Somewhere Between the Pain and the Promise

I’m sitting at my infusion with about an hour to kill, and I realized I haven’t written anything here in a while. Honestly, the last several months have been a blur of pain, appointments, chaos, responsibilities, and putting one foot in front of the other because sometimes that is quite literally all I have known how to do.

My health has been less than par, to put it lightly. There are days I genuinely don’t know how I’ve gotten through everything I have. I’m behind on more things than I care to admit. There are lists I keep rewriting because things get carried over from one day to the next, and then the next. There are things around the house I look at and think, I’ll get to that when I feel better, except “when I feel better” keeps moving farther away. There are appointments constantly. There is pain that seems to take up residence in my body and refuse to leave. There are days when simply keeping everyone fed, where they need to be, and relatively functioning feels like an accomplishment.

I am tired.

Really, really tired.

But last night, I stood in the middle of this big empty space that will soon be our living room, looked around, and something in me got quiet for a minute.

Because this empty room isn’t really empty.

It is full of years.

It is full of conversations my husband and I had when this was still just a dream. It is full of sketches, plans, measurements, Pinterest screenshots, changed minds, decisions, saving, sacrificing, waiting, and wondering if the day would ever actually come when we would stand inside it.

And now I can.

I looked at those walls and that beautiful wood ceiling and realized that little by little, the empty spaces are about to start filling up. Furniture will come in. My ridiculous number of plants will undoubtedly find their places. 😂 There will be shoes by the door and cups left where they shouldn’t be. Kids will argue in these rooms. We will laugh in them. We will celebrate birthdays and holidays here. There will probably be nights I’m curled up in a recliner hurting like hell and mornings when sunlight comes pouring through those windows and reminds me that yesterday wasn’t forever.

Life is going to happen here.

And standing there last night, I couldn’t stop thinking about how completely unreal that still feels.

Thirty-four years ago, I entered this world weighing 1 pound, 2 ounces.

One pound. Two ounces.

There have been plenty of things thrown at that tiny baby girl over the years that probably should have broken her. There have been times I’ve been knocked flat. Times I’ve been angry. Times I’ve been scared. Times I’ve been so physically and emotionally exhausted that giving up sounded a whole lot easier than getting back up.

And I won’t pretend I’ve gracefully marched forward through every one of those seasons.

Sometimes I crawled.

Sometimes I stopped.

Sometimes I sat down in the middle of everything and said, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Sometimes moving forward looked like nothing more than surviving until bedtime.

I have stalled plenty of times.

But I have never quit.

Somehow, that 1-pound-2-ounce baby has spent 34 years moving mountains.

And last night, I was standing inside one of them.

That really hit me.

Because not very long ago, this house existed in conversations between my husband and me. We talked about what we wanted. We wrote things down. We drew things. We imagined where rooms would go and what our life might look like here someday.

Now there’s a kitchen.

There are walls.

There are countertops and cabinets and floors and lights. There is a deck where I can already picture myself sitting and watching sunsets exactly like the one stretched across our land last night.

And maybe the most meaningful part of all is that this isn’t just some piece of land we decided to build a house on.

This is where we got married.

Before there was a house here, there was us standing in that grass, holding hands and promising each other forever. We said our vows on this very land. And now, almost exactly where we stood making those promises to one another, our home is rising around them.

I don’t think I will ever walk through our front door without knowing what happened there first.

Before the walls, there was a promise.

Before the kitchen, there was a field.

Before the dream became something we could touch, there were two people standing there choosing a life together.

And now I get to spend the rest of mine here with the family I dreamed about long before I ever knew what that family would look like.

I think sometimes we believe gratitude and struggle are opposites. Like if you recognize how blessed you are, you shouldn’t be sad. You shouldn’t be overwhelmed. You shouldn’t complain about pain or admit that you’re struggling because, after all, look at everything you have.

But life doesn’t work that way.

You can be incredibly blessed and incredibly tired.

You can be standing inside an answered prayer while your body is hurting so badly you want to scream.

You can look around at a life you once dreamed about and still feel overwhelmed by the life you are currently living.

You can thank God with your whole heart and still ask Him, Please, Lord, make this part easier.

The good does not erase the bad.

And the bad does not cancel out the good.

Sometimes they exist in the exact same moment.

Maybe the hard seasons even have a way of keeping us grounded enough to recognize the beautiful ones. They remind us not to rush past what we once prayed for just because life is still imperfect after the prayer is answered.

Because last night, my body still hurt.

My list was still unfinished.

My health was still complicated.

I was still behind.

Nothing about my circumstances magically changed when I walked into that room.

But for a few minutes, I stopped looking at everything that still needed fixing and looked at everything that had already been built.

The house, yes.

But also me.

My marriage.

My family.

My faith.

My life.

There is so much I am still fighting through. There are days when I genuinely feel like I am barely keeping my head above water. I don’t know what some of the next chapters are going to look like, especially when it comes to my health.

But I know this much…

I have lived through every single day I once thought might break me.

And somehow, here I am.

Still hurting sometimes.

Still overwhelmed sometimes.

Still behind on half of my life sometimes.

Still dreaming.

Still praying.

Still building.

Still here.

And soon, that empty room won’t be empty anymore.

Neither is my life.

It is overflowing with evidence that some of the things we once whispered about, prayed about, sketched on paper, and wondered if we’d ever see…

eventually become the places we stand. ❤️

#MomWithATube