Making Plans
What are you up to Saturday night?
Seems like a simple question… Just don’t ask it to me. Don’t ask if we’re coming to visit. Don’t ask if I’m planning on going to the park. Don’t ask if I’m coming for Christmas. I mean… you can ask all you want; it’s not like it offends me… I just won’t know what to tell you.
The thing is, we genuinely don’t know. Ben’s work is, as we have already established in other posts, not a very traditional job. It’s not like he has a set schedule… ever. There’s no 9-6 job, with dinner and a bedtime routine.
Ben loves singing the girls to bed at night; and when he is around at bedtime, he usually spends about an hour with them, making sure they all get to sleep before getting ready for bed himself. But he isn’t always home for bedtime.
He often leaves here at 4 or 5am so he can make it through LA traffic and to the set on time for his early morning call times. When he has those early calls, he tries to get to bed early himself, so that he can get up on time, and then he’s seldom back before 7pm. If it’s a later call, he’ll leave by lunchtime, and often doesn’t come home until late into the night, or sometimes even the following morning.
What makes it all even more exciting is that he usually doesn’t even know he’s working until the day before… sometimes not even until the morning of. There are rush calls where they need someone to come within the next hour or two, and he just packs up and takes off at a moment’s notice.
There are some definite challenges to such an unpredictable lifestyle. But there are also some distinct advantages, too. For example, on our last trip we took back to Utah, we didn’t even know we were all going until the week we left. Ben had been planning on going out there for a couple days for a job; then he got another job there for a week later. We didn’t want to be apart for that long, so we decided to pack up and go all together.
Even after we got there, we didn’t know how long we would be able to stay. Once we arrived, he started applying for acting jobs both there and here, and we just waited to see where he got picked up. The older girls and I even applied for a job or two ourselves. It made vacationing quite unpredictable for us and for our hosts, but allowed us to spend a couple weeks more with friends and family than we had originally expected.
As a side note, what a blessing it has been to have family and friends that allow us to be unpredictable with them. We are always welcomed with open arms, even when we decide last minute that we’re going to visit. We love and appreciate you!
Back to our craziness…
Even on days when he’s around, Ben’s working from home. He spends hours applying for all kinds of acting jobs, hours working out at the gym, and the rest of the time calling in for more extra work or working on writing his own scripts. There are jobs posting around the clock, it seems, and most are time-sensitive, so he has to be aware of things as they pop up.
So… Here’s the deal… I love my family. They have become my focus. And generally speaking I get to see my children all day, every day. Well… minus the time they are at school… which is far too long. But Ben… well, we get to see him far less. So when he’s home… we all want to be able to spend time with him. Whether he has his work done and can spend time with us seems irrelevant when we miss him. We don’t want to take off for the evening if there’s a chance he’ll be done soon.
In addition to that… we still only have one car. One car to rule them all… one car to drive them. Okay… it’s not really one car. My mom lets Ben borrow her car to get to work so that I can use our car to take the kids where they need to go. She’s been so nice. Probably too nice… but don’t tell her that. Even so, our schedule often revolves around the car anyway. My mom still needs transportation to and from work and for occasional errands, so I make sure I’m around to provide it.
My schedule, then, is both unpredictable and predictable, in different ways. I wake up, take our kids to school, pick them up, make dinner, and get them to bed on time. But we’re never sure when our how long we’ll get to spend time together as a family. Our vacations are very spur of the moment, and depend on when and where Ben gets jobs. Our weekends are sacred, filled with catch up work around the house and family fun so we can tackle another week of not seeing each other.
I’m sure this all sounds stressful. I won’t pretend like it isn’t. But… I will say that I have learned that there is very little I need to know right this moment. I don’t need to know if I’ll be able to go to the gym in the morning, or have a ladies night out. I don’t need to know where I’ll be for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I don’t need to know if we will have date night every Friday night.
I feel comfort and peace even amongst the chaos. I’m feeling like we are where we are supposed to be. We have goals and dreams. We have action plans and tentative and alternate schedules, but when they’re all thrown out the window and I suddenly can’t go to my adult-only girls night… I feel peace. Maybe someday, there will be more predictability. Maybe not ever. Whether we ever get it or not, though, I’m just glad that we have this time relying on God and on each other.
But please… don’t stop inviting me to the girls night.
