Mindset Maintenance

You Find It Where You Find It

It was a Monday night in a parking lot, 10 easy minutes from home.


Gena and I were waiting for Tessa to finish her clarinet lesson. I was, as is normal these days, on my laptop — checking our social media (bane of my existence) and working on my next blog. What turned out to be this blog, but very much was not what you are currently reading. That blog, one you will eventually read, was more about me, marriage, life, things I think I've overcome — or at least things I think I have something important enough to write about. But I wasn't feeling it. Not that night.


I've spent the first posts of this blog introducing myself and my family. Introducing Jason. Introducing our dynamic, our marriage, our failures, our views. But I really hope I have more to say than just the things I've learned about marriage. I hope I am so much more than what I've boiled myself down to so far.


So there I am. There she is. We're waiting. Just another night.


Then Gena pulled out her phone, connected to the car, and put on High School Musical — the original, the ridiculous one from 2006, the one that came out before she was born, before Bella was born. The one I saw for the first time while pregnant with Bella, while Jason was gone on his first deployment, when I was alone and scared and completely new.


But tonight, Gena and I just sat there. Bopping along. Knowing every word. Being completely, unapologetically dumb about this goofy old movie for 10 minutes of our evening. And I forgot that I was stressing about social media and blogs and the house I know is still a mess because I just got over strep throat. I was just smiling at my beautiful, dorky kid — seeing all those old memories and seeing her here now, 15 years old, over the moon because she has her first boyfriend, she made it through her freshman year, she's going to New York for a student leadership conference soon. So many big things. But here we are in this small, simple moment.


That was it. That was the whole thing.


No deep conversation. No breakthrough. No intentional quality time with a capital Q. Just two people in a car who both knew the words to a Disney movie and weren't too cool to sing them. (I promise you, I am never too cool for anything, so no worries there.)


I've been thinking about that ten minutes ever since.



My original plan for this post was a straightforward take on Maintenance Mindset. I'm not going with that writing — but the topic is sticking around. Because what happened in that parking lot? That was maintenance. Just not the kind anyone puts in a self-help book.


Maintenance doesn't always look like what you think it does.


Sometimes it looks like Sunday dishes and folded laundry and the calm that comes after the work. Sometimes it looks like staying in bed on a rainy Saturday because your body just needs to stop. Sometimes it looks like a shower that runs too long because it's the only quiet in a twelve-hour day.


And sometimes it looks like High School Musical in a parking lot on a Monday night.


The small moments that don't cost anything. That happen sideways, when you're not looking for them. That remind you there is joy in here somewhere, under all the logistics and the mess and the getting through it.



There was another moment this week.


One of my bus kids — N — was SO excited when he remembered Bella was coming over that night. Just lit up completely. And I paused and pictured it — Bella walking in, him running to her, her face doing the thing it does around little kids. That whole other version of her that I don't always get to see. The one that lights up like nothing else.


She is so good with kids. Patient and present and genuinely delighted by them in a way that makes them feel it. They don't just feel it — they know it. This girl, who I still very much see as my first baby, the one I will always want to shelter the most. The one I made the most mistakes with. The one I have apologized to the most. The one I wonder — daily — if she will ever fully forgive me for all of it.


This kid who has grown into this beautiful young woman. Someone I realize I need to get to know again and again because she is just blossoming, just becoming. And right now she is responsible for four kids — kids who matter to me, who have fallen completely in love with her — for the next eight days while their parents are deployed. She stepped out of her comfort zone. She's adulting.


I am so proud of my kid.



Now — I don't always like my kids. I'll just say that out loud because I think parents aren't supposed to admit it, but it's true sometimes, and pretending otherwise helps no one. And in full admission that I am very, very far from being a perfect person or parent, I have at some point told each of my kids I don't like them — always with a caveat. I may not like you right now, but I love you. I will always love you. No matter what you do or say, that doesn't change. There is nothing you can do to make that not true — even if right now, I don't like you very much.


Okay. Back to Bella.


We are very different people, and I have spent a lot of years grieving the version of her I imagined instead of seeing the version she actually is. Her choices became my failure, in my story, more times than I want to count. It's one of those lessons you don't learn until you're a parent yourself — that the time we spend trying to make them who we want them to be, instead of helping them grow into who they are supposed to be, is on us. Not them. They have not failed. They are not failures. They are who they set out to be. So much of what we needed them to learn is there at the core. We just don't always see it the way they do — because no matter how hard we try, and no matter how much we may wish, they are not us. They are them.


But imagining her evening with those kids — I felt proud. Genuinely, surprisingly proud.


Some of what I did worked. I don't always see it at home. But it shows up out there in the world, in the way she treats people who need gentleness.


That's not nothing. That's actually everything.



So my story tonight isn't really my story — but it's enough mine to share.


Maintenance isn't always grand. It's not always intentional. It's not always planned. Sometimes it's ten minutes of a Disney movie. Sometimes it's catching a glimpse of your kid being exactly who they're supposed to be, even if it's not who you pictured.


You find it where you find it.


That's enough.



— Holly | Life Behind the Screens