Flexibility - I hear you calling but I don't want to answer!

I have been described by many a friend as "super flexible". M2 as well. No not in the sense where we can put our feet behind our heads or anything crazy like that, although I might try that today! More in the sense that we can go and do on a whim. We adjust quickly.

Or so it seems to the world!

Really that is all on the outside and mostly due to the lifestyle that we live. The Army lifestyle. It demands flexibility. That is one main reason we seem flexible another is that M2 and I are both a little flighty! We get going on one path and see a butterfly and say "ooh look" and head the other way without ever realizing it. My youngest, bless her heart, got a double whammy of flightiness. Seriously though, we will be driving over an hour away to go do something specific and on the drive I will google something else in that city on my phone and before you know it we think that new thing is what we went to the city for all along and it will not occur to us until we are home that our original intent for the trip was never reached!

On the inside though, deep down, I am not a flexible soul. I am a rigid homeschooling mom and I am a rigid disciplinarian. There is no flexibility within my realm of parenting. Mostly, I understand this to be a great thing. It means that my children have no doubts as to what is expected of them most the time. It also means that at the end of every school year I know my children received a solid education and I get to lay any homeschooling doubts aside. Yet, where there is goodness in all this there can also reside something not so good. Children with spirits that might be breaking. This is something I completely do not want.

I have exactly 8 1/2 weeks of curriculum left in this year. I have exactly 8 1/2 weeks before I send E off to summer camp. I so desperately want to finish before she leaves. We have pushed so hard this year and come great strides. Yet, she came to me heartbroken this morning and said she felt pressured to get "all this work" done and I could tell it was really causing her spirit to suffer. Unlike myself, I took a DEEP breath and decided to stretch out our weeks - who says we can't just finish after she gets home from camp. I attend a homeschool forum with other moms using the same curriculum, just with older kids, and most of them stretch this particular curriculum into 2 years anyways. It covers A LOT!

This is just a mild example of me hearing flexibility calling my name. But I think I must be in a season of learning flexibility because every day I am having to rethink a ton of ways I operate and become more flexible. I am having to give a lot up.

This brings we to the car situation! My, oh so wise, husband informed me that we will not be getting another car. We will learn to be (you guessed it) more flexible!

Let the adventures begin ...

Oh, the car drama!

I should probably put the laptop down right now and not proceed with blogging. Sometimes on days when your eyes are red from countless tears and your heart feels burdened you should back away from the keyboard before you type something dramatic to only regret it tomorrow!

But I'm going to throw caution to the wind ...

Today has been HARD! I have spent almost half of every hour since I woke up crying. My only consolation at this point is that maybe this emotional roller coaster I am on means I am pregnant!! (Lets all collectively cross our fingers!) I am sure as M2 reads this he will be pleading that no one sends up a prayer for me that the "Vacancy" sign on my womb suddenly flashes to "No Vacancies"! Ignore him though - we need another baby pronto! I'm getting old people! I am also getting WAY off track here ...

Back to the reason behind the emotional roller coaster because let's face it - the tubal ligation I had probably means it is NOT a pregnancy. We, as a family, have fought hard for the last 4 years to maintain ourselves as a one car family. We have reasons. Economical ones, environmental ones (yes we are tree-huggers, love us anyways), but most importantly, familial ones! We have gone through stages where we both had a car and the kids and I did our own thing and M2 did his own thing and we got very disconnected in ways we did not even know. Then, through a set of circumstances that an entirely different blog could be written about, we ended up selling our second car to some friends. This was going to be temporary because M2 had already planned on buying his dream car, at the time a Honda truck, as soon as we moved to our next duty station. But then something kind of cool happened. We squeezed into a routine of one car. It made us rely on each other more, it made us compromise and work together, it forced us to communicate more, it meant that we went EVERYWHERE as a family. When you face challenges and work together to overcome them - it only makes you grow stronger. We grew stronger as a family. We made a decision to stay a one car family and keep working to make it work.

Each move we go through some growing pains as we figure out new routines and new ways to give and take. This move has been especially hard so far. We live off post. The schedule M2 works is not predictable in the least right now (not that in the Army it ever has been but we have been able to guesstimate pretty well in the past). We have had several episodes of disappointment as schedules change and activities are missed. Right now we are on the verge of throwing the towel in and heading to the nearest Honda dealership and for some reason that is causing me to be an emotional wreck! I feel like the entire dynamic of our family is about to change, entirely! (I know I am RIGHT in the midst of crazy right now - who else in the world thinks purchasing a second car will throw the entire world off balance? Not a sane person, I tell you!)

Maybe it is time to give up on the one car dream. Or maybe it is time to reach down to our depths and stretch ourselves in a way we never have and figure out a way to make this work. Which is why I shouldn't be blogging this. Usually I blog right as I am coming out of a whirlwind and have come to some conclusion or learned some lesson that I feel like sharing with the world.

Not this time. I'll cry on it some more and let you know ...