Balancing a career, motherhood, my marriage, a home, friendships, family, events, and normal day to day chaos during a global pandemic has not been easy. -Understatement of the century.

What do you do when you are the adult in charge and everything is on fire, but you have no access to water? Do you get your family out and just let it burn? Do you scream on the top of your lungs for help? There is no way out, you just have to face the fact everything is on fire and the only thing you have to stop the flames is a water balloon.

Does anyone else feel like that is how life this year is going? Or is it just me? *Nervous laughter*

I know I am not alone. I have had dozens of conversations with my husband, friends, family, colleagues, young mothers, complete strangers on the internet. . . Everyone is feeling a version of “Everything is on Fire”. Everyone.

No, not everyone is experiencing financial hits that 2020 has brought on. Not everyone has immediately had someone diagnosed with this disease. Not everyone has been locked in their homes since March. But everyone has been touched by the chaos of this year.

I was so encouraged this week by two women, on Instagram, that I have never met in person. Two lives that I never would have known existed if it were not for the lockdowns in Ohio way back in March. If I hadn’t been given extra time, no commute, more hours with my daughter, and the encouragement to start a blog, I never would have made the Instagram account for my blog.

I never would have met the almost 150 women I know through an IG feed on my phone. I don’t get the honor of personally talking with all of them often, but the couple I get to talk with throughout the week are so real, so sweet and so encouraging.

It is nice to know I am not alone. That I am not crazy in feeling the way I am right now. It is nice to know other working moms are genuinely pioneering through situations that NO ONE could have seen coming, that nothing could have prepared us for.

I am thankful. I am thankful that this year has aggressively taught me to focus on what I really want, and what is most important in my life. Looking back on 2020 there will be tears, but what I hope stands out more in my memory is what we overcame. What walls we were up against and how we busted through them.

I am thankful that God has blessed me with a little girl who is sweet and so affectionate. I am thankful for so many little things that in January and February they looked like negative situations, and life going not according to plan, which now looking back was OBVIOUSLY God setting things in place for us to be taken care of this year. At the time they sucked and were so discouraging.

Hindsight is 20/20 right?

I hope hindsight for 2020 is just that. Through the chaos, the tragedies, the loss, the pain, the trials, the mess, the massive walls we were up against . . . I hope we busted through them all. I hope that looking back we see that while we were fighting to stand in the flames as everything around us burned, that we found out we had a never ending supply of water balloons, from our friends, family and Instagram neighbors we never met. We had help. We were not alone. While we fought on the inside we had a team fighting for us on the outside.

We won’t be the same people going into 2021 that we were going into this year. We will have some wounds still healing from this year, but we will be stronger. Hopefully. We will know we can reach out for help when we need it, and reach out to others when they need it. Hopefully we will be a little more transparent, and less judgmental. Hopefully we will show more grace.

Hopefully we will be better.