My family and I have lived through some hard seasons. My husband and I had to fight for our family, our marriage, and the life we were trying to build. We stuck it out, and we came through stronger together.
I’m learning that making it through survival and feeling safe after survival are two different things.
My husband now looks at me and says, “You deserve this.”
He wants me to have room to write, create, travel, and decide what I want my life to look like. He wants to provide a softness that neither one of us could afford in those earlier years. Our children are grown. The constant pressure has eased. Abundance is flowing into our lives in ways we once prayed for.
But sometimes I still brace myself.
Survival taught me how to make a way. It taught me how to stretch, sacrifice, adjust, and keep moving when I was tired. Those skills helped me protect my family, but I do not want to use them to block the very life they helped us build.
I do not want to finally reach a softer season and spend the whole thing waiting for the ground to fall from underneath me.
So now I am learning another way of living.
I am learning to let a good day be a good day without searching it for bad news.
I am learning that my husband providing for me does not erase what I contributed to this family. I helped sow this life, too. I carried children, made homes, held memories, stretched meals, encouraged dreams, and kept pieces of us together when neither one of us knew what would happen next.
Receiving is not taking something I did not earn. Sometimes receiving is finally gathering what was planted through years of love, labor, forgiveness, and endurance.
This does not mean I believe we must suffer before we are allowed to have good things. It means I can look honestly at what my family has lived through and recognize that something grew here.
Our marriage grew.
Our understanding grew.
Our ability to tell the truth grew. Even the way we love has grown.
The harvest is not a perfect marriage or a life without problems. The harvest is that we are still here, but we are not standing in the same place.
We are not loving each other from pure survival anymore.
We have room to choose one another.
I still have room to choose myself and that is taking some getting use to.
Gather What You’ve Grown: A Harvest Full Moon Sound Bath for Receiving What You’ve Sown will be an evening of breath, reflection, and sound for anyone learning to welcome what has grown without fear.
This reflection is the heart of the sound bath I will be leading under the Harvest Full Moon on Saturday, September 26 at 6:30 p.m. at Live a Little Fitness.
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