This little girl sure brings back memories. With her tiny horse, and tiny saddle, and tiny boots stomping off. Give me a pony and a wide open pasture and watch me ride away.

When I was little, my dad always said I was my own person, and spanked me for it often. Looking back, I can see when it happened: the day I lost my way and developed a fierce need to please people. This path I picked the night my brother and I did push ups. After watching Wild Kingdom and Walt Disney and eating potato soup with buttered crackers in a kitchen covered in flowery yellow wallpaper and Formica counter tops. It was the 70’s after all.

Wild Kingdom and Walt Disney always aired at the end of the week. On Sundays. The three of us, Dad, my brother Patrick, and me never missed those shows. Mom worked nights in the ICU. Nurses still wore little, white dresses with white stockings back then. Mom always looked so pretty in that uniform. And quiet surrounded her at home where she slept during the day, and at work where machines beeped like baby birds, but little girls like me couldn’t make a peep as I waited for Mom to finish her night shift after Dad dropped us at the hospital on his way to work early in the morning.

So we did push ups real quiet in the living room with Mom asleep down the hall, first my brother, and then me, Dad counting them out in a loud whisper. “I’ll buy the winner a special present,” Dad promised, and I trembled knowing I couldn’t beat my big brother, but determined to die trying.

And part of me died trying that night. The part that didn’t care what people thought of me. My skinny little arms shaking with fatigue. My long, straight, strawberry blonde hair hiding my freckled scrunched up face. Dad and Patrick rooting for me once they sensed my dogged determination doing those push ups. “Come on Paul Harvey, you can do it!” My nine-year-old brother insisted. “Just a couple more and you’ll beat me!” That couple more pushed me past my seven-year-old limits. And there was no limit what I could earn after that. Against all odds, I won the push-up contest. And my dad bought me my first real piece of jewelry. A dainty gold bracelet.

And a people-pleaser was born.

That little pony girl who once rode only for the whisper of the wind turned her pony around and rode for the roar of the crowd.

And that gold bracelet became a gold shackle. I was now enslaved to earning love. Doing my best to make everyone like me. To approve of what I said and what I did and who I was.

Nearly forty years later– like forty years in the desert thirsting for water– Jesus has offered me grace. Slowly, but surely the Lord is setting me free. All my little ways and means of gaining approval falling by the wayside.

It began with my fourth pregnancy not long after I became a believer. Why weren’t people happy for us? Number three baby arrived highly approved. “You’re trying for that boy. Good for you!” “You had your boy! Well done little momma! Two girls and a boy: your family is complete!”

Number four pregnancy was a different story.

“Are you gonna keep it?” A family member asked when we announced our good news. “Can you afford to put four kids through college? To even feed four kids? You really need to consider your family’s future and do what’s best for the kids you already have.” When this family member suggested terminating the pregnancy, Scott hung up the phone. Another family member insisted I was too old at 35 to have a healthy baby. “Down syndrome skyrockets at your age,” they counseled. “You really need to rethink this pregnancy.”

How do you rethink a pregnancy?

With our fifth pregnancy people on the street added their two cents. Hard, little pennies I carried around in my pocket and in my heart. “When is your husband getting a vasectomy? You really need to get your tubes tied. You’re too old to keep having babies!”

I did become popular with the Latter Day Saints, however. These sweet “the more the merrier” families began inviting me to their church when they discovered I wasn’t one of them. I sure appreciated these talks with friendly Mormon moms at Sam’s Club when they found me pushing a cart full of kids. “God loves children. Building a large family is beautiful. Those little ones are jewels in your crown,” they encouraged me.

Even Muslims appreciated my children. “You keep having sons! You are blessed by God. You need to become Muslim,” an earnest Muslim beseeched me one day.

But my people weren’t happy. God had set me on a path many in my orbit didn’t approve of. And life got pretty lonely, the days full of diapers and exhaustion and people I so longed to please who didn’t understand why I was always pregnant with a trail of kids in my wake.

I didn’t quite understand it either, except that little girl on her pony told her grandma riding beside her on a Tennessee Walker with a flowing mane and tail that I would have five sons someday. “You had four boys, Grandma Helen. And that baby girl that died on you ’cause you wouldn’t stop riding your horses.” That’s what Grandma Helen told me, her voice heavy with regret. “I had that baby– my only girl– early because I wouldn’t get off my danged horse.”

“I’m gonna have five boys, okay Grandma Helen?”

“Okay,” said Grandma Helen with a grin. Riding horses and motorcycles well into her 70s, there was no taming my black-haired Montana-raised grandma. To my regret, she only lived to see our oldest son born, though she told me when I was six-years-old and sharing my dreams with her she’d be happy to have five great grandsons.

Spending twenty years pregnant or nursing a baby rocked my world. Pretty much rocked everyone around me’s world. The babies kept coming and my approval rating deflated like a leaking tire sighing out its life’s air. I ran into a former school teacher who once thought I was pretty special. I’d seen him on pregnancy number four and five as well. On four, he frowned at my belly. On five, he really frowned, and gave me his two cents. And on number six, he turned his back and walked away in disgust when he saw my baby belly coming. So glad when I was fat with number seven, I never ran into him. I had another former teacher tell me, “You had so much potential. Why are you wasting it all on babies?”

Arrows in my heart.

But with each pregnancy, God encouraged me. Pregnancies with crisis and the testing of my faith. The testing of my heart. But the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength, 2 Timothy 4:17.

And since then the Lord has steadily torn down the idol of other loves in my life. Especially the idol of people pleasing and my tendency to work my butt off earning love.

The Bible has plenty to say about this:

Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ” Galatians 1:10.

On the contrary, we speak as those approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel. We are not trying to please people but God, who tests our hearts. 1 Thessalonians 2:4. 

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith– and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God– Ephesians 2:8. 

Bearing seven children, and now raising five rambunctious boys in my forties is not something done in my own strength. It’s by the grace of God. The overflowing and overwhelming grace of God in my life. Every day I wake up and say, “God give me the strength I need for this day.” And every day it comes.

Strength comes.

And I remind myself I don’t have to earn it. Not people’s love. Not my parents’ love. Not God’s love.

I want you to like my blog. I want my parents to like my life choices. I want God to like everything about me. But I’m done muscling my way through this world.

I’m done doing push ups.

I’m done earning love.

I’m living on grace now.

I hope you are, too.

And Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace” Luke 7:50.

Thank you for these photos of the boys ~ Ashton Imagery. You can find Kayla on facebook under Ashton Imagery. Love her pictures and she’s great with wiggly little ones.