#Jillian needs a hug some love AND therapy

[emylilas]

"I wish I... I didn't understand..."

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[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

i preserved in him what he needed to believe about you.

i wrote yesterday that this episode had a lot riding on it. for the most part, it delivered--mostly in anchoring both dick and slade’s arcs, expanding on the themes introduced in s2, and in firmly establishing jericho as My Favourite Forever And Ever. it was also very flawed, but in (mostly) interesting ways. let’s talk about it!

SPOILERS ahead.

1. jericho has my whole heart and then some. i think it would’ve been very easy to paint him with broad strokes--my fear was they would drag the innocence all the way to the edge of infantilisation, which, good god NO--but while he is enthusiastic and ready to believe the best of both his friends and family, there’s a sharpness to him, a kind of reckless guile, and quite a lot of unresolved and complicated feelings about father figures. 

1.25. he is obviously very proud of his father having served in the military--he’s even tangentially aware that he was experimented on, given his nonchalant attribution of his own powers to “drugs” that his father took while serving. (this awareness has to include the fact that his father definitely took a number of lives as a soldier.) even the awful assault that took away his voice and eventually his father from his life tracks with a single, knowable truth. knowing this helped him ground his own identity--the problem comes when he realises that what he’d used to build himself on was itself built on a lie. 

there is a tension, then, between his loyalty to these friends who used him but ultimately revealed the truth to him, and his desire to have that cornerstone of his life back. his compromise is to talk to his father, but only with dick’s permission; in it, he would know if his father was finally ready to be completely honest with him, and if there was more to dick’s friendship than merely using jericho to get to his father.

1.3. of course, it doesn’t exactly work that way: in the final fight at the church, there are two men who insist on their truth while pushing him to the side. in it, he sees one of them ruthlessly cut down the other, and he sees the other using his own body and life to protect him. jericho makes his choice in the end.

1.45. dick i think was absolutely right and justified in bringing jericho to a safe place where he can explore and learn to control his powers, even if dick was surprisingly blase about the potential ethical tangles of being able to possess other people’s bodies without them being aware of it. it was honestly a bit disturbing to see that hank was chosen to demonstrate jericho’s powers, given his history and the fact that he describes the experience as a “blackout”. i’m just going to assume that he would’ve come around to it eventually.

given the relative paucity of Big Bads and grand superhero battles, i’m kind of taken with the idea of the titans essentially being a support group for young troubled superheroes who need help and training and ways to ground themselves before heading back to their corners of the world. 

1.5. ultimately this episode once again drives home what should be the essential question in a show that revolves around a team of superhero sidekicks: are we destined to be what we were moulded to be? is the point of their existence to perpetuate what their mentors/fathers did? slade and jericho both struggle with this; so do dick and donna in this episode. so do rose, and jason, and rachel, and conner, and kory in the broader context of the series. the answers they find are complicated and at the cost of a great deal of pain, but the process is always interesting.

1.8. obviously jericho isn’t actually dead. i wonder what that initial dreamscape sequence was all about? is it some secret pocket dimension that jericho jumped into at the last minute when slade killed his body? is that where he’s been for the last five years?

2. dick grayson is lost. he is utterly buried under artifice and armour. i mentioned in a previous post (i think the one for 2.07) that he performs quite a bit of emotional labour for the team on top of being their leader in a tactical sense. here, he’s trying to hold it together for the team after a devastating death; he’s spearheading an effort for revenge he thought they all supported. he pulls on batman-goggles, trying to look at what he’s doing from a logical, emotionally-removed perspective, even while burying his bleeding heart as deep as he possibly can. no wonder he’s acting “like a ghost” and “burning at both ends”--it’s a terrible burden to bear. 

then the team turns around--once they’ve already gotten the info they needed, mind!--and tells him to cut jericho out of this operation; that it’s wrong and awful to have involved him at all. when he tries to do just that, he sees that he can actually help jericho as a friend and teammate, and at the urging of dawn, comes clean to him. meanwhile garth’s death and donna’s grief is still an unrelenting pressure on the back of his neck, driving him to find deathstroke at any cost--except when that cost is betraying jericho’s trust. ultimately slade nearly murdering donna is what breaks him--and he decides to follow jericho to slade anyway.

at every point he is so desperately trying to do good by everybody that he loses himself in the process. that his reward for this is being beaten up, a truckload of survivor’s guilt, and being abandoned by his closest friends is just so fucking awful. his friends are so used to his artifice and he is so used to absorbing all the blame that they think nothing of both praising him for being someone that saves people and believing he would sacrifice innocent lives for the sake of a mission in the same day.

(but this makes dick/kory so beautiful and refreshing--she has no time for his artifice and he doesn’t have to Be Someone around her. their relationship is defined by being undefined, and in that sense--at least for now--both of them find peace in the other.)

2.5. slade commenting coldly on dick’s fighting skills and the way he uses dick’s feelings for jericho to distract and defeat him makes me think that slade’s been playing this game with dick for far longer than he was aware: slade used both jericho and donna as bait to lure dick to that church, fought him in a cold, critical way undoubtedly reminiscent of a thousand sparring sessions with batman, and drove him utterly to the ground not just to prove a point to the titans and the superhero community at large but to jericho as well: this man is weak, manipulative, and ultimately a poor substitute for slade. 

2.75. who knows for how long dick wallowed in his failure, still seeing jericho take the blade that was meant for him, utterly alone? did he go back to the batcave, utterly defeated, and did he listen to bruce call him out on his mistakes? how much do you think he internalised all the terrible things he’d been told he was until he believed it all to be true? until he couldn’t live with himself and spiralled and spiralled until his self-hatred lead to outright self-destruction?

like--no wonder he completely fell apart in the present day when deathstroke showed up again. he’d just started to trust--he’d just started to build a family again. and here it is, a reminder of his biggest failure threatening to have him fail spectacularly once again. 

... this boy needs so much therapy. or at least a long nap and a series of hugs.

2.8. (that fight between him and slade tho... goddamn. even my shitty quality stream couldn’t take away from how thrilling it was to watch.)

3. dawn is... well. i know it’s been frustrating to follow dawn this season, as she’s been either non-existent or, uh, flat, but there was something interesting in the way her dynamic with dick moved and shifted in this episode. she thrills to ideals without considering the consequences of actually following those ideals. in the space of a few months, she can implore dick to act like batman, then tell him no, she was wrong to have asked him to do that, then say that she loved him for saving people and then barely days later abandon him for being a reckless sociopath who exploited innocent lives. in the present day, she can support hank in his retirement and rehabilitative process, yet still think it’s perfectly ok to go behind his back and continue being a vigilante. she supported protecting rose in the tower but still piled on dick for going off on his reckless suicide mission to try and save both jason and rose. she endorsed (and once praised) dick taking on troubled young superhero charges, yet turned around and berated him for daring to open up titans tower and “put them in the firing line”. 

i mean, for all that she takes the considerate, sensitive line in conversations, it’s almost always in contradiction to a position she’d taken earlier. it’s too consistent to be a coincidence, and i think it’s fascinating.

4. i didn’t realise amazons could be defeated and killed so easily?? who issued the contract to kill jillian in the first place and what was the “important work” they were doing in san francisco in the first place? a mystery within a mystery...

5. if this season were the draft of a story, i would go right in with a red pen and start moving around all the parts to make it flow better; excise entire passages and rewrite a few others. the pacing has been terrible, and this has meant that the younger titans--and the team we came to know and love through the first season--have gotten almost nothing to do, either plot-wise or emotionally. even if kory and gar and rachel become absolutely vital to the story in the last 4-5 episodes, it would still be a fairly significant failure, storytelling-wise.

that’s a pity because this show is packed with a stellar cast, always looks gorgeous, and is filled with genuinely insightful human relationships that are allowed to unfold in ways you just don’t see in other superhero media. just--*vibrates* a little more love and care from the people making and producing the show please!

[ruinedthatfriendship]

Concentrate

A/N: Basically five pages of Dimon wanting to bang each other, but with feelings and introspective backstory? I do think this was supposed to be a two-part sequence I never finished, so sorry if it seems a little abrupt at the end. Also this is OLD, and my writing has (hopefully) improved since then I promise, I’m so sorry...

Hiring Demi Lovato had been a surprisingly easy decision. She represented an important demographic, she was fun and fresh and fit a particular role with her ex Disney star gone bad history. Simon remembered feeling exceedingly pleased with himself after placing the appropriate calls to her manager, relieved that his show would be getting the new judging talent it needed to maintain ratings.

She had been a good decision, he’d been sure of it. Or he had been, until somewhere between audition cities two and three.

It started with talking back, something no one else really dared to do to him. She was sassy and she gave as good as she got and he wasn’t quite used to getting put in his place on camera, much less by a girl half his age.

Then there was the way he could never quite resist rising to her bait and digging himself deeper, and pretty soon they were five minutes into a weird dynamic of banter-fighting while some poor fool waited on stage for their attention.

And bloody hell, she had some nerve. He could still remember the shock when she’d turned his teasing back on him and spat all of those mints right out into his hand. When she’d informed him she’d call a pig after him. When she rolled her eyes and let that pink ponytail cascade over her shoulder and sassed him with all of the attitude she had.

Demi was unique and enigmatic and something he’d never encountered before, a fiery personality he couldn’t resist poking at and a heart bigger than any he’d ever seen, wrapped up into admittedly a very beautiful package.

Her stylists allowed her to express herself, rocking some borderline hairstyles that somehow still worked on her, and they consistently dressed her in outfits that highlighted her gorgeous features.

Simon wasn’t blind. He wasn’t heartless, as Demi herself had pointed out after Jillian’s audition right in the beginning. And she was enchanting, he could admit that much. That was, after all, why he’d hired her. He’d chosen her to be beautiful and funny and bright.

But it was meant to work on the audiences and the viewers and the contestants she would mentor. She was supposed to appeal to America, for god’s sake, not him.

Even looking back, he couldn’t identify what it was that had gotten to him. When she’d gotten under his skin, integrated herself so completely into him that he couldn’t begin to figure out how to extricate himself from the hold she had on him.

The worst of it was how oblivious she seemed. Like she really, genuinely just wanted to tease him and poke at him because it was good for a laugh, and he was sitting there tormented, by her laugh and her touch and his own train of thought. She wasn’t for him. She was so young, this couldn’t happen, he shouldn’t think this way, get your mind the fuck out of the gutter, Cowell.

Maybe he’d just done something really despicable in a past life, and this was hell. Because somewhere along the lines he’d started waking up tangled up in his hotel sheets with the fading image of her behind his eyelids like he was some kind of teenager. Somewhere, he’d started comparing every woman he saw to her. Not just physically, it wasn’t just that. It was the tightness in his chest when his mind would stray and he would look at his date across the table with a pang, it’s not your laughter I want to hear.

At his worst, he felt a bit disgusted by himself, and that wasn’t a thought process Simon was used to. But he couldn’t deny that it was all wrong on so many levels. He was her boss. She called him ‘grandpa’. Careers would get blown open. She deserved someone who could commit to her, someone who was her own age, someone who she could love. Someone who wasn’t eternally opening his mouth around her and then kicking himself, because apparently the only way he knew to flirt with a girl that actually affected him was to pull her pigtails.

None of that was enough to derail the track of thought going through his brain that was always dedicated to her. None of that was enough to drag his focus away from her any time she was in the room. None of that was enough to keep her from distracting him in every possible way, without even trying, as she sat next to him on the panel.

She was biting her lip. Just a little, she did it when she was thinking. He could see her out of the corner of his eye, her head bobbing slightly to the beat of the current singer’s track, her pen poised above her notepad to write her thoughts.

The picture of someone dedicated to finding talent for the show. What he should have been doing, instead of zoning out staring at her mouth. But damn it, he just wanted her. From her perfect little body to the sheer brightness of her personality, she was an obsession he couldn’t shake. 

He wanted to slide his hands underneath her sequined skirt, wanted to know what her kisses tasted like, what she would feel like in his arms, against his body. More than that, though, he wanted to take her out and show her off. He wanted her to just keep talking, and laughing, he wanted her to teach him how she saw the world. He wanted to know what she would look like in his shirts, sitting in the morning sunshine in his kitchen with a coffee cup, late at night with her hair tangled and her feet bare.

He just wanted to know her, and it was getting out of hand. 

“Simon?”

He blinked, trying not to let on that he hadn’t been paying attention, and started making vague statements. “Okay. I think that was really, um, a very unique audition. Da--” he looked up just in time to cut himself off. No, Daniel was the last one. Some unidentified blonde girl was on the stage now, the sight of her causing a mild panic in Simon’s chest. Had he really missed an entire act? He didn’t even remember voting on the last one.

“Let’s go to a vote,” he said briskly instead, ignoring the woman beside him studiously. He could base his vote off of theirs if he went last, make it look like he knew what was going on. And then he really needed to get his bloody head on straight.

He watched the blonde walk off satisfied, receiving four yes’s--even though Simon’s was awarded at random--startling slightly when Demi slapped his arm.

“Hey!” she leaned over, the smell of her perfume invading his nostrils. “Where is your head at?”

Simon swallowed. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Demi scoffed and rolled her eyes. “You were about to call her Daniel, Simon, don’t think you can fool me. Does the old man need a break?”

He finally met her gaze, regretting it immediately. She was smirking at him with a fire in her eyes, pink lips curving up into a smile before she burst out laughing suddenly, a sound he was entirely too in love with.

“Oh my god, your face!” she was giggling, color flooding her face as she kept laughing. “I mean wow, Simey, you really spaced out!”

Simon swallowed, rolled his eyes back reflexively, and turned away from her. “Brat.”

She kept on laughing with L.A., danced along to some music in the background, posed for a selfie beside Britney with her lips out in an exaggerated kiss, let one of the audience members in the front row--a young man--give her a hug.

By the time they ended the break, Simon wasn’t sure if the prevailing emotion was jealousy or lust or possibly just insanity. And now someone else was singing and she was biting her lip again.

He shifted in his seat, adjusting himself discreetly, and idly picked up a pen to distract himself. He could only hope that he wouldn’t be expected to stand in the near future, and that he’d make it through the rest of the day without doing something stupid. She was never going to fall for him, and he would just have to remember that fact.  

~ Demi ~

From the second she’d gotten that first offer of a contract on The X Factor, Demi had been anticipating problems she could run into. It was an unfortunate necessity in the planning; this would be her first real return to the public spotlight after rehab. She was still living in a sober house, still going to meetings and therapy and not quite far enough removed from the edge of a cliff to be comfortable.

She’d planned for the comments. She’d planned for questions and uncertain moments and how to deal with those feelings if they came up again.

She had never once considered that the biggest hurdle of all would be sitting next to Simon Cowell for several hours a day. And there was no contingency plan for this, no sponsor for her to call, she couldn’t even ask her mother about this one.

He was annoying as hell, though, granted, she’d been annoying first. What had initially been irritation born of long hours and the stress of the audition circuit across the country had blossomed into a friendly banter that audiences seemed to like. That she enjoyed. And they were fast becoming unlikely friends.

Or they would be, if he would just stop it with that damned pen. Demi scowled slightly, her hand balling into a fist on her lap, and she redoubled her efforts to focus on the stage. She could not afford to start drooling over the man sitting next to her on camera just because his mouth was doing...things...to a fucking ballpoint pen. Jesus Christ.

Simon Cowell was a pain in her ass. From day one, he’d been annoying her and pushing her until she just had to push back. He had a brand of arrogance that was initially so damned irritating that she just had to take him down a notch, and it had been unbelievably amusing to watch his face when someone talked back to him.

Then somewhere along the line that arrogance--tempered somewhat, now--and the repetitive fashion sense and the British accent and every other fucking thing had become annoyingly sexy, and Demi was halfway to going out of her mind.

It was ridiculous. She was fantasizing about her boss, twice her age, who was actually Simon Cowell. Who would blow up her career. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

She wanted to let it happen. For god’s sake, Demetria.

She knew it was wrong. She knew it was unrealistic. She knew it was never going to work. But she still wanted to help him out of that stupid white shirt and let him have his way with her, and the thought alone made her blush. She wanted to know him, she wanted to find out what else made him laugh besides off-key auditions, she wanted to hold his hand and meet his dogs and find out what it felt like to sleep in his arms. Somehow she just knew he could make her feel safe. And beautiful, for once. And strong, like she wasn’t just a fragile little star gone bad. 

Simon shifted slightly, his hand going to its usual place on the back of her chair, fingertips just brushing her back. She could smell the familiar mix of mints and smoke and soap, risking a glance in his direction. He was watching the stage like he was in some kind of staredown, a fierce expression in his eyes that shouldn’t have ended up being as attractive as it was. She wanted him to look at her with that level of concentration. 

She fought the urge to squirm in her seat, crossing her legs and propping her elbows on the desk, leaning forward and out of his touch. She was pretty sure she was flushing red anyway. Damn it, he wasn’t even doing anything.

She was still all too aware of him out of the side of her eye, playing with that pen between his fingers and then against his mouth.

Concentration on the stage was laughable, and she was going to give herself a headache if she tried to keep this split focus much longer.

“Stop,” she said suddenly, unaware if she was speaking to herself or to him, but abruptly realizing she’d spoken aloud. Luckily they were between acts now, so nothing could be misconstrued there.

Simon leaned over toward her. “What did you say, brat?”

Demi made a frustrated noise, biting her lip once more. And then all at once her control snapped and she lunged, yanking the pen out of his hands. “Stop…” she waved it around vaguely. “Playing with this!”

Simon blinked at her wordlessly for a moment, looking at her fiery, breathless, flushed expression. “Stop biting your lip,” he retorted suddenly, regretting the words as soon as they were out of his mouth.

It was Demi’s turn to draw back in confusion. Her eyebrows furrowed adorably and she shook her head in impatient irritation. “What?”

“Never mind, brat. Give me that back.”

“No,” Demi protested with her usual annoying self. “It’s distracting.”

“I’m distracting you?” Simon’s eyes narrowed. It could have been a flirty question, but he was far too tense to do anything but snap. “Do you have any idea--”

Demi swallowed. A British accent usually wasn’t a big deal to her. Apparently Simon just had his own rulebook. “I am trying,” she spat out, “to do the job you hired me for.” That was good, remind herself that he was her boss. “I can’t focus on the acts if you and your stupid pen--

“You’re always dancing in your seat--”

“--that ridiculous outfit--”

“--cut that dress any lower--”

“You show more cleavage than I do, god, Simon!”

“I don’t think you really want to talk about that right now.”

“Don’t tell me what I want to do.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re doing--”

“Simon I swear to god--”

“HEY!”

Both of them stopped short at the sudden shout from L.A., leaning down the table and glaring at both of them. “Stop it, both of you!”

Demi blinked. Her nose was an inch away from Simon’s, they’d both leaned into each other as they’d shouted over one another, both of them breathless and even Simon looking slightly flushed.

Simon collected himself first, taking a sip of his water and looking over to one of the cameramen. “Cut that, obviously.”

Demi was still a mess of emotion, not entirely sure if anger or arousal would win out, his words coming back to her as she habitually tucked her bottom lip between her teeth. She turned to him suddenly, her eyes flicking over his face in search of some kind of clue. “Why my lip?”

“What?” Simon snapped out, looking halfway to breaking that pen in his hand.

“Seriously, why? That’s literally the weirdest thing--” It was incomprehensible that he might find her attractive, that her curves made her anything but ugly, so he had to just be picking on her. And of all things he could have gone after, he had to choose her one stupid little nervous habit. 

He turned toward her, eyes raking over her with an unreadable expression. “Demi,” he murmured, his voice low.

She swallowed, her hand nervously tracing over some of the sequins sewn onto the hem of her dress. Just because he didn’t find her attractive didn’t mean he didn’t affect her. Beside her, Britney was absorbed in conversation with L.A., oblivious.

Simon’s hand landed on hers suddenly on top of her leg, squeezing her wrist just hard enough to stop the motion. “You’ve gotta stop that, doll,” he whispered roughly.

Her eyes finally flicked up to meet his, her uncertainty fading the longer she looked. Because the expression in his eyes mirrored the one on her own face. The unspoken agreement they’d somehow reached that he probably wanted to just throw her up on the desk right then and there and she wanted to let him.

Simon pulled his hand away first, Demi carefully smoothed her dress and clasped her hands over her notepad, both of them turning their chairs away from each other.

Demi smiled to herself, blushing again and looking down at her lap to hide it. She’d just head to her dressing room after the day finished. Something told her she wouldn’t have to wait very long.

[matthew-eleventhirty]

so i spoke to jill and this is the first time she didnt completely bitch on me, like i told her about the blog and what i kinda wrote and how its gotten so repetitive but helps me deal with the fact i cant text you all this stuff. she asked if i would ever show you and i said no unless you didnt believe me when i say i still love you or if say we were to get back together and we were like hanging out and you needed some reassurance that i still love you so much and that you are more than enough for me. i told her that these are all raw feelings and some things i would be hesitant to let you read but i feel that i shouldnt hold back my experience especially since this is how i always felt. i told her that i mentioned i never felt 100% comfortable around your family and she said okay maybe then dont show him. i told her that its not something youve never known and how ive always been so honest with you. like when your mom was talking about politics and i kinda tensed up and you took over the convo or when i went to vanessas house and when i was in a convo you would jump in. at first i hated it it drove me crazy because i was trying to get to know them but after you told me its because you knew that was a hard thing for me to do. and she said that was absolutely adorable of you. she also said that she misses you a lot. she misses sitting on the couch while we watch “stupid” shows and you explaining every little detail. it was cute. i wasnt the only person who loves and misses you, my family loves and misses you too. she just didnt want to tell me earlier because she didnt know how i would react. she also said somehting to me that made me feel a lot better about this whole thing. if im being honest, ive gotten really crazy, like whenever i go on insta i always check to see if youre on too. its weird but comforting its the only thing i have of you actively still. im so sorry if i do end up showing you this and you think im crazy but maybe i am? but anyway i stayed up all night the day before my chem final studying and i noticed you werent on for a while so i figured you went to sleep. i never ever post stories to my finsta and i did this night so i wanna say a notification went out mentioning that i posted a story. you were the second person to see it so i guess once you saw the notification you checked. it made me feel better about this, like maybe you were checking to see if i was out or how i was doing or something, but it felt like okay he still cares. when i told jill that she agreed with me on how you still cared and that it was good. i just wish i knew how you felt. i dont want to be the fool who was waiting this whole time to find out you actually didnt care. but jill also brought up a good point that i havent thought of in a while. when i was freaking out and going through our texts over and over and over again, the words you chose whether you thought about them or not did show a little of your intentions. it was just the actions that threw me. but words like “separated” and “if you want to end it all completely” and how you really need this for you. i just read over our messages, im sorry i was so mean and selfish, i just going through the motions ya know? every day felt like forever and i do still wake up every morning hoping for a call from you. i just never knew how i could get through another day without talking to you. i think the only reason i havent called yet was because this is keeping me from it. jill said that you probably do wanna call me or text me, but youre nervous to because we agreed at the end of the semester. youre probably sitting there hoping id call you too in the back of your head and maybe were both sitting here like uuhh end of the semester. the way she talked to me tonight it feels like right after your last final youll call.. it would be really cool if you did. i mean then we could figure everything out. it seems like a much bigger possibility that you would need more time, but i just want to hear your voice again. i wanna see you i wanna give you a hug and pull any sadness or worry out of you. i wanna be on talking terms with you because i definitely do not like this. i cant see you jumping for the phone once you get out, but i could see you thinking about it. reading over our messages i hate myself. i was so mean to you i was so selfish i wasnt as understanding as i was right away compared to a few days later. i wanted to but i just felt this huge weight on my heart and i felt it breaking and i had no idea what to do. i hope you havent moved on. i hope im still yours in your head. maybe at first glance i have been showing you that i moved on, but look a lil deeper. i havent, in fact i think i miss you more now than ever before. its been a month and i still think about you every day and still wanna love you and get married and have babies. if that was too quick for you im sorry, i just never saw a future with someone more than you. i was really really selfish. i mean i kept thinking about the work ive done and discrediting all the things that you have done for yourself. it takes courage to let someone you love go for the sake of yourself. it doesnt sound courageous it sounds obvious to do but it is not an easy task. i mean that aside everything else youve done. im looking at it as okay this is what you have this is what you have to do, but its probably much easier to say to do it than to actually have it and get it done. i probably shouldve recognized that more. i mean i see it first hand every day. but i cannot stress how proud i was and how proud i still am of you trying therapy trying to get a schedule trying to do the thing that you have to do for yourself all while working to keep me happy. thank you for that. it took me a little bit longer to see and its not something thats easy for me to stay completely calm with because of the type of relationship we have, but please know that i do want to. i didnt want to put the blame on you above having to work with you for this for so long for you to dump me. i should have never added that burden onto you. i never would take back those six months, i never would ever want you to think i just did that because we were in a relationship, i want you to know that i did try working with you because i wanted to. it was brave of you to tell me all these things. youre very prideful and i can only imagine what it took for you to even bring this stuff up with me. i should have been much more level-headed and understanding. i wish i could have made you happier, i wish i couldve been a stronger girlfriend for you, i wish you didnt have to go through all of that alone for so long. im happy you told me though, im happy you were mature enough to do something so risky for the sake of you and us. it shows me who you are as a person. (just next time can we try to work together, im just thinking hypotheticals but if we were married or had a family and needed time to step back... i dont know how that would play out.) for that tho im praying you learned a new way to calm yourself down when things got overwhelming or maybe a new hobby so if you started to feel sad or needed time away from life you werent just sitting in bed becuase although that might feel great it does more damage than anything else. im praying you learned more about what causes this, whether its a big paper coming up, or a grade thats expected, or maybe you slipped in one class and now youre slipping in another that makes you not want to do any work. something so that when it does happen you can be like no i know this pattern lets try to subside it. thats ultimately what i want you to be able to do and maybe this break was what you needed the most. i should've known better tho, i shouldve known that you werent yourself and things were off and it wasnt something wrong with me but something wrong with you. i mean the signs were there. not jillian or carols signs but they were there. i cant wait to hear about everything that youve done! im so excited to hear form you again. i hope its sooner rather than later, but either way id be happy. i love you so much and ill always love you with all of my heart, never think that i wont please.

[fesahaawit]

Big Family Minimalism

This is a guest post from my friend Jillian. It dawned on me, recently, that I don’t think I’ve ever had a guest post about family. Jillian is changing that in a BIG and meaningful way.

I never searched out minimalism. Rather, I stumbled upon it first as a type of survival tool. Our story is a bit of a winding and twisting journey. But our minimalism story starts 3.5 years ago, while I was sitting in a job interview and honestly killing it. The interviewers were over the moon happy to hire me on the spot, but I was distracted. I was trying to hold focus on the interview, but my phone was exploding with text messages and missed calls.

See, while I was interviewing my heart out, a 5-year-old boy with big hazel eyes had just been dropped off at our house by a social worker. He had been in foster care for a while and had disrupted from the last 5 homes. (This happens when foster parents or the birth family aren’t able to meet the child’s needs and a new family has to be found.) The social worker was rather confident we couldn’t handle him either. I have soft eyes and a sweet smile that hides the depth of my love, tenacity, and gumption. She mentioned, almost offhandedly, he also had two little sisters. No other family had been able to keep them together and the “state” didn’t want to attempt to place them together again. I just smiled my sweet smile and said, “Well, we aren’t every other family. When you are ready, we are ready for anything.”

It was lie. No one is ever fully ready. His little sisters moved in a few months later. I quit my job. I lived at the end of my rope for the next year.

Having four little kids at home is a lot (6, 5, 2 and 1). Just that alone. But it wasn’t just that. There were 12 appointments a week of various meetings, therapies, and with professionals. There were difficult visits with birth parents. There were court dates and a rotating door of overworked social workers. There were lawyers, judges, and court-appointed advocates. There was the uncertainty of not knowing what the future held for these kids I loved so much.

Plus, there were these sweet kids. They had seen so much trauma and neglect in their short lives that every behaviour was broken. I had the skill, knowledge, tools, and love that was needed. But I was exhausted. Like lay on the floor at night after I tucked them in and cry silent, hot tears exhausted. Until their nightmares started. Every one-to-two hours during the night for 3 years.

It’s all too much. A life at the end of our rope.

We were all at the ends of our rope. While it was challenging to be the ringleader of this circus, it wasn’t any easier for my kids. The two-year-old had lived with 5 different families before us. She called me and her birth mom, mama. They had to be dragged to appointments and meeting after meeting. They had their own trauma and no skills or words to express what they were feeling.

Just getting them ready for the twice-weekly visits with birth parents would nearly break us. They were excited, terrified, overwhelmed, full of dread, happy, conflicted: all at the same time. So they hit each other, melted down, took off their clothes, bit each other, screamed, hid and lost their coats. It was like dressing a whole litter of pissed off kittens into costumes and taking their picture. I would arrive to drop the kids off at the visit only to be criticized, belittled or ignored by the birth family. I would smile my sweet smile then go cry alone in my mini-van.

The foster care process isn’t easy or fun for anyone—not foster parents, not kids and not birth families. They lived in a constant state of anxiety not knowing if they would be with us for the next birthday, or at Christmas, or when school starts. No one knew.

So minimalism found us.

I imagine most people start with minimalism with their stuff. Decluttering and all. Maybe they read an awesome blog, or hear a podcast, and think “I SHOULD get rid of some of this stuff!”

I needed it in every area of my life, all at once. I dubbed 2015 the year of “Easier, not harder”. That was my only litmus test. Is this easier or harder?

I stopped wearing color because I didn’t have the time or skill to coordinate outfits.

I said no, and opted out of most of my commitments that were, in fact, optional.

I pulled my kids from sports.

I ate the same breakfast every single day.

I told all my kids teachers we weren’t doing any homework. ANY. No signing reading charts, no math worksheets, no flashcards. We aren’t doing it. I’m not signing it. Honestly, I’m not even going to look at it. I was so thankful for what the teachers were doing at school, but I couldn’t add “teacher” to my list of things to squeeze into our evenings.

I had to set boundaries with professionals. “No, I can’t change our appointment time every single week. Either keep our set time, or we skip it.” With 12 appointments on the calendar, having them all shift by 30 minutes or 2 hours IS a big deal.

I had to learn minimalism in my relationships. Most people were incredibly supportive, encouraging, and really understood the importance of what we were doing. And some people . . . didn’t. I didn’t have any leftover emotional energy to hear, “Why are you doing this? Why don’t you just give them back? The system is so broken, you shouldn’t have to put up with this. It’s fine if you want those kids in your family, but even if you adopt them, it doesn’t mean they are part of our family.”

I started owning the fact that I live in a real human body that needs food, water, exercise, and sleep. I started to accommodate those seemingly unreasonable demands of my non-robot body.

Bit by bit, we were doing better. Not just surviving with our nose barely above the waves, but almost flourishing.

Then in the same week in June 2015: We were officially asked to adopt our kids, and we found out we were pregnant.

Enter minimalism, level ninja.

I’ll admit, I had a bit of a mommy meltdown when I found out we were pregnant. Sure, we had spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on fertility treatments over the years. Sure, we had tried for 7 years. But now? Adding a baby definitely didn’t fall into my “easier, not harder” motto.

We had been shopping for a bigger house. We were a family of 6 in 1,650 cozy square feet. A bigger house seemed to make sense. Every single person who came to our house echoed the words, “So when are you moving to a bigger place?” like it was the chorus line in a Disney movie.

But the saying “a baby changes everything” is true.

Turns out, we didn’t want more and bigger. Our entire life already felt “more and bigger”. We wanted less. Actually, we all needed less.

Less clutter. Less cleaning. Less overwhelm. Less hectic.  Less appointments.

We needed margin for the right kind of more. More engagement. More quiet. More stories and cuddles. More adventure. More travel. More time in the garden. More focused time. More creativity.

More stuff and more space weren’t going to give us any of that.

We donated 50% of the kid’s toys, and decided to only keep 3 out at a time to play with. And I saw the kids settle in. Instead of the anxiety, overwhelm, fighting, and frustration they felt when confronted with a massive heap of toys, they just played. Slowly, carefully, thoughtfully with one toy. There was no cleaning up, correcting, and prompting at the end of the night. Each child set one toy on a shelf and it was over. That one simple change freed up a mountain of emotional and relational energy.

I made it a mission to touch every item in our house. I would ask a few questions. Is this a “hard-working” item, or is it “lazy”? Because we didn’t have space for lazy items. Our home couldn’t be a storage unit for barely used items. I would ask, “If I didn’t already own this and saw it at a yard sale for $5 would I buy it instantly, and with joy?” Because if it doesn’t add $5 of value, it doesn’t deserve a place in our home.

Minimalism is an act of faith at first. We paired our life down—appointments, relationships, classes, sports, commitments, stuff—with no guarantee of a better outcome. There was no promise in writing that what we would gain would be better than what we were letting go of.

You pull your kid from a sport and just hope. Hope that the extra two hours a week somehow adds as much value as the sport was adding. It takes a bit a faith to hold space. To create margin and not rush to fill it up again.

We got rid of “perfectly good” toys. (Ok, and a crap ton of McDonald’s happy meal toys.) It’s an act of faith to say, “We are going to donate all these ‘perfectly good’ toys that at one point we actually spent money on,” and just hope that “less is more”.

To the parents.

I kind of just want to give you a hug, at this point. I’ve raised six kids (my oldest passed away). I have to say that motherhood, in the thick of it, is the hardest and most beautiful part of my life. It has been my defining work.

So, if you feel like your kids will kick, scream, and cry themselves into a puddle, if there were less toys, less classes, less sports, less commitments. Remember this: If you are maxed out, they are maxed out.

My very normal kids hate picking up toys. Actually, I think they hated it even more than I did. They hated being corralled into the van. They hated the rush and my grumpy “Where in the world are your shoes!? Why are they in the bathtub? Can anyone answer me this!?! WAIT!?! Why are you covered in purple paint? OMG, I don’t even care. Come on. We are SO late. Please, please, please just put your shoes on.”

Despite what it seems, minimalism is a perfect fit for families. Here is how we started this journey with the toys. (Because no one likes living in a house that looks like a daycare crossed paths with a tornado!) I had this conversation with my four kids who at the time were 3-8:

“I think I haven’t been doing a good job. I think maybe I’ve made it too hard for you guys to pick up your room. The job is simply too hard. And that’s my fault. So here’s what we will do. You pick up as many toys as you can handle. Then I will come clean up the rest. I’ll put them away on this special toy shelf. Anything you can take care of, just pick up and you can keep that in your room. The only rule is, only keep as much as you can handle. If it gets to be too much for you to take care of on your own, I’ll come put it away.”

They managed to clean/organize about 5 toys. All the rest I took out of their room and put on a “toy shelf” that they could swap toys (if their room was clean).

It also made it simple to see what toys we could sneak away in the dark of night. If they hadn’t picked the toy off toy shelf in a few months, obviously it wasn’t a high-value toy. (If your 4-year-old willingly parts with toys, I salute you, dear Jedi Master! We are SO not there yet!)

For parents who are terrified to start, this is about an easy of a sell as you can get. And my kids loved it. No shame, no blame. Just me making their life easier. No more cleaning, no more tears over not being able to organize their room.

Big family minimalism.

When you walk into our home, “minimalism” might not be your first thought. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is white (even stuff that was white when we bought it!). There is a pile of shoes and coats and winter boots by the door. It’s loud with laughing, playing, and often someone is crying. I’m probably making chocolate chips pancakes. I’ll make you a cup of tea, but a toddler will interrupt our conversation every 90 seconds.

But if you look closely, you’ll see a family flourishing with less. Happy, healthy and whole. Our days are full of reading, writing, folding laundry, hiking, gardening, and travel. We eat real food, at a table. We have adventures on the weekend and a game night each Friday. We get enough sleep and have real conversations.

Sometimes I let myself wonder what our alternate life would look like. What path our three adopted kids might have taken if they didn’t end up together with us? But I don’t stay there long. Because my 90 seconds is up and a 4-year-old is peppering me with questions again (that I have already answered 12 times today).

Jillian drinks tea daily and writes about intentional lifestyle design, mini-retirements and creating financial freedom over at Montana Money Adventures. She lives in Montana, right by Glacier National Park, with her husband, 5 kids, and dog: cheesy taco. 

Big Family Minimalism posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnwIdQ

[fesahaawit]

Big Family Minimalism

This is a guest post from my friend Jillian. It dawned on me, recently, that I don’t think I’ve ever had a guest post about family. Jillian is changing that in a BIG and meaningful way.

I never searched out minimalism. Rather, I stumbled upon it first as a type of survival tool. Our story is a bit of a winding and twisting journey. But our minimalism story starts 3.5 years ago, while I was sitting in a job interview and honestly killing it. The interviewers were over the moon happy to hire me on the spot, but I was distracted. I was trying to hold focus on the interview, but my phone was exploding with text messages and missed calls.

See, while I was interviewing my heart out, a 5-year-old boy with big hazel eyes had just been dropped off at our house by a social worker. He had been in foster care for a while and had disrupted from the last 5 homes. (This happens when foster parents or the birth family aren’t able to meet the child’s needs and a new family has to be found.) The social worker was rather confident we couldn’t handle him either. I have soft eyes and a sweet smile that hides the depth of my love, tenacity, and gumption. She mentioned, almost offhandedly, he also had two little sisters. No other family had been able to keep them together and the “state” didn’t want to attempt to place them together again. I just smiled my sweet smile and said, “Well, we aren’t every other family. When you are ready, we are ready for anything.”

It was lie. No one is ever fully ready. His little sisters moved in a few months later. I quit my job. I lived at the end of my rope for the next year.

Having four little kids at home is a lot (6, 5, 2 and 1). Just that alone. But it wasn’t just that. There were 12 appointments a week of various meetings, therapies, and with professionals. There were difficult visits with birth parents. There were court dates and a rotating door of overworked social workers. There were lawyers, judges, and court-appointed advocates. There was the uncertainty of not knowing what the future held for these kids I loved so much.

Plus, there were these sweet kids. They had seen so much trauma and neglect in their short lives that every behaviour was broken. I had the skill, knowledge, tools, and love that was needed. But I was exhausted. Like lay on the floor at night after I tucked them in and cry silent, hot tears exhausted. Until their nightmares started. Every one-to-two hours during the night for 3 years.

It’s all too much. A life at the end of our rope.

We were all at the ends of our rope. While it was challenging to be the ringleader of this circus, it wasn’t any easier for my kids. The two-year-old had lived with 5 different families before us. She called me and her birth mom, mama. They had to be dragged to appointments and meeting after meeting. They had their own trauma and no skills or words to express what they were feeling.

Just getting them ready for the twice-weekly visits with birth parents would nearly break us. They were excited, terrified, overwhelmed, full of dread, happy, conflicted: all at the same time. So they hit each other, melted down, took off their clothes, bit each other, screamed, hid and lost their coats. It was like dressing a whole litter of pissed off kittens into costumes and taking their picture. I would arrive to drop the kids off at the visit only to be criticized, belittled or ignored by the birth family. I would smile my sweet smile then go cry alone in my mini-van.

The foster care process isn’t easy or fun for anyone—not foster parents, not kids and not birth families. They lived in a constant state of anxiety not knowing if they would be with us for the next birthday, or at Christmas, or when school starts. No one knew.

So minimalism found us.

I imagine most people start with minimalism with their stuff. Decluttering and all. Maybe they need an awesome blog, or hear a podcast, and think “I SHOULD get rid of some of this stuff!”

I needed it in every area of my life, all at once. I dubbed 2015 the year of “Easier, not harder”. That was my only litmus test. Is this easier or harder?

I stopped wearing color because I didn’t have the time or skill to coordinate outfits.

I said no, and opted out of most of my commitments that were, in fact, optional.

I pulled my kids from sports.

I ate the same breakfast every single day.

I told all my kids teachers we weren’t doing any homework. ANY. No signing reading charts, no math worksheets, no flashcards. We aren’t doing it. I’m not signing it. Honestly, I’m not even going to look at it. I was so thankful for what the teachers were doing at school, but I couldn’t add “teacher” to my list of things to squeeze into our evenings.

I had to set boundaries with professionals. “No, I can’t change our appointment time every single week. Either keep our set time, or we skip it.” With 12 appointments on the calendar, having them all shift by 30 minutes or 2 hours IS a big deal.

I had to learn minimalism in my relationships. Most people were incredibly supportive, encouraging, and really understood the importance of what we were doing. And some people . . . didn’t. I didn’t have any leftover emotional energy to hear, “Why are you doing this? Why don’t you just give them back? The system is so broken, you shouldn’t have to put up with this. It’s fine if you want those kids in your family, but even if you adopt them, it doesn’t mean they are part of our family.”

I started owning the fact that I live in a real human body that needs food, water, exercise, and sleep. I started to accommodate those seemingly unreasonable demands of my non-robot body.

Bit by bit, we were doing better. Not just surviving with our nose barely above the waves, but almost flourishing.

Then in the same week in June 2015: We were officially asked to adopt our kids, and we found out we were pregnant.

Enter minimalism, level ninja.

I’ll admit, I had a bit of a mommy meltdown when I found out we were pregnant. Sure, we had spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on fertility treatments over the years. Sure, we had tried for 7 years. But now? Adding a baby definitely didn’t fall into my “easier, not harder” motto.

We had been shopping for a bigger house. We were a family of 6 in 1,650 cozy square feet. A bigger house seemed to make sense. Every single person who came to our house echoed the words, “So when are you moving to a bigger place?” like it was the chorus line in a Disney movie.

But the saying “a baby changes everything” is true.

Turns out, we didn’t want more and bigger. Our entire life already felt “more and bigger”. We wanted less. Actually, we all needed less.

Less clutter. Less cleaning. Less overwhelm. Less hectic.  Less appointments.

We needed margin for the right kind of more. More engagement. More quiet. More stories and cuddles. More adventure. More travel. More time in the garden. More focused time. More creativity.

More stuff and more space weren’t going to give us any of that.

We donated 50% of the kid’s toys, and decided to only keep 3 out at a time to play with. And I saw the kids settle in. Instead of the anxiety, overwhelm, fighting, and frustration they felt when confronted with a massive heap of toys, they just played. Slowly, carefully, thoughtfully with one toy. There was no cleaning up, correcting, and promoting at the end of the night. Each child set one toy on a shelf and it was over. That one simple change freed up a mountain of emotional and relational energy.

I made it a mission to touch every item in our house. I would ask a few questions. Is this a “hard-working” item, or is it “lazy”? Because we didn’t have space for lazy items. Our home couldn’t be a storage unit for barely used items. I would ask, “If I didn’t already own this and saw it at a yard sale for $5 would I buy it instantly, and with joy?” Because if it doesn’t add $5 of value, it doesn’t deserve a place in our home.

Minimalism is an act of faith at first. We paired our life down—appointments, relationships, classes, sports, commitments, stuff—with no guarantee of a better outcome. There was no promise in writing that what we would gain would be better than what we were letting go of.

You pull your kid from a sport and just hope. Hope that the extra two hours a week somehow adds as much value as the sport was adding. It takes a bit a faith to hold space. To create margin and not rush to fill it up again.

We got rid of “perfectly good” toys. (Ok, and a crap ton of McDonald’s happy meal toys.) It’s an act of faith to say, “We are going to donate all these ‘perfectly good’ toys that at one point we actually spent money on,” and just hope that “less is more”.

To the parents.

I kind of just want to give you a hug, at this point. I’ve raised six kids (my oldest passed away). I have to say that motherhood, in the thick of it, is the hardest and most beautiful part of my life. It has been my defining work.

So, if you feel like your kids will kick, scream, and cry themselves into a puddle, if there were less toys, less classes, less sports, less commitments. Remember this: If you are maxed out, they are maxed out.

My very normal kids hate picking up toys. Actually, I think they hated it even more than I did. They hated being corralled into the van. They hated the rush and my grumpy “Where in the world are your shoes!? Why are they in the bathtub? Can anyone answer me this!?! WAIT!?! Why are you covered in purple paint? OMG, I don’t even care. Come on. We are SO late. Please, please, please just put your shoes on.”

Despite what it seems, minimalism is a perfect fit for families. Here is how we started this journey with the toys. (Because no one likes living in a house that looks like a daycare crossed paths with a tornado!) I had this conversation with my four kids who at the time were 3-8:

“I think I haven’t been doing a good job. I think maybe I’ve made it too hard for you guys to pick up your room. The job is simply too hard. And that’s my fault. So here’s what we will do. You pick up as many toys as you can handle. Then I will come clean up the rest. I’ll put them away on this special toy shelf. Anything you can take care of, just pick up and you can keep that in your room. The only rule is, only keep as much as you can handle. If it gets to be too much for you to take care of on your own, I’ll come put it away.”

They managed to clean/organize about 5 toys. All the rest I took out of their room and put on a “toy shelf” that they could swap toys (if their room was clean).

It also made it simple to see what toys we could sneak away in the dark of night. If they hadn’t picked the toy off toy shelf in a few months, obviously it wasn’t a high-value toy. (If your 4-year-old willingly parts with toys, I salute you, dear Jedi Master! We are SO not there yet!)

For parents who are terrified to start, this is about an easy of a sell as you can get. And my kids loved it. No shame, no blame. Just me making their life easier. No more cleaning, no more tears over not being able to organize their room.

Big family minimalism.

When you walk into our home, “minimalism” might not be your first thought. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is white (even stuff that was white when we bought it!). There is a pile of shoes and coats and winter boots by the door. It’s loud with laughing, playing, and often someone is crying. I’m probably making chocolate chips pancakes. I’ll make you a cup of tea, but a toddler will interrupt our conversation every 90 seconds.

But if you look closely, you’ll see a family flourishing with less. Happy, healthy and whole. Our days are full of reading, writing, folding laundry, hiking, gardening, and travel. We eat real food, at a table. We have adventures on the weekend and a game night each Friday. We get enough sleep and have real conversations.

Sometimes I let myself wonder what our alternate life would look like. What path our three adopted kids might have taken if they didn’t end up together with us? But I don’t stay there long. Because my 90 seconds is up and a 4-year-old is peppering me with questions again (that I have already answered 12 times today).

Jillian drinks tea daily and writes about intentional lifestyle design, mini-retirements and creating financial freedom over at Montana Money Adventures. She lives in Montana, right by Glacier National Park, with her husband, 5 kids, and dog: cheesy taco. 

Big Family Minimalism posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnwIdQ

[fesahaawit]

Big Family Minimalism

This is a guest post from my friend Jillian. It dawned on me, recently, that I don’t think I’ve ever had a guest post about family. Jillian is changing that in a BIG and meaningful way.

I never searched out minimalism. Rather, I stumbled upon it first as a type of survival tool. Our story is a bit of a winding and twisting journey. But our minimalism story starts 3.5 years ago, while I was sitting in a job interview and honestly killing it. The interviewers were over the moon happy to hire me on the spot, but I was distracted. I was trying to hold focus on the interview, but my phone was exploding with text messages and missed calls.

See, while I was interviewing my heart out, a 5-year-old boy with big hazel eyes had just been dropped off at our house by a social worker. He had been in foster care for a while and had disrupted from the last 5 homes. (This happens when foster parents or the birth family aren’t able to meet the child’s needs and a new family has to be found.) The social worker was rather confident we couldn’t handle him either. I have soft eyes and a sweet smile that hides the depth of my love, tenacity, and gumption. She mentioned, almost offhandedly, he also had two little sisters. No other family had been able to keep them together and the “state” didn’t want to attempt to place them together again. I just smiled my sweet smile and said, “Well, we aren’t every other family. When you are ready, we are ready for anything.”

It was lie. No one is ever fully ready. His little sisters moved in a few months later. I quit my job. I lived at the end of my rope for the next year.

Having four little kids at home is a lot (6, 5, 2 and 1). Just that alone. But it wasn’t just that. There were 12 appointments a week of various meetings, therapies, and with professionals. There were difficult visits with birth parents. There were court dates and a rotating door of overworked social workers. There were lawyers, judges, and court-appointed advocates. There was the uncertainty of not knowing what the future held for these kids I loved so much.

Plus, there were these sweet kids. They had seen so much trauma and neglect in their short lives that every behaviour was broken. I had the skill, knowledge, tools, and love that was needed. But I was exhausted. Like lay on the floor at night after I tucked them in and cry silent, hot tears exhausted. Until their nightmares started. Every one-to-two hours during the night for 3 years.

It’s all too much. A life at the end of our rope.

We were all at the ends of our rope. While it was challenging to be the ringleader of this circus, it wasn’t any easier for my kids. The two-year-old had lived with 5 different families before us. She called me and her birth mom, mama. They had to be dragged to appointments and meeting after meeting. They had their own trauma and no skills or words to express what they were feeling.

Just getting them ready for the twice-weekly visits with birth parents would nearly break us. They were excited, terrified, overwhelmed, full of dread, happy, conflicted: all at the same time. So they hit each other, melted down, took off their clothes, bit each other, screamed, hid and lost their coats. It was like dressing a whole litter of pissed off kittens into costumes and taking their picture. I would arrive to drop the kids off at the visit only to be criticized, belittled or ignored by the birth family. I would smile my sweet smile then go cry alone in my mini-van.

The foster care process isn’t easy or fun for anyone—not foster parents, not kids and not birth families. They lived in a constant state of anxiety not knowing if they would be with us for the next birthday, or at Christmas, or when school starts. No one knew.

So minimalism found us.

I imagine most people start with minimalism with their stuff. Decluttering and all. Maybe they need an awesome blog, or hear a podcast, and think “I SHOULD get rid of some of this stuff!”

I needed it in every area of my life, all at once. I dubbed 2015 the year of “Easier, not harder”. That was my only litmus test. Is this easier or harder?

I stopped wearing color because I didn’t have the time or skill to coordinate outfits.

I said no, and opted out of most of my commitments that were, in fact, optional.

I pulled my kids from sports.

I ate the same breakfast every single day.

I told all my kids teachers we weren’t doing any homework. ANY. No signing reading charts, no math worksheets, no flashcards. We aren’t doing it. I’m not signing it. Honestly, I’m not even going to look at it. I was so thankful for what the teachers were doing at school, but I couldn’t add “teacher” to my list of things to squeeze into our evenings.

I had to set boundaries with professionals. “No, I can’t change our appointment time every single week. Either keep our set time, or we skip it.” With 12 appointments on the calendar, having them all shift by 30 minutes or 2 hours IS a big deal.

I had to learn minimalism in my relationships. Most people were incredibly supportive, encouraging, and really understood the importance of what we were doing. And some people . . . didn’t. I didn’t have any leftover emotional energy to hear, “Why are you doing this? Why don’t you just give them back? The system is so broken, you shouldn’t have to put up with this. It’s fine if you want those kids in your family, but even if you adopt them, it doesn’t mean they are part of our family.”

I started owning the fact that I live in a real human body that needs food, water, exercise, and sleep. I started to accommodate those seemingly unreasonable demands of my non-robot body.

Bit by bit, we were doing better. Not just surviving with our nose barely above the waves, but almost flourishing.

Then in the same week in June 2015: We were officially asked to adopt our kids, and we found out we were pregnant.

Enter minimalism, level ninja.

I’ll admit, I had a bit of a mommy meltdown when I found out we were pregnant. Sure, we had spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on fertility treatments over the years. Sure, we had tried for 7 years. But now? Adding a baby definitely didn’t fall into my “easier, not harder” motto.

We had been shopping for a bigger house. We were a family of 6 in 1,650 cozy square feet. A bigger house seemed to make sense. Every single person who came to our house echoed the words, “So when are you moving to a bigger place?” like it was the chorus line in a Disney movie.

But the saying “a baby changes everything” is true.

Turns out, we didn’t want more and bigger. Our entire life already felt “more and bigger”. We wanted less. Actually, we all needed less.

Less clutter. Less cleaning. Less overwhelm. Less hectic.  Less appointments.

We needed margin for the right kind of more. More engagement. More quiet. More stories and cuddles. More adventure. More travel. More time in the garden. More focused time. More creativity.

More stuff and more space weren’t going to give us any of that.

We donated 50% of the kid’s toys, and decided to only keep 3 out at a time to play with. And I saw the kids settle in. Instead of the anxiety, overwhelm, fighting, and frustration they felt when confronted with a massive heap of toys, they just played. Slowly, carefully, thoughtfully with one toy. There was no cleaning up, correcting, and promoting at the end of the night. Each child set one toy on a shelf and it was over. That one simple change freed up a mountain of emotional and relational energy.

I made it a mission to touch every item in our house. I would ask a few questions. Is this a “hard-working” item, or is it “lazy”? Because we didn’t have space for lazy items. Our home couldn’t be a storage unit for barely used items. I would ask, “If I didn’t already own this and saw it at a yard sale for $5 would I buy it instantly, and with joy?” Because if it doesn’t add $5 of value, it doesn’t deserve a place in our home.

Minimalism is an act of faith at first. We paired our life down—appointments, relationships, classes, sports, commitments, stuff—with no guarantee of a better outcome. There was no promise in writing that what we would gain would be better than what we were letting go of.

You pull your kid from a sport and just hope. Hope that the extra two hours a week somehow adds as much value as the sport was adding. It takes a bit a faith to hold space. To create margin and not rush to fill it up again.

We got rid of “perfectly good” toys. (Ok, and a crap ton of McDonald’s happy meal toys.) It’s an act of faith to say, “We are going to donate all these ‘perfectly good’ toys that at one point we actually spent money on,” and just hope that “less is more”.

To the parents.

I kind of just want to give you a hug, at this point. I’ve raised six kids (my oldest passed away). I have to say that motherhood, in the thick of it, is the hardest and most beautiful part of my life. It has been my defining work.

So, if you feel like your kids will kick, scream, and cry themselves into a puddle, if there were less toys, less classes, less sports, less commitments. Remember this: If you are maxed out, they are maxed out.

My very normal kids hate picking up toys. Actually, I think they hated it even more than I did. They hated being corralled into the van. They hated the rush and my grumpy “Where in the world are your shoes!? Why are they in the bathtub? Can anyone answer me this!?! WAIT!?! Why are you covered in purple paint? OMG, I don’t even care. Come on. We are SO late. Please, please, please just put your shoes on.”

Despite what it seems, minimalism is a perfect fit for families. Here is how we started this journey with the toys. (Because no one likes living in a house that looks like a daycare crossed paths with a tornado!) I had this conversation with my four kids who at the time were 3-8:

“I think I haven’t been doing a good job. I think maybe I’ve made it too hard for you guys to pick up your room. The job is simply too hard. And that’s my fault. So here’s what we will do. You pick up as many toys as you can handle. Then I will come clean up the rest. I’ll put them away on this special toy shelf. Anything you can take care of, just pick up and you can keep that in your room. The only rule is, only keep as much as you can handle. If it gets to be too much for you to take care of on your own, I’ll come put it away.”

They managed to clean/organize about 5 toys. All the rest I took out of their room and put on a “toy shelf” that they could swap toys (if their room was clean).

It also made it simple to see what toys we could sneak away in the dark of night. If they hadn’t picked the toy off toy shelf in a few months, obviously it wasn’t a high-value toy. (If your 4-year-old willingly parts with toys, I salute you, dear Jedi Master! We are SO not there yet!)

For parents who are terrified to start, this is about an easy of a sell as you can get. And my kids loved it. No shame, no blame. Just me making their life easier. No more cleaning, no more tears over not being able to organize their room.

Big family minimalism.

When you walk into our home, “minimalism” might not be your first thought. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is white (even stuff that was white when we bought it!). There is a pile of shoes and coats and winter boots by the door. It’s loud with laughing, playing, and often someone is crying. I’m probably making chocolate chips pancakes. I’ll make you a cup of tea, but a toddler will interrupt our conversation every 90 seconds.

But if you look closely, you’ll see a family flourishing with less. Happy, healthy and whole. Our days are full of reading, writing, folding laundry, hiking, gardening, and travel. We eat real food, at a table. We have adventures on the weekend and a game night each Friday. We get enough sleep and have real conversations.

Sometimes I let myself wonder what our alternate life would look like. What path our three adopted kids might have taken if they didn’t end up together with us? But I don’t stay there long. Because my 90 seconds is up and a 4-year-old is peppering me with questions again (that I have already answered 12 times today).

Jillian drinks tea daily and writes about intentional lifestyle design, mini-retirements and creating financial freedom over at Montana Money Adventures. She lives in Montana, right by Glacier National Park, with her husband, 5 kids, and dog: cheesy taco. 

Big Family Minimalism posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnwIdQ

[fesahaawit]

Big Family Minimalism

This is a guest post from my friend Jillian. It dawned on me, recently, that I don’t think I’ve ever had a guest post about family. Jillian is changing that in a BIG and meaningful way.

I never searched out minimalism. Rather, I stumbled upon it first as a type of survival tool. Our story is a bit of a winding and twisting journey. But our minimalism story starts 3.5 years ago, while I was sitting in a job interview and honestly killing it. The interviewers were over the moon happy to hire me on the spot, but I was distracted. I was trying to hold focus on the interview, but my phone was exploding with text messages and missed calls.

See, while I was interviewing my heart out, a 5-year-old boy with big hazel eyes had just been dropped off at our house by a social worker. He had been in foster care for a while and had disrupted from the last 5 homes. (This happens when foster parents or the birth family aren’t able to meet the child’s needs and a new family has to be found.) The social worker was rather confident we couldn’t handle him either. I have soft eyes and a sweet smile that hides the depth of my love, tenacity, and gumption. She mentioned, almost offhandedly, he also had two little sisters. No other family had been able to keep them together and the “state” didn’t want to attempt to place them together again. I just smiled my sweet smile and said, “Well, we aren’t every other family. When you are ready, we are ready for anything.”

It was lie. No one is ever fully ready. His little sisters moved in a few months later. I quit my job. I lived at the end of my rope for the next year.

Having four little kids at home is a lot (6, 5, 2 and 1). Just that alone. But it wasn’t just that. There were 12 appointments a week of various meetings, therapies, and with professionals. There were difficult visits with birth parents. There were court dates and a rotating door of overworked social workers. There were lawyers, judges, and court-appointed advocates. There was the uncertainty of not knowing what the future held for these kids I loved so much.

Plus, there were these sweet kids. They had seen so much trauma and neglect in their short lives that every behaviour was broken. I had the skill, knowledge, tools, and love that was needed. But I was exhausted. Like lay on the floor at night after I tucked them in and cry silent, hot tears exhausted. Until their nightmares started. Every one-to-two hours during the night for 3 years.

It’s all too much. A life at the end of our rope.

We were all at the ends of our rope. While it was challenging to be the ringleader of this circus, it wasn’t any easier for my kids. The two-year-old had lived with 5 different families before us. She called me and her birth mom, mama. They had to be dragged to appointments and meeting after meeting. They had their own trauma and no skills or words to express what they were feeling.

Just getting them ready for the twice-weekly visits with birth parents would nearly break us. They were excited, terrified, overwhelmed, full of dread, happy, conflicted: all at the same time. So they hit each other, melted down, took off their clothes, bit each other, screamed, hid and lost their coats. It was like dressing a whole litter of pissed off kittens into costumes and taking their picture. I would arrive to drop the kids off at the visit only to be criticized, belittled or ignored by the birth family. I would smile my sweet smile then go cry alone in my mini-van.

The foster care process isn’t easy or fun for anyone—not foster parents, not kids and not birth families. They lived in a constant state of anxiety not knowing if they would be with us for the next birthday, or at Christmas, or when school starts. No one knew.

So minimalism found us.

I imagine most people start with minimalism with their stuff. Decluttering and all. Maybe they need an awesome blog, or hear a podcast, and think “I SHOULD get rid of some of this stuff!”

I needed it in every area of my life, all at once. I dubbed 2015 the year of “Easier, not harder”. That was my only litmus test. Is this easier or harder?

I stopped wearing color because I didn’t have the time or skill to coordinate outfits.

I said no, and opted out of most of my commitments that were, in fact, optional.

I pulled my kids from sports.

I ate the same breakfast every single day.

I told all my kids teachers we weren’t doing any homework. ANY. No signing reading charts, no math worksheets, no flashcards. We aren’t doing it. I’m not signing it. Honestly, I’m not even going to look at it. I was so thankful for what the teachers were doing at school, but I couldn’t add “teacher” to my list of things to squeeze into our evenings.

I had to set boundaries with professionals. “No, I can’t change our appointment time every single week. Either keep our set time, or we skip it.” With 12 appointments on the calendar, having them all shift by 30 minutes or 2 hours IS a big deal.

I had to learn minimalism in my relationships. Most people were incredibly supportive, encouraging, and really understood the importance of what we were doing. And some people . . . didn’t. I didn’t have any leftover emotional energy to hear, “Why are you doing this? Why don’t you just give them back? The system is so broken, you shouldn’t have to put up with this. It’s fine if you want those kids in your family, but even if you adopt them, it doesn’t mean they are part of our family.”

I started owning the fact that I live in a real human body that needs food, water, exercise, and sleep. I started to accommodate those seemingly unreasonable demands of my non-robot body.

Bit by bit, we were doing better. Not just surviving with our nose barely above the waves, but almost flourishing.

Then in the same week in June 2015: We were officially asked to adopt our kids, and we found out we were pregnant.

Enter minimalism, level ninja.

I’ll admit, I had a bit of a mommy meltdown when I found out we were pregnant. Sure, we had spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on fertility treatments over the years. Sure, we had tried for 7 years. But now? Adding a baby definitely didn’t fall into my “easier, not harder” motto.

We had been shopping for a bigger house. We were a family of 6 in 1,650 cozy square feet. A bigger house seemed to make sense. Every single person who came to our house echoed the words, “So when are you moving to a bigger place?” like it was the chorus line in a Disney movie.

But the saying “a baby changes everything” is true.

Turns out, we didn’t want more and bigger. Our entire life already felt “more and bigger”. We wanted less. Actually, we all needed less.

Less clutter. Less cleaning. Less overwhelm. Less hectic.  Less appointments.

We needed margin for the right kind of more. More engagement. More quiet. More stories and cuddles. More adventure. More travel. More time in the garden. More focused time. More creativity.

More stuff and more space weren’t going to give us any of that.

We donated 50% of the kid’s toys, and decided to only keep 3 out at a time to play with. And I saw the kids settle in. Instead of the anxiety, overwhelm, fighting, and frustration they felt when confronted with a massive heap of toys, they just played. Slowly, carefully, thoughtfully with one toy. There was no cleaning up, correcting, and promoting at the end of the night. Each child set one toy on a shelf and it was over. That one simple change freed up a mountain of emotional and relational energy.

I made it a mission to touch every item in our house. I would ask a few questions. Is this a “hard-working” item, or is it “lazy”? Because we didn’t have space for lazy items. Our home couldn’t be a storage unit for barely used items. I would ask, “If I didn’t already own this and saw it at a yard sale for $5 would I buy it instantly, and with joy?” Because if it doesn’t add $5 of value, it doesn’t deserve a place in our home.

Minimalism is an act of faith at first. We paired our life down—appointments, relationships, classes, sports, commitments, stuff—with no guarantee of a better outcome. There was no promise in writing that what we would gain would be better than what we were letting go of.

You pull your kid from a sport and just hope. Hope that the extra two hours a week somehow adds as much value as the sport was adding. It takes a bit a faith to hold space. To create margin and not rush to fill it up again.

We got rid of “perfectly good” toys. (Ok, and a crap ton of McDonald’s happy meal toys.) It’s an act of faith to say, “We are going to donate all these ‘perfectly good’ toys that at one point we actually spent money on,” and just hope that “less is more”.

To the parents.

I kind of just want to give you a hug, at this point. I’ve raised six kids (my oldest passed away). I have to say that motherhood, in the thick of it, is the hardest and most beautiful part of my life. It has been my defining work.

So, if you feel like your kids will kick, scream, and cry themselves into a puddle, if there were less toys, less classes, less sports, less commitments. Remember this: If you are maxed out, they are maxed out.

My very normal kids hate picking up toys. Actually, I think they hated it even more than I did. They hated being corralled into the van. They hated the rush and my grumpy “Where in the world are your shoes!? Why are they in the bathtub? Can anyone answer me this!?! WAIT!?! Why are you covered in purple paint? OMG, I don’t even care. Come on. We are SO late. Please, please, please just put your shoes on.”

Despite what it seems, minimalism is a perfect fit for families. Here is how we started this journey with the toys. (Because no one likes living in a house that looks like a daycare crossed paths with a tornado!) I had this conversation with my four kids who at the time were 3-8:

“I think I haven’t been doing a good job. I think maybe I’ve made it too hard for you guys to pick up your room. The job is simply too hard. And that’s my fault. So here’s what we will do. You pick up as many toys as you can handle. Then I will come clean up the rest. I’ll put them away on this special toy shelf. Anything you can take care of, just pick up and you can keep that in your room. The only rule is, only keep as much as you can handle. If it gets to be too much for you to take care of on your own, I’ll come put it away.”

They managed to clean/organize about 5 toys. All the rest I took out of their room and put on a “toy shelf” that they could swap toys (if their room was clean).

It also made it simple to see what toys we could sneak away in the dark of night. If they hadn’t picked the toy off toy shelf in a few months, obviously it wasn’t a high-value toy. (If your 4-year-old willingly parts with toys, I salute you, dear Jedi Master! We are SO not there yet!)

For parents who are terrified to start, this is about an easy of a sell as you can get. And my kids loved it. No shame, no blame. Just me making their life easier. No more cleaning, no more tears over not being able to organize their room.

Big family minimalism.

When you walk into our home, “minimalism” might not be your first thought. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is white (even stuff that was white when we bought it!). There is a pile of shoes and coats and winter boots by the door. It’s loud with laughing, playing, and often someone is crying. I’m probably making chocolate chips pancakes. I’ll make you a cup of tea, but a toddler will interrupt our conversation every 90 seconds.

But if you look closely, you’ll see a family flourishing with less. Happy, healthy and whole. Our days are full of reading, writing, folding laundry, hiking, gardening, and travel. We eat real food, at a table. We have adventures on the weekend and a game night each Friday. We get enough sleep and have real conversations.

Sometimes I let myself wonder what our alternate life would look like. What path our three adopted kids might have taken if they didn’t end up together with us? But I don’t stay there long. Because my 90 seconds is up and a 4-year-old is peppering me with questions again (that I have already answered 12 times today).

Jillian drinks tea daily and writes about intentional lifestyle design, mini-retirements and creating financial freedom over at Montana Money Adventures. She lives in Montana, right by Glacier National Park, with her husband, 5 kids, and dog: cheesy taco. 

Big Family Minimalism posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnwIdQ