A few weeks ago we took family pictures. As usual, I was the crazy mom trying to control my kids. They’ve gotten so big and I’ve become the Snoopy adult from the Peanuts cartoon. Nobody really listens to me. I sound blah blah blah blah, even to myself.

With seven kids, and now four grandbabies as well, getting a good family photo is about impossible. Like everything else in life, I’m learning to cast aside my expectations to experience what’s really happening: the good, bad, bone-jarringly beautiful, blazingly fast thing called life. Of course, I planned my life out years ago because I thought you could do that.

When I was about ten years old, I told my Grandma Helen, “When I grow up, I’m going to have five boys.”

“What about girls,” Grandma asked.

“I don’t want any girls.”

“Why not?” Grandma was on a horse and so was I, riding through a field of rolling yellow grass on a warm summer day.

“Because girls aren’t fun.” I urged my pony to walk faster to keep up with Grandma’s Tennessee Walker, Gypsy. I was my grandma’s only granddaughter. She had three grandsons, none horse-lovers, so I was her riding buddy. “You should have at least one girl,” Grandma advised.

“I’ll think about it,” I conceded, then kicked my pony into a gallop. How kind God was to give us two sweet, sassy girls. And how wrong I was. They were so fun to raise.

This month our oldest daughter, Cami turns thirty. Lacy is just two years behind coming up on twenty-eight. In thirty years of raising kids, I’ve learned something profound. At least to me, it seems profound. Kids aren’t the only ones being raised. Parents are being raised too.

Our older kids sometimes say we are irresponsible, like when we bought our way-too-young-for-motorcycle sons John and Joey tiny dirt bikes that went too fast and three-year-old Joey crashed into a tree in the middle of a family party. I’m happy to say, he was okay. But Cami chewed us out. “Who buys their three-year-old kid a motorcycle?! You guys are way too irresponsible!” Cami was so mad at us.

“If we were responsible only half of you kids would be here,” Scott likes to say. “Not even half. We would have stopped on number three.”

Had we ended on our oldest son, I’d believe raising boys is harder than raising girls since Luke was a colicky baby, a wild toddler, and in high school about did us in. He wrecked four cars before his high school graduation. Not to mention having to leave his private Christian high school because he was a rebel. And Scott was a teacher there. Talk about a painful moment. We laugh about it now, but at the time, I cried for days.

Luke is still a bit of a rebel. His non-compliance continues to be the reason I freak out during family photos. Believe me when I say this is not my finest moment. I’m after what Luke is holding behind his back and I’m ready to wrestle him to the ground to take his beer and hide it from the camera.

As you can see, my daughters are trying to calm me down. Luke and Lacy have been close since they spent several years at the same time (Luke in high school, Lacy in college) keeping Scott and I awake at night. “Do you think we’ve failed as parents?” Scott asked me in the thick of Luke and Lacy’s season of figuring out who they really were. Testing their limits and our limits too.

“No, I said. “We have Cami and Garry to prove we are good parents. If Cami and Garry were our only kids, we’d think we were all that and a bag of chips. But thanks to our risk-takers Lacy and Luke, we know what it’s like when your sandwich falls apart in your lap.”

The good news is Lacy and Luke found their way. They are amazing adults. Lacy is a nurse and Luke just received another promotion in the Army. It looks like Luke’s headed to language school to learn Russian in 2022 for his military intelligence job. Scott and I are very proud of our grown kids, and secretly, incredibly relieved that even with all our parenting mistakes, they turned out just fine.

It has been so fun, hard, crazy, gut-wrenching, sweet, and utterly stunning all at the same time raising these seven kids. Amazing how they all came out of the same gene pool and yet they are so different. Our eighteen-year-old son John looks so much like my brother Patrick, it’s uncanny. He also has the Laughlin knack for knowing it all.

“You don’t know? Just ask John. He knows everything.” says Joey, our sixteen-year-old who is quiet like Scott, except with his brothers, or on the football field. And I don’t know what happened to Scott’s quietness. I fell in love with Scott because he was the strong, silent type. Now my husband is louder than me. I used to be an outgoing person, but that wasn’t who I really was.

I realized I was an introvert not an extrovert when my dad gave me a bunch of old childhood film he put on CDs. In these videos, I am a silent, pensive little girl watching my big brother Patrick perform for the camera. Our parents were outgoing people and I learned to be outgoing from the family I grew up in, but that is not who I really am.

My real self feels safer behind a bigger person. When I was young, the bigger person I liked to hide behind was my big brother Patrick. My senior year of high school, Scott became that bigger person in my life. Yet in our love affair (Scott was my first real boyfriend), I realized a person can’t always protect you. In fact, your biggest protector has the greatest ability to hurt you. Even now, thirty-five years and seven kids after we got together, the fallout from our early years still gives me something to write about.

In my new novel, River of Mercy, my main character Maggie is searching for a protector. Not just for herself, but for her fifteen-year-old son Lane. She’s been betrayed by everyone she’s ever loved. It’s a broken, scary, hard place to be and I am exploring that right now. With each of my novels, I have a book cover created and then put that cover on my computer’s screen saver. So every day, when I open my computer, the book hits me in the face until I finish it.

“That’s you!” A precocious little three-year-old told me the other day. My computer was sitting open and this three-year-old was visiting my home and pointed to my book cover.

“No, that’s not me in the river,” I assured this incredibly cute, bossy little girl.

“It is you!” she insisted. “I know it’s you!” She became indignant. Like I was playing a trick on her. The big frown on her tiny little face was so funny.

“I promise it’s not me.” I put my hands on my hips and stared down at her, all fifty years older and wiser, so I thought.

“Well, it’s you!” she said, and then ran off like I was lying to her. I stood there a little stunned for a moment, staring at the woman in the river on my book cover.

Standing in a river of mercy… of course, it’s me.

All my main characters are me in some way. I write stories to work out a wound in myself and River of Mercy is no exception. How did I end up talking about my new book when I began telling you about taking family pictures? The moral of this blog post is becoming who you really are isn’t easy. Your parents try to shape you. The world tries to shape you. Your own will and desires do their best to shape you. But in the end, your Creator has already shaped you and you are becoming who you’re really meant to be if you are opening yourself to the God who made you.

You is smart. You is kind. You is important. Scott and I came across the movie The Help the other night in Reno on our hotel room TV. My favorite character in this movie says this line. She loves the children she must raise. She instills in them their inherent value. The world will damage them. Their parents will damage them. They will no doubt become their worst enemy because, in the end, we all are to some degree our own worst enemy.

Nobody is harder on our over-achieving kids, Cami and Garry, than themselves. And our rebel children did their own kind of damage to themselves, just like Scott and I damaged ourselves and each other before surrendering to Jesus. And yet there is that River of Mercy we all can experience. The grace that flows from the Mercy Seat of Heaven. Are you standing in that river of mercy yet?

I hope so. If not, shoot me an email and I will pray for you to experience God’s amazing grace. It’s life-changing.

I’m getting excited about my latest novel, River of Mercy. It’s halfway finished, and I’ve fallen in love with my broken characters. Ernest Hemingway said, “We are all broken. That’s how the light gets in.”

Our extended family photo is full of the sun in our faces. A lot of light gets into our family because we are a broken but beautiful mess. We call my dad Opa. Opa roughly means “cheers” in Greek. We are not Greek. A hundred other countries run through our bloodstream, but not a drop from Greece. The terms: Opa and Oma come from my mom’s German heritage. But in our gene pool, we are so many things, above all we are human. We are all growing up, and it shows.

Many thanks to our boys’ awesome youth pastor Justin Bronder for taking these photos for Oma’s 79th birthday. He captured “us” and I’m so grateful to have these forever photos.