Reading · Courage & Caffeine by Rebekah Ricks

Yesterday was my birthday. Our air conditioner is still broken. It is August in Florida.

I would like you to sit with that for a moment. I have been sweating like as sinner in church! I have basically been sitting with a boxfan aimed at my face for most of the day!

So it is Monday night and I am at the kitchen table. My little chaps are finally asleep, so it is time to write and reflect.

Here is what I have figured out about birthdays. The day itself is logistics. Somebody has to handle the cake, somebody has to answer the messages, and there is a schedule to keep. The reckoning shows up the day after, late, once the house finally goes quiet.

Earlier this week I was on the phone, digging through that same stack for a bill number, and one of my boys was telling me about a lizard, and the other one was narrating the lizard situation from the porch, and I said the sentence I have said probably four thousand times.

“When things calm down.”

Then I heard it. Because I have been saying that sentence for years. I said it when they were babies. I said it during session. I said it last spring and I said it Tuesday. Whatever calm is coming has been coming for a very long time, and I have quietly organized a decent portion of my life around waiting on it.

Which brought me to the thought I have not been able to shake. What if this is it? Not the waiting room. The actual thing.

I was born in the seventies.

Late seventies. But still.

Which means I am, by every chart I have ever seen, fully eligible for a midlife crisis. Past due, arguably. I have been meaning to schedule one and there has not been a good week.

I understand the standard package involves a convertible, or a dramatic haircut, or an announcement that you are moving somewhere with better light. The premise is that you look around at your life and decide you would like a different one.

My problem is that I looked around.

I do not want a different one. I want this one, noticed. That is a considerably less exciting crisis and it does not come with a car.

The house is loud. There is a decibel level in a home with two boys that I do not believe can be measured with standard equipment.

There are papers on every flat surface I own. The table, the counter, the arm of the couch, the passenger seat of my car where a math worksheet has been riding shotgun since March.

I get interrupted constantly. I have taken calls with a child draped over my shoulder like a scarf. I have muted myself to referee an argument about whose turn it was and then unmuted and asked, in a perfectly professional voice, if the sponsor would repeat the fiscal note.

And the driving. Winter Haven to Tallahassee. Winter Haven to Miami. Winter Haven to a fellowship hall in a town with one traffic light and forty women who wanted to know what was actually in the bill. I have eaten dinner at a gas station more times than I will admit in writing. (My favorite right now is wings at 7-11)

Loud, cluttered, interrupted, overheated, too many miles.

Someday this house is going to be quiet. Not peaceful. Quiet. I suspect I will learn the difference the hard way.

No papers on the counter, because nobody will be doing math at the counter. Nobody interrupting my calls. I will drink a cup of coffee at the correct temperature all the way to the bottom and I have a feeling it will taste like nothing.

Those boys will be men with their own kitchens and their own noise, and if I have done this right they will be too busy to call me as often as I want them to. That is not a failure. That is the assignment.

Babies do not keep. Every mother knows it. It is the reason you cry in the car sometimes for no reason you can explain to anybody.

Here is the part I have been turning over all week, sweating at my own kitchen table.

Policies do not keep either.

A bill has a session. It has a committee calendar and a deadline and a sine die, and when the gavel comes down, a thing that was two votes from happening becomes a thing you get to start over on next year, from the beginning, with new members who never heard the testimony.

Elections do not keep. They happen on the date printed on the card whether or not you were too busy, too tired, too hot, or too disgusted to participate. There is no makeup date. The seat gets filled by whoever showed up.

And trafficking does not keep. A child in that situation does not have a legislative calendar. She is not waiting for a good week or a favorable committee chair or the year I finally get my life organized. Her clock is running right now, at this exact moment, while I am complaining about my air conditioner.

That is the whole thing, and it took me most of a week and a broken AC unit to see it. The same truth cuts in both directions. The clock that says hold your boys close, this is short, is the same clock that says get in the car, that hearing is Tuesday and nobody else read the bill.

I do not get to use one to excuse myself from the other.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. (Psalm 90:12, KJV)

Numbering your days is not morbid. It is honest math. And honest math is what tells you that the window on your children and the window on a piece of legislation are both closing while you are standing there deciding.

I did not invent it. I inherited it.

My mother had the television on during the Oliver North hearings and she was not watching it the way people have things on. She was watching. I was on the floor in front of it, mostly there because she was there, and I could not have told you what half of it meant. I could tell you that it mattered, because I could see her face.

She took me to Moral Majority rallies. Folding chairs, bad coffee, a room full of ordinary people who had made a decision to be in that room on a weeknight. Nobody paid them. Nobody clapped. There was no algorithm rewarding them for showing up.

She never once sat me down and explained civic responsibility to me. She just went, and I was in the back seat.

That is how it transfers. Not through a lecture. Through a back seat.

So now there are two boys in my back seat. They have been to more hearings than most adults in this state. They have sat through testimony they did not understand and eaten a lot of vending machine dinners and watched their mother be told no in public and go back the next week.

Since I am doing the honest version tonight, let me say the other part.

I have missed things. I have taken a call in a church parking lot during something I promised I would be present for. I have driven home at eleven at night from a hearing that ran long and stood in a doorway looking at two boys who were already asleep.

There is no version of this where that is free. Anybody who tells you that you can carry a burden for other people’s children at no cost to your own is selling something.

But I have never once believed God gave me two boys and a burden for somebody else’s and then expected me to pick.

Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. (Proverbs 31:8, KJV)

That is not a hobby verse. It is not a when-things-calm-down verse.

I am not going to tell you to cherish every moment. That instruction has never helped a woman at five thirty on a Thursday with a sink full of dishes, a deadline, and a house that is currently ninety degrees. It adds guilt to exhaustion, which is not a combination anybody needs on a Monday night.

Some of these moments are not cherishable. Some are just hard and you are allowed to say so out loud.

What a person can actually do is smaller. Notice one thing. The way he still says a word wrong and you have never corrected him because you do not want him to stop. The weight of a kid asleep against you in the car on the way back from something that ran too long. The specific sound of the back door when they come in filthy.

You will not remember the fiscal note. You will remember the door.

The AC is still broken. The laundry is not done. The coffee is a glass of brown water. There is a worksheet in my car, a lizard situation on the porch, and a hearing I need to prep for that I have not opened.

If that adds up to a midlife crisis, it is the cheapest one on record. No car. Same haircut.

I have been living the good old days this whole time and filing them under chaos. The boys are still in the back seat. The window is still open on both of the things I care about. Nothing about that is calm, and I am finished waiting for calm to arrive before I am willing to call it good.

Hot house and all, these are the good days. I intend to notice more of them before they are gone.

If you are in the loud years too, running on too little sleep and doing the work anyway, send this to somebody who needs to hear that she is not behind. I am also starting a personal week over at The Homeschool Connection, so come sit at that table with me too. And if you want to stay at this one, subscribe.

Turns Out, This Is the Good Old Days

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