It was after the birth of my third baby, Silas, that I started to learn the art of “culling”.
Having been a pretty accommodating person that endeavored to please people and fill their needs, it took me not one, nor two but THREE babies to start to seriously think of myself as a matriarch that needed to protect her energy, set some boundaries and say “no” to things that weren’t working.
I wish I could say that I started nailing it soon after, but that was just the teeniest little baby step beginning to a much larger transformation that was going to take years.
Isn’t that how the real stories go?
This isn’t a movie, its my real life so rather than one sweeping, life changing realization and transformation, I had more of a “shoot, I thought I had conquered this experience” and “Oops, I did it aging…, Dang it!” over and over and over again for years…
It’s nice that the Lord seems to reveal my (as my friend Kate calls them) “areas of opportunity” to me gently and slowly.
Even though I confess that I’m the kind of person that likes to pull EVERYTHING out of every closet and cabinet in the house and clean out the trash organize/reset it all at once, it would be horribly overwhelming and excruciating to have to grow, clean out and improve in all the areas of our lives at once.
Learning to cull, and a I choose that word very intentionally, is a very grown-up thing to do.
In fact, as the young mom that I still was when my third baby came, I wasn’t a very good culler, but I knew I had to learn.
I had NO CHOICE but to do it to protect my most precious valuables on earth, this precious baby and his brothers, the parts of me that they needed to be available to them so they could be nurtured and nourished.
I had to learn to ask myself,
“Do you have space for that?”
”Do you have time and energy to care about or get involved with that?”-meaning not just actual time and energy it takes to do the thing, but ALSO do you have anything left for your husband and children when you are done?
”Is that person’s problem REALLY your responsibility or is that a time and energy suck?”