I’ve written about the importance of margin in life since very early on in my blogging days. It’s a principle that we’ve consistently tried to apply to our life.
Well, I lost my margin earlier this year and I’m struggling to get it back.
There are a few reasons for this, but the primary issue is that I lost the margin in my Sundays and it has snowballed into a loss of mental margin in my life. Caroline is feeling it as well. I’m not sure what the answer is, but wow. You can know something is true and live it consistently to the point you almost take it for granted, but when it gets messed up… It’s so noticeable the way it negatively impacts your life. We’ve both been in that on-the-verge-of-tears-from-lack-of-downtime feeling so many times in 2023 I’ve lost count.
So that’s what I’ve been up to and why I’ve not been doing much around here. I’ve been mentally tired from lack of introvert downtime and when I’m tired, I’m indecisive. And when I’m indecisive I don’t feel like doing anything that requires much effort. For some reason the older post Parenting and Homeschooling an an Introvert became popular today. I saw it ranking in my sidebar and read it again as well as some of my comments. Still so incredibly accurate. I wrote it when Caroline was almost six and then left a lengthy comment when she was almost 13.5 years old. It’s all still true.
We celebrated It’s A Girl Day and Mother’s Day this month. Thankfully we’ve been doing well with our homeschooling since I’ve prioritized that above everything else. Caroline and I have been playing Yahtzee almost every school day for the past few weeks and having lots of fun with it. David and I are finally watching the Victoria series they bought for my birthday last year. We’re half way through Season 3. I watched it in real time on PBS and then on Amazon Prime at one point so I’ve seen it a few times. David has never seen it so he’s enjoying it. At least I feel like I’m accomplishing something by watching the series with him.
It’s now the middle of May and I don’t have our winter clothes packed away because it feels like too much work. Yes, that’s how bad it’s been. Maybe this weekend I’ll get it done.
This too shall pass. Eventually.
Morning Hope – Genesis 1
Hello Sallie,
This article resonates with me so very much. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been on that non-stop going-fast feeling and I’m tired. I have 3 daughters, a 15 (gifted/introvert, highly artistic), my 11 year old Pre-Pointe ballerina that just got promoted to En Pointe!, and my 8 year old that wants to do the same or more than her older sisters. And I tutored this year as a Challenge B CC tutor. But, I’m pulling out my eldest and youngest from CC bcuz it just doesn’t work for them.
I’m yearning my Sabbath day so much, which I do on Saturdays and Sundays.
I’m enjoying your site so much and learning how to help my eldest with schooling and life with your articles.
Thank you!
Hi Charlene,
Thank you for your comment. I’m glad you’ve found my content helpful. I have a lot more I plan on writing about homeschooling and parenting when I get my thoughts collected enough to write something coherent. LOL. A gifted/2e, introverted, artistic child is something I understand. That’s my wheelhouse. LOL!
Re: Saturday and Sunday. That’s something I’m having to rethink again for our family. We typically do not run errands, shop, etc. on Saturdays because I know it makes Sundays more difficult. I’ve thought about taking Mondays off when our Sunday is too full, but that doesn’t seem to work either. We thrive on rhythm/routine and it simply blows it all up for the week. I’m not sure what the answer is short of resigning from my new responsibilities and simply not taking anything up until I’ve finished my parenting/homeschooling responsibilities. I don’t want to do that so I’m hoping the Lord will show me another solution. But it may be it’s simply not the right time for all this.
Sallie
Hi Sallie,
Sometimes you can spend too much time in your head. A good walk habit, being outdoors everyday for a small amount of time can do wonders to clean out the cob webs. Always on calculating mode, trying to cover all the angles can be burdensome after a while. Leave the clothes until… throw them into the closet out of sight for now. Make a lasagna, open a bottle of good Tuscan, wine put on a little Vivaldi and chow down in the garden. We all feel the way you do at various times…
Hi Thomas,
It’s actually the opposite problem. I don’t have enough time to be in my head. I am rarely alone so I don’t get the introverted mental processing time I need. When I get a day in which David and Caroline go out together for four or five hours to run errands, etc. I feel like a different person when they get home. My head is clearer and I’m more relaxed. I rarely get that opportunity since I became a mother. That’s just the way it is. Adding just a few responsibilities at church has simply made it worse because now I have more to think about and even less time to process it.
I wish I could take a walk every day. Once mid-April hits, it’s either pollen or humidity that forces me inside. And with my EoE, food isn’t something I enjoy very much any longer.
So I understand what you are saying and I think it’s probably great advice for many people. It doesn’t fit my world though.
Good to hear from you!
Sallie
Hey Sallie, got it. Still, fresh air is a wonder cure for stress. Allergies are inconvenient, got a couple myself, but unless they’re life threatening usually they are managable for this time of year. The EoE is something I am wholly unfamiliar with so I will research it. Be good and as well as you can be..
Hi Thomas,
Eosinophilic Esophagitis is basically an allergic reaction in the esophagus. It causes it to swell. It can be caused by food or environment. Mine flares due to both.
Between my grass allergy, EoE, and the humidity basically choking me, outside is not a healthy place for me to be in the spring and summer. With regards to the food, I’ve not eaten out or at someone else’s home in probably seven or eight years since I can’t have other people preparing my food.
I wish it was different, but that’s the way it is. I try to make the best of it. EoE completely changed my life and the life of my family.
Sallie
Praying that God will help you find a solution, which sounds like it needs to be something like a weekly “retreat of silence”. I can see how an INFJ simply can’t skip over having that time the way that many other types can.
I’m running over my own margins intentionally now, because I am starting a personal sabbatical in a couple of weeks, and I am okay with making one last push.
Hi Peggy,
I think your observation is correct. I stopped using the INFJ terminology in the past year or two to move away from the psychological terminology, but at the same time we know introverts are not all the same. The reason the MB terminology is so widely used is because it’s a shortcut to help people discuss bigger issues.
After reading your comment last week, I’ve thought about starting to use the INFJ terminology again because I think homeschool moms who are wired that way face some unique challenges. Obviously homeschooling is a challenge for every mom, but INFJs have their own set of issues. I can’t speak to the issues that the other 15 MB types face, but I do want to be supportive of the INFJs out there who are struggling. So you made me think.
I hope your sabbatical goes well!
Sallie
I appreciate all the work you do here. I hope you have a restful weekend! God bless you!
Hi Mrs. White,
Thank you for your kind words!
Sallie
Hi Sallie, first Happy Belated Mother’s day. You are obviously a good mother to Caroline. We love the Its A Girl Day. That is so nice. We can understand your problem with trying to get things going. We have so much projects and things that need attending to in and around the house. We need some motivation,too. As far as the weather and allergies, we all have allergies,too. To make things worse,Marion has asthma, and numerous food allergies along with the usual animal and dust. As far as getting things accomplished ,there seems to not be enough hours in the day. Hope you can get some of your project started and in due time they will be a done deal! Have a good week end and God Bless.
Joan,Marion and Marilyn
Hi Marilyn,
It’s good to hear from you. Allergies definitely make things a challenge. I agree with how it seems like there aren’t enough hours in the day. So many people seem to be saying that right now. It almost feels like time has sped up in some weird way.
Have a good week!
Sallie
Sallie, I am the wife of a conservative Christian M.D. (my husband practices as a hospitalist, seeing in-patients only) who regularly took care of Covid patients who were very ill during the pandemic. He saw death from the virus, and then saw and heard many of his fellow Christians speak of protective measures like masks and “the jab” with disdain. Margin was nearly non-existent for he and his hospital colleagues during the height of the pandemic. There are seasons of life where an individual can’t just build in missing margin. Covid was one of those for my husband. To hear of your relatable stress over lack of margin while also having read of your negative remarks about widely accepted conventional medical recommendations during the pandemic has been discouraging. I have read many of your articles about Christians and Covid. Would you consider reading one that highlights my perspective about the same subject? If so, it can be found online: “A Lament for White Evangelicals’ Response to Covid-19” by Dylan McLemore, whose wife is an ER physician. Their experience mirrors my husband’s and mine. Missing margin, and missing support from fellow believers during one of the hardest times of life.
Hi Cheryl,
Thank you for your comment. I want to be thoughtful about how I respond to this. I did look up and read the article you suggested. I’ll link to it at the end for anyone else who wants to read it.
I’ve appreciated that you’ve shared your perspective of working in a hospital during the past few years. That is a perspective I didn’t have so it was good to hear from those who did. Another blogger’s husband is a nurse and she often mentioned their very difficult and stressful experience in Portland, Oregon. I have a dear friend who has many connections to the medical world and she shared numerous stories with me based on the experiences of her friends and family members. Their stories were the opposite of yours. They were usually Christians who lost their jobs because they would not take the injection.
For anyone who is reading about this topic here for the first time, I want to make it clear that I trusted the official narrative at first. I faithfully watched the White House briefings the first few weeks. We stocked up on food and supplies starting in February because I could see lockdowns coming. I warned people we were going to get locked down. I made videos about it to warn my readers. We even started our own unofficial family lockdown a few weeks early just to be extra careful given health issues in our family. I’ve written about all that, but I give that context for new readers. I initially made the choice to trust the medical and government leadership. I was not an anti-vaxxer and we had done almost all of the recommended series with our daughter. David had gotten the flu shot a few times.
But this experience forever changed how I think about all of these topics – medical, government, etc. And anyone reading this can feel free to fact check anything I say below.
Our family was forced to make many changes during the 2020-2021 timeframe. We had to all change doctors, including leaving the pediatrician Caroline had had since birth. We now pay $190/month (on top of Samaritan) just to have access to Christian doctors who will allow us to make our own medical choices since every big medical system around here required masks to even walk in the door. Caroline and I were locked down for I don’t know how long because of the draconian mask policies implemented by our infamous governor (Michigan). Neither of us could wear a mask and so we lost our freedom to go basically anywhere for many, many months.
I’m struggling with how much to say about the contents of the article here. I moved that kind of content to my other website for two reasons. One, so people who wanted to escape the news would know that it would not come up here unless it was in a tangential way. I know people are overwhelmed and weary. I want to respect that.
The other reason I set up a second website is so that I could speak freely and often. I didn’t have to be concerned that I would write about current events too often here and annoy or offend people. I’ve lost sooooo many readers over the years because I’ve spoken up about current events, etc. Over there I write whatever I want and whenever I want because anyone who is on that website has chosen to be there.
I didn’t want to delete your comment, but I also want to respond to its content. I think there is a lot in that article that is factually not true based on more recent information. It was written in August 2021 so I will give them a pass in terms of not having current information in it. But a lot of it is now demonstrably false.
Dr. Naomi Wolf has done extensive work on the damage the jabs have done to people, especially fertility in women and the impact on babies. She has a huge team of medical professionals, researchers, etc. working to pore over the Moderna and Pfizer documents. They have been doing that for well over a year, I think. To listen to her discuss their findings is truly depressing. It’s so depressing I opted not to share some of her interviews on my other website. I can’t even think about the enormity of what they have found. It’s too overwhelming. Many people still have no idea because the MSM will not cover it. I pray her team is wrong. I don’t think they are, though, because the same data trends are showing up around the world in the heavily jabbed countries.
Ed Dowd has done extensive work using public source government employment data and statistics from actuaries while researching the elevated levels of death and disability in the USA. The levels are a 13 sigma deviation from normal. In other words, they are beyond statistically impossible. No one can offer him any other explanation other than the jabs. The elevated death and disability levels are among the employed and those who are younger. It is not just the USA. The same trends are occurring in Europe, Australia, the UK, etc.
There are many, many large studies out now that show that not only did the masks not work, they were actually harmful. I stopped sharing those stories on my other site because there are now so many studies out there that they are easy to find. The mask policies were medically, psychologically, and developmentally devastating. The Fauci videos re: masks are especially interesting since he said before covid that masks don’t work for respiratory viruses. Why the change?
Dr. John Campbell has a very popular YouTube channel where he has tracked covid data and official information from very early on (both in the UK and the world). He was one of the first people I followed in January 2020. He was a true believer in the official covid information and the jabs, encouraging people to get them. Slowly he realized he had been lied to and had to tell his viewers. It was emotionally painful for me to watch him come to terms with it, especially because for so many months people in his comments shared information with him to get him to look beyond the official narrative.
Early treatment of covid was inexplicably denied which we now know would have saved many to most people. Ivermectin and hydroxychlroquine were inexplicably denied and demonized which made no sense at the time. We now know there would have been no Emergency Use Authorization for the jabs if other available medications were effective so the cheap and readily available meds had to be demonized and crushed. Doctors who used these drugs and had excellent success rates were demonized and lost their jobs.
Death numbers were manipulated because they were based on “died with” versus “died from” covid. There is also the fact that if someone died within the first 14 days of getting an injection, the numbers were manipulated. IIRC they were considered “not fully vaccinated” in the first 14 days, but their death was never considered to be a possible result of the injection itself. There is lots of information online about that. Remdesivir and vents were another issue. Many whistleblowers have come forward about that topic.
The list goes on and on.
I will skip addressing the comments in the article about the so-called conspiracy theories. I have covered those topics at length on my other website.
I would never have brought these things up here, but I stand by what I’ve carefully shared over the past three years. All I have ever cared about is the truth and I have searched for it diligently as best as I could. It has cost me a great deal in many ways. But when the stories started coming out very early on about the jabs seriously messing up women’s menstrual cycles both in Europe and the USA, I knew something wasn’t right. When they started injecting pregnant women with an untested substance for an illness with a 99% survival rate, I knew something was very, very wrong. I never told people to take the jab or not. I simply made sure my readers had access to information that wasn’t shared in the mainstream press. NO ONE will ever be able to say to me – how could you know all this and not say something? The choice of what to do with that information was theirs. They could think I was crazy and ignore me. They could do further research and draw their own conclusions. I did my best to help as best I could.
Cheryl, I am sorry for the pain you and your husband suffered. I can only imagine how awful it must be to feel helpless and watch people die and to feel like people don’t understand what you are going through.
At the same time, I have friends who have watched family and friends die as a result of the injections. One friend finally started writing them all down because every time I had contact with her it seemed like she knew 1-3 more people who had died suddenly or been diagnosed with aggressive cancer. And I don’t mean we talked once a month or every several weeks. This was contact weekly or multiple times a week. She and her husband have a wide social and professional circle and they have never experienced anything like this in their life. Their horror is real as well.
I truly hope every day that everything I shared in this very lengthy comment is wrong. I hope these jabs haven’t destroyed the fertility of two generations of women. I hope there aren’t a million missing babies in Europe as Naomi Wolf just discussed. I hope Ed Dowd is wrong and there is some other reason why death and disability is up 23% in this country.
I will be THRILLED to be wrong because the other option is almost too horrific to bear at times. I welcome anyone to take what I’ve written, dig into the information, and demonstrate that it’s wrong. TRULY. Leave comments with links that debunk anything I’ve shared. I hope these people are all wrong. I will GLADLY go back and update every single post and podcast I did with “UPDATE: Good news! They were wrong!”
I don’t think they are.
The truth is going to be very painful for all of us. We’re all just getting there at different times.
Sallie
The article:
https://www.facingsouth.org/2021/08/voices-lament-white-evangelicals-response-covid-19
I looked up to see more about the organization behind the website and found this:
https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/institute-for-southern-studies/
Hi Sallie,
Thank you very much for responding to my comment with respect and kindness. That posture has been missing in some Christian circles during Covid, and some non-Christian colleagues of my husband have had their ears closed to the gospel because of it. We do come at this from different perspectives, it is true, but I do appreciate the dialogue. The only other resource I would recommend is the CMDA (Christian Medical / Dental Association) website. There are members of CMDA who are against Covid vaccines, but the vast majority are for them. There are podcasts and blog posts there that may be of interest to you, or your readers. Thank you again for the respectful exchange. God bless you and your family.