Yield

My season has changed.

I knew it was happening, especially this past summer, though I tried hard to drag all the parts of me that I’ve enjoyed in previous seasons into the current one.

Over the summer, I started preparing to go back to work for the first time in a decade. I’m teaching kindergarten and I’ve never taught in a traditional school as a paid teacher before. It’s odd to be the “new” teacher in your 40s. You have all kinds of related experience (I’ve been a homeschooling parent in a related curriculum for five years and involved in religious education for my entire adult life), but you also have to have the humility to listen to people almost half your age tell you how to do your job. My weekly routines and household rhythms this fall have been a work in progress as I discover how to make more time to learn my job while still getting the laundry done.

My husband’s formation for the permanent diaconate has gone into full swing this year as well. Last year the formation took place during five one-day sessions. This year, we’re away from home one weekend a month, leaving three of our children at home with a college-aged babysitter who (thank God) is willing and able to take them to Mass.

This need for a babysitter has been another change I knew was coming but still had to feel my way through. For the last few years, I’ve had a teenage son at home who was fully capable of babysitting his siblings, even driving them to Mass. But now that son, David, has graduated from high school and is at seminary, several states away. My oldest son graduated from high school and has chosen to discern a life as a Catholic priest. Just saying that sentence out loud to strangers has been a shift for me. A part of me, the girl who grew up as a liberal-leaning Protestant who didn’t believe in lifelong celibacy, wonders almost daily right now how we got here. (I tell her it’s so much better than she ever imagined.)

My stack of books this summer was the first real sign, for me, that my life was shifting. There were books about kindergarten and classroom management. There were books about classical education. There were books about discernment and spirituality. There were several copies of The Priest Is Not His Own (a very popular gift to David this summer). My own fiction reading and theological interests stayed on the shelf as I scrambled to keep up with the material necessary for this season.

At the beginning of last week, I met with my spiritual director and one word stuck out: yield.

I’m so excited for this new season. Friends ask about how my new teaching job is going with some amount of trepidation, like they’re not sure if someone can genuinely like teaching kindergarten. Every time they ask, I feel an incredible joy bubble up inside of me. I never knew I could teach well and I never imagined I would love to teach, but here I am and I am loving it. This job is right where I want to be. And it’s hard to express my awe at the choices David and Chris are making to listen to the Holy Spirit’s call. There’s incredible discernment happening in my family!

Although all these changes have happened at once, none of them have happened spontaneously or quickly. All of them have been the fruit of years of work and planning and praying. Our life now is the yield of this year’s harvest, the sweat and labor in the fields of family life. And what a crop it is.

But when I pray through the word “yield” right now, it’s not just the harvest that comes up. It’s the need to make way for the harvest. I must yield my preferences and habits to create space for the next yield of the harvest. I have to prune.

This started last week with a quiet week here on Little Conversations. I needed to lie fallow and see how that felt.

Although part of me feels sad about it, to pause felt good. The format I developed for Little Conversations when I decided to start writing here three years ago does not produce the consolation it did when I started.

I do plan to continue writing here. After three years of examining the spirituality of motherhood in my own life so minutely, I am convinced that women need to know that God seeks to love us and heal us and put us on paths we never dreamed of through the maternity He created in us.

But the yield has to change to the season. This will look like a new format for this newsletter. I won’t be writing on a weekly basis, probably more like a couple times a month. Little Conversations remains free and goes out to email subscribers like it always has, but I may slim down or delete some social media connected to it.

I thank you all for your presence here. I never imagined what this would grow into when I sent out my first post over three years ago. I believe that more growth will come of this pruning. I hope it continues to bless you as it has blessed me.