Gather Your Seashells, Go on a Roadtrip, Have Kids, or Not

No one gets to decide what your faithful life is

It was a sweltering Dallas day nine years ago. We were eating a late lunch at Velvet Taco after one of our favorite date spots, Half Price Books, and this, dear reader, was the setting of the biggest fight of our marriage.¹

But first you should know that when I was a teenager, my parents produced a tool for homeschoolers that went 1990s viral. The way we hawked this ware was by traveling around the country to homeschool conventions proliferated by attendees of every sort you imagine to be at homeschool conventions in the 90s. What I don’t think most of the attendees knew, though, is that parked behind these gigantic convention centers was a line of campers and RVs, filled with the progeny of the adults who worked in the booths. And when I say filled, I mean, busting at the seams. The quivers were full.

I hated the conventions, loathed pulling up to them in our Class C camper hauling a utility trailer behind us. But in those years of traveling, I saw more of these united states in my teens than most kids will ever see and I loved it.²The Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains and the St Louis Arch, but also rest stations and off the track diners and bad roads and good mechanics.

I have never gotten the travel bug out of my system since.

Going on a road-trip is my idea of a great vacation. I would rather spend four days in a car driving somewhere than twelve hours driving to and from airports, waiting, getting delayed, flying, landing, and navigating to a rental car. Arm me with a good audiobook and road snacks, and I’m set. Avoid the highways and cities, and I’m game. Mapless? I’m cool, I’ll find my way.

About ten years ago I started to dream about vanlife or building out a schoolie. Maybe it was a hyper-fixation or special interest, but it became a pulsing goal for the last five or six years. I’m constantly dreaming and scheming of ways to take our life on the road while still somehow maintaining roots here.

Nate grew up in a military family, moving across the country or world every two years for most of his life. For all my wanderlust, he has wanted nothing more than to be stationary and rooted.

In the beginning of our marriage, despite how we appreciated these qualities in one another (his stability, my adventuring), these two goals were at silent war with one another. I can look back now and see how many of the regrettable decisions we made early in our marriage were in some way shaped by these competing values.

Hence our biggest fight.

I’m not going to share all the details but I was restless and angsty, and spontaneously suggested we just go tour some campers or RVs, just to see what was out there. What he internalized was “We’re going to sell everything, uproot our lives, pour everything we have into a cheap plastic box on wheels, and end up broke and broken down on some rattlesnake infested desert road.”

I wish I could go back to those two coldly staring individuals and say, “Hey, how about both of you learn to externalize your thoughts a little sooner and better instead of internalizing everything to the point that it comes out sideways?”

One thing we’ve talked about for a long time is how difficult it is for a couple without children to shift the internalized and assumed priorities a couple our age has. Our peers are graduating their kids, marrying them off, some of them are still in the little stages, naps and tantrums and finger painting on the walls. We don’t have another couple friend our age who also doesn’t have kids. They’re all building these beautiful little kingdoms of stability, rootedness, home, legacy, and security.

But it’s also suburbs, big box stores filled with diapers and kids clothes, school pickup lines, chore charts, sports every night, and saving for college. This just isn’t our life, but for some reason, we constantly feel like we’ve slipped into a cardboard cutout of that life, a substanceless paper-doll version of that life. Flat, one dimensional, propped up but not held up by the things that hold up and give heft to our friend’s lives, the things that give their lives shape and reason.

The question we’ve had to circle around all these years is what instead does give our lives shape and reason?

For a few years we had a little pull-behind camper we called The Dandelion Man. We loved him.

Years ago I wrote a piece in response to a popular reformed preacher’s sentiment to “not waste your life collecting seashells,” and I think about it all the time. I wrote it when we were still hoping to have children and I read it differently now, eight years on.

The earnest evangelicals will make the argument that there are other ways to get children and therefore “leave a legacy,” therefore not wasting your life. But I have left that binary behind. I don’t think it’s a choice between loving the life you have and living some kind of backbreaking sacrificial life worth emulating. Some of the most preachy-about-legacy people I know are also the most stingy, hoarding their wealth, bragging about spending their children’s inheritances, and trying to find loopholes out of paying taxes.

Having kids doesn’t automatically make you less selfish. And not having kids doesn’t automatically make you more selfish.

The point is navigating what is a faithful life for me?

And no one can answer that question but you.

Last Saturday, after spending the entire day cleaning the house, Nate said, “Hey, wanna drive over to Harrisburg and tour camper vans at Camping World?”

And, reader, that’s what we did.

Below is your monthly Link Love and there are some beauts in there. A piece on a semi-famous childless couple, a tv show that shot to the top of my favorites, an album I can’t stop listening to, an article with so many nuggets, I couldn’t pick one to quote, and more!

Hope you like what I found for you this month =)