"There is a formative period in the life of families during which parents and kids don’t just live with each other, they create each other."  –from David James Duncan’s River Teeth

At times, I must admit, my lovely daughters feel a bit like appendages.  I don’t mean that in a burdened, dragging-me-down, oh-I-wish-I-wasn’t-a-Siamese-twin sort of way.  Instead, when I say appendage, I mean that my family is now such a part of me (like an arm or a leg) that I have to really stop and consciously think about it in order to remember that it wasn’t always like this.

But it definitely wasn’t always like this, was it?

Sarah has only been around for one-eleventh of my life.  Anna’s years encompass only a standard tip of my existence (i.e. 15%), and I’ve only known Christa for about half the number of years I spent getting an education.  It gets weird when you crunch the numbers.  But for some reason the length of time we’ve spent together doesn’t seem to matter all that much.  The time is so consolidated and full of rich experience.

I don’t know what brings all this to mind other than the realization that, as Duncan suggests, I am am creating, and being created by, my family.  This is a formative stage.

As we linger on the outskirts of semester 4 of Chinese language study, lots of familiar family-related questions arise:

Will Christa finally get a good language teacher?

Will Anna joyfully be writing essays by the end of the semester at her beloved International School?  (Don’t put it past her!)

Will Sarah find a good Chinese pre-school that can help channel all of her energy and creative prowess for good instead of evil?

Will Todd ever get his lazy self back to the basketball courts like he’s been vowing to for the past 6 months?

Will the Johnson family turn cross-cultural survival into a more meaningful and adapted existence?  Is that corner to be turned on the horizon or not?

These are the questions we’re facing, as ridiculous or dramatic as they may seem.  In some ways, we go over the same questions at the start of every semester (and often many of the weeks in-between!)  Are we where we need to be?  Are we doing this right?  Is there something we could be doing better?  How are the girls adjusting to all of this?  What are we truly called to?

They are good questions to ask and I’m glad we do ask them.  The difficult part is that the questions often feel very rhetorical.  They are open-ended–without easy, cut-n-dry answers.  Such is life, eh.
So like Hulk Hogan before us, we wrestle.  We persevere.  We keep showing up.

And that’s something I like about this family that we have are creating.  We do well with what we are given to work with and we keep chugging along.  I’m not bragging on myself as much as I am the three wonderful ladies who put up with me. 

They inspire me and make me with their love and joy.  In that sense, I know we’re exactly where we need to be.

Footnote: One great example of this.  Sarah brought me great joy today just by being herself.  She was playing the song, "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" on one of her many musical toys. As the tune was playing she was sitting, legs out-stretched on the floor, rowing her imaginary oars as quickly as her tiny arms could propel them.  Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth…gently down the stream.  I couldn’t help but smile to myself.  Life IS but a dream.