relationship – 5 MAMAS and a blog

Running From Relationships

I’m a runner. Oh no, not the kind you probably are thinking of….the put your sneakers on, hit the ground and go kind? No, that’s not me. I’m more of the kind of girl whose scars from the past have made her unintentionally (or maybe sometimes intentionally) flee when red flags or hurts in relationships happen. Yep, I’m a runner.

Did you know you can actually have friendship PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder)? When I first read about it in Lisa-Jo Baker’s new book Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships, I thought it was a brilliant way to describe the hurts from childhood, teen, and adult friendships that stay with us, sometimes subtly, without even realizing the scars are there. For me, it showed up in my inner runner girl. It was less painful to run from a hard relationship or person than to stay and grow through it. Now, I do believe that there are some toxic relationships that we are meant to flee from. It’s learning to figure out the difference and trust your instincts to know when it’s worth working through. Some of my relationship scars go back as far as first grade and some as recent as last year. The good news is that I’ve discovered there can be healing for some of those wounds and restoration for some relationships …if we are willing to do the work and feel the discomfort that healing and growth sometimes bring.

“our relationships have subtle, yet powerful, lifelong impacts on us. This means that while they can burden us with unwelcome PTSD, they also have highly reparative capabilities too. The relationship patterns we have learned can become clues that lead us back to the scene of the original crime and equip us with tools to investigate, understand, and prevent it from happening again.”
~ Lisa-Jo Baker Never Unfriended

When I was offered a pre-release copy of Never Unfriended, I had no idea how much it would impact me or even those I’ve shared it with. The subtitle is The Secret to Finding and Keeping Lasting Friendships, so I thought, well, I think I know how to do that…some of my friendships span decades. I cherish my relationships. But I realized I was overlooking the painful relationships in my life, the ones over the years where I hit my emotional remote control button and put my wall up or the ones I ran from. So, I decided to dig deeper and quickly found myself highlighting many of the author’s words. I’ve underlined so many sentences in Never Unfriended that it now resembles a coloring book. What I found most refreshing was the author’s gut deep honesty. She shared so many things that I’ve thought but didn’t have the words to say or maybe didn’t want to be vulnerable enough to share. It was a reminder to me that we are not alone. There is always somebody else going through something similar, and sometimes there are many somebodies. As Lisa-Jo shared, sometimes that person next to you is waiting for someone else to speak up. For someone to admit that relationships can be hard, that rejection stinks, and that even the strongest {appearing} person can actually be very weak. Lisa-Jo did that for us….she spoke up with all her vulnerability and raw insight, and all different types of women around the internet and coffee shops are shouting “me too.”

Speaking of the internet, the chapter on FOMO(fear of missing out) is one of my favorites. We are doubly blessed and cursed with all the ways to connect via social media. Actually, that term “connect” in reference to social media is interesting. So many studies have found that the more people are “connected” through Facebook, Instagram, twitter, etc, the more lack of connection and actually loneliness is taking place. It’s created a false sense of friendship and connection.

“…..we have got to demote our social media status, our obsession with inclusion, and our fear of missing out and get it OUT of the hallowed place. We have worshipped at the altar of inclusion when we were built to worship at the altar of the only living God. Living tied to clicks and likes and friend requests on Facebook will drain the life out of us”- Lisa-Jo Baker, chapter 2, Never Unfriended

Through my ever changing years of being a woman, I am so very thankful for relationships. What I ultimately found in reading this book was that our relationship with God and being able to rest in who we are is the most important thing. There’s an inner strength when you feel complete and loved by the Creator, which then helps in all your other relationships. Who knows? I just may hang up my running shoes.

“Jesus is never tired of me always needing Him. Instead, He is delighted by how desperately I need his validation and He never, ever withholds it from me. Or from you.” Lisa-Jo Baker, chapter 5, Never Unfriended

Mondays hate me. They do. I am thoroughly convinced that Monday is a living, breathing thing destined to make homeschooling a nightmare for me. As each of the first 6 Mondays of the school year ended, I was looking for the hidden cameras in my house. I really shouldn’t complain. Nothing really terrible happened…just life with four boys and a puppy, and my always patient and loving reactions. Not. Thank God for no cameras. Oh, a small recap, you ask?

I seem to remember the one morning where I had just finished washing the kitchen floor from a puppy accident, while attempting to do math with two of the children, when another one ran up behind me and with a kiss on the back of my head said something about the bathroom. That something I found out about an hour later when the 5 year old decided that flushing the clogged toilet over and over would fix it, and then his brother helped him by using the entire linen closet to sop up the water. Don’t you just love doing laundry?

Or there was that time that the teenager dropped an advil tablet on the floor and the puppy decided to eat it right up. Bet you didn’t know that it’s toxic to dogs, huh? I kind of thought that the hydrogen peroxide that I had to turkey baster down her throat to make her throw up was, too, but apparently it saved her very expensive purebred little life. Of course this happens when I’m supposed to be out the door in 15 minutes. (Apparently, having a dog again is good for the family. I’ll have to get back to you on that one.)

Add on everyone waking up overtired from the weekends, to bad attitudes, to the laundry still sitting in the washing machine from like…last Thursday, to it being my hubby’s longest day so reinforcements were not coming, it was not a recipe for success. And success was the goal for this certain letter type, list addict, task orientated girl.

My calendar is organized.

My school planner is planned.

My to do list is freshly updated.

And it was becoming more important than the people I was doing it all for. I was putting my list and my need to accomplish it all before the relationships in my life. My reactions to normal life stuff was showing it. And this was not who I wanted to be…definitely not what I wanted for this school year.

A friend introduced me to this book, Teaching From Rest, and there are some amazing nuggets in there….the things YOU KNOW, but FORGOT THAT YOU KNOW. Like…

Surrender my idea of an ideal day…

…or relationship, situation, experience…..

and give it to the Lord, trusting Him with the outcome

The being and becoming needs to come before the doing and checking off…

…being in the moment, undistracted and focused on the people in my life

Do less to do it well

…simplify, simplify, simplify so that what I do choose to do can be done with excellence

Whose “well done” am I working for?

…work, serve for the praise of God, not man

It’s not about being “successful”…God is looking for our faithfulness

…to keep going, keep at it, persevere through it all

Every task, each assignment is an offering of love to God

…no matter how small or insignificant it seems

And most importantly, put relationships before anything else. This one. I mean, this is why I decided to homeschool in the first place…my children’s hearts.

So, I decided to quit. I quit Mondays.

Practically speaking, I redid the planners to make Monday an easier day, I emptied the calendar of any Monday appointments, I got up earlier and I let go of my start time a whole half hour. Listen, small steps, my friend. 🙂 And peace reigned in my home. No, everything did not go perfectly. The computer crashed, I got sick, the puppy…well, let’s just leave that unsaid. This is all just… life. I still have my lists, my planner, and my beloved calendar, but I put them back where they belong. I saw an immediate difference in my children and remembered the amazing gift I have in being able to stay home and school them.

My thing is the homeschooling, but I think those little reminders apply to anything we start putting in the “doing and checking off” list as being more important than the “being and becoming.” I know I’ll need to be reminded of this very often…at least every Sunday night.