I love our house. It is cozy and charming. It has all of the quaint features of houses built in the 1920s- stained glass windows, crown picture moldings, beautiful hardwood floor, oddly shaped closets. It’s a 3 bedroom first floor flat with an impeccable location. We can walk to just about all of the errands we need to run in a given week.
The inside and decor perfectly match our family- warm tones and worn furniture. We have an approach to hospitality modeled after the Benedictines, a welcome you into our life as it is mentality. That’s not to say I’m not going to run a vacuum or attempt a quick tidy before someone comes over, but I don’t feel that not having the house fully put together is an impediment to inviting someone in.
Lately, I’ve been meditating a great deal on one of the Benedictine vows lately, namely the vow to stability, in terms of our home. When a Benedictine monk joins the order, he takes a vow to stay at his monastery for the rest of his life, the vow to stability. The idea behind this is that new is not always better, the grass is not greener, and that you need to be able to find God where you are. The vow to stability means that the monk is going to be sitting next to the same person for dinner until he dies, going to be praying in the same chapel, hearing the same voices, walking the same halls. It’s counter-cultural in today’s world that encourages us to seek bigger, better, newer.
My call to stability does not look like a Benedictine monks. We will not stay in this house forever. Full disclosure, we will probably move soon because there are objective issues of space and long term finances to take into consideration. But, I am called to be at peace, to live fully in the present where God has placed me now. I am called to be grateful, to enjoy, to learn and grow in this house in this moment. And I am called to model that for my children.
We’ve lived here for four years, and as we’ve grown our family, the house hasn’t grown with us. It remains a three bedroom, one bath flat. And sometimes it can feel as though we are bursting out of the seams. If I focused on the things our home doesn’t have, I’m sure I could list many, but I’m preferring at this stage of life to focus on what it does have. Contentment is a great gift, one I grow more and more grateful for each day.
Diving into stability isn’t always easy. One thing that has helped us has been to pair stability with flexibility. In order to make this house work for us, we have swapped rooms and switched up floor plans at least half a dozen times over the past four years. Mark has probably moved every single piece of furniture we own at least twice. As our family has changed, our space needs have too, and we’ve learned to be flexible in our approach to our home.
When we first moved here, G had the tiny bedroom off the kitchen and Gram had the bedroom next to us. When William was born, he bunked with us for awhile, then moved in with G. Then G, ever the precocious child, learned to unlock all 3 locks on the door to the back deck, so we did a quick swap out of bedrooms, and moved Gram into the back. Right around then, I was realizing that trying to use the Montessori method out of our dining room wasn’t working (lots of tiny pieces!), and feeling like we needed a classroom space. So we bought some foam tiles and inexpensive shelves and paired them with an old rug to create a classroom in our unfinished basement.
In the meantime, we’ve rearranged the living room and kitchen to give us and the kids more space to move, and toys come in and out on rotation so we aren’t overwhelmed.
And that’s where we’ve been until this week. It’s been about a year since we’ve made any major changes to our living space, just constant tiny tweaks here and adjustments there to optimize things. Buuuuut, this week Mark and I finally sat down to chat about a couple of issues that have been brewing and realized we needed to make another change.
The first is that William has been having trouble sleeping alone. It’s been a few months now, and we’ve past from normal sleep regression into something else. He’s always been a kid who relies on physical touch, and for whatever reason, is needing more of it at this stage of his life. He craves contact and closeness, especially at night. And he’s been waking his sister up. Yikes. So most nights for the past months, we’ve had both kids ending up in our room at various times, leading to not a lot of consistent sleep for anyone.
The second issue is that Gram’s world has gotten smaller. She hasn’t been going to the senior center any more, and doesn’t like to leave the house much at all. She’ll sometimes come with me when I go places, but other than that, she stays home. As we’ve spent more and more time in our basement classroom during the day, this means that she’s spending more and more time alone, which I don’t like. She can’t make it down the stairs, so it’s a trade off, either we have classroom time or we have Gram time.
As we talked these two things through, Mark and I realized that the solution was to link the two issues and solve them together. As I said above, we have 3 bedrooms. Gram is in one, we’re in the other, and the big kids have been in the third. Since the kids were coming into our room anyways, we moved their beds in with us, moved all of the dressers into the classroom space (one giant walk in closet!), and moved the classroom upstairs.
This way, William gets the closeness he needs at night and is sleeping much better, and Gram gets the socialization she needs, and is much happier. It’s an unconventional solution to be sure, but this is our home, until God calls us elsewhere, and so we are going to dig deep into both stability and flexibility. I don’t know that I would have ever considered such a move as viable or been willing to even put it on the table unless God had been putting the Benedictine vow on my heart. Meditating on stability has made me much more flexible, and far more peaceful with change than I ever have been before. It has made me more free to fully embrace living in the present, to live and breathe and dive deeper in to this stage of life. That has been a tremendous gift.
I’m sure I’ll give updates on how the new living arrangement is working, but for now, I’m grateful. I’m grateful my children are close. I’m grateful we’re able to teach them at home. I’m grateful that they are so happy to be able to share their education with Gram. I’m grateful for the stimulation they bring her. I’m grateful for a husband who is always game for moving furniture. I’m grateful for a God who lets things weigh heavy on my heart so that I can grow.