The last few weeks have been one hot mess between a broken wrist, covid, van issues and returning to work. Phew, what a time to be alive! Today, we are talking about what happens when you fall back? Whether in homeschooling, your health, or spiritual life. What do you fall back on?
Hey there! Welcome to the Imperfectly Pollyanna Podcast! I am your host, Courtney, a faith-filled homeschool mom of 2, licensed medical professional, certified health coach and eternal optimist. Here at the podcast we talk about real life, always imperfect but always finding the good. I’m so glad you’re here!
So, fun story. It’s nice to be back on the show. I had not intended to be gone so long however, in true new year fashion, life has sort of fallen apart.
My daughter began complaining of some wrist pain a couple of weeks before the end of the year. She had been playing around at my moms house while my husband and I had been out of town for our anniversary. Honestly, I blew it off because well she can be a bit dramatic and so I thought she was just being dramatic about her wrist and that maybe she had sprained it or just turned it wrong. Fast forward to returning to gymnastics after Christmas break and she was crying at practice saying that it hurt her wrist. At the beginning of January, I happen to be at one of the practices and not 20 minutes into her practice, she began crying in pain. We couldn’t get into see the orthopedic doctor that evening but I did notice some swelling to her wrist and so we decided to take her the next day. Much to our surprise the x-ray showed a buckle fracture. As you can imagine, this has earned me mother of the year already! Thankfully the x-ray show that it was already starting to heal so they put her in a splint for two weeks with the idea that as long as she was careful with it, she should be back in the game after that. Unfortunately, that meant that she was out for her next competition.
About a week after she had had the splint in place, we found out that some family members had tested positive for Covid. Family members that my husband and children had been around during that time. On Wednesday of that week my husband began complaining of feeling a bit under the weather while he was at the office. By that night he was feeling pretty achy. He spent the following day in bed with a fever, severe headache, and bodyaches. Everything was fine until Friday morning he decided to pass out on me several times and which I ended up having to call an ambulance. It ended up that his heart rate was dropping and he was dehydrated. Let me Telya, it tests everything in you when you are a paramedic and you have to call an ambulance about your spouse. Thankfully, the medic that showed up as someone that both my husband and I have worked with in the past and knows as well. I was able to pick my husband back up at the emergency room later that afternoon and he felt much better because they had given him a bunch of fluids. The kids and I had been staying away from him as much as possible but unfortunately we woke up on that Saturday morning feeling under the weather. My kids, in their true form in fashion, felt bad for less than 24 hours, slept through the night, and bounced back very quickly. Now, just in complete transparency, my husband did test positive for Covid while he was at the ER. So it was safe to assume that myself and the kids had it as well when we began to have symptoms that weekend. I felt pretty rough for several days and it’s so weird because it seems like things happen in waves. One day I was feeling good and then the next day I was hit with some new symptoms. I really think that we handled it well because of doing some pregaming when my husband was down. We made sure to have plenty of fluids, take our juice plus and some vitamins for support, and did a lot of binge watching on TV. Unfortunately, my son had to miss his first gymnastics competition because of not feeling well and needing to quarantine. Basically, what it comes down to is that the first couple of weeks of the year showed to be like a toddler pitching a fit. Oh! And I almost forgot to tell you that the first full day that my husband was down for the count, my driver side window of my van broke because we had had snow and freezing temperatures and while I had left to go grab some food and other necessities, a little gear and my window decided to break so my son and I had to get a tarp and work that out as well. I’m telling you, it’s been quite a couple of weeks. I’m finally back to work today and feeling much better even though the fatigue is real. One thing that I’m thankful for with homeschooling is that we can adapt based on what’s going on in our lives. Typically, that means we can take vacations whenever we want but this time we had to adjust because of illness. I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about what happens when you fall back. What happens when your plans fall apart or things don’t go as planned, what do you fall back on?
The first night that I started feeling bad, one of my best friends sent me a text message and she made a comment about how there really is something to say about positive thinking. Now, I admit that I get a little bit annoyed whenever somebody will make a post on social media and all the comments say things like “sending positive vibes“ because I wonder what that really means? I mean sure, it means that they are wishing them well and hoping that they feel better and so they use different verbiage to mean the same thing. However, when my best friend made the comment about positive thinking, I did stop to think what that could mean in that moment. The kids were already asleep, my husband was back in bed, and I was sleeping on the couch with a headache and chills. I couldn’t think of anything to say and I wanted to pray but I couldn’t really think of anything nor did I have the energy to think of words to say. Now what happen next is not some thing that I share lightly. See, there used to be a time where my prayer life was strong and I have never been one to be short for words even when I’m talking to God. I talk to him like a friend and I am very blunt with how I’m feeling. After all, he already knows my heart so why try to act like I’m not feeling or thinking the things that I’m feeling or thinking, right? In that moment, though, I had no words and I fell back onto the only thing that was in my head. I begin saying the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, he maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he restores my soul. I said that scripture over and over again. It was the only thing that was coming through my mind but the more that I said it more relaxed I became until I actually fell asleep. And during the time of being sick and trying to figure out what needed to be done, what was a priority to take, and even what to do about homeschooling, all the way down to what to say in the middle of feeling so miserable… what did I fall back on? Well I can tell you that when it came to what supplements to take, I fell back on what I knew which was juice plus and whole food nutrition. And because it is whole food and not a vitamin, we could double or even triple up on it and know that we were getting the best nutrition possible outside of eating it fresh ourselves. I went back to the basics of knowing common sense stuff like drinking water and staying hydrated and supporting our immune system‘s the best we could. When it came to homeschooling, obviously we took the first several days off. And there’s nothing wrong with that. One of the things I had to let go of was the idea of how homeschooling should look and how it’s not like school at home at all and that is a huge blessing even when you don’t realize it. But when we were feeling well enough to be able to do a little bit, I fell back on the basics. We did our Gather Round lesson relax on the couch enjoyed the conversation and even worked on fun little things to go with our diorama. Which, by the way, is looking super cute because we are currently learning about living off the land and we have made a well, a couple of cabins, some firearms, and I even sewed up a couple of blankets and pillows and pouches to pretend like they are flour and sugar. So AnyWho, when I was sick I fell back on the basics of immune system support. When we were sick and homeschooling, I fell back on the basics and just relaxed and enjoyed the time together. And when I had no words to say of my own, I fell back to scripture that I had hidden in my heart.
Let’s face it, this time in our life is hard for so many people. Sure, there are some really wonderful things happening in life that we need to pay attention to and appreciate. We need to be able to find the good and the difficult because if not, we will never survive. But I say that, to also say that I think there’s so many people that for the last several years have been struggling to keep their head above the water and maybe even dipped below a few times. They are not only struggling to find the good but struggling to even have the ability to care to find anything to begin with. Maybe you are someone who you’re struggling. Maybe Covid has hit your house or your job just really sucks or you are stressed out over politics or even people in general. Maybe you can’t even really pinpoint exactly what’s causing the state of mind that you’re in but you know that you’re not happy where you’re at. Maybe you’ve been in that spot for a few months, or even years. So when that happens, what do you fall back on?
In EMS, things can be very unpredictable. We might get a call for a pretty straightforward run only just show up and realize it is not anything like what Dispatch told us. It can be completely chaotic, unstable, or whatever. And in those moments, when we aren’t sure what to do, we fall back on the basics. Things like airway breathing circulation. If we don’t know or don’t do the basics then the rest of what we do won’t matter.
When I think about this subject, the idea of when we fall back what do we fall back on, I wonder if you are someone who knows what the basics even are in order to know where to fall. For example, when you are homeschooling and the day is just not going the way that you had hoped or planned. Maybe you or the kids or the family dog are just not having it and everyone ends up in tears. When you feel like you have completely failed at this homeschooling thing, do you have a habit that you turn to? Sure, this may mean you want to sit and drown your feelings in food. You begin making a list of what schools you could send your child back to. You go into the mode of thinking all hope is lost and ask yourself why you even thought you could do this in the first place. The thing is, is at home schooling is not school at home. So if you’re having a rough day, you have the ability to take the day off or to still do something that is educational but may be off the beaten path. You may watch a documentary or build a Favorite item that you’re studying in the game of Minecraft. If you are a Homeschooling mom, or maybe you’re just a mom in general, and you have a moment of feeling like you have failed, fall back on the basics. Tell yourself the things that you were doing right. Did you make sure that the kids were fed today? If so, You got a point! Did you lose your temper or snap at them out of anger? Apologize to them. It’s OK for our kids to see that we don’t always have it all together. What they will learn from us is how to handle it when they will inevitably mess up themselves.
When it comes to our spiritual life, I feel like this question we are asking today goes much deeper than many people feel or think about. See, when I was a child I heard all the Bible stories, sang all the songs that helped me memorize Bible verses, participated in special events, and did all the right things. Life happens to all of us and I have made some really dumb decisions in my life that I’ve had some not so great consequences. I have been hurt but I as I have also been the one to do the hurting. I have question God and wondered if there was any hope for me at all. But when I think about falling back in the spiritual sense, falling back to the basics, it comes down to what type of foundation do we truly have? If you are someone who has grown up in the church or been a Christian for most of your life, you have or may have a different view of the world then someone who has only come to know the Lord in recent years. However, one thing we can all know is that when we are in the depths, when we are struggling to breathe from the weight of the world and the stresses of our lives, even when we can’t quite put my finger on where the source is that our stress is coming from, we can fall back but not from failure. We fall back to the basics, to the foundation, into the loving arms of God. So falling back isn’t a failure at all! In fact, it’s part of the very thing that we are called to do. Trust in the Lord with all our heart and lean not to our own understanding. It is casting all our cares on him because he cares for us. It is very simply loving God and loving others and letting him work out the rest.
There’s so many self-help books and self improvement books these days. You can find a how to book for pretty much everything. You can also find out how to do things that you probably never expected to need to know, especially if you’re a homeschool family. I’ve recently seen several, and I mean a lot, of articles or videos or posts about people wanting to read their horoscope‘s, enneagrams, watching and listening about prophetic words or witches that are reading tarot cards. Yet people that read those things and listen to those things struggle to believe in the guy that created them? We, as a society, have become so used to putting our trust and beliefs in fallible human beings. Yet we struggle to put our faith in God. We have lost our way to knowing which direction to go when it comes to falling back. We have lost our footing on the foundation. And all that does is cause a ripple effect. A ripple effect that not only affects our lives but our children’s lives.
Which brings me to the question again of when you fall back, what do you fall back on? If you are someone who has lost your footing or maybe you never feel like you had a foundation to begin with, you may be wondering what in the world you do to fix that, right? I don’t think that it is a complicated answer. I think that it is, in fact, a simple answer but it’s not necessarily the easiest answer. In order to have a good foundation, you have to build it first. If your foundation is already crumbling, then you have to repair the foundation before you can build on it. Sometimes a broken foundation means completely stripping it away and starting again from scratch. Everything in our life, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually, can all find peace and healing when the foundation in our spiritual life is restored. And I’m not saying that because I have all the answers. I‘m not saying it because I feel like I’ve always done it right. In fact, I have probably failed more times than I have actually done right. But it is in our brokenness and our mistakes that we can be made whole again. If you are struggling with illness of any kind, there is healing. Even if it’s not on our terms or at the pace that we want, there is peace available. In our homeschool life, there are so many times of frustration and feelings of doubt or fear of failing our children. We are afraid of making the wrong decision or not teaching them what they need to know and we don’t know how to balance that with the rest of our lives. But when our spiritual walk is on the foundation, when our home school world has a good and strong spiritual foundation, we cannot fail our children. In our spiritual life, there will always be attacks from evil. One thing that is for certain is that life is uncertain. And when we are trying to improve ourselves on a spiritual level that seems to be when the hardest temptations come in. But it doesn’t mean that we are failing spiritually. Being tested is not a sign of failure. Being tested is truly just that. We cannot grow without struggling. It may sound cheesy but, you know, a seed is planted into the ground and it actually needs the weight and the resistance of the soil to sprout and ultimately become a plant. But if we are going to survive those struggles and those temptations or tests, we have to constantly be seeking the Lord. That means talking to him every day and not just before bed. That also means hiding his word in our hearts so that when we are in those struggles and we aren’t sure what else to say, his word will be there to give us the strength that we need. This episode represents one year of my podcast. I am being listened to regularly in at least 10 countries. I have had over 2500 downloads. I have had several interviews and built friendships from them because of it. But none of that truly matters because what it comes down to is being able to have a platform that I can talk to you without interruption or being shoved down some algorithm. From the beginning of the show, it has always been my intention to encourage others by sharing my own struggles and imperfections while helping you to feel less alone and more loved by God. It is my prayer that you will continue to show up as we find the good together. Because I might be a year into this but I’m not stopping now. And I don’t know exactly where this podcast is going to go this next year even though I have ideas. I know that I want my relationship with the Lord to grow and my leadership to my children to grow as well. I hope you will stick around for the journey. We are all imperfectly perfect and THAT’s that kind of people God chooses to use.