Making Your Home Sing Monday - Monday Musings

Making Your Home Sing Monday

I haven't been joining in on Mom's the Word's Making Your Home Sing Monday because, well, I haven't felt I had anything to add.  This week is different.  As you may know, I just spent two wonderful weeks with my family all together in one place (even my adult son came "home" whenever he could).  It was blissful.  Our extended "family" of friends spent tons of time with us.  Then, we put Superman on a plane back to his place of work and "family time" changed to Skype calls, emails, mailing goodies to each other.  Weird, by so many people's standards, we know.

What does this have to do with Making Your Home Sing Monday?  Simply this:  A home sings when the members are true to themselves and are allowed to follow where they are being led.  Since we first came together, more than 21 years ago, Superman and I have NOT followed common wisdom.  For whatever reason, NOT following common wisdom, established paths, societal norms, whatever you want to call it, works for us.  When we listen to where we're being guided rather than following what we're told we "should" be doing, we are blessed beyond measure.  It is just that simple.  (Not having a theological discussion, so I'm not going into who is doing the guiding; you can fill in that information for yourself.) 

Don't believe me?  Superman and I started living together 10 days after our first date.  (Hey, it was the 80s!  Need I say more?)  We got married less than a year after our first date and are still going strong.  (People were taking bets on our demise at our wedding!)  We had our first child 14 months after we got married, even though we were not financially stable.  I quit my job to stay home with our kids even though we had no idea how Superman would actually support our family of 4.  (We added Buttercup after we'd decided I would quit said job.)  How did that all turn out?  Well, we've been happily married almost 21 years and I've been able to be home with the kids for 12 years.  Our oldest child has already graduated from college.  I'd say we've done pretty well there.

We sold our house in Southern California before we knew where we were moving.  Superman bought us a house in Eastern Washington that a) I had never seen and b) even though he didn't have a job in Eastern Washington and c) even though we knew not one person in Eastern Washington.  How did that turn out?  Well, Superman bought a house we've come to absolutely adore in a neighborhood wherein our neighbors became our best friends.  (They even drove across the state to help me stage an epic surprise for Superman and the kids.) Superman found a wonderful job two days after we moved into this house and it served him well for four and a half years.

Finally, despite coming from a family filled with teachers, we home-school our two younger children (and home-schooled our oldest for middle school and watched him with pride as he finished out his primary education at the local junior college before heading off to a four-year university at 17). 

Those are just a few of the ways we've bucked traditional wisdom and marched to the beat of a different drummer.  Was it scary?  Not really.  Why?  Because we knew those things were the right thing to do. 

Now we're at it again.  Superman left a good job to pursue his career as a civilian contractor for the US military.  People thought he was crazy for wanting to do it and thought I was crazy for agreeing to it.  It didn't feel crazy.  It felt right.  So far, it has been.  Has it always been easy?  No.  No one promised life would be easy, however.  It is the challenges in life that help us to grow...just like that song that says "God gave us mountains so we could learn how to climb".

Still don't see what this has to do with Making Your Home Sing Monday?  Honestly, maybe you won't think it does.  For my family, however, we've discovered that listening to that guidance, even as it is steering us away from the tried and true, leads us to places we've never dreamed of going and gives us joy we didn't expect.  Going thousands of miles away from the family didn't move us farther apart as a family; instead, it caused Superman to rededicate himself to our family and our marriage and feel blessed by the life we have made together.  Having him absent from the household has helped me to remember how capable I am.  Far from being intimidated by the challenges I face without him, I work to make him proud of me and our kids.  The successes we experience make our family sing in spirit day in and day out, even if the notes we reach are the ones we expected. 

So, I ask you:  Do you allow your home to sing in new and exciting ways?  In tunes and rhythms you might have been afraid to sing?  Make Your Home Sing by being brave and following the path being put before you.  Listen to the voice that guides you to do something different.  You won't regret it.  Making Your Home Sing doesn't have to mean that your home is singing just like the neighbor's house sings, or your friend's house sings, or your mother's house always sang.  Your home is supposed to sing a song that is unique to your family, unique to the journey you all embarked on together.  Don't be constrained by expectations that are "what everyone should do", but instead free your heart to follow the path that fits your family and hear the song unique to your home.

As for me and mine?  We're doing well.  Yes, we put the head of our household on a plane last Friday, but we still feel like a family.  We're humming right along.  We're planning our next joint vacation - no secrets from the kids this time.  The tears that we shed the first time Superman flew away in January have been replaced by the anticipation we feel as we look forward to the new songs we'll be singing.