A 15-year-old girl sat in the driver’s seat of a parked car in a high school parking lot, tears running down her face. Her voice was angry, her face flushed. Her mother was doing her best to remain calm. “You need to learn to drive. How are you going to be a functioning adult if you don’t know how to drive? You will learn!”
“I don’t need to learn. I’ll just move to Chicago for college and use public transportation. People all around the world use public transportation every day, like biking or walking, instead of driving cars. I just don’t want to learn how to drive!”
Nearly 20 years later, that teenage girl heard echoes of her own voice in her tenderhearted 3-year-old son, as she was driving her minivan down the highway. “Mama, I don’t need to learn how to swim. My head gets wet if I dump a bucket of water on it. I just don’t want to put my face in the water!”
Fear.
Sometimes we can be tempted to allow our fear to control our decisions. My son is afraid of water because he has fluid in his ears perpetually, due to being born with a special kind of cleft palate. The pressure changes in the water are uncomfortable and terrifying for him, despite tubes. But we’re going to be moving near the ocean, and he needs to learn to be comfortable around water.
Oh, how I wish I could have gone back and transported some of my “I’m doing this because I love you” Mama wisdom into my teenage heart. (And truth be told, I hope my mom got a lot of miles out of making fun of her emotional teenager with her mom friends.)
But fear. Fear is a real thing.
I have some scary things coming up this year. I bet you have got some too.
We’re bringing in a nearly 3-year-old boy into our family, and part of me is horrifically terrified, and the other part of me is absolutely in love. What if? What if? What if?
But the thing is…We decided four years ago that we would adopt again. We knew inherently that this is where our family was meant to be. Four years later, we’ve added two more kids to our brood, and the family dynamics are so very, very different. I know this fourth child will enmesh himself into our family in a beautifully scarily complicated way, and we will be so interwoven and our hearts so entangled that it will become a new normal.
But I’m scared.
A few weeks ago, I laid in bed, wondering if I was this scared before the addition of each child. And feeling guilty about feeling scared. The answer is no. I wasn’t this scared for child number two or child number three. That isn’t a bad thing. It’s acknowledging that our lives will experience a new season of stress and anxiety. But that’s just it. A season. We have fantastic support and networks available. I know that things will “all shake out” as Meg Ryan says in You’ve Got Mail. (“Meanwhile, I’m putting up more twinkle lights.”)
So the answer lies with me. I have to make a choice to do it scared—to be “all in.” To live my life, and to live through my fear.
You get to make that choice too. You get to choose between living a bland life of safety and a life of beautiful mess, blindly or sometimes not-so-blindly stepping out into the thing that absolutely terrifies you.
This week, I will step on that plane. I will meet my son. And we will muddle through this messy, complicated thing called “being a family” together.
How about you? Are you facing a new job? A new city to live in? Empty nester for the first time? Waiting for a pregnancy test to finally show positive? Looking forward to the birth of your first or eighth child? Facing a spouse’s deployment? Changes can bring very real fear. If there is one thing that I would love to speak to all of your hearts (and yell to my own) it is this:
Do it scared. Be all in.
What’s an area of your life that you’re feeling fear or trepidation in?
