Joy

This year, I’m thankful for joy. 

At the end of 2016, I read The Happiness Project for our January book club. It was at the end of a very frustrating, difficult, and transformative year. I had decided years before that having more than one goal for the year was setting myself up for failure, so I had been choosing one over-arching goal each year for several years. For 2016, I had chosen to “pray every day to know how to show Christ-like love for others.” 

Boy, did I get schooled! In case you’re wondering, learning to love others with Christ-like love requires becoming humble. Learning humility is, well, humbling. Hard. At times, painful. Christ lowered himself to the depth of humility to suffer through everything we suffered, and that is how he can show perfect empathy. And I wanted to do that?!



So, when I read The Happiness Project, I was inspired to find more joy in my life, to really tease out what makes me happy and do more of it. I was exhausted from the loving without replenishing my stores. No more of this constant struggling to find purpose and meaning in my life. No more just getting through each day. I distilled it to five categories of things that make me happy: my relationship with Adam, having a clean and peaceful atmosphere in my home, feeling healthy, feeling accomplished/needed, and spending time with friends. So I set goals in each of these areas. I made charts to check each of these things off for every single day of the year. And I made a list of “Rachel’s Rules of Adulthood,” really a set of mantras to repeat when I found myself stuck in unproductive or negative thinking. It’s not quite the end of 2017, but in the spirit of Thanksgiving I’d like to reflect on how much this has changed my life.

I’m not going to even touch on the category of my health. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t perfect in my goals in that area (or any area), but I made a strong effort with very little result. That’s mostly out of my hands, so I will leave that for another day, another year.

I struggled with my goals to strengthen and honor my relationship with Adam, but I definitely saw growth. The more energy I put into it, the more he seemed to give. He knew that was on my to-do list, and he made an effort to help me accomplish it. Between our efforts there was more intimacy and a greater sense of strength in our marriage.

Having a clean and peaceful atmosphere in my home was also very difficult. It’s not for no reason that keeping my house orderly had taken the back burner. Slowly, I made an effort to organize areas of my home that were in overwhelming chaos. It’s not perfect, there are still things I’d like to accomplish, but I am feeling more peace and less stress when I’m at home.

Spending time with friends and building better friend relationships took on a completely different meaning than I ever expected. I set goals to spend time with specific people, and it turned out that I needed interactions of a different sort in the end. The friendships I have cultivated are still new, but deeper than I had imagined. I find purpose and meaning in my interactions, and a level of understanding and empathy that surpasses what I have previously found in other relationships.

The area that has changed the most for me is in my efforts to expand on my accomplishments and feelings of being needed and useful. It happened almost subconsciously, which sounds ridiculous considering I had a daily checklist, but it really seemed to happen because of my mental shift and not because I was consciously “checking” things off my list. I started to think of myself as a person who had valuable skills and abilities, and to be less afraid of taking risks. And once I got started, I just didn’t seem to stop. In the past, I would have felt overwhelmed by tasks that felt foreign or to which I was unaccustomed, but with a new set of mantras, I was able to continue taking another step forward, and another, and another.

The most noticeable and measureable change in my life has been going back to work. It really has given me confidence and newfound purpose in my days. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t set the goal to “practice a skill.” I tried for a couple of months to convince myself to take on different skills that I thought were in the direction I wanted to go, but fairly quickly I fell into the habit of writing “teaching” in the blank space I had left underneath “practice a skill.” It only took me until March or April to realize that was where I was meant to be all along.

Under the same category of accomplishments and being needed falls my church responsibilities and praying to lift others. The shift in importance from the former to the latter has been slow, but looking back, monumental. I have found a similar to, but deeper, fulfillment in answering the “promptings” or nudges to be a loving presence and voice in people’s lives as I have had in serving in church callings. Because I had the opportunity to expand the circle of people I was interacting with, it has felt even more urgent and necessary than serving those who have have the support system of the church.

I also have found so much peace and joy in checking nagging to-dos off my constant to-do list. Going to the first items I have listed there (ones that have sat there for months) and finally accomplishing them is so empowering, I highly recommend it!

A huge part of me wants to go back and carefully polish my thoughts, but I think I’m going to leave it as it is, a quick brain vomit so that I can remember exactly how it came to my mind. So there it is.

This year, I’m thankful for joy.

Calendar

Do you remember day planners? My mom had one and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I got one as a teen and LOVED it. I thought it was the best thing ever to color code everything. (I'll admit it, I was totally a nerd! Oh, I guess I still am.) The only problem was that I didn't have all that much to keep track of in those days (which means it must have been before my junior year of high school when I started getting really busy). Even when my oldest kids were little, there was very little to keep track of on a calendar. Now, though, my days are very full with all our family's activities, and unless I keep very careful track, we miss important things. It turned out that being a nerd and loving planners has come in handy.

If you are a parent, you know how important routine is to a child. They thrive on knowing what to expect, and what is expected of them in any given situation. Calendaring for my family has solved so many issues, from Adam knowing what is happening that day to the constant question from the kids: "What are we having for dinner tonight?" What was most surprising to me as I began calendaring for the family, is how much it changed for me. It has helped me stay on track in all the areas of my life.

This is our family calendar, hanging on my pantry door. I found a planner printable I liked on Pinterest and tweaked it in Photoshop to be what our family needed, then printed a 16x20 of it and framed it. I learned the hard way that the frame has to have glass, and not plexi glass, in order for it to work long-term with dry erase markers. I buy the ultra fine point Expo markers that have 8 colors, and store them lid down, like this:

Each person in our family is assigned a color, including the dog, and then anything that pertains to more than one of us, or the whole family, is in black. The colors correspond with the (Google) calendar on my phone. Not every color translates, which is annoying. But on my phone pink=yellow and black=navy. I know what they mean, so it works. Each Sunday afternoon or evening, I erase the weekly calendar and the week's menu and write in the coming week's information. I know this would be a sticking point for some people, but because of my love for planners, color-coding, and organization in general, I just love writing in the calendar and look forward to it every week. If you're not a weirdo like me, setting a reminder in your phone can also work! As I fill in the calendar, I quickly become aware of any conflicts in the schedule, or the need to rearrange a carpool, and take care of that immediately before moving on.

That reminds me of the most important part of this whole system: adding things to the calendar the instant I hear about them. I absolutely cannot wait until I get home, or I'm done with the dishes, or I have checked with someone to write it down, because then I will forget and it won't be on the calendar. So when I make an appointment, I put it into my phone as I make it. Someone suggests a play date, and I put it into my phone right then. The kids run into the house with a birthday invitation, and I stop right then and put it on the calendar. Having my phone give me automatic reminders is super helpful, so that if I forget to transfer something to the dry erase calendar, at least I have it somewhere!

So, how do you calendar for your family? What makes it successful for you?

Love Thy Neighbor

I've been thinking about a concept for a long time, and it all began during a Sunday School lesson over a year ago, when we were discussing Samaritans and how the Jews wanted nothing to do with them. My sweet neighbor, Kathy, posited that members of the LGBTQ community could be our present-day "Samaritans," the people we as an LDS community often want nothing to do with. This struck me with such force at the time, it really resonated with me.

You all know the parable of the Good Samaritan, right? A man travels from Jerusalem to Jericho, and on the way falls among thieves and is beaten and left for dead. A priest comes along and crosses to the other side of the road rather than helping the man, and then a Levite (one who works with the priests, or under the priests) does the same thing. Only when a Samaritan, one of the race of people that the Jews reviled and thought of as dirty or less-than, travels that way does the man receive any help. That Samaritan man goes out of his way to bind up wounds, take him to a safe place to rest, and take care of him, paying for his care .

What is interesting to me is that in the parable of Good Samaritan, the Samaritan is not the receiver of service but the giver. I have felt quite frequently lately that it is not our responsibility to serve and "save" our LGBTQ friends and loved ones, but our privilege to be taught by them, and to learn to love completely by knowing them. Can we see them as Christ does? Can we humble ourselves to be like the man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, receiving compassion and having our wounds bound up? Or will we continue to only play the parts of the priest and the Levite and assume that we are good people and need not dirty our hands with serving someone we don't know or coming into any contact with the Samaritans we could learn and grow from?

I hate politics. I don't like the way people turn ugly as they assert their opinions, as if the best way to prove their point is by discrediting their opponent, tearing down others to build themselves up. So I try to stay out of it as much as possible. But I feel the need to break my silence, to differentiate myself from the priests and Levites of the world to say this: I feel the LDS Church's amicus brief for the Supreme Court case regarding transgender bathroom rights was unnecessary. Religious freedom and human rights do not have to be pitted against each other. We can worship as we choose and be respectful of one another's needs. In fact, as disciples of Christ, we should already be doing that.

It's time to write

What did you want to be when you grew up? I had lots of dreams over the years. As a little girl I sang the song, "When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Mother." And I knew from the time I was little I was going to serve an LDS mission like my mom. When I was in fourth grade, I wrote a story about all the ice cream in an ice cream parlor melting and was one of a couple of students from my school selected to go to a literary workshop where we got to learn all kinds of things about writing and listen to a local author speak. I knew I was going to be an author someday. I was a voracious reader and writer, and was even awarded an Eagle Warrior honor (the only one of my graduating class) in English.

I wanted to be an interior designer in high school. I took a lot of art and design and even a few business classes to that end. And then my senior year my school counselor suggested I do a practicum helping an elementary school teacher. I fell in love with making a difference in the kids' lives. I loved watching them learn because of the way I taught something, watching them become better readers because I spent time reading with them. I was hooked and graduated from Southern Utah University with my Bachelor's Degree in Elementary Education, with a minor in reading, in three years. Adam and I were married in my second year, and in my third year I timed throwing out the birth control so I would deliver my first baby after I received my degree. Young and pregnant, student teaching was tough. I decided it was a good thing I was having a baby and staying home because I was not going back to teaching.

And so I became a mother. Those first years were so hard, trying to adjust to my life being about someone else instead of my own needs and feelings. Having always had grades and praise from teachers to validate my work, I had no experience with a completely open-ended, subjective, messy career with no validation, to awards, to graduation with honors to work toward. It took a lot of years and a lot of guidance from my Heavenly Father to reach the place I am now: confidence in my role as a mother.

It's been nearly a decade since blogging was the cool new thing. Nearly a decade since I started blogging the first time. After years of being completely overwhelmed and losing myself in love and service for my family, I am finally at the stage of life where I am starting to circle back to my original dreams for my life. And I realize I need to write. It's time to write. Welcome to my blog, and welcome to my life.