Then my parents called. Just checking in on our Sunday, which in my family was never only a check-in. There was always a right answer to how's your Sunday, and I'd spent a lifetime learning it.
I told them where we were.
And there it was. The pause. The kind with a whole conversation folded inside it, disappointment and question and expectation all pressed flat into a few seconds of nothing. I knew that pause. I'd been raised on it. Some part of me had started bracing for it before the phone even rang.
Here's the thing you have to understand about me. I don't say the thing. I go quiet until I explode from all the things I'm not saying. I keep the peace and carry the cost of it privately and call that fine. Saying the true thing out loud, in the moment, to the people I was built to need the approval of, that is not a small act for me. That's close to the hardest thing I do.
But I was standing in the sun watching my girls ride a carousel, more myself than I'd felt in months. And I was done apologizing for it.
So I said it. We needed a family day. What we're doing is the right thing for my family, getting closer to nature, to each other. To God, if you want to put it that way.
I meant every word. And I braced.
Nothing came. Not the words I was waiting to hear, not the derision, not the disappointment I'd expected as surely as the breath I took to answer the call. None of it.
My words just landed, quietly, into that same pause, and the pause let them. No fight. No lecture. Nothing broke.
And that's when I understood something I hadn't before. I'd spent my whole life flinching from the gut-punch that disappointment always carried, the one that, this time, never came. The bracing had always been mine to carry, not theirs to cause. Most of the true things we're too afraid to say turn out to be lighter in the air than they ever were sitting in your chest.
That was its own kind of reset. Maybe the realest one.
Taking your family anywhere when your kids are small comes with a certain level of risk that nobody really prepares you for. How are they going to act? What are people going to think? Will someone get hurt, cause a scene, fall apart in the parking lot over the wrong flavor of juice? And Heaven forbid you forget the diapers! You run the calculations before you even back out of the driveway.
That day the calculations came back fine. Better than fine.
It's lived in my memory as perfect ever since. A perfect day, something we all never get enough of, which probably says something about how rarely things feel that way, and how worth it it is when they do.
These days, the reset looks different. We have four kids, the dogs we had back then have since passed away and new dogs have come along to fill the space they left, and a house that generates mess the way some houses generate charm, constantly and without effort.
Sunday reset now is dishes done. Laundry folded. Dog hair vacuumed. If those things happen, the evening opens up. A show together. A game. Cooking something without it being a production. Just space. The kind that only comes after the work, when you can actually exhale and look around and feel the accomplishment of a reasonably functional home before the week starts eating it alive again.
I do most of the cajoling. Most of the begging. Most of the standing in the middle of a room trying to figure out where to start before I shut down entirely and just ask Jason to tell me what to do first.
He usually does. Sometimes he just quietly handles the thing I haven't been able to get to, the thing that's been sitting there bothering me, and I don't even know he noticed until it's done.
That's its own kind of reset too, its own kind of perfect.
Sunday was already set aside. First for church, then for whatever we were becoming. It made sense to keep it as the day we try to return to ourselves a little before Monday asks us to be everything again. It's not always all of us together, but it's us.
And really, any day could be a reset, if you let it.
But there's something about Sunday. Something about pancakes and a decision and a zoo in perfect weather that I've never been able to shake.
Some resets stick with you.
- Holly
| Life Behind the Screens
