I am, for the most part, a do-it-yourself kind of lady. This approach to life was born out of necessity in 1986, following the birth of my first child.

I had always intended to return to work following a liberal maternity leave. So, in anticipation of my child’s birth, I toured the home of a recommended day care provider and signed the necessary paperwork. I informed my employer of my return plans and purchased the necessary breast pump. I told myself that this commitment to nursing indicated I was willing to go the distance for this child.

Yet as my due date approached, something more than the movements of my daughter began to quake inside me. Gentle stirrings evolved into an intensely deep, personal, and agonizing debate. To fully understand my deliberation is to understand how seriously I had embraced all that had been said to me during my nearly three decades of life: You can do anything you want to do. Let nothing and no one stand in your way. An education will provide the future you want. To abandon a career is to abandon your education and your skills, desperately needed by the world.

The Women’s Movement was enjoying positive press at the time. I had experienced firsthand the implications of being a minority in the working world, yet I received the full support and respect of my co-workers, family and husband, and that was more than enough for me. I reasoned that if I continued to work full time I could provide the opportunities my child deserved.

Then I labored and gave birth to a wondrous human being. I began serving her every need and woke up just days following her birth to squarely face a most challenging question: How could I justify giving the world my best but not my child? Arriving home in time to nurse, bathe, and tuck her into bed would never qualify in my mind as giving her my best or what I believed she deserved from a fully-engaged mother.

That is when I became a do-it-yourselfer. I understood that with some sacrifice I could be the mother I felt I needed to be.

It came out of necessity when I stepped back from my career to redraw the vision of my role and myself in this world and become a full-time mother. Early on I missed my co-workers and the camaraderie we shared. At moments I felt lost and insignificant and trivialized because my child-care tasks were constant, tiring, and certainly not rewarded with money or notoriety. Full-time mothering also stopped my portion of our income, which strongly impacted our lifestyle.

In response I harnessed the determination I had once used for my career outside our home and brought it inside. I told myself I would keep up the quality of our lives by doing things myself, now that I could no longer pay someone else to do it for us.

Three short years following the birth of our eldest child we caught the vision for a life that did not resemble the suburbs and moved to the Pacific Northwest. We eventually added two other children to our fold and it is these three chickadees that I have considered anew this week, as they flew in and out the house, leaving me alone to listen to the quiet and assess where we are, now 19 years into this parenting era. I am simply amazed at the number of ways God has given my husband and me the life we first dared to begin living—this life filled with kids and animals and an undying commitment to parent them in all ways and with no reservations.

It began with a sudden, enormous change to our approach to parenting. It has continued with a growing and evolving, thrilling and challenging vision for family.

I consider this area of my life one of the best signs that there is a God, for He has been able to take two very different people and over a span of years move us along a path of solidarity. During an age when people divorce because they have “grown apart” or hope to fill a deep personal void by embracing new faces and places, God as shown my husband and me that you can be deeply in love over a lifetime. You can accomplish your dreams with modest resources.

It is this aspect of our life together that we hand over to God—in faith—on a daily basis. We have no other choice. Growing a family is an exhausting, worrisome, challenging, and scary adventure in great part. If we project too far in the future we worry and tire. But when we look back and talk about the amazing ways every need has somehow been met–every single time–we rest in the promise God was there, is there, and always will be there.

In many ways we are do-it-yourselfers. In many ways, we never were.