In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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It all started with my desire to see Hamilton.

My husband Jeff made the argument that it would be easier and potentially cheaper if we just got season tickets to Broadway Across America in the cheap seats at the Hobby Center in downtown Houston. The upcoming season had a few other shows that we would enjoy seeing, and so we made a commitment to see around six shows over the course of a year, one of them being Hamilton. And with the exception of Love Never Dies (what were you thinking, Andrew Lloyd Webber???), we enjoyed every one.

We renewed the tickets for the next year when I saw that three of my 90’s favorites (Miss Saigon, Les Miserables, and RENT) were coming to Houston. Date night became a very regular thing. While we had sporadically enjoyed college and professional sporting and theatrical events over the years, this was the first time that we had fully committed to regularly scheduled evenings without the kids. In the two years before COVID shut everything down, we made a habit of getting a babysitter so that we could spent a designated evening together doing something we loved.

And it wasn’t just about having a scheduled date night; we were doing something that we enjoyed and having fun together. We explored a few downtown restaurants and saw new shows. Then we decided it was time to start attending concerts and before we knew it, we were purchasing tickets to see the likes of Dave Matthews (a dream since we started dating), Brad Paisley, Hootie and the Blowfish, and the Barenaked Ladies. After surviving the toddler years, when we lacked funds, energy, and imagination to find ways to enjoy each other’s company, we rediscovered how much fun we could have together. Sure, it was sometimes romantic, but we weren’t trying to woo each other with the guaranteed end game of getting tangled up in the sheets; we were spending time just being us and rediscovering why we fell in love in the first place.1

Before my husband and I got married, my aunt—who by that time had been married to my uncle for over ten years—told me that I would always love my husband, but I might not always like him.2 An idealistic 22-year-old who could not imagine this being the case in a healthy marriage, I filed away the information but promised myself that I wouldn’t need it.

It didn’t take me long into our marriage to discover that she was right. Of course, anyone who has had an honest dating relationship could understand what my aunt meant at the time. After all, I had had those moments when we were dating. We’re human beings. We drive each other crazy. We have quirks and habits that never seem to go away, no matter how much we try. No amount of time or counseling or chemistry is going to change that.

So many married couples, us included, say that we married our best friend. That’s not to say that we don’t have other people who we trust and are deeply connected to, but it’s become a modern trope to discuss the importance of having a partner who is your friend as well as your lover. But if referring to your spouse as your best friend only refers to the intimate connection you have and does not include the joy that best friends find in each other, then are you really best friends? Finding something in common that you both enjoy helps to consistently renew that friendship and bring joy in even the darkest of times.3

And it doesn’t have to cost anything.

When I lost my job almost three years ago, it didn’t just send me into a spiral, it also challenged our marriage in ways that we had never experienced, even during years of infertility and then years of financial instability with two babies two years apart. I shut down. I had so many feelings and no idea how to express them. And I was shutting out the person who was hurting almost as much as me.

Jeff eventually told me he was taking a day off and I needed to decide what we were going to do. We could use the time that the kids were at school doing anything I wanted. And I wanted to go hiking. I needed to get out into nature and take back a piece of myself from the universe. We went to Brazos Bend State Park in southwest Houston, hiking the trails and taking pictures of turtles, birds, and uncomfortably close alligators. The trails helped me find steady ground and we returned home temporarily renewed, the healing process just beginning. And yes, we were doing something that was fun for both of us, and all it cost was gas to drive south.

Since moving back to Indianapolis, Jeff and I have spent a lot of time focusing on finding fun with each other. Our kids are old enough that we can occasionally leave them while we’re camping to take hikes and bike rides with just the two of us. We’ve gone to concerts and keep commenting on how much we wasted our childless twenties by not enjoying more live music the last time we lived in Indy. Jeff talked me into getting the AMC A-list so that we could see at least one movie a month and it has been worth it to just have a quick date night when there’s a movie that we’re even remotely interested in. (And yes, it does help that we have kids who are old enough to be left alone for awhile.) In our time healing from heartbreak, we’re working together to enjoy our forties as much as possible.

There are many “secrets” to long and healthy marriages. No one secret works for every couple. It takes a combination of approaches to make a marriage work. Committing to spend a lifetime with another human being who is just as flawed as we are, isn’t for the faint of heart. We’ve discovered that one of the fixes for this is making time to have fun together. Not every date or outing has to be about dressing up and being romantic. We don’t have to always be focused on passion. But we do need time together to just be us.

And after almost twenty-two years, we’re still figuring out what that means.

I also enjoyed this piece by which challenges the idea that marriage has to be hard.

Not Your Helpmeet

On my ninth anniversary

There’s this idea in society that marriage is hard. Pick up any anniversary card at your local Target and you’ll find unnecessarily long paragraphs of flowery prose about the ups and downs of married life. It’s odd how prevalent this idea actually is, especially considering that so much of society is still structure…

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3 years ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Autumn Martin Privett

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In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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Nothing confirmed my decision to be a high school teacher more than becoming a mother myself.

I love my children and I love being a mother. Since the day they were born I have loved reading with them, exploring outside, and playing some games with them. But early childhood is not my forte and this became abundantly clear when our children were small. In those early years, my husband Jeff often proclaimed by mid-July that it was time for me to go back to school because I was clearly going crazy at home. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with my babies, I did. I just was at a loss as to how to entertain and engage them all day long.

My small children definitely benefitted from spending each school year with early childhood experts who knew how to engage them in play and learning. We don’t give these teachers nearly the credit that they deserve.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to help my children learn in those early years; I honestly didn’t know how to do it. I was a high school teacher. My days were spent teaching students how to research and understand Shakespeare and see the connections between Fahrenheit 451 and their modern world. Reading instruction, learning how to count, and elementary science experiments were beyond my scope of understanding.1 I’ve spent the last fourteen years trying to balance my passion for education and experience as a high school teacher with learning about inventive spelling, journaling, sight words, phonetics, base-ten math systems, class parties, and everything in between.

With the exception of a single year teaching only college students as I started my master’s program, my 21-year teaching career has centered around reading novels, writing analysis and research papers, and preparing students for College Board exams. Instead of class parties and room moms, Homecoming activities, prom, athletics, and clubs fill my students’ social calendars. My students are talking about break-ups and make-ups and bullying takes on a new kind of sophistication the older they get. They have jobs and are getting ready for the adult world. I love watching them grow from awkward adolescents to young adults during the school day, before returning home to my own little humans, who I have been watching learn and grow since before they were born.

But this year everything changes, because this year I have a high schooler. This year, my daughter is entering my world.

I’ve been preparing for this my entire career.

I finally know the lingo. I know teen drama, school events, Common App, NHS, SAT, ACT, AP, DC, course management systems, and diploma requirements.

But I’m not ready for the stuff that goes with it. The pain and the drama, the stress and the anxiety, the changes and the growth. I’m so excited to see the young woman that my daughter is going to become, and I’m scared for the road that she will have to travel over the next four years. (And I’m pretty sure I’ll feel the same way in three years when her brother starts the same journey.)

As our kids spend the next seven years combined in high school, we are now headed into a world of triumph and defeat, college visits and waiting for acceptance emails, and competition and heartbreak.

I’m not ready for my babies to grow up and leave home, but I am more than ready to finally feel like I understand what is happening, to have a grasp of what they need to do as students and humans. And I’ve finally accepted that they will be doing it at a safe distance from their mom.

When first I brought my babies home, I dreamed of the day that they would someday go to school with me. I dreamed (and sometimes dreaded) my children having my colleagues as teachers and debating whether they should ever be my own students.

That dream died when my career took an unexpected turn and I had to rethink my entire teaching future. In the end, we knew that whatever teaching job I would take next, it was highly likely that I would not teach in the same school my children attend.

And while I would have loved to get extra time with them, I think it’s okay. I’ve taught my colleagues’ children. My second year of teaching, I had my principal’s son in my class. He would be in my class for the next two years. When I started my second teaching job, my principal’s daughter auditioned for the first play I directed in the school. I would spend the next two years managing the politics of having my boss’s daughter in my casts. I have taught many of my colleagues children over the years, and it has always been a little awkward, even when those colleagues are good friends. Now I can speak a common language with my kids’ teachers and counselors without worrying about how they will see me or my children because they are also my coworkers. I’m appreciating the distance, and I think my kids will too.

I want time to slow down, but I know that isn’t how time works. I pray for a wonderful high school experience for our daughter, and I know that not every day will be good. In fact, some will be downright awful. But there are things about this stage of parenthood that I’m loving, and I’m just going to be thankful that we’ve made it this far.

But if we could put off those college visits a little bit longer, that would be great.

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I’ve written a memoir collection of essays based on several of my blog posts from the past seven years. It is available for purchase on Amazon.com.

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Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends so that others can join me on the journey.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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I stood in line at Chick-fil-a waiting for our lunch, my kids asking me questions about what we still needed to do for the day. It was our son’s birthday and he was excited about our evening plans to travel two hours each way to Fort Wayne to attend a baseball game for my husband’s company picnic. He wanted me to sit and watch a movie with him when we got back, but I just looked at him and said, “Honey, I’m sorry, but if we’re going to be gone tonight, I just have too much to do this afternoon.”

A couple of minutes later, still waiting for our food, my almost high school daughter asked, “What all do we have to do?” Both anxious about the summer school work that she has to do to get a head start on early college classes in the fall and eager for reasons to not complete the work, she was trying to figure out what other errands I was going to drag them on before we headed home.

“Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I have a lot to do this afternoon.” And I did. And I have a lot on my list for today. And so go the realities of summer “vacation” for parents everywhere.

I’ve never known summer to be anything other than a “break.”

While my dad spent most of my childhood vacillating between teaching and administrative ministry roles, my parents always prioritized traveling as a family during the summer months. First, my dad could more easily take time off during the summer months because his duties were more flexible during the summers. Second, we often lived far away from family, which meant that my parents wanted to spend our summers visiting their siblings and parents whenever possible.

When we weren’t traveling, my childhood summers were spent playing outside for hours with my neighborhood friends, and then aimless wandering with my pre-teen friends, and then being lazy with my teenage friends. Some structured time was spent at camp during a few summers, but otherwise I filled my time getting as many summer reading program points as possible. From the summer before my freshman year all the way through high school, I spent at least two weeks traveling and participating in youth ministry events. By the end of my junior year of high school, summers also meant working as many hours a week as possible, a practice that lasted me all the way through college.

Oh, and then there were the two summers that my parents spent packing up our family and moving to new states.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that my summers have always been packed with something.

But yesterday, as I tried to explain to my kids that I actually did have things to do even though I haven’t worked in two-and-a-half weeks, it finally hit me just how much I try to pack into the eight weeks that I have off every summer.

As a 21-year teaching veteran, I know that my summers have always looked a little different from the rest of the population, something that my dear IT director husband tries to frequently remind me of every time I try to plan a family vacation for longer than two weeks.

But that doesn’t mean that my summers haven’t been busy.

Before we had kids, my summers were packed with teaching summer school, reorganizing the theater department, and taking summer classes myself. Even after we had kids, my summer school work included attending workshops and taking summer classes. And in twenty-one years of marriage, we have spent five of those summers moving, four of those moves being to completely new cities.

Now that the graduate school years are behind me (I think) and I’ve learned to set better work boundaries, I’ve packed my summers with other things.1 I’ve always needed my summers to make appointments and now I have to manage the appointments of two other humans and two dogs that have two months to fit everything in as well. Jeff has always rightfully waited on things like car maintenance and other home improvement projects for the summer months. In the last two weeks I’ve sat in auto shops while getting the oil changed and new tires for the truck. I’ve worked on building the new buffet for our dining area and I hope to clean up the front flower bed before the end of the summer. (Last summer it was building a wall.)

And then there are the personal goals outside of responsibilities and our planned vacation to Orlando in July: Finish my book, build up my store of freelance writing, get enough written here on Substack that I can schedule out through September and not have to worry about the start of the school year and writing, create a few photo books, try to start the school year with a clean house, etc. And I add to that list every day.

I think that fellow Substacker captured it with this comment on the thread I posted yesterday:

I think we try to stuff so much into the down time built into our schedules because we have so much we never got the chance to do during the “on-time”. And, we feel like we SHOULD. Wouldn’t we be lazy or missing out on vital experiences if we just sat around and read a book by the pool? That won’t do.

A few months into the pandemic, I wrote about how COVID had forced us to slow down. That temporary stop appears to have disappeared as I look at our summer, which we just keep adding stuff to. But then I am grateful for the scheduled time that I still have with my kids, who most days are content to play video games and hide away from us in their rooms during the time off from school. I’m grateful for nights like last night, when they willingly spent four hours on the road so we could sit at a baseball game for three hours and just enjoy each other’s company.

And I’m going to cling to the promise of Sarah Lavender Smith of who commented on the same thread that for her, now that her kids are grown, “summer feels more like downtime.”

But for now, I’m just going to be happy for the hour or so in the morning that I get to write uninterrupted before heading out for a run, embracing the little bit of extra time that summer gives me for myself.

Order my new book!

I’ve written a memoir collection of essays based on several of my blog posts from the past seven years. A couple of the above essays can be found in this very book. It is available for purchase on Amazon.com.

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And if you do purchase, please give it a favorable review on Amazon and Goodreads, or any other book tracking app that you might use.

Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends so that others can join me on the journey.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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I did not grow up a runner.

But when we moved to Houston and we didn’t have easy access to a YMCA where I could continue exercising on workout machines, my husband passed along the laughable suggestion that I start running for fitness instead.

And I did laugh. And then I downloaded the C25K app. And at the ripe age of 36, I became a runner. (You can also read more about my initial journey into running in my book.)

I’ve always kept my running rather simple. Over time, running three miles, three times a week, became so routine that when I don’t run at least twice in a week, I start to get antsy. I become a little more irritable and I long for thirty-five minutes to myself so I can just go for a solitary run. And while I’ve run a couple 5K races, I didn’t want to do more. I was comfortable with where I was in my fitness and didn’t feel like I needed to push myself. Besides, I didn’t really have time to do more, did I?

But then, in a chat thread with two friends who are lifelong runners, one of them said, “We should run the St. Louis half-marathon together.” After all, we are all living back in the Midwest after an overlap of time together in Houston, and with both of them living in St. Louis, I could just drive over there for a weekend to join them.

Except the most I had ever run was four miles, a race I had done with that same friend shortly after I initially completed the C25K program.1 The very thought of doing just over thirteen miles froze me in my tracks. It was a crazy proposition, wasn't it?

I chose the word “forward” for my word for 2023 long before 2022 was over. Additionally, I was not happy with my physical condition. Six months of uncertainty at the beginning of 2021, a difficult move in the summer of the same year, and two and a half months of a job that did not work for me after that move, all wreaked havoc on my body. While I had kept running during the first half of the year, the move and the time required to transition to that first new job took away time that I needed to take care of my health. Additionally, stress combined with middle age added its own kind of weight. It seemed like the kind of challenge that I needed, even if it was to just prove to myself that I could do it.

I told them that I would do the race if I could hit six-mile runs by the end of the year. I did just that on December 31. The next week I started training for the half-marathon, using an app training plan and slowly increasing both my regular runs during the week and my weekend runs. I discovered that the empty neighborhood behind our house, a future neighborhood with a finished road and no houses, had a loop that was just under one mile. I started running laps there and pushed myself more every week, realizing about halfway through that the scheduled interval days were there for a reason, and that interval training might be the only thing that treadmills are actually good for.

I got lucky. We had a relatively mild winter and most of our bad weather days didn’t fall on Saturdays, when I was scheduled to do all of my longer runs. I occasionally had to go to the Y to run on the treadmill, especially during the darkest days of winter, but in general, I was able to do most of my training outside, albeit with several layers that I shed during the course of my laps. The only exception was my longest training day two weeks before the race, when, thanks to a March snowstorm, I begged our closest fitness center to allow me to use their much better indoor track for two hours of running that I think totaled twelve miles.

That isn’t to say it wasn’t without significant challenges. About halfway through the training program I developed runner’s toe, three of my toenails turning black and blue with the middle tow on my right foot painfully swollen due to bruising and blistering under the surface. The mild winter turned unseasonably pleasant during the worst week of toe pain, and I traded my running shoes for my bicycle, taking off down our country roads to our closest biking and running trail. I also finally followed advice and went to an actual running store to get fitted for new running shoes, leaving the store with a size bigger shoe, arch insets, and new socks.2

It also was not easy on my family, who often saw me take off for more than two hours just to run and come home exhausted and trying to continue with normal Saturday activities, despite the fact that I had just run several more miles than my body was used to.

But on April 2, Palm Sunday, my friend Rachel and I laced up our running shoes and she slowed her pace to stay with me for the whole race. We started in one of the last bays, trying to stay warm in 40-degree weather, cold hands eager for our bodies to move. We got to talk more than we had in well over a year, we saw our friend Gretchen (who did not run because of injury) at Mile 3, and we were greeted at the finish line by my husband, kids, and sister-in-law, who decided to fly in from Denver for 48-hours just so that she could be there to support my finish.

I survived the longest run of my life. I survived the hills that seriously kicked my butt (I did not train on hills and I did walk up the very last hill near the finish line because I just couldn’t do it). I survived the transition from being too cold to too warm as I approached the finish line. I proved that I could do something really hard as I keep moving forward with my life.

Will I do it again? I think so, but not anytime soon. I’ve proved I can do it and now I have to work on making those six-mile runs as easy as my three-mile runs. I’m in my forties and it’s time to add weights back into my workout routine and I need to find parks with hills so that I can build up more strength and endurance with changes in terrain.

But I’ve done what I truly believed was impossible when I was a teenager. I’ve shown my kids that it is possible to keep doing these things no matter their age. And I’ve proven to myself that I can do hard things.

I can’t give that up.

You can see the training highlights from my Instagram stories here.

For more Substack writers who run, check out and her book The Trail Runner’s Companion and and her books about running.

Order my new book!

I’ve written a memoir collection of essays based on several of my blog posts from the past seven years. It is available for purchase on Amazon.com.

Order Embracing the Journey

And if you do purchase, please give it a favorable review on Amazon and Goodreads, or any other book tracking app that you might use.

Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends so that others can join me on the journey.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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The summer between my seventh and eighth grade year, my family took a vacation back east from Wyoming to visit family and friends in Michigan and Illinois. I couldn’t wait. After two years of exile in the desolate wastelands of central Wyoming (because I still hadn’t opened my eyes to the true beauty of the Rocky Mountains), I would finally get to see the friends I had left behind in northern Illinois and Detroit. In my adolescent mind, my friends had missed me as much as I missed them, and they looked forward to my visit with the same level of anticipation that I felt.

It would be my first harsh lesson in the ever-changing nature of friendship.

On the Journey

The Graduation Photo Collages I'll Never Have

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected…

Read more

4 years ago · 4 likes · 9 comments · Sarah Styf

Were my friends in both places excited to see me? Yes. Did I have fun with sleepovers and a trip to a waterpark? Yes. But did I have the same place in their lives as I had before I had moved away? Decidedly, no.

It is a lesson I would learn through several more moves through adolescence and then adulthood. Friendships change as we and the world around us changes. It is neither inherently good or bad, but it can be painful to discover that others have moved on while we are still clinging to the past or our needs in the moment.

My best friend in high school became my best friend because of both proximity and shared experience. Our dads both worked for the same church, we lived two blocks away from each other, and we were only a year apart in age. We went to the same church, we were both avid readers and top students, we knew almost all of the same people, and we connected on multiple levels. Sure, in many ways we were complete opposites. I was boy crazy; she didn’t really want her first boyfriend until she was nearly graduated from high school. I used track to hold onto athletics for a little longer while she avoided most sports. I harbored a secret desire to rebel and found ways to use more colorful language outside of her presence, while she was the perfect example of what a pastor’s daughter should be.

But she was my best friend, and nothing was going to get in the way of that.

Except my family moved 1000 miles away, partly because of issues at the church we had attended together for four years. And my friend committed suicide, although she did know him because of our mutual friend groups. And I met a boy she didn’t think was good for me, but I stuck it out and married him. And we attended different colleges, although both were connected to the same faith tradition. And I went to Europe for a full semester and had my whole world opened up to me in ways that she didn’t experience in her short trip across the pond with a roommate.

By the time we were in our 20s, we were different versions of ourselves, not better or worse, just different. And we no longer knew how to relate to each other. Honestly, there are a lot of things I could have done better to preserve our friendship, but I wouldn’t even know where to start over again.

It’s just one of many friendship casualties over the years, and probably one of the more painful ones, but that is just part of being human.

There are friends who I’m pretty sure I could go years without seeing and we would be able to pick up right where we left off, the challenges and changes in our lives running parallel courses that allow us to reconnect with ease. These are the friendships that make me thankful for social media, because I have been able to see these friends grow in their careers, marriages, and families. I appreciate the online connection that allows us to see glimpses into each other’s lives, with occasional messages that say, “Hi” and “I’m thinking of you” on those days when we decide to forgo polite speech for the sake of honesty.

There are past friends who positively impacted my live in the moment, but the connection is broken. If we were to see each other again, our conversations would be as shallow and fast as a creek in spring. It doesn’t cheapen the experiences that we shared during the years when we were most important to each other, but life moves on. Of course, that doesn’t make it any less painful for any of us, which became pretty clear when I asked about friendships for a season on Twitter.

I struggle with change, a point that becomes pretty clear to anyone who reads my latest book. But one of the reasons I struggle with change is because of how many times I’ve felt left behind by others when my life has changed because of circumstances outside of my control. It is human nature to move on with our own lives. We have to because we have our own selves and families to look out for. Should we care about the friends who life has left behind? Yes! Should we check in on them? Yes, but that doesn’t mean that we can expect and demand that from others all the time.

But friendships matter and finding our villages is what helps us both survive and thrive. Friendships may change. Friends may not be able to stick with us through hard times because they are in the middle of their own troubles, but that doesn’t mean they don’t care. It just means that in that moment, they can’t be the people we need.

On the Journey

We Need Our Villages

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected…

Read more

5 years ago · Sarah Styf

For the lucky ones, there are the “ride and die” friends. The friends who are willing to sit with us. There are the friends who will support us through the worst shit. The friendships that extend beyond a season are those where they don’t just encourage you from the sidelines; they are willing to have their own worlds transformed by witnessing your navigation of the worst that life throws at you. They are the ones who start to rethink everything that they thought they knew about health care when they watch you struggle with health issues that are outside of your control. They are the ones who reconsider everything they thought they believed about marriage and divorce after holding your hand as you recounted the events that caused your own marriage to fall apart. They are the ones who are willing to reinvestigate their own understanding of faith and spirituality after watching you suffer abuse at the hands of your mutual religious community.

So while I struggle with the reality that some friendships are only for a season, I’m thankful for the ones that have lasted across many changes and seasons over the years. Because those are the relationships that keep me going on even my worst days.

Support my writing

While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you would like to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider buying me a book 😊

Buy me a book

If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.

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And thank you for supporting my journey 💗

Order my new book!

I’ve written a memoir collection of essays based on several of my blog posts from the past seven years. It is available for purchase on Amazon.com.

Order Embracing the Journey

And if you do purchase, please give it a favorable review on Amazon and Goodreads, or any other book tracking app that you might use.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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There are a lot of practices for the start of a new year. It’s not hard to see why. We live in an age of constant self-improvement. We aren’t supposed to be happy with our bodies or our finances or the way our lives are going and so the start of a new calendar means a clean slate. If there is ever a time to turn everything around, it is on January 1.

For a few years, I did just that. I stopped making resolutions years ago, but I wrote down a list of goals for the coming year. They were aspirational but achievable (if life didn’t get in the way) and I felt pretty good about them. The problem with them, as with all goals we set for ourselves, is that they often ignored the realities of a life that just happens to us.

That is when I started the practice of selecting a word for the coming year.

The first time I chose a word for a year was in 2020. Months before a global pandemic took over and we experienced shutdowns and many of our lives were changed forever, I chose the word “hope.” In 2021, less than a month before our lives were turned upside down, I chose the word “light.” Last year, just days before I would come down with COVID, I chose the word “heal.”

And each year, the irony has not been lost on me.

But the irony has not kept me from my yearly selection of a new word for each year. It’s a practice I appreciate because it really does take the pressure off of list and goal making for the year. There are no resolutions to keep. I don’t have a checklist that I need to complete in twelve months. There isn’t the fear of failure because I didn’t accomplish everything that I set out to accomplish by the end of the calendar year.

Instead, when I choose a word for the coming year, I’m selecting a posture for how I’m going to approach the next twelve months. Does that posture come with goals? Of course. Goal setting is how we fulfill our dreams and recover from the curveballs.

Even though I started the year with COVID, 2022 was a year of significant healing for me. I rediscovered a love for the profession that I dedicated myself to over 20 years ago. We went to Hawaii and I fell in love with the 50th state and almost didn’t come home. I got in all of my doctor appointments for the year and even had my first mammogram. (Although I am still working on finding a therapist.) We went back to Texas and I not only survived the trip but felt good about our return to a place that was home for six years.

2022 was most certainly a year of healing.

For 2023 I have chosen the word “forward.” It is a word that encompasses many of the other words from past years but takes it a step further. It is a word that implies goal setting (and there is some of that), but it means that I want to keep looking to the future instead of constantly looking back. I believe in the importance of history, of knowing and reflecting on our past so we can better understand our present and heal for a better future. But a better future only happens if you decide to take that knowledge and move forward with it, correcting the mistakes made and taking risks, even if that means making different mistakes along the way.

For this year, moving forward means publishing my book in January. (More updates on that in the coming weeks.) It means growing this newsletter and the community here. It means facing the challenges of education in 2023 and beyond and finding ways to do better. It means figuring out next steps for and working with my partner to dream big and make things happen. It means sitting down to finish my camping memoir and figuring out how to submit to publishers. It means getting back to keeping a budget so we can do all of the things we want to do with our house. It means finally going to therapy.

None of these action items have a start or end date. None of them require arbitrary success by the end of 2023. They just require that I keep moving forward, even if sometimes that means I’ll be taking one step forward and two steps back.

And in December of 2023, we’ll see where this next leg of the journey took me.

Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends so that others can join me on the journey.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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It was our favorite tradition for five years. We packed up all of our Thanksgiving fixings into the camper and coolers and took off for a different Texas state park (and one year, Louisiana) to escape society and explore while celebrating a traditional Thanksgiving feast.

On the Journey

Campsgiving In the Time of Corona

In Mission: Wanderlust, I write and podcast about our family’s travel adventures and the things that we have learned along the way…

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3 years ago · 6 likes · 4 comments · Sarah Styf

When we camped at Lake Mineral Wells State Park in November 2020, we had no way of knowing that it would be our last Campsgiving, at least for the foreseeable future, but even though Thanksgiving looks different for us now that we’ve moved back to Indiana, the lessons from those less frantic years of camping during America’s feast day taught us important lessons that have carried over to hosting Thanksgiving in our home.

We don't have to have the house perfect

It’s one of the rules of hospitality, right? We have to have a perfectly clean house before we allow our friends and family, who are supposed to love us without reservation, see how we really live.

Look, I’m not suggesting that I want to have people over with kitchen floors covered in months of food droppings and a pile of dog fur clinging to every corner in the house. And I certainly don’t need guests to see the downstairs bathroom, which is normally used by the eleven-year-old boy, in its standard state. But if we waited for house to be perfect, we would never have people over.

I’ve been slowly savoring Shannon Martin’s new book Start With Hello; she addresses this desire for perfection and the quick cleaning tips that she employs when she knows people are coming over and she only has a short notice. Floors get swept, counters wiped down, and doors to messes closed. This year, with fourteen people coming over for dinner, I focused on the downstairs, employing my family’s help to clean floors, the bathroom, and clear the dining table of my typical paper piles. And you know what? No one cared, I don’t think.

Dinner is ready when it's ready

As a child, I was fed on a regular schedule. Dinner time was always before six and snacks before meals were limited. Now, when the clock approaches 1:00 or 7:00 PM and I’m starting to feel a little irritable, I recognize that I’m getting “hangry.” My kids are the same way. In fact, we frequently joke that our son is a walking Snickers commercial, turning into a child version of the Hulk when he’s gone too long without eating.

While I have never attended a Thanksgiving dinner that started “on time,” camping on Thanksgiving helped to adjust my expectations. When you are cooking an entire Thanksgiving dinner with multiple outdoor devices that can be unpredictable, you have to accept that dinner will be ready when it’s ready and that snacking is not only expected, but necessary. That attitude shift certainly helped this year in our house when one of the two turkeys took longer to cook than everything else. We dug into what we had and then went back for more when the second turkey came off of the grill. And I don’t think I had a genuine panic about food prep once.

I have no interest in Black Friday

Seriously, I don’t care. That first Campsgiving we spent the day after exploring Corpus Christi and didn’t even remember that it was supposed to be one of the biggest shopping days of the year. Two years later we spent the day exploring New Orleans. Some years we traveled on Friday and other years we hiked and explored nature. We were practicing #optoutside on Black Friday before it became a huge campaign.

Yesterday I did go to a local boutique that supports women escaping sex trafficking and abusive relationships because they offered a mind-blowing 40% off for an hour in the morning. I bought a couple items for me and two Christmas gifts and I called it good. We took the kids to see Wakanda Forever and then I came home and walked the dogs before Jeff and I walked the empty paved streets of the new neighborhood that is planned across the field from us. Even my one attempt at online shopping was a complete failure because everything I wanted was sold out and I just accepted it as something I would just have to wait to buy later.

And did we feel like we were missing out on anything special? Not even a little bit.

Traditions change, but we take the lessons of each tradition with us as we move from one stage of life to the next. I’m thankful for what we learned in our years camping for the holidays and maybe some day we can bring back the tradition, when we have more time to travel further south. Until the, we’ll just enjoy hosting, recovering, and relaxing at home.

Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends so that others can join me on the journey.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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I got two Bs in high school.

It’s true. And yes, more than 25 years later, it still irks me.

Blame on my Enneagram 1 need for perfection. Blame it on the fact that I can’t let go of the little mistakes that caused those two Bs in math classes that didn’t matter to my eventual job as an English teacher. Blame it on an inconsistent education for the first 12 years of my life.

Yeah, I still have a hard time accepting those two Bs on a transcript that no one else has cared about for over a quarter of a century.

It’s silly, because I graduated in the top ten of my class. I went on to college and graduated with honors. I eventually got my Master’s degree in my field which transformed my teaching career. And I did that all without getting A’s in two upper-level math classes in my junior and senior years of high school.

It’s just one example of many of me letting imperfections get in the way of a generally good situation.

But maybe it’s not just me. It’s possible that I’m just noticing it more now that I’ve reached middle age, but it feels like a lot of us are stuck in a world of “not good enough.” We want perfection from our sports teams and our politicians. We want big changes and do nothing but grumble when we don’t get everything that we want. We put on blinders to the impacts of our desires because we believe that it has to be all or nothing. Compromise, it seems, has gone the way of the dodo.

I suppose we could blame social media for the way it has siloed us into spaces where we only interact with people with whom we agree. Or we could blame our politicians for a toxic work environment where nothing gets done. Or, and hear me out, we could blame ourselves for constantly looking for the negative and seeing imperfection as a sign that nothing is going right.

What if we took just a moment to consider the positives around us? Not feel-good stories that impact small numbers of people, but actual near-universal positives that could potentially touch many lives? What if we started looking for ways to build on the positives in our own lives? What if we started using those pieces of news and personal stories to show those who oppose us how our stances and positions could make all of our lives better instead of telling them why they are wrong?

Ok, I admit it. It does sound a little Pollyanna-like, but for some reason right now, my perfectionist, peacemaking self who avoids conflict at all cost is feeling unreasonably optimistic about the future. (After all, I’m admittedly giddy about the Inflation Reduction Act and am so excited about the possibility of being to afford both solar panels and an electric car in a few years as a result.) A couple of weeks ago, my favorite podcasters at Pantsuit Politics, when discussing current legislation, said that we shouldn’t allow the imperfect to be the enemy of good, and that has really stuck with me as I’ve looked at so many areas of my life.

There are so many changes I would love to make to our house, but right now we’re in the “fix the big structural issues before we get to do the fun stuff” stage of home ownership. We built a sturdy retaining wall on the back of our house that only we regularly see. It is a huge improvement over the rotting railroad ties that were there before and has allowed us to stabilize our driveway. From a distance, it looks amazing. But I still can’t get over the wave in the wall when I inspect it up close. However, it’s our wall. We built it and it is doing exactly what it needs to be doing. It’s definitely better than good.

Our kids are in different schools this year for the first time since daycare. It’s been a huge transition, but it has been so good for our daughter and our son has had a good start to his school year as well. Is the situation everything that we could hope for? No, it certainly isn’t, but it’s definitely better than good.

My classroom still doesn’t have windows, I have a few classes that are fuller than ideal, and I spent most of the other day fighting with the scanner on the copier, but I’m loving teaching again. I feel appreciated. I’m loving my colleagues and school and while I don’t believe there is such a thing as a perfect teaching position, right now it feels good.

In a season of my life where my faith in God has strengthened while my confidence in the people leading his Church here in America has all but disappeared, I’ve stopped looking for perfect and instead am seeking good. I’ve asked myself what role I can play in the lives of others seeking to do the same. I’m not just looking for good, I want God to use me to be that good for others.

There is no such thing as perfect. When we demand perfection from ourselves and others we just end up being disappointed. But there is nothing wrong with good. That doesn’t mean not seeking better and that doesn’t mean we stop pushing for more, but it does mean that we aren’t defeated by imperfection. Instead, we use that imperfection to learn how we can build something better in the future.

So I’m not giving up on seeking better. I’m not giving up on improvement in my life, my family, my community, or my country. But I’m also not going to stop progress for the sake of perfection. I’m willing to concede that in an imperfect world full of imperfect people with significant diversity, not everyone will be happy at all times.

But that doesn’t mean we give up trying.

Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends so that others can join me on the journey.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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Social media apps have a funny way of bringing back memories and helping you remember anniversaries. Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of photo memories related to our move to Texas seven years ago. It was a move that we were so excited for because it was something new and different and took us away from the Midwest that had been our home for most of our lives.

For most of those six years, our new lives as Texans was a true adventure. We saw things we never thought we would see. We explored the diversity of our new home state, traveled to the western United States, and started a Thanksgiving camping tradition. It was a good life, until it wasn’t. When the chaos wreaked by the 2020 election and a global pandemic finally hit our family, we decided it was time to return “home.”

So we returned to the Circle City where we had family, remaining friendships, and we could pick up the pieces and put ourselves back together with the help of those who love and know us best.

The last year has been far from perfect. I started one teaching job that I was really excited about only to discover that the position was stressing me out so much that I spent Sunday nights yelling at my family for absolutely no reason. For the first time ever, I willingly left a position during the school year (something teachers are trained to never do because it’s not in the “best interest of the students”) and started at a new school with a new department where I have felt the most at home that I’ve felt in years. I know that I have challenges ahead of me this coming school year, but I will be in the same building, in the same classroom, and with mostly the same colleagues as I ended last school year and I’m more excited than I am apprehensive.

We faced significant challenges on the parenting front, as we tried to manage our own moving transition and two new jobs for me while also helping our kids make the rocky transition in the middle of adolescence. For the first several months we faced a lot of tears, yelling, proclaimations about how we had ruined their lives, and uncertainty about the future. We made one important decision after another as we tried to give them the support they needed and often felt like we were failing. And because sometimes we need big changes, we are putting our daughter in public schools for the first time ever this coming school year in hopes that a big change will help her find her place and her people before starting high school in a year. So for the first time since our kids were in daycare/pre-school, they will be in different schools on different campuses. It’s going to be a big change for all of us, but hopefully a good one.

Over the last year we’ve visited old haunts and discovered new possiblities. We remembered how much we love fall and I grudgingly admitted that I missed the snow. We finally made it back to Michigan and this summer made one very quick trip back on a perfect beach weekend so we could enjoy the lake at her very best. And an exhausting trip to Houston so the kids could see friends did not break me like I feared that it would. Instead, it reminded me of the friendships and experiences and good that came from our six years there while making it abundantly clear that we had made the right decision to move. It will always be a part of us and I’m honestly ok with that. Our lives are richer for the good that we experienced while we lived there, and for that I am thankful.

A year ago this week we arrived back in Indiana and immediately got to work trying to heal and make it once again feel like home. One year later I can honestly say that I like the Sarah that is emerging. She has scars that will never completely heal, but they are slowly fading. She still struggles with what was lost, but is celebrating what has been gained as well. She is tougher and braver than she ever thought possible. And while there is a lot that she still wishes she could change, she hasn’t given up believing that change is possible.

Honestly, it’s been better than I could have hoped for as we continue to move forward.

Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends so that others can join me on the journey.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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By many metrics, I grew up in a nomadic household.

From the time I was born until the time I graduated from high school, I lived in four different states, we moved five times, and I attended six different schools. I didn’t attend the same high school as my childhood friends. I didn’t attend the same high school for all four years. I couldn’t even apply for NHS until I was a senior because of a move across the country the summer before my junior year.

I know people who lived far more nomadic lifestyles, but it certainly wasn’t a childhood or adolescence marked by the stability of consistent friendships that spanned my entire academic career.

I wanted it to be different for my own kids. I had dreams for them. I had plans for 18 years of attending the same schools with the same friends from the time they started until the time that they graduated from high school.

When I was a yearbook adviser, I was in charge of collecting senior messages with collages of my very grown-up students during every stage of their lives. As I looked through ads and messages and carefully placed them in spreads, I considered all of the photos from the years that I would want to include in my own message to my graduating children. 

Now my husband and I are finally at that age where we are seeing friend after friend posting pictures of their not-so-little ones graduating from high school. While our late venture into parenthood means that we have a few more years to go before we start emptying the nest, we are getting a taste of what it means to prepare for that transition, and again, I’m looking at photo collages of our friends’ children from every stage of their lives. Some of the most adorable collages are the ones that show them with the same friends over the years, through preschool baby cheeks, elementary growth, middle school awkwardness, and finally high school maturity.

After an adolescence and young adulthood of mourning the absence of my own pictures with the same childhood friends through the years, I desperately wanted that for my own children.

That was my dream when we brought our little girl home to the south side of Indianapolis. Then a year later we moved to Fort Wayne. Five years later we moved to Houston and at the young ages of four and six, it appeared that I could somehow keep the dream alive. But six years later we moved back to Indianapolis and the dream that I had for both of my children from the time they were born lay shattered at my feet. I would never be able to create cradle-to-graduation-cap collages. I would never know what it was like to watch the same group of children grow alongside my children into young adulthood and see their friendships through all of the changes and challenges of growing up. And they would never know the gift of having friends alongside them who had known them through every stage of childhood.

I don't fault my friends for sharing adorable photos of their now graduated seniors when they were friends back in kindergarten. Truth be told, if it were me I would be that annoying mom putting my kids and their best friends through the torture of replicating poses through the years.

It’s just the difficult reality for those of us who have exchanged consistent stability in a single geographic location for new and exciting challenges and adventures. One is not better than the other, each decision bringing with it advantages and disadvantages. For me, the biggest challenge has been the loss of personal connection and history. I wish I could have spared my own children the same experiences, but life happens and we learn how to adjust our expectations to match the lives that we are given.

I’m happy for the friends who have those progressive photographs. I’m glad that their children faced a different set of challenges from knowing and being with the same people for their entire childhoods. But for those of us who will never have those photos, who feel a sharp pang every single time we see our friends post those cradle-to-graduation cap photographs, it can be a little bit too much a reminder of the things that we lost in exchange for the gain of experience.

So don’t stop sharing, don’t stop posting, and please do not feel like there is any shame in celebrating the stability that you have been able to give your children from the time you brought them home. Just know that some of us are living vicariously through your photographs, and hoping that our own children will someday forgive us for taking away their own chance to graduate with their preschool classmates.

Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends so that others can join me on the journey.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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The summer I turned thirteen my family made the trek back to the Midwest from Wyoming, less than two years after our cross-country move, to visit family and friends in many of the locations we had left behind. We returned to our Detroit neighborhood and met up with our neighbors and saw the Strawberry Shortcake curtains still hanging in my old bedroom window. I spent the night with my childhood best friend and we rented Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, mooning over both Christian Slater and Kevin Costner. But most importantly, we returned to the Illinois town where we had lived for only two years so that I could see the middle school friends I had desperately missed for far too long.

Four years later, my family would drive in the opposite direction, from Michigan to Wyoming, so that I could see the high school friends I had left behind and find personal closure from my friend Mike’s suicide only a few months before. I spent the night at friends’ houses, traveled up to the mountains so my high school best friend’s mom could take senior photos of me in the mountain landscape, and visited Mike’s grave, still marked with a simple grave marker in place of the larger tombstone his family planned to put into place.

When Jeff and I were still essentially newlyweds and traveling back to Indiana from Yellowstone, I directed our travel through Riverton, the town my family had left less than ten years before. Yes, things had changed, but years later my body remembered the way to the football stadium where my high school won the football state championship my sophomore year, the downtown main street where I had watched movies and shopped with friends, and the cemetery on the outskirts of town where my friend Mike had been buried.

For those of us who cannot call just one place home, each location we have lived, no matter how long, tattoos itself on our hearts. I don’t remember living in California, but I pride myself in being a west coast baby. While I’m not a huge baseball fan, my team will always be the Detroit Tigers, I will always defend the Detroit Pistons against character attacks, and the Detroit Red Wings is the only professional hockey team I will cheer for. (The return of my hockey boyfriend, Steve Yzerman, to the front office sealed that deal.) I will never forget learning about the Lincoln/Douglas debates when we lived in Freeport, the Rocky Mountains constantly call to me, I know far more about Johnny Appleseed than I care to after living in Fort Wayne (full disclosure: it’s still not much), and hurricane season now draws my attention every fall, even though we currently live nearly 1000 miles from any oceanic coast.

Each place we live leaves a mark; some of those marks spark joy while others hurt to touch, but the mark is undeniable. And when we leave and never return, we can leave gaping holes that never fully heal.

As a child, all I could ever remember was the good of each place we lived. And while there were good memories for my parents, there were bad ones too. But each time we left a place, we returned at least once because there was still something that tied us to the places we had left. There were still friends we missed, places we wanted to see again, and experiences we wanted to try replicating. And each time we returned, I realized that changes had happened to me and my friends, places didn’t look quite the same as I had remembered them, and I while I missed what I had I still had something to look forward to when I returned home.

Moving is like seeing the past through a screen door. You can still see it, but it's grainy. You can still feel and smell and hear what is on the other side, but it's not quite enough. And with each new screen door, the additional doors let in a little bit less of the past. But because it is a screen door and not one made of metal or wood or glass, the past still seeps through, the sounds and smells and feelings eventually fade to a noticeable whisp.

I knew that when we moved away from Texas last summer we were going to need to return sooner than later. Our kids missed their friends and still idealized what they had in Texas. So I drove over 2000 miles round trip to give our kids eight full days visiting the places they missed and hanging out with their friends. To say that I was a bit anxious about the trip is an understatement. I was going to be doing this alone and this trip would take me away from my husband for the longest time ever in over twenty years of marriage. I had no ideas how plans were going to work out, where we would stay every night, or if our kids’ plans would go the way they had dreamed up in their minds. I prepared myself for disappointment during the trip and a return of depression and solitude once we returned home.

And as would be expected, it didn’t go exactly as planned. Texas experienced an unseasonably hot heat wave during the entire time we were visiting, making what was already going to be an uncomfortably warm trip even hotter. The mom of one of our daughter’s best friends (who was supposed to be her host for the last three nights we were in town) got ill and our daughter had to sleep with me at the hotel instead in an effort to keep ourselves healthy. Instead of a mother/son trip to NASA we had a mother/kids trip to NASA. But through it all, friends were visited, favorite foods were consumed, and we enjoyed being tourists in the city we used to call home.

Despite my apprehensions before leaving home and the realities we faced while away from Indiana, I couldn’t let my fears stop me from giving my babies a chance for a little more closure. When my family moved from Wyoming to Michigan during the summer before my junior year of high school, I left a piece of my soul in the Rocky Mountains. I’ve come to accept that my own children have left a piece of their souls in southeast Texas. Living in Texas for a large chunk of their formative years means that it will always be a part of them. It will always call to them, just maybe not the way that they think.

Moving may change our addresses and the place where we lay our heads, but it doesn’t change where we leave our hearts, each home still felt on the breeze that comes through the closed screen door. I just hope that my children will someday see it that way too.

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In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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A year ago, we made the first of many consequential decisions.

On a single, simple walk to the corner from our Houston home, I asked my husband a question that forever changed the trajectory of our family’s life.

Within two weeks I had a job offer, we had told our kids we were moving, we wrapped up plans to continue with our summer vacation, and we didn’t physically and mentally stop moving for the next nine months.

As I look back a year later, I am sitting in a Houston Starbucks while my children enjoy time with friends that they haven’t seen in nearly a year. I’m squeezing in plans with friends to reminisce about the past and look toward the future. And I’m experiencing the constant bittersweet that comes with moving regardless of the circumstances.

To be perfectly honest, it has been a difficult eighteen months, starting with six months of complete uncertainty and then several more months of the pain of watching our children suffer through the loss of everything that they loved and held dear, and then finally the growing pains that come with change. When we packed everything up and moved across the country to a city that had once been our home, we had no idea what to expect, but all we could hope for was an improvement of some kind.

I didn’t expect that I would rediscover a love for and purpose in teaching while also desperately needing out of a situation that was toxic for me and my family. I didn’t expect to land in a new school after the school year had started and fall in love with my students and colleagues and to feel truly valued, for the first time in years, for what I brought to the table. I didn’t expect to realize how much I really missed fall and snow and even the weirdness of Midwest “nice".”

I did expect it to be painful. I did expect to miss things and people. I did expect our kids to struggle with sadness and anger and the challenge of meeting new people and making new friends. But I wasn’t prepared for just how hard it would be for me to watch as a parent. I wasn’t prepared for just how much it would hurt to hear “I hate you,” “You ruined my life,” and the quiet and more devastating “My life is over.” I wasn’t prepared for painfully real conversations about running away, depression, and yeah, even suicide ideation.

But there was a lot of good that I didn’t expect also.

I didn’t expect to immediately feel so comfortable in the city we had left eleven years before, to have roads and landmarks feel so familiar. I didn’t expect to be able to return to our favorite Chinese restaurant, the Indianapolis Zoo, and our favorite Indiana state parks without ever feeling like we had been gone for over a decade. I didn’t expect to so easily pick up some relationships and to realize just how much I had missed having my sister a short car drive away. I didn’t expect to be so happy to frequently see our nieces and nephews and watch my own kids develop genuine relationships with their cousins for the first time in their lives.

Saying that we made it to the end of a difficult year doesn’t feel nearly descriptive enough. It doesn’t encapsulate everything that the past year has really held for us.

The last eighteen months have been rough. The last year has been a challenge that I didn’t think we could recover from. But we’ve made it to the other side. That doesn’t mean the challenge is over. I am prepared to have a backslide when we get back home, but this time at least it will be a return to the familiar. Our planned family vacation will be shorter than last year and actually planned and not thrown into the middle of a massive transition. And most of our family will have started a new twelve-month cycle after a time of friendship and memory-making and the important reminder that we made a mark on the lives of those we have missed in the last year.

Here is to continued healing and looking to the future.

Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends so that others can join me on the journey.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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I sat on the top stair of our house and sobbed in the empty hallway.

That morning I had spent most of a church service stubbornly wiping away tears that refused to stop falling. Before church, I had completed a morning social media tour with post after post of friends announcing their middle schooler’s confirmation and congratulating them on their affirmation of faith. My daughter was supposed to be one of them. My daughter was supposed to have spent the last year learning and studying and growing with her best friends under the guidance of a pastor who she had spent several years getting to know and a spiritual leader who I trusted with my daughter’s walk with God.

Instead, we were 1000 miles away, still feeling the limbo of unplanned changes that keep us second-guessing.

And what caused the dam to burst?

Just 30 minutes before, when we arrived at the football fields for our son’s flag football game, he panicked and announced that he didn’t have his mouthguard. I immediately turned around and headed home and after looking at my mess of a house and a frantic search through that mess, I learned on a quick phone call to my husband that a mouthguard had been found and everything was ok and I could just come back.

I. fell. apart.

I am a fragile human being caring for fragile human beings just trying to glue the broken pieces back together.

In some places, the superglue is holding, thanks to the love and support of friends and family. In other places, the pieces are still being held together with clear scotch tape, the cracks showing through and the adhesive barely holding on.

And I know I’m not alone.

Six years of political turmoil and two years of living through a global pandemic that brought countries and communities to their knees have left a lot of us feeling depleted. Far too many of us are holding onto far too much: too much grief, too much hurt, too much fear, too much loneliness.

There are days that I wish I could walk around with a “Handle With Care” sign. There are days that I wish I could attach a similar sign to my children, to warn people that I need them to know that my kids are more fragile than they might appear. And yet, in an individualistic culture that still elevates personal strength over healthy interdependence, asking for such a sign feels like I’m asking too much.

To “handle with care” does not mean coddling or focusing on the bright side. Instead, it means acknowledging a person's struggle and refusing to intentionally add on to that struggle. It’s recognizing that someone’s reaction to your comment or question might not be because of the question but because of everything that lies under the surface of that question. It’s admitting that you may have unintentionally hurt someone with your words and actions and asking for forgiveness and attempting to heal the relationship.

It’s operating under the philosophy of “do no harm” because that may be the best way you can show love to your neighbor.

I can't even begin to count the number of times in the last two years I've swallowed a “**** you” in response to another person's less-than-care-driven comments or flippant response to my concerns or expressed struggles. Because when someone is hurting, they don't need half-hearted platitudes; they need someone to listen without judgment. And yeah, sometimes they also need someone to sit with them and agree, “that's bull****,” even if they don't fully agree.

Because sometimes it won't go away. Sometimes the outcome can't be changed. Sometimes it can't be fixed.

We need people who will be honest with us. And yes, I suck at this. I'm a fixer. I'm a peacemaker. I don't want to rock the boat.

I spent years walking on eggshells, trying to avoid politically motivated landmines. I kept my mouth shut when my heart was telling me to speak up. I sometimes compromised my values under the mistaken belief that it was for some kind of greater good. I did all of this only to have it all eventually blow up in my face.

I am tired.

I’m tired of holding it all together to make others feel better. I’m tired of acting like I can keep handling even the little disruptions that get tossed my way because my ability to deal depends on a given moment on a given day. I’m tired of my perfectionist nature being at war with my desire to be a peacemaker because all I really want is justice.

So people are just going to have to deal with the fact that I am a little fragile right now. I’m seeking bubble-wrapped situations because right now I just don’t know how to safely exist in a world that seems intent on caring for self instead of others.

And in the meantime, I’ll keep praying for healing and peace and something better around the corner, because that is all I really have the strength to do.

Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends so that others can join me on the journey.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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When we commit to accepting the unexpected journey, we are choosing to see life as an ever-changing series of life events that shape and transform us into the people that we are.

And the last year has been a constant shaping and transforming of my life and the woman that I am.

I lost a job, started a podcast with a friend, moved back across the country, started not one, but two new jobs, and settled into a life that is equal parts new and old.

For the last seven years, I have kept on writing and creating, sometimes intermittently, sometimes with obsessive regularity, but always with the drive to just keep creating because it helped me to cope with the craziness that was the world around me.

But when it seemed like I was losing everything at the beginning of 2021, when I found myself off-kilter and grasping in the dark for something, anything to hold onto, creating became an obsession. I wanted to write. I wanted to be heard. I wanted my writing to mean something and possibly be a pathway outside of the career I had believed would be a part of me for the rest of my life.

That frantic searching led to some pretty counter-productive behavior. One of the myths about being a creative is that you have to always be hustling and that the hustle is just as important as the quality of your work. I started joining Facebook groups and Instagram follow threads with the sole purpose of sharing my work with complete strangers who may, or may not, have cared about what I had to say. Feeling professionally crushed and at a complete loss, I searched for some kind of validation from places designed only to validate through numbers, not genuine engagement.

Once we made the decision to move to Indiana, I decided it was time to go cold turkey. I quit all of the groups, I stopped spending useless hours clicking and viewing and liking the creative work of others that I had no interest in. I devoted my creative energy to starting a podcast with a friend and once again searching for a job in a career I was not ready to leave. I still obsessed a little about numbers, but those numbers were based on genuine engagement. I was done with the hustle. I was done trying to be something I wasn’t. I still wanted validation, but I needed to focus on the changes right in front of me and I would take it from there.

Interestingly enough, I quickly learned that this was a situation where “let go and let God” had genuine merit.

When I stopped hustling out my writing in Facebook groups designed with the sole purpose of getting views and clicks, people were still finding my blog without extra effort and reading what they wanted to read. My organic numbers stayed steady and I was back to genuine engagement that I could actually track.

When I slowed down the frequency of publishing blog posts, people were still reading my old posts. After two full years of writing at least once a week, I was still getting engagement that I could objectively analyze to figure out my next steps, even if I wasn’t writing once a week anymore.

When I started writing for a purpose outside of my blog and submitted original work to other places, I once again found my words being appreciated by a wider audience. It was hustle that mattered. I was creating instead of hawking my words. Eventually, all of that work paid off when I was invited to be a contract writer for The Educator’s Room. Now I can write, work to be a positive impact in the larger world of education, and make some money on the side while working to make a positive impact in my classroom, as well.

I initially believed that not teaching would give me the time needed to work on a podcast that utilized my skills as an English teacher, only to remember just how much I loved analyzing with students and discovering that being in the classroom made me better at a side gig that I was doing “for fun.” It also helped me learn a lot of other skills, such as audio editing and effective social media management that my partner Alicia and I hope will help us turn our podcast into something that has a broader educational influence.

Years ago a friend told me that I needed to see my blog as my writing workshop: write and write and see what sticks, both personally and with my audience. And after years of writing and sharing and writing some more, I’m finally seeing the bigger picture of that writing workshop.

While I’m not completely stepping away from my blog, I have decided it is time to put the workshop on the shelf for a while so that I can focus on being intentional about my creative work.

My most consistently popular work, by far, has been my travel posts. I really started writing about our travel adventures mostly as a way for me to record what we did and to share the meaning behind the hundreds of pictures that I posted for friends and family on Facebook. After nearly four years of listening to podcasts and after one year of podcasting for Lit Think, I have learned that some material is best in different forms. So I am starting a travel podcast. The bulk of my material will be going back and turning my many posts into podcasts to make it easier for people to listen and share. But now, instead of writing about our new adventures, I will be posting them on the podcast below. So subscribe on your favorite player (I’m still working on expanding the platforms) and take a listen. Or go to the Mission: Wanderlust tab. My goal is to do it once a week, recording several weeks at once so that I can avoid what I said I hated so much: the hustle.

My writing workshop has also been my space for writing about life, family, and faith, so I have a writing project in the works that I will announce when I am ready. Between teaching and vacations, I don’t know when I will be ready for that blog post announcement, but I will be making that announcement by summer.

I will close out this transitional announcement by saying thank you to all of my faithful readers and followers, because there are good things on the horizon and I can’t wait to see what it turns into.

Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends so that others can join me on the journey.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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The last couple of years that we lived in Fort Wayne we experienced two absolutely miserable winters.

The winter of 2013-2014 was the winter that the snow never stopped coming. I didn’t go to school for a full week for the first six weeks of the semester. In fact, we got nearly one full extra week of Christmas break because the snow started falling right before the break was supposed to end and the storm didn’t stop for days. By the end of that winter, everyone was ready to head south for spring break, most Midwesterners fleeing their homes for warmer weather and outdoor play that didn’t require a hat and gloves.

The next winter wasn’t much better, only this time we experienced a bitter cold that never seemed to go away. When we headed “south” to Kentucky at the end of March for a family spring break at Mammoth Cave, we still experienced freezing temperatures every night, our camper’s water hose sealing itself to the outdoor spigot during our first night in the campground.

Was it any wonder that two Midwesterners were willing to leave everything behind for a fresh start in the South where we wouldn’t experience such temperatures all winter long?

Ok, maybe it was a little rash for us to start discussing moving south after two miserable winters in a town that I didn’t want to stay in anyway, but there was something real to our burning desire to risk beastly hot summers if it meant that we could escape the bone-chilling winter cold that we had suffered for most of our lives.

So we went south. We enjoyed five years of camping for Thanksgiving. We barbecued and wore shorts on Christmas day. We went camping in the relatively cold Texas desert for three Christmas breaks. We even occasionally swam in our backyard pool during the winter months, even more so in the six months before we moved when we were finally able to take advantage of our new pool heater and our hot tub.

And when Texas experienced the deep freeze of 2021 that shut down the entire state for days on end, we defended our friends and neighbors and all of our complaints about power outages that eventually caused nearly one thousand deaths and millions of dollars in property damage.

In fact, during the coldest days of that week in February 2021, I admitted that I had been wrong to ever desire a return to the Midwest. The cold was miserable. I hated walking on ice, and I couldn’t imagine willingly returning to a place where I would experience that kind of climate for months on end.

But life has a funny way of making changes for you.

We knew that a return to Indiana meant a cold winter. We knew that a return to Indianapolis meant we were right in that weird weather spot where we could experience fairly mild days mixed with bitter cold and that we were more often than not going to experience ice days over being buried in blizzards. We accepted reality.

And then we waited.

We waiting through the whole month of December with unseasonably warm temperatures and still, no snow. In January we got some dusting snow, but nothing that really stuck. Then last week there was finally enough for our kids to play in when they got home from school for the weekend. Then my sister messaged me and asked me if we were ready for a storm, acting as if we had never dealt with a snowstorm before. Then we watched the forecast change and adjust to show us squarely in the middle of a winter storm that promised a thick blanket of snow.

I was more excited than I wanted to admit.

I sat in the strange calm before the storm. The weather was gorgeous earlier in the week. The day before the storm started it was 50 degrees, too warm for my winter coat. Then, while I stayed home for the day in preparation for potential ice, my kids sat at school waiting for their own announcement of school cancelation. My husband kept saying that this was going to turn into nothing, and it seemed like a real possibility. All we saw in central Indiana was hours upon hours of steady cold rain.

But the next morning we woke up to a blanket of snow that didn’t stop falling for the rest of the day. I watched our kids play in the snow and our dogs run and kick up the powdery dust of dry snow that blew into drifts over a foot deep. I bundled up to brave the combination of deep snow and ice underneath so that I could walk both dogs.

And I once again remembered the beauty of thick snow covering all of the ugly of winter.

Do I love the cold that goes on for months and months? No, but I don’t love sweltering heat that does the same. Every place I’ve ever lived has trade-offs and I’ve learned to accept them as a reality of the choices that I make.

But right now I’m going to revel in the beauty of a winter wonderland. I’m going to treasure the memory of my kids playing together outside yesterday as the snow blew around them. I’m going to continue to giggle over my son’s concern about the twilight glow of lights reflecting off of the white surface long after the sun has gone down. I’m going to enjoy the sight of sunshine reflecting off of the snow after the clouds have cleared.

Because there really is nothing like a post-blizzard landscape, no matter what Southerners say.

Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends so that others can join me on the journey.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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It’s been one year since our lives were turned upside down.

One year since sobs started escaping my body without warning. One year since my body became a ball of tension that hurt to move. One year since the panic attacks and inability to make even the smallest decisions plagued my daily life. One year since I had to re-learn how to communicate with my family, especially my husband, as we tried to find a way forward.

One year since the life I thought we would always have was swept away in an instant.

As I look back on the emotions of the past year, I can’t help but be overwhelmed by the realization that I have spent the vast majority of the last twelve months holding onto far too many feelings at one time.

The fear of telling my children that their life was changing, certain that they would blame me for everything that was happening to them. This was especially true as our son asked us “does this mean we will have to move?” and five months later the answer would be yes.

The embarrassment as I questioned my worth as, not just a teacher, but as a human being and child of God.

The pain of feeling betrayed by the silence of people who I thought were friends.

The loneliness of being isolated from what I thought was my community and the painful discovery that I didn’t really belong.

The righteous anger of believing that I had followed my heart and God’s desire and the questions I had about others as I asked God why.

The grief of loss, so much loss, not just for me but for my entire family.

In Greek mythology, the phoenix is an immortal bird that goes through the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. In the Harry Potter series, Fawkes, Dumbledore’s phoenix, shocks Harry as he dies in a burst of flames and is reborn as a baby bird. This phoenix also has special powers of healing through its tears, saving Harry and his friends on more than one occasion.

And so the phoenix can be a metaphor for the rollercoaster of life.

By June, my internal phoenix had completely burned to ashes and the baby bird that timidly poked up its little beak was unsure of how to take flight, but it knew that it had to start over.

We made the most impulsive decision of our marriage and decided that it was time to go “home.” While we could still say that Texas had been good to us in six years and given us so much, in the end, we had lost a lot and we needed to be where we felt we really belonged.

We survived the most miserable vacation of our marriage and yet are still planning what we want to do next summer.

We bought a house, sight unseen, which has already become a hub of multiple family gatherings as our kids become reacquainted with cousins and we renew friendships.

I learned to say no to a situation that was harming me and my family and say yes to something better when I made the unprecedented decision to change schools in the middle of a semester.

We returned to Michigan for the first time in five years, first for a football game that caused our kids to fall in love with one of our favorite northern cities, and then at Christmas, when we finally got to see “our” lake again after far too long.

And through it all, I learned that, even when I felt weakest, I am stronger than I thought I was.

The worst year of my life was, in many ways, the start of something that we didn’t know we needed.

Because two things can be true at the same time.

I can still see my children’s grief and ache for them while knowing that, in the long run, the decisions we have made in the last year are what is best for them.

I can still grieve the loss of friendships while remaining forever thankful for the ones who stuck by my side and walked with me along the way.

I can be still be hurting and nursing my wounds while fully recognizing that those wounds brought me to a better place.

I can still be in the midst of spiritual trauma and have a stronger faith in the One who doesn’t forget His promises.

I can still feel called to the vocation of teaching without it defining everything that I am and allowing it to decide how I live my life.

And the lessons keep coming.

I have spent the last year in the wilderness, watching the old me burn to ashes so that I could be reborn into something that is still me, but better.

But the wilderness doesn’t have to be a place of desolation, it can be a place of growth that we often cannot see until we are safely back at home.

And now the phoenix is once again learning to take flight, ready to leave the wilderness for something better than was there before. As scary as that unknown is, I’m ready to see where it will fly next.

Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends so that others can join me on the journey.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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I knew it was risky when I picked it for my word of the year.

After all, “hope” and “light” had backfired in different ways.

But I picked “heal” because that’s what I needed for 2022.

And on January 5, I tested positive for COVID-19.

I suppose I could have been angry for a lot of different reasons when I looked at the pink and the blue lines side-by-side. Fourteen years ago I would have given nearly anything to have seen two lines on a home pregnancy test, only to be repeatedly met with nothing. Now I was sitting in my bedroom confirming that after two years of running from a pandemic, it had finally caught up with me.

Yeah, I could have been angry. Instead, I felt defeated and just a little bit relieved. I couldn’t escape it anymore. It finally had me in its grasp. And now I could just pray that I would be the only member of my family to become ill.

After two years of fearing my fellow humans, two years of masking, two years of crying when loved ones weren’t taking the pandemic as seriously as me, two years of anxiously walking into my classroom and jumping at every sniffle and cough, I was now exiled to one room of my house, only leaving on occasion with a mask covering my face and unable to hug my babies and sleep next to my husband.

All things considered, the vaccines did their job in keeping me from severe illness.

Wednesday night was the worst night, as muscle and bone pain made it nearly impossible to relax and fall asleep, even though I was desperate for rest. A friend sent me Vitamin D3 and Zinc tablets, as well as some other items to help speed along my recovery, and by the time I finally did fall asleep, there was an indication that I would get out of this relatively easily.

Over Thursday and Friday, body weakness kept sending me back to my room, although I braved the stairs for short trips to do my own “dirty work,” getting drinks when I needed to or when I was ready for something simple to eat. I masked up and avoided family, staying as far away as possible. With the kids also stuck at home in their own quarantine to ensure they wouldn’t inadvertently pass anything along to classmates, our family lived an uneasy existence of waiting and isolation.

On Friday night, as I drifted off to sleep, I was hit with the sudden fear that I couldn’t smell. That one of the symptoms I feared would still hit me had suddenly impacted my body. It wasn’t so much the fear of losing my sense of smell. I’m a human being who has had a fair share of colds over the years. Losing my sense of smell is something that goes with the territory. No, it was the knowledge that this wasn’t a cold-related symptom; it was neurological. And if I lost my sense of smell, something several friends had admitted took longer than expected to come back, what other strange side-effects could I expect?

I woke up the next morning with a muted sense of smell, but it wasn’t gone, something made clearly apparent when I could smell my eggs cooking on the stove and the freshly ground coffee that I scooped into the coffeemaker.

I spent the rest of the weekend slowly getting back into my work while I continued my isolation. I may have been taking time off to recover, but teachers don’t really get to take days off even if our decrease in sick days available says so, a fact far too easily ignored by those outside of education as we continue to try to figure out what the Omicron wave means for school buildings across the country.

While I’m still wondering when I will be strong enough to run even a mile, I am feeling significantly better. I got away with some aches, occasional headaches, and a mild cough that has gotten better every day.

But the voice in the back of my head keeps asking all of the questions: Is my heart going to be ok? Will I struggle with physical exhaustion forever? What if the temporary brain fog of the first two days comes back? What if I have hidden issues that I won’t know about for years? What if my family really did have it but they were entirely asymptomatic and we need to have the same concerns about them?

They are the questions that plagued me before I got sick. They are the questions that had me running, not walking, to get my third shot as soon as I was able. They are the questions that had me signing my children up for their vaccines once their age groups were approved. They are the questions that have haunted so many of us for nearly two years.

Still, I am now able to take walks along the street next to our house. Ten thousand steps doesn’t seem like an impossibility, but maybe a little irresponsible. I became bored as I tried to effectively work in preparation for a full day of school, grading what work I could and hoping that four days in the building this week will be enough to get me caught up so I can once again try to get to know 150 brand new faces.

And our family will continue to pay attention to guidelines and listen to experts as we keep navigating these uncharted waters, because, after two years, the end is still nowhere in sight.

But at least we know we got through this mild storm, for now.

Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends so that others can join me on the journey.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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Our family has taken a lot of cave tours. During every tour we have ever taken, there is a moment when the tour guide turns off all the lights, asking those on the tour to also keep their cell phones and avoid looking at their watches so that the entire group can be thrown into absolute darkness.

It is thick and disorienting. You can’t see your hand in front of your face. Individuals who have found themselves lost in a cave without any kind of artificial light have been known to lose their minds within 48 hours. Those who are lost in caves for more than a couple of weeks have their sleep patterns severely disrupted and have trouble with their eyesight. The sudden loss of all light of any kind disrupts the entire human biological system and can cause permanent psychological and physical damage in the most extreme cases.

After a few minutes, the tour guides turn the dim and scattered lights back on. What had moments before been merely mood lighting and a way to prevent visitors from losing the path is suddenly so much more.

When you’re lost in a cave, even a flickering light can be the difference between life and death.

In preparation for 2021, I chose the word “light” as my word for the year.

I had high hopes. After all, the year before I had selected “hope” as my word for 2020, and look how that went. A novel virus turned our lives upside down. Civil unrest followed the undeniable evidence that our country still had far too much work to do to heal our racial wounds. The election had been the most emotionally and spiritually exhausting one of most of our lives, testing bonds of friendships and family ties.

But as 2020 came to a close, I was still holding onto hope.

Looking back, it feels naive, foolish, and entirely too optimistic for the time we were, and still are, living in. True, there were a lot of reasons for hope. A new administration appeared poised to take on many of the challenges that had reared their ugly head during the course of 2020. We were in the early stages of vaccine distribution and it looked like we could possibly be out of the pandemic sooner than later. People were having open and honest conversations about the problems that faced our country and many appeared to be ready to take them head-on. As an educator, I was watching people have real conversations about what we had learned in the last year about our education system and there seemed to be a willingness for reform. And a new year was around the horizon. 2021 had to be better, didn’t it?

When I look at end-of-2020 Sarah, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at her naivete.

I chose the word “light” for 2021 to be a metaphor for how I wanted to live my life moving forward. Already optimistic by nature, I wanted to renew my optimism about the future and all the possibilities of what we could be individually and as a nation. I had spent the previous year becoming increasingly vocal about politics in my personal life because I wanted to be a light to my former students and those around me to show them that, as Christians, there was a better way for us to interact with our political system and with each other. I wanted to show them that loving our neighbors and seeing our communities as interdependent made us stronger, not weaker.

But when our lives fell apart just weeks into 2021, I found that it was hard to be light when you personally can’t see the light. When you’re falling down into a dark abyss with nothing to grab onto, you can’t help anyone else. You can’t offer hope because you need someone to offer it to you. You can’t make decisions about even the simplest things because your agency has been stripped from you. You question everything that you are and believe in because someone else has decided that those things have no value. You temporarily lose your voice because you were told that your voice is not wanted.

Suddenly, all you need is for someone else to hold the light for you because all forms of light burn your eyes and skin. Light is supposed to offer security and a way out, and instead, it just hurts.

Slowly, the light came back. It came back in the form of friends around the country who constantly checked in to offer listening ears and good advice. It came back in the form of family that kept reminding us that we were loved and wanted and that we could always come home. It came back in my renewed faith in a God that wouldn’t fail me even when the institutions that claimed to preach His Word did.

I had no way of knowing that choosing “light” for my word of the year would be ironic. I could not have predicted anything that has happened to us this past year, including a move back to Indianapolis.

But as I prepare to exit 2021, I’m realizing that maybe my choice of the word “light” was really less about what I was going to do during the past year and more about what God was going to do for me through the light of others. In a year that was completely unexpected, I can finally see the faint glimmer of light at the end of the dark tunnel. It’s not fading; it’s growing.

And maybe, just maybe, it will light the way to healing, as well.

Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends so that others can join me on the journey.

In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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It happens every time we move. Somewhere in the packing and sorting and then unpacking and trying to figure out where we are going to put all of our stuff, we look at each other and say, “We have so much crap.”

While I fully admit that nearly everything about moving sucks and we have said, at least twice, that we’re never moving again, there is one advantage to the awful task of packing all of your earthly belongings and moving them to a new location: It forces you to consider what you really need and purge like you’ve never purged before.

And every time we move, I promise myself that we will not do that again. We will not keep buying things that we don’t need. We won’t keep filling space for no reason except to fill the space. We will be responsible, stick to our budget, and pursue a more minimalist mindset.

We’re still working on it.

It’s a work-in-progress that follows us every time we move into a new house. As we are purging and getting rid of the stuff we don’t want and we never use, we are simultaneously buying items that fit the “needs” of the new house. During our last move, we added more than a thousand square feet to our living space but purged a lot of stuff on the way because they didn’t fit into the Pods that we had to use for the transition. When we moved in, there were items that we needed to replace because we no longer had them, such as a new dining room table.

But still, even after at least one trip to donate items that made the move but we decided we didn’t need anyway, we are surrounded by questions about our stuff.

Have I really used that flour sifter that we bought several years ago? No, but I used that one recipe that one time that called for it, so I’m not getting rid of it. Do four people really need all those mugs? No, but we really like some of those mugs that we’ve collected over 20 years of marriage. Do I actually use all of those flip-flops? No, but they aren’t broken yet. Do I wear all of those t-shirts? No, but I just can’t get rid of that Homecoming 2000 t-shirt from my senior year of college because…reasons.

Do I really need to keep all of my books? Yeah, we’re not even going to go there. No one is going to purge my book collection. No one.

I’m constantly plagued by the question, “Do I really need that?”

And nothing makes me ask that question more than the season between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

For the month (at least) leading up to Thanksgiving and the entire month after, we are inundated with sales trying to convince us that we need more stuff, we need more gadgets, we need to find the perfect gift for our loved ones and of course, that perfect gift should be something that they don’t need.

And this year, with an economy heavily impacted by a global pandemic and a fragile supply chain that finally collapsed due to all of the pressures of that same pandemic, there is an inordinate amount of fear about whether or not Christmas is going to be ruined because people won’t be able to get more of the “stuff” that they want to fill stockings and pile under their Christmas trees.

Yes, I know, our economy is driven by how much we buy. We constantly hear about how the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the month that will make or break a business. There’s a reason Black Friday has been such a big deal for so many years. It’s become the day (or weekend) when a business determines if they will end the year in the black or in the red. Will they walk away from the year with a profit or in debt?

But after two years of a pandemic, after two years of so much talk about what was and was not working for us before we even heard of coronavirus, after two years of asking what a “new normal” could look like, can we possibly start talking about a paradigm shift away from this materialistic way of looking at our “needs” and the economy?

We shouldn’t lament when the under-40 crowd doesn’t want to buy all the things and fill their already small homes with more stuff. We shouldn’t complain that stores aren’t stocked with cheap stocking stuffers that are destined to break and be thrown in a landfill less than 24-hours after our kids open their stockings. We should keep asking ourselves, what do we really need?

So as we head into a new season, I propose that all of us make some small changes to our holiday buying habits. If you are donating to a shelter or toy drive, pick items that will last instead of cheap trinkets that will quickly break or tear after only a few wears. Perhaps stick to the “four-gifts” rule for your kids (need, want, wear, read). For our kids, they get a new pair of Christmas PJs, books, and a big gift (or two smaller gifts) in addition to stockings filled with candy and mementos. Maybe focus on experiences instead of material items by buying a zoo or museum membership or even taking a family trip to create memories. Instead of spending more money on Amazon, buy from Etsy shops or local businesses to support your community instead of big business. Instead of adding to the accumulation of things that we don’t need (and probably won’t want weeks or months later), let’s focus on investing in our communities and pursuing quality over quantity.

No, this won’t solve the supply chain issues. No, it won’t shut up our kids who bombard us with requests for every little thing they see in the stores. And no, it won’t completely clear our homes of all of our junk. But if we can take baby steps to a better future post-pandemic, it’s worth the try, right?

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In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.

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When my husband and I moved to Indianapolis in the summer of 2005, we were in our mid-20s with our whole lives in front of us. We were Michiganders looking for a new home after three years in Chicagoland, and Indianapolis was the perfect place for us to relocate. It was still a large enough city to give us everything we wanted, but it wasn’t nearly as overwhelming as living in northwest Indiana, just 45 minutes from downtown Chicago. 

For five years, we lived in and loved the city of Indianapolis. We attended a few baseball games at Victory Field and hockey games at the Coliseum, where we made jokes that we felt like we were on the movie set for Chasing Amy. We jumped on the Colts bandwagon and cheered on their victory over the Chiefs in the AFC wildcard game at the RCA Dome. We watched my high school students make a run for the basketball state championship at, what was then, Conseco Fieldhouse. We visited the animals at the zoo in both summer and winter months and listened to Weird Al from the lawn seats in White River State Park. We climbed up the stairs to the third story to watch movies at the now-closed Hollywood Bar and Grill and strolled around Monument Circle. I visited the Children’s Museum with a friend and our new babies. While we didn’t take advantage of all Indianapolis had to offer, we did our best to get out and truly be a part of the city.

We weren’t Indianapolis natives, but Indy was home. We were going to raise our children here and put down roots and embrace the fact that we were true Midwesterners living in a truly Midwestern city.

But then my husband got transferred to Fort Wayne and after five years in another Indiana city, we decided to completely turn our family’s life upside-down when I took a new teaching job in Houston, Texas. We had both spent most of our lives in the Midwest and after two really long and cold winters, we were restless and ready to try something different.

For six years, we happily lived in the fourth largest city in the country, a city full of transplants from all over the world where we believed we could put down roots and live forever. Our Indiana kids – our daughter born in Indianapolis and our son born in Fort Wayne – started to see themselves as Texans; they accepted the heat and humidity and embraced year-round shorts-wearing and swimming in our backyard as a natural part of their lives.

But something in me never stopped longing for Indianapolis. Every time I saw a Colts game and the city skyline behind Lucas Oil Stadium. Every time we watched a sporting event that presented a shot of Monument Circle. Every time a former student or a friend or my sister posted pictures of places all over the city. Every time I turned on HGTV and it was showing Good Bones. Every time I saw any of it – I felt a little pang from knowing that we were so far away and the place that we had thought would be our forever home would never be home again.

Then I lost my job in a painful turn of events and something in me snapped. I needed to go “home.” I needed to be closer to family again. I needed to be around old friends who I knew would stand by us no matter what. I needed to be back in the familiar Midwest because, as much as I didn’t want to admit it, I was a Midwestern girl through and through and that was where our family needed to be.

So we found a way. I found a new job and my work-from-home husband willingly pivoted to a new and different home office. We bought a house just outside the city so we could enjoy country living and still take advantage of everything Indy had to offer us. We were away for eleven years and yet sometimes it feels like we never left. Our transition has been far from smooth, but we’re sure we made the right decision.

And now we look forward to football games and Final Fours at Lucas Oil, trips during all seasons to the zoo and Children’s Museum, the changing of seasons in the Indiana state parks, and visits to apple orchards and wineries. In the unexpected twists and turns of life, we somehow found ourselves coming full circle back to the Circle City. 

And that just feels right.

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