Is There Room for Me? Making Space for My Growth in My Family’s Life

Recently I told my husband that there wasn’t room for me in my own life.

I spend most of my time taking care of others. This is the nature of parenthood with young children, of being a homeschooler, of raising neuro-diverse kids and a husband with a chronic mental illness. I feel as though someone always needs me, often desperately. Sometimes it’s seemingly small things like needing me to put on shoes or find misplaced items. Other times it’s emotional crises and spiritual struggles. It can be exhausting.

Lately I’ve been having my own issues. I wouldn’t even call them struggles, though it isn’t always fun. It feel more like growing pains. This is good news, because it means that I am changing and hopefully becoming more of who I am supposed to be. But it sure is hard when there doesn’t seem to be any room for me.

I feel like a seed, put into the ground too close to other growing things. I have to fight for the sun and the water, and as I start to reach for the light, I’m being crowded out by larger, louder more urgent needs than my own. Are they really more important? Sometimes, but not always.

The other plants that live with me in this garden are important and I want to see them nurtured, but I may also need to clear out some of the weeds to make sure there is room for all of us to grow.

This past summer, I tried to make it a priority to get out of the house by myself more, to find a place I can work. To be honest, it’s been more difficult than I thought. The usual cafe’s I work in are loud and crowded. The music I listen to to drown out the noise is peppered with even louder commercials. I have a limited choice of places to work. My children seem incapable of respecting my quiet work time when I try to stay at home. But I know that I must find a way to do it.

It often feels easier not to.

Sometimes it’s easier not to eat then to make healthy choices. I may lose weight that way, but I probably won’t be healthy. It may be easier to push my own emotional needs below the surface, but that won’t make me a mentally stable person. I can’t deprive myself of sun and water and expect that I will be equipped to help those around me.

Last spring I taught a series of classes at church about spiritual disciplines and the final one was about the discipline of submission. This is probably one of the most unpopular topics in all of Christendom. But the more I read, the more I realized how beautiful and terribly misunderstood submission is.

I don’t have to defend my right to exist, I don’t have to shrink away into anonymity. Because my value does not come from anything I accomplish or achieve. When I realize that my identify is in Christ it removes the need to constantly stand up for myself and the fear of insignificance.

But boy do I want to defend myself. I want to scream at my kids (and sometimes my husband) that I’m allowed to need a few minutes of quiet. I want to put myself first for once. That line between selfishness and self-care can feel so very blurred at times.

It comes back again to reminding myself who I am. If God chose to make me an introvert surely he had in mind a way I could raise this gaggle of children without completely losing my mind. If he put in me these creative gifts, then he must have a plan for their use. Maybe it doesn’t look like what I’m doing now and maybe it won’t come until later. But it does have a purpose. I have a purpose. Doing laundry and picking up toys may be part of that but they certainly aren’t all of it.

I need to give myself permission to make room for myself the garden of our life as a family. I don’t know quite what it looks like yet, but I’m working on it. My main thoughts each day may be for the needs of my husband, children, friends, family and church, but somewhere in there I have to find room for me.