From: Paige Ray. Mom, Writer, and Podcaster. Age 31.5
To: Paige Burkham. Freshman college student. Age 18

 

Dear Paige –

I don’t have loads of time so I’m going to make this quick.

You will get married to a wonderful man and you will have a beautiful family. Right now, that’s basically all you think about. Ever.
And I just wanted to let you know that all that thinking, and wondering, and stressed out worrying isn’t going to do a single thing to speed up the process.

Repeat: It will not help.

But, since I know you’d rather be “doing” something than just un-patiently waiting for that day to come here are a few things you can do instead.

Write more.
Right now, you are pretty consistent about journaling but you need to stretch yourself. Take that class that everyone is scared of because there’s a creative writing project at the end – that challenge is good for you! Just because writing doesn’t come easy doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. 

Read more.
Yes – I know you can make it through a paperback romance novel during a long weekend. And that’s fine. But, again, stretch yourself. Ask a teacher you admire what they last read. Or even, ask them what you wish they had read when they were your age. You won’t be disappointed.

 

Pick the experience over the object.

You were raised in a home where money was tight so you are always conscious of where you spend money. That’s great but that doesn’t always help when you have a choice of two things to spend money on. My advice is to go with the experience, the non-tangible thing that will allow you to make memories. Cars get old, clothes go out of style, but no one can take away the memory of you dancing in the rain in the middle of the Ouachita hills (yep- that’s on its way).

 

You may have noticed a common theme: stretching.

Getting out of your comfort zone.

Being willing to take a risk.

 

Yes, writing more means putting your thoughts out there for people to see and potentially judge. The payoff of self-expression is worth it.

Yes, reading different things means struggling over different and new concepts. The knowledge is worth it.

Yes, being the girl who chooses the experience over the “thing” means you might not have the latest and best, but you will have the most interesting conversations.

 

You have so much ahead of you. Take the risk and soak up the awesome that happens because of it.

 

Love,

P

 

Paige is a brand new mom who was scared that all of her creativity would be sucked dry after becoming a mother. Hear Motherhood is the project that came about because of that fear. Instagram is her favorite – visit her there because she’d love to hear your story.

by Katharine Trauger

Our friends were young—in their twenties— brand new Christians and recovering from a miscarriage, when they felt called to the risk of raising a foster child.

Fostering was to become an ordeal for their lives.

An emergency placement at the age of four, raised in neglect before foster care, then torn away from several substitute mothers, Pamela* was the difficult-placement product of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome/Reactive Attachment Disorder (FAS/RAD).

But our friends did not know it. Actually the syndrome/disorder had yet to be identified, in those days. Nevertheless, they had chosen her, and they chose to encourage her through all her difficult days.

Armed with little but the explanation that Pamela had “loved and lost one-too-many times”, our friends charged ahead, directly into the risk, assuming all she needed was constancy in love. They were told that their home was her last chance, that her next stop was placement in a mental institution, and they were determined to give her the happy life she’d never had, instead.

No pressure, there.

Unable to love, unable to be loved, but most of all, unable to allow anyone else to love or be loved, Pamela entered our friends’ child-starved home, and the war began. And it wasn’t just them who had to fight down her demons: Every place she went, everyone who encountered her, encountered trouble, unmanageable trouble.

They had to teach her every aspect of civilized life.

She fought them every step.

Failing public school, and later expelled from private school, Pamela actually was the reason they began homeschooling, since the experts were positive “all she needed was a little love”.

Believing she would feel more loved, if adopted, they longed for the predicted day of her release, when she could fully become “theirs”.

Still, Pamela remained incorrigible, and ten years after they first rescued her from institutionalization, they were forced to institutionalize her in a professional home for wayward teen girls. Everyone hoped she (and they) could have one last chance at sanity. Those professionals, however, called within a week, begging for help with managing her, and calling her “dangerous”.

Facing the risk.

Between the beginning days of blooming hopes and those last days of acknowledging failure, lay nearly 4000 days of utter testing. Days of our friends knowing people thought they did not love her. Days of total care, as in, having to be awake most of the time, to ensure everyone’s safety. Days of continual explanation and apology to offended people who’d encountered her. Days of never being able to find someone willing to risk being their babysitter.

All the normal things anyone might do to help or to please any child might have helped and pleased her, if Pamela had only been “any child”. Twenty years later they would learn about FAS/RAD, and wish they could go back . . . .

The other risk.

We learned of our foster child in 2014, and despite the pain our friends had shared with us, we knew God was also calling us to risk fostering.

Ours was an anemic teen boy from a drug-ravaged home, with a failing school record, whose hair was as long as mine and stank, bless his heart, and needed a safe place. Oh. Dear. Not our friends’ cute little girl, but a scary teen boy.

What on earth would God do with us (to us?) with this child?

The answer, in a word: Reward.

Who would have thought it could be easy? This child was easy. Fun. Compliant. Grateful. Willing.

He’d chosen us two old people, and we all three knew it would be for a short time, maybe a year. His mom would return. I could educate him and maybe he could learn something in this new adventure our home offered.

 He found in us the dad he’d never had, and a mom who always was awake during the day. He learned car maintenance, wood splitting, carpentry, and vacuuming, along with what to do with skillsets for rulers, fractions, algebra, grammar, and all science to the moon. He loved history and—although feeling the urge to quit—actually wrote several essays.

He went to church. He went to men’s meetings. He cooked. He ate steak.

He bloomed.

He gave in to Christ.

Then just after that, it was over. His mom had recovered. He went home. Mom found employment. He entered a private school and fast-tracked to an engineer degree, or maybe acting . . . .

What we risk.

And the risks of fostering are: You can experience a heart that is cold, aching, and wrung out, or you can experience a heart that is strangely warmed, although emptied.

But you will know you had a heart.

 *  Not her real name.

Katharine Trauger is a retired educator and a women’s counselor. She has spent 25 years managing a home and school for children who would otherwise have been homeless, and has worked 15 years as contributor and/or columnist for several small professional magazines, with over 60 published articles. She blogs about the rising popularity of “being at home” from a sun room on a wooded hilltop in the Deep South at: Home’s Cool! and The Conquering Mom and tweets at Katharine Trauger (@KathaTrau). She is currently working on a self-help book entitled: Yes, It Hurts, But . . .

 

by Brittney Lee

So many of us so easily get into ruts.  If you’re like me, I like things to be familiar and comfortable, so it can be a challenge to branch out.  I know for me, one rut I get into is going to the same restaurants and always ordering the same food. I have a friend I meet for a weekly lunch date, and one afternoon, we started talking about how tired we were of going to the same five places over and over again.  So we mapped out a plan for a culinary adventure on our lunch breaks.

My friend and I decided we wanted to try all the hole-in-the-wall restaurants around town. We wanted to experiment with different types of cuisine.  We wanted to try things from the menus that were unusual. We wanted to try all the places our husbands and kids wouldn’t go.

A year or so later, and we have taken a tour around the world without ever leaving Fort Smith.

Trying a new place, or a new cuisine, or a new dish can make me uncomfortable. I like knowing what to expect, and when you walk into a new restaurant and order something you’ve never had before, there is nothing familiar about it. It’s a risk.  Will the restaurant be good?  Will I like what I order?  Will I even be able to pronounce what I order?! So many uncertainties. But I’ll tell you, the risk has usually had a big payoff. And when it flops?  We haven’t lost much.

We have discovered several places and dishes that we love from these weekly risk sessions on our lunch dates.  

Fort Smith has an abundance of Thai and Vietnamese restaurants, and we’ve tried many of them.  Instead of ordering something familiar, like fried rice, we’ve branched out.  Some of our favorite items have included a Vietnamese Banh Mi sandwich, beef pho noodle soup, and drunken noodles.  

When we ventured downtown to try the new Peruvian restaurant, we sampled a Peruvian pasta and steak dish, and Peruvian stir fry that had some of the best savory flavors I’ve ever tasted.

One of the most interesting lunches came when we tried Indian food.  Not knowing much about this type of food, we sort of ordered blind. We asked the staff to recommend dishes for us, and they hit it out the park!  We loved the butter chicken and the tikka masala so much we forgot to take a picture until we were halfway through our meal!  And don’t even get me started on the strange but delicious dessert we had that was homemade cheese in a milk sauce called ras malai.  

Here’s the fun thing about these adventurous lunches, they have made it easier to branch out and take risks in other areas of my life.  When I regularly do things out of my comfort zone, it makes it easier to go for other risks.  For me, it’s been vital to build these small, regular risk sessions into my life.

What are you regularly doing to take risks?  If you don’t have anything that stretches you out of your comfort zone, try a new restaurant.  Order the dish you can’t pronounce. It will be worth it!

Brittney is on a mission to be better every day. She blogs her journey at Razorback Britt, where she writes about fitness, faith, cooking, travel, fashion, weekend adventures, and more. She is an almost-country girl living on 20 acres with her dogs, husband, and the occasional wandering livestock.

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