Renee Emerson

tonight i’m up a little later than usual, despite my intentions of going to bed a half hour earlier this month. too nauseous to sleep. i remember this from last time i was pregnant, the long hours listening to bryan snore happily in our bedroom. baby june is kicking happily in my belly; sometimes she kicks hard enough that you can see it on the outside.

zu is sleeping and bryan works most nights now, so in the evenings i have a few hours alone between her bedtime and mine. used for grading, writing, reading, cleaning, preparing for the next day. alone but still surrounded by others, by all of the needs and wants and musts.

quiet restores me. when i was younger, and even in college, i loved to take long walks by myself. as a girl, i would walk through the woods and back fields behind our house, for hours. sometimes i would bring a journal and write things down, but mostly i was just outside, alone, listening to the quiet. 

sometimes i feel lost in the clamor. a friend told me recently that those times of quiet solitude with the Lord were a time of filling up, a time to prepare me for now, my life as a mother and wife. a time of pouring out.

i never understood what the bible meant when it said to give up your life as a sacrifice until i became both a wife and mother; how having so little time for yourself can either make you the most miserable or most happy person, depending on if you have Christ and if you allow him to create the right attitude in you.

as much as i crave it, time for myself doesn’t have the eternal investment like time spent on others. even little things. little noisy things. they don’t remember the day to day–i doubt anyone in my house notices the when and where of laundry getting done, just that it appears in their drawers as needed–but they’ll remember that i was here, filling the crux of the house, the role of wife/mother.