Coming out of a season of drowning - it brings hope. Feeling it on the downward slope after everything is going well gives me a cue that I need to make some adjustments, or we’re going to be headed into a really hard season.

What do we do when those low seasons circle back? When we’re drowning again? What do we do when we’re lower than ever before? There are seasons in life where if you don’t focus so intensely on your own well-being then you don’t have a shot in the dark at making it through in one piece. Last year was like that for me.  

Moving from drowning to thriving is a massive leap…What if there's a step in between that nobody's talking about? This one's for the caregivers who are exhausted but still showing up.

It was New Year's Eve 2018, and I was standing at our kitchen door looking outside as our kids played in the yard. I’d spent the majority of the last month comatose, hiding under the covers on my bed. I didn’t have a word for what I was experiencing. It would be months before I would know to define it as caregiver burnout. But that didn’t matter in the moment. What mattered was this overwhelming feeling that the life we were living simply wasn’t sustainable. 

What’s the tool that we can use here? It’s a simple phrase that changed my life, “The story I’m telling myself is…”

The relationship that had once been so effortless was suddenly ice-cold. We began walking on eggshells. One wrong answer and we’d get the silent treatment for days.

I broke against that certainty.

I couldn’t even put my finger on what was so hard. I’d never experienced this before. I’d never had a child in my home that I felt incapable of loving. The more I tried, the farther away this feeling of love felt.

💛 Love is patient. Love is kind… But what happens when it doesn’t feel that way?

What if love sometimes feels messy, awkward, or even contradictory?

As a foster mom, I learned that love isn’t always easy, and that’s okay.

Can love be real if it doesn’t feel the same every time?
I’d love to hear from you…how do you define love?