PROLOGUE - Part 1

Welcome to our story. I have documented the events, but God is the author. When I am filled with doubts, worries, and frustrations about our life at Like a Mustard Seed Farm, I've found it's best for me to reflect on how God brought us here and what He's brought us through. I hope you can find something in this story that connects to you, and that it points you to the Creator who wastes no opportunity for our good or His glory. SDG. Kristin

May 15, 2020

“Mama! Look how high it went!,” my five year old yelled. He had just launched the bottle rocket he’d received for his birthday, and I looked up in time to watch it float to earth and bounce with a plop on the grass. His little sister toddled over to retrieve it, as delighted as he was.

“I missed it,” I said, “can you do it again?”

“Sure!” Levi shouted, and Lucy clapped in anticipation.

I smiled. It felt so good to see them having fun; they desperately needed something new and novel to change up the monotony. And I had desperately needed some human interaction. The memory of yesterday’s time with just a few members of our family was laced with both gratitude and grief.

It had been the first time in months I had seen anybody in the flesh beside our neighbors, and even though I felt perfectly safe seeing these individuals, I felt likea criminal having them over. But it was Levi's fifth birthday. He wanted to see his grandparents. I felt no regrets. I had needed it as much as he had. Since mid-March, the world had shut down, fellowship had been condemned, and every day felt more like a dystopian novel than the simple life I’d come to love.

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"Two weeks to slow the spread." That was what we’d been told: two weeks of no school, no church, no gatherings. Everyone was to hunker down.

But my husband, who was employed in management at a fast food restaurant, was deemed “essential” and would drive down empty streets daily to extra-long and chaotic days at work.

For two weeks, I told myself, I can hold down the fort. I can entertain my active and social children with activities and I can be strong and fearless while the world was sinking into frenzied desperation. I can greet my hero husband home from work with a home-cooked meal and scratch his back while praising him for enduring such unideal circumstances. I could do anything for a season. So I paced myself, budgeting energy and positivity for each day, knowing that soon it would all end, and life would go back to normal.

Then, two weeks stretched into three. And then three quietly turned into four. And as each day passed, I became more and more unhinged.

I began constructing and believing a narrative in which the rest of the world was all nestled home together with their people, getting paid for work they weren’t doing while learning to bake sourdough and blissfully numbing out with endless entertainment. Meanwhile, my husband was working longer and more inconvenient hours while I was alone in a 1,400 square foot house with two littles in straight up survival mode.

I became resentful, a caged animal, agitated and pacing. When seven o-‘clock in the evening hit, I’d begin listening anxiously for the sound of wheels coming up the road. At first, I ran like a wild thing to the window when Kevin would come home, hungry for interaction and a reprieve from the fatigue of parenting solo.

Then, as days melted into weeks, I could barely look at him, barely utter a hollow, “how was your day?” while the kids clambered into the arms of their weary father.

Kevin would come home exhausted after his intensely active work day which included dealing with irritated and irrational customers, rules that changed daily, and the back-burner knowledge that his wife was slowly drowning at home. I had very little sympathy to offer; I couldn’t support him while I could barely keep my head above water.

We weren’t ok.

Sometimes, we could make it for the kids to be asleep before the arguing began. Other times, it was instantaneous upon his return home.

It wasn’t his fault that he was employed, that they kids were dysregulated, that the government had moved the goalpost. It wasn’t his fault that a pandemic had altered the doings of our entire world. But in my desperate-to-blame mind : this is all his fault.

Why couldn’t he ask for more time off? Didn’t his boss understand he was the only employee with young children at home? Couldn’t he advocate for us so that I could have my husband back and the kids could have their daddy? “I didn’t sign up for this!” I’d protest.

“I didn’t sign up for this either,” he’d replied hotly. Every day sucked, but he couldn't not work. His team was depending on him.

“What about THIS team?” I yelled back, the tears hot in my eyes. “You’re going to show up for people you hardly know and leave me in the lurch? What about me?”

I didn’t know how to say: I feel abandoned. The kids are getting to me. I’m afraid I’m being a terrible mother. I’m anxious about the future. I need help. You’re literally the only human who can help me, and you can’t. I feel powerless. I’m so angry that I can’t solve this problem. I am angry that you can’t either.

We’d move through the uncomfortable tension, because there were no solutions. Our circumstances were not going to change. I'd feel the gentle conviction of the Holy Spirit and stumble toward my husband, and we'd mumble half-hearted apologies before heading to bed, ready to do it all again tomorrow.

Eventually, we accepted that things just weren't going back to normal. Each week, I stood in line at the grocery store, waiting to be let in, filling my cart with limited items, always thinking: if the food system goes down, what will we feed our family? Our

In March, during a moment of primal panic, I ordered an edible plants book, a travel Berkey water filter, and a flint off of Amazon. They sat in our house like little omens of a future I wasn't sure was good or bad.

Then, in April, my mother-in-law dropped off two Tractor Supply chicks to give the kids something to do. The kids loved them so much and I was so food-conscience, I convinced Kevin to buy five Easter Eggers from a local hatchery. We named them after our grandmothers and Kevin began building a mobile chicken coop out of recycled materials.

The chicks were pecking at grass in our tiny back yard as Levi re-loaded the bottle rocket. This time, I watched as it blasted into the air, or more accurately, our large pin-oak.

The bottle bopped down branch by branch and came to rest fifteen feet off the ground. Stuck. Of course.

"Daddy can get it!" Levi said, sprinting past the tree.

"Yeah, well," I yelled after him, "you're going to have to wait a long time, bud, Daddy just left for work a little bit ago."

"But he's here!" he called back. Sure enough, our clunky CRV was sitting in the driveway, and Kevin was walking toward me.

"Daddy!" Lucy shrieked, throwing her arms around him.

I walked toward him, my mind still trying to make sense of his presence. Our eyes met, and he smiled to mirror me, but his eyes were dim. "What are you doing home?" I asked, delighted to see him.

"I just got fired," he said, still smiling.

The corners of my lips fell. My fingers went cold. "What?"

We stood there for a moment before moving into a slow embrace. I rested my head upon his chest, looking off into thedistance twhile he kids pranced widlly around us, problem-solving how to get the bottle rocket out of the tree.