Ordinary Routine

April 28, 2023

Dr. Gregory House, of the award-winning series (House) on FOX, would not have been one of my favorite real-life doctors. He was a narcissistic atheist with a terrible bedside manner. But recently, one of the character’s quotes has had me stopped in my tracks, “Sometimes we can’t see why normal isn’t normal.”  Is everything we experience normal…or does normal not exist? This question is black or white. People land on one side or the other. I don’t think that there is one human being that hasn’t asked themselves what they believe “normal” is.

Over the past two years, our family has seen a lot of change. What we felt was our normal changed on the day that Collin was diagnosed with his brain tumor. Before Medulloblastoma, we were boring people. Our lives followed a pattern. I went to the grocery store the same day every week. We did the same traditions year after year (most of them because we wanted to, but some because we felt like we had to). The kids all settled into their usual extracurricular activities. That was our normal. Everything we were experiencing was normal.

Until that normal didn’t exist. After years of the ups and downs that come with living with pediatric cancer, we are now learning to live post Medulloblastoma. Collin is up in Heaven doing God’s work, and we are learning to live without him physically being here-just accepting the little pieces of Collin that God sends us, watching God’s work unfold before our eyes. Deacon started college, came back home from college, started his own businesses, and is now discerning going into the military. KaraBeth went off to Ohio University, living the best college life, discovering who she is. Emma will be graduating in the next month from high school, only to join her sister down in Ohio University and start her own path of self-discovery. Mr. Lincoln has taken us off road with parenting-he’s a creation of his own. Lincoln is our theater kid (already at the age of 7) who will sing you a song about the bogger you have hanging out of your nose. And then come up with a math problem that solves how many square inches of the tissue you should use to wipe that booger, based on the size of your nose and the length of the booger-all with his hands on his hips. He’s honestly unlike any of our other kids!!! Lincoln’s present goals in life are to be an art teacher Monday through Friday, a barber on Saturday, and a priest on Sunday, plus being in a Broadway show along the way.

Mike and I have been adjusting to these new lives, with new paths and forks in the road. Like Abraham and Sarah, sometimes we do it with grace, sometimes we do not. Throughout Collin’s cancer journey, we learned to trust God, we relied on it every day and could not live without it. Collin was the brightest example of that. During the most tremulous time in our lives, we learned from our 9-year-old son to place all our trust in God. Every. Single. Day. I, like many people, was proud of the change that Collin had helped me make in my relationship with God. He showed me what it truly meant to have my eyes fixed on Jesus.

But then Collin died. I felt like a baby bird that was pushed out of the nest to figure out how to fly on my own. I didn’t have Collin here to show me how to live that life of trust in God. It was all too easy to revert back and try to obtain that normal life that didn’t exist anymore. In the time following when Collin passed away, my list making was on steroids. I attempted to get the older kids to fit in the boxes of life that were the ‘usual’ path of life. Closely watching what I ate, I tried to gain control of life with my weight. Occasionally, there would be nights where I would use one too many drinks to forget that I had feelings. I found myself not trusting that God had a plan for us now in these new lives.

It took a lot of work to release the grip I had on life. Slowly, but surely, with Mike at my side and weekly meetings with my therapist, I was able to start relaxing the clench I thought I had on everything (and everyone) around me. Through endless prayers and conversations with God in my head and my heart, I started to change. It became easy to transfer the trust I had in God with Collin’s journey to all the aspects of our lives. I read books about saints that lived their lives for God, and how they did that. I forgot about my daily lists and handed my mornings to God every day, asking Him to guide where it went. The tension in my body was being released inch by inch from top to bottom, all while re-fixing my eyes on Jesus. I was like Simon Peter, walking on water while Collin was alive, but momentarily falling into the depths of the sea after he passed away when I took my eyes off of Jesus. But He showed up-Jesus picked me up and let me regain my focus, fixing my eyes on Jesus.

We laid Collin to rest two years ago today. I can finally feel my feet back on the ground again-it has taken a long time. There is still a lot of work I have to do though. As the kids settle into their new paths of life, we are faced with what our ordinary routine is becoming. There is something to be said about an ordinary routine, which is far from thinking that life is normal. I can thrive on routine. I can thrive on the ordinary, all while letting God be the extraordinary of my life. These past few weeks, it has made me sad to realize that Collin is not a part of our normal anymore. I can wonder what Deacon is going to decide about the military. I can watch Kara follow her heart in her relationship and give my support wherever life takes her. I can help Emma get ready to leave home for a new adventure in life. I can experience a new way of parenting through Lincoln’s craziness. But I don’t have to worry about where Collin is, what he is doing, or where he will end up. I know that answer. Knowing that I can trust God with where He has taken Collin, I can certainly trust that God has a plan for the rest of our family.

“Sometimes we can’t see why normal isn’t normal”-normal simply doesn’t exist. When we trust God, there is no normal…just an ordinary routine, with an extraordinary plan, from an extraordinary God.

Kim Nemet