One Room, Fifth Year

There is a system for the mornings and it took about four months to develop and it works, and the fact that it works is the thing you cannot say out loud to anybody.

Coats on the back of the door in order of who leaves first. The little one dresses under the duvet in winter because it is quicker. Homework happens on the bed, and there is a folded board that goes on top of the duvet, and it was a good idea and you are proud of it and you hate that you had to have it.

Five years.

It was six months. That is what was said, by somebody official, in a tone that suggested six months was already an inconvenience they regretted.

The word was temporary. You used it constantly for about a year. You said it to your mother, to the school, to a woman at church who asked. It was a useful word because it made the room a corridor rather than a house.

You do not use it any more. You stopped somewhere in the third year, and you cannot say exactly when, and that is more or less what this article is about.

Your eldest is eleven now. She was six when you came here. She does not remember the other flat.

God is described as a house-setter

There is a couplet in Psalm 68 that lists what God does, and one of the items is domestic.

A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation. God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.Psalm 68:5-6

Look at the company that verse keeps. Father of the fatherless. Judge of the widows. And then, in the same list, God setteth the solitary in families.

That is not a sentiment. It is a job description, and it is placed among the things God does for people whose situations nobody else took responsibility for.

And setteth is a builder's word. It means placed, established, put where it will hold.

You are being set somewhere by God, and it is His verb and not yours. I am not putting my own idea over you here. Scripture says God setteth the solitary in families, Psalm 68:6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a weight-bearing thing for a woman sitting on the edge of a bed at eleven at night.

We are not explaining the five years

I will not, and it matters that I say so.

Nobody knows why this is the fifth year. Anyone who tells you fast has usually never lived in one room with two children, and the reasons offered to women in your position are frequently about character and are always insulting.

Not a season with a purpose you have to accept. Not a lesson. Not a refining. Scripture is willing to name a hard state plainly and leave the reason out of the sentence entirely, Psalm 68:6, and the Holy Spirit does not require you to have understood a thing before He is willing to be in the room.

You are not being taught something by this room. You are in the fifth year of an arrangement, and God is in it with you.

The word you stopped using

Here is the part that costs, and it is not the folded board.

You stopped saying temporary because saying it had begun to feel like a lie you were telling other people. That was honest of you. It was also the moment the room stopped being a corridor.

Scripture does not scold anybody for that, Proverbs 13:12, and the Holy Spirit has not been counting it against you. And once a room stops being a corridor, a woman starts making decisions differently. Nothing bought. Nothing planted. Nothing that assumes next year, because assuming next year in here feels like accepting it.

That is where five years has actually landed, and your eldest can feel it even though she could not name it.

There is a difference between accepting a room and being alive in one, and the two have merged. You have not been asked to put your family's life on hold until an address changes. Scripture says this is the day which the Lord hath made, we will rejoice and be glad in it, Psalm 118:24, and the Holy Spirit gives grace for a Tuesday in the fifth year exactly as He will for the first Tuesday afterwards.

Put something on the wall. Not a poster. Something the three of you choose together, this month.

And the system is not a failure

One more, and I want to be firm about it.

The coats in order. The board on the duvet. The little one dressing under the covers.

Those are not evidence of a woman who has settled for something. They are the work of somebody who looked at an impossible arrangement and made it function for two children for five years, and there is no assessment anywhere in Scripture that reads that as anything but strength.

You are not diminished by having made this work. Scripture says she looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness, Proverbs 31:27, and the Holy Spirit does not read a mother's worth off her square footage.