Every Ending A Beginning

Today was the last day of preschool for our twins. Next year all my kids will be in school, and will all be on the bus by 7:00 am. Having been home with little kids for almost 17 years, it feels surreal to have that much time open to me.

The day started taking them to kindergarten screenings, and it ended with me helping to decorate for my daughter’s 8th grade graduation tomorrow. Like so many others at this time of year, I keep thinking about endings and beginnings.

I love being a mom and am deeply in love with my vocation, with the joy and delight I get from each one of my kids. I routinely tell them, if you were my only child, I would be blown away by the gift of you, by the gift of motherhood youhave given me. And I have that feeling times six.

I also love deep thinking, writing, and reading. I have always written in the little pockets of time I had, and when people ask me how I found the time, I always cite Barbara Kingsolver’s line that if you want to be a writer, be a mother. If you have the writing impulse, you will find the time, and you won’t waste it.

So taking stock of the next chapter of motherhood is so exciting. To have more time for these things will be so joyful, and if past seasons are any indication, it will overflow to our family. Before the twins, I sent our other children to a private preschool because the public preschool was only a 2.5 hour day. I’ll have just packed their backpack and dropped them off before I have to pick them up again! I’ll have no time to write! I opted for a preschool with a longer day that gave me writing time.

But with Ronan, my son who loves Scooby Doo and potato chips and Batman, and also has Down syndrome, we knew having an IEP and having the public school know him well was better for him. The school is 20-25 minutes away, so I ended up having the tiniest window to do all the things for our family + write. To have that constraint in my schedule for the past three years has made this final mile like the ones in marathons: hard and long, but worth it. It was hands down the best choice for us, and Ronan has grown so much.

But dear reader, the fact that I only have to do this drive for one more day is making my heart skip a beat. When I think about the twins getting on the bus in the fall at 7 am, well, let’s just say we are planning to pop some champagne that morning.

Mom’s can do hard things because we love hard. But to be able to love hard and have our days have a little more space for other things sounds amazing. While being a mom always came first, the seasons I could write were always the best. I felt like a better wife, mom, friend. I have learned I have to prioritize that mental stimulation. I have found many ways to do that while being a mom – books on Audible, podcasts, smart conversations on Youtube. It was a crazy realization that my food blog was an attempt to feed my creative brain while multi-tasking making dinner, and it worked! I loved it. I had to take a break from it this busy season because I had so little time, and I wanted to simplify everything in my life. I have learned through this time about the sweetness of self-sacrifice.

But in looking at this next season, I felt called to deeper learning, deeper writing, a kind of formation. One week while I was in the middle of outlining C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, my husband called. His best friend Matt was in town, who was the best man at our wedding, and they caught up for dinner and a few drinks. “Guess what?”, he said. “Matty is getting his PhD online. You should do that too!”

I looked over at my computer, and the Lewis book that lay open.  “We’ll see,” I said. I had just finished my second novel, and thought I don’t know. I love philosophy but I love writing and literature too.

I had gotten my MA in Philosophy at Boston College and was two years into a fellowship towards a PhD program in Philosophy when I had my oldest son. When he was six months old, my little family had zero time to be together due to my husband’s travel, and I resigned. A few months after that we found out that we were being transferred back to our home state of New Hampshire and were expecting our second child, so I was so glad I had been nudged to quit at the beginning of the term. I wrote about it here.

I recently shared about the joy of being able to write every day during lockdown while the twins still napped. When the world opened back up, and I had no time to write plus all of the scheduling demands for my kids on me again, I knew that something was wrong but couldn’t put my finger on it. After my sister was diagnosed with ADHD during lockdown when working full time and remote learning was too much for her, she mentioned I may want to get checked out. I thought I was fine because lockdown was good for my brain. But then when things opened up again, I wasn’t. I suddenly saw how ADHD affected me. I got on medication, and it was a major relief.

When I look back at leaving my PhD program after I had my oldest, I wondered if I had been on ADHD medicine, would I have been so inclined to quit? That was a similar season where the demands on my executive functioning were really hard.

But God’s hand is all over this story.

By trusting him and trying to stay close to His plans for our family, we have this amazing life. It is hard work and so much joy. Ducking out of my PhD then to have a family, to be able to be home with my kids, was such a gift. It didn’t matter why I quit then, and I would have made the same decisions all over again.

But there is a season for everything. And my season for having little kids at home is almost done. So when my husband planted that idea in my head, I looked into it. I found a program where I could easily do courses online at night and read and write during the day. I was already pretty much doing that out of sheer interest and a need to write and think about questions I was interested in. Why not get credit for the work?

The best part? It is actually a PhD in Humanities program. Philosophy + Literature. It feels like God just nudged me there and found the perfect way to merge a love of philosophy with a love of literature. When I found the program, I thought it was a Philosophy PhD because of all of the ancient Greeks and modern philosophers listed in the course work. And I am sure my dissertation will be heavily in philosophy. But I also get to look deeply into literature and classic great works. There is a connection for me between these two – when I think deeply on abstract ideas in philosophy, it always generates examples of this inside of stories, in characters and narratives.

I applied and within a week I had everything in. Since I already had my Master’s, I didn’t need GREs, and all of my grad school professors were still there and remembered me and wrote recommendations. I randomly found a writing sample of my work in my PhD was the same length as the writing sample they requested. When I re-wrote it, something woke up in me. I remembered loving writing about these things.

It was kind of…too easy. That hallmark of grace – serendipity – was all over it. Of course, being a busy mom, I forgot all about my application until after Christmas and then I checked.

I had been accepted. I could go back, sixteen years later, and get my PhD.

So we are celebrating a lot of endings and beginnings in our house. We will have two kindergartners, one fifth grader, and three high schoolers. And a mom whose beginnings and endings of babies and learning just end up being a circle of love.

Babies don’t keep you from your dreams. They make your dreams better.