There’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, and it started with this thought:

We don’t get to decide what kind of adults our children will be; the only thing we can control is what kind of childhood they will have.

As parents we spend a lot of time worrying about raising our kids “right” and hoping that, if we do, they will “turn out well.” And I think we do have a great amount of influence on our kids, but ultimately they’re going to grow up, and they’re going to become who they want to be. That’s their adventure. Figuring out who they want to be is an important part of their personal journey.

It’s not for us to decide.

At the end of the day, we can only do our best to support them.

But we do have a huge amount of influence over their childhood. And that’s no small thing! It’s the beginning of everything. Their genesis. Their foundation.

When I look back at my own childhood, there were things about it that were pure magic. But, of course, other things were less so. And one of the things that I look back on with a twinge of … not regret, although it feels a bit like regret, but sadness, I guess, is that my parents spent most of my childhood trying to instill in us, what they considered, “good values” and the “right beliefs.”

My mom, in particular, believed very strongly in the Proverb, “Train up your child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.”

And when I think back, that’s largely what I remember about her. I remember her homeschooling us. I remember morning Bible studies at the kitchen table. I remember memorizing Bible verses since before I could read. I remember her reading to us before bed. I remember her many, many lectures.

She trained us well, and if that sounds tedious, that’s because it mostly was. Some of those things I do remember fondly, like her reading to us before bed. But a lot of it felt just like it sounds, like training.

And, ultimately, it didn’t even work. I departed from her teachings. I grew up and realized I get to decide who I want to be and what I want for my life. And so, sadly, not only were all her efforts in vain, but also I now feel like they were a waste of my time. Like I spent my entire childhood training for adulthood, learning how to be the kind of adult my parents wanted me to be, only to grow up and become the almost complete antithesis of who my parents wanted me to be — career-driven, liberal, and spiritual-but-not-religious. I mean, sure, I’m not a serial killer, but surely the bar isn’t that low.

And now I’m the mom who’s knee-deep in the middle of raising my own little family and trying to figure it all out. Spoiler: it’s hard! It’s so, so hard. So I get it. Most of us are just out here throwing ideas at the wall and hoping beyond hope that we’re doing something right.

Just like my mom, I get caught up in the idea that I’m responsible for my adult children, that they will be a reflection of me and how well I did in raising them. Of course I think that. Society thinks that. And because moms still do the bulk of the childcare (yes, that is a generalization, but statistically it’s still true), we also take the brunt of the blame for how our kids turn out.

But I’ve been reflecting on that idea recently, and the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that I should take that same energy I’m wasting by worrying about a future I can’t actually control, and instead focus it on trying to give my kids the best damn childhood right now that I’m capable of giving them. Because, truly, it’s the only thing I can do.

I feel silly and a little embarrassed every time I tell someone we bought a house 3 hours away from our big city lives and our big city jobs.

The first thing most people wonder is if this is some type of business venture. Are we planning to rent it out? No, I have to admit, it’s just a weekend place. But we’re not really the type of people who should own a “weekend place.” We’re just two millennials who’ve clawed our way into careers we enjoy, but really we’re “comfortable” at best. We don’t even own a house in the city where we live and work. So you can see why we had some well-meaning family members who advised us against buying this property.

But then I remember, we already tried the conventional route — and we hated it. Since then we’ve tried just about everything else. So how’d we get here? Well… storytime.

Once upon a time, we did the whole two-story-house-in-the-suburbs thing. We had just gotten married and were both working 9-to-5 office jobs with 401Ks, yearly reviews, and dress codes (yes, this was pre-Covid). So we bought a cute little house within easy driving distance from both our jobs, and we were convinced we were going to start a family in it. But when I tell you… the ink had barely dried on the closing docs before we wanted to get out. And for no good reason! It was nice. The house was nice. The neighborhood was nice. The schools were nice. Everything was nice. And we hated it.

My husband has a casual affinity for the French language, and the summer after we bought our house I started teaching myself French too. We did that until we gradually got more and more serious about it. One day we found ourselves looking for classes in our area, and I told him: “If we’re going to put all this time and effort, and now money, into learning French, I want the possibility of actually moving to France to at least be on the table.” And from then on we had it in our heads that we were moving to France. We spent our evenings drinking wine and throwing resumes into every inbox we could find, and within a few weeks my husband actually started getting some bites. After a couple opportunities fell through — as they do — he got an offer from an American company with a branch in the French Alps. We couldn’t believe it!

We sold our house. We sold our cars. We sold our furniture. We got rid of everything except what we could cram into a corner of my husband’s sister’s attic. We packed two suitcases each and flew to France just in time for the most magical Christmas in the French Alps you can imagine. After a couple months of meeting people and getting to know our new city, we came back to the States to apply for visas — aaaaand that’s when Covid hit the US and suddenly shut everything down.

Instead of just finding a short lease and hunkering down for a few months, we decided to take advantage of our homelessness and travel. We didn’t have a lot of money, and I didn’t have a job at the time, so we bought a popup camper and spent the next 4 months chasing beautiful weather all over the United States.

But by summer of 2020 we realized Covid wasn’t going anywhere any time soon, and likewise we weren’t going back to France anytime soon, so we upgraded the popup camper for a bigger rig. We eventually made our way back to Texas (and warmer weather) for the holidays, and then I got pregnant with our son. All the doctor’s visits made it tough to travel during the pregnancy, so we mostly stayed put after that. And around that time, we finally decided to abandon our dream of moving to France altogether.

We were still living in the RV when our little boy was born, but then shortly after that I got a job opportunity downtown, so what’d we do? Obviously we took our newborn and moved into a loft apartment downtown within easy walking distance of my new job — a setup that allowed me to work full-time but also go home for lunch every day to nurse.

We started saving for a down payment on a house and were looking at houses in our area, but we were starting to get that same stir-crazy feeling we’d gotten when we bought our house before. I kept obsessing over what was wrong with our last house? And why did we hate it so much? And how could we avoid doing that again?

Around that time we took some RV trips to the lake where my husband’s family used to own a lake house. They sold it just a few months before we met, so I never got to visit, but it was a huge part of my husband’s childhood and family life. He showed me around the lake, and we noticed some of the houses that were for sale. Not the big ones. Just the small ones…

We started talking, and then we started looking at the different lakes around us. We visited a couple places but nothing spoke to us until we found this house. And really, the house itself isn’t what spoke to us, so much as the property. The lot was beautiful, tucked into an inlet and hidden from the road by trees and brush. But the house hadn’t been lived in for 20+ years.

Let’s just say there were no bidding wars for this little monster.

But there was something about it that spoke to us — and at the time, that was enough. The rest of the story, though, is a whooole other story.

A few weeks ago, I bought a few seeds at the grocery store. I only picked up what I already knew would thrive in the Texas heat, things my parents used to grow in their backyard garden when I was a girl — okra, cucumber, squash & some flower seeds.

We didn’t have a garden yet. We were planning to wait until after the renovations, but I couldn’t help myself. It was only a few dollars for the bundle of seeds, and I figured it’d be a fun project. Something to do in between the heavy lifting.

We had leftover fencing of all different types — wooden fence posts, iron bars, chicken wire. We threw it all together in the most ramshackle way imaginable. We strung a barely functioning soaker hose around the edges, and then crossed our fingers that our shoddy construction would keep out the deer, hogs, bunnies, and whatever else might come sniffing around for a meal.

After turning the soil and pulling out the grass and weeds, I planted the seeds with the same devil-may-care attitude as we’d “built” the rest of the garden.

Then we watered it, shrugged our shoulders, and told it good luck! “If it grows, it grows,” we told each other (more than once) and drove back to the city to finish out the workweek.

But then when we came back just a few days later, lo and behold, there were dozens of tiny sprouts peeking their heads out of the soil. Sprouts! It felt like pure magic. Like the most unimaginable surprise.

Sure, we had planted seeds with the hope they would sprout and turn into viable plants, but it still felt like it shouldn’t have actually happened. Like they should have poked their heads up, taken one look at their surroundings, and wilted on the spot.

But they didn’t, so that weekend we planted more seeds in a garden off to the side. We planted tomatoes, watermelon, zucchini, pumpkin, two types of lettuce, onion, carrots.

I’m embarrassed to admit we didn’t little to no research before planting our new seeds. We planted them in a very similar manner as the previous ones. I threw them out and swiped some dirt over them. Next year, I will do more research. But this year, we’re just seeing what happens.

Part of me feels like I shouldn’t blog about this year’s attempt, because I fear our garden is doomed to fail. But I’d like to document to journey from the very beginning.

And guess what? Last weekend, there were sprouts everywhere! An abundance of sprouts. I was most worried about the lettuce not germinating, but they were some of the first sprouts to pop up and say hello.

I have no idea how our little garden will fare as the months go on and the Texas heat fully kicks in. But it has already been so much fun watching tiny seeds turn into tiny sprouts and week by week grow bigger and sturdier.

I hope you’ll come along for our journey. If you know about gardening, any and all advice is welcome! We’re standing here at the budding start of an adventure, and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

We did it!

We closed on the house in January, and we’ve spent every weekend out here since then.

I say we bought a house, but I think you can see from the picture that we really bought a project. But you have to admit, it does have a certain kind of rustic, cabin-in-the-woods charm. Or at least we think it does.

The lot is BEAUTIFUL. That’s what really drew us to the place. It’s covered in scrubby brush — it is Texas, after all — but there are also so many beautiful trees. Most of them are Hickory and Post Oak, but there are a handful of Pine trees as well, and some other trees I haven’t identified yet.

Much of the property is also covered in Yaupon Holly shrubs that have grown tall and winding and wild. They add to the overall scrubbiness of the property, but they’re such interesting evergreen trees that I don’t want to trim them back too much.

Another year, another season of big hopes.

This year feels like it’s brimming with promise.

We’re buying a lakehouse.

Well, kind of.

We’re buying a small piece of property (less than an acre) on the corner of a lake.

On the property is a small structure we’re calling a “lakehouse”, even though “fishing shack” is probably a more accurate description. And this little lakehouse hasn’t been lived in for 15 years and looks like it needs a strong wind to blow through and knock it down.

But in 15 years, no strong wind has knocked it down, and I hope it doesn’t. Because we want to rebuild it and put all our hopes and dreams inside its tiny walls.

Like a lot of our decisions, this one probably seems like it’s coming out of nowhere.

Some people (read: my mom) think we’re being emotional and making a spur-of-the-moment decision. I can see why, I guess. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve made an emotional decision, and it certainly won’t be the last.

But this doesn’t feel that way to me because I know it’s something we’ve both wanted for a long time, that we’ve talked about, and dreamed about. We’ve dreamed of a house in the country, a slice of heaven where we can let our hair down, get our hands dirty, and spread our wings.

And now the dream might actually be finding its way into reality.

The reality is a little less charming — as reality often is. But God, I want this to work out so badly it makes my bones ache. And maybe it isn’t the dream, yet. But it could be. And sometimes dreams are like that, right? It’s the start of a dream. The dream of a dream.

But even dreams aren’t free.

We’ve run the numbers. And run the numbers again. And again. We’ve stayed up at night worrying about it, and woken up early talking about it. We’ve combed through every inch of our spending. We’ve knocked against the parts of our budget that are too solid to move, squeezed the parts that are squishy, and hacked away at the fluffy bits.

And we’ve determined that maybe — just maybe — this isn’t a crazy decision. If we curb our spending in the areas where we tend to be reckless, if we can be more responsible and less impulsive, we can make this work and still continue to do adulty things like save for retirement.

Just to be clear, we’ll still live and work in the city during the week. So is it worth it for a weekend place? I think so. I hope so. I hope it will make living and working in the city more bearable. I love my job, and I love the convenience of living close to things, and close to family and friends. But when I think about what I want for my life and how I want to raise my kids, I think about the parts of my own childhood that were magical.

I grew up in the country and we had so much freedom back then. We went outside and played. We used our imagination. We spent hours climbing trees and catching frogs by the lake shore. We got dirty and sometimes we made messes, but sometimes we built cool things, too. We came inside when we got hungry or when it got too dark to see, and it seemed like no one ever asked where we were or what we were doing.

I know my kids are growing up in a different world than I did. I know that, I do. But I feel like this little house by the lake is an opportunity — a ray of hope — that maybe my kids can have a small piece of what I once had when I was a wild child running barefoot through the yard.

Maybe we’ll have to rein in our habits of eating out too often and hitting the “buy now” button without checking the budget first. But I really, really strongly believe that it’s going to be worth it.