, and our kids had called it home for almost seven years. We didn't realize at the time how this move would affect us all, emotionally.
As Elijah put it, "we had just survived a lot of changes, started to settle down, and even bought our Christmas tree. And then WHAM!" He was right. There was no way that this was on our radar at all. I can't even explain it. What we thought would be a normal Saturday of shopping for and ministering to our neighbors in the mobile home park, turned into something beyond our imagination. Christmas was his favorite holiday. I was so grateful that we had been able to follow our tradition of picking a tree together and decorating it with the kids while drinking hot cocoa.
This entire thing feels like a gut punch, or in Elijah's words "it feels like an airplane landed on me."
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