MOTHERHOOD AND MOVING
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I moved around a lot in my years before motherhood. My parents were teachers so when I was young we did a lot of moving from schoolhouse to schoolhouse around New Zealand. They aren’t bad memories; in fact I actually can’t really remember much about the moves at all. My family moved with me so each place always felt like home as long as they were there with me.
After high school I moved overseas for a Gap year. This time my family wasn’t moving with me and while an adventure in a new land, it was also a lonely time and one that still triggers feelings of homesickness when I recall it.
Since being a mother however, we have only moved twice. The first was from our very first house. We called it our gingerbread cottage. We brought it as newly weds and although small I adored it. All three of our children were brought home from the hospital to that house. In that house, we planted trees that grew as our children did. We brought a dog and built a picket fence. A lot of life happened within those walls and I mourned the idea of having to move on but we had grown too big for it. I remember crying when it sold wondering how I was ever going to feel ‘at home’ somewhere else.
But you know what? We moved to a bigger house the family and I, and from day one it felt like home. Because I realise, my family was with me. When I drove past the old house, I didn’t feel any tugging at the heart strings, I looked at it as bricks and mortar, which is odd I guess but once we had moved, it became just a house.
I know now God used that move to teach me some lessons about what is worth clinging too and what isn’t.
Those lessons made our next move pretty easy. It was to South Africa so I began to feel a little nervous that moving so far away from all that was familiar would be lonely but then a wise friend reminded me that it wouldn’t be like my gap year because this time I had my family with me. She was right.
We packed up, we left New Zealand with only a suitcase each, we have been renting a furnished house that is full of another families belongings but all is well because the things that mean the most to me are right here with me.
I think as mums we can worry a lot about how change and uprooting can affect our kids, but in my experience if Mum is calm and ok, then the kids will follow suit. As mums we can be the rock for our kids, the one constant in a changing environment.
And for us as mums that constant we can lean on when everything else is unfamiliar is God. Hubby’s are good too, but they shouldn’t have to carry that burden. God however can take all our worries, our prayers and then some. Knowing this I am careful that as my children use me as their rock that I use every opportunity to point them to the real rock of ages.
I remember meeting a complete stranger at a BBQ a few weeks before we left who said something that has stuck with me since. She said,
“yes, it is a big move you are doing, but our God is bigger. He is with you wherever you go in the world.”
She said it so matter of fact I wondered why I had forgotten it.
Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.Psalm 139 v 7-10
Moving is just a change of scenery but if our eyes are fixed on God the view needn’t change that much wherever in the world you find yourself.
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