It’s my birthday today, and birthdays have a funny way of making you take stock.
This morning I found myself thinking that sometimes the best present is no present at all.
Not because I don’t like gifts, but because a little more financial breathing space can be a gift in itself.
The same is true of food. Choosing the healthy picnic instead of the extravagant meal isn’t really about saying no to cake. It’s about saying yes to a body that hurts a little less tomorrow.
But the thing I’ve reflected on most today is family.
People often compare lives as though somewhere, someone has found the perfect balance. The perfect home. The perfect children. The perfect relationship. The perfect routine.
I’m not sure that family exists.
Instead, I think we all make trade-offs.
A perfectly tidy house has benefits. It can also come with more demands, more stress, more reminders, more arguments about keeping it that way.
Beautiful ornaments have benefits. They can also mean anxiety about breakages and less freedom to move, explore and create.
Choosing connection over conformity has benefits. It also has costs.
For us, I’ve often chosen to make life fit our brains and bodies rather than forcing our brains and bodies to fit someone else’s idea of how life should look.
That choice has costs. There is judgement, both from society and, sometimes, from the little critical voice inside my own head. There is less money. Less time. A body that carries the consequences of chronic illness every single day.
Perhaps every family pays a different price for the life they create. There is no right answer. Only the question: which costs are we willing to carry, and what are we hoping to grow in return?
But there are benefits too.
Our home isn’t always calm. Sometimes it’s beautifully chaotic. But it is deeply connected, and love is never in doubt.
Perhaps peace isn’t the absence of chaos. Perhaps it’s knowing that even in the middle of it, we’re still connected. Even when we’re angry, overwhelmed or sad, we repair. We come back together. Home is a place where our nervous systems are allowed to be human, without belonging ever being at risk.
Yesterday, while buying my son a notebook for his maps, I quietly bought myself a birthday present too: The Wilding Year.
I realised it wasn’t really about gardening.
Every garden asks something different of us. Some ask for neat edges, careful pruning and constant control. Others ask us to notice more than we interfere. To work with what naturally wants to grow. To become less of a designer and more of a steward.
Neither is right or wrong. They simply create different landscapes.
Perhaps families are much the same.
I’ve realised I don’t want to cultivate a perfect family any more than I want to cultivate a perfect garden.
I’m trying to steward both.
To notice what helps each person grow.
To remove what I can that causes harm.
To protect when protection is needed.
To trust their own nature more than my own need for control.
Perhaps stewardship is simply love without ownership. It asks a different question from control. Not “how do I make this become what I want?” but “what does this need from me in order to flourish?”
Today my children sent me upstairs while they quietly laid out a birthday picnic with little pink doughnuts, candles and all the food they had chosen themselves. Earlier we’d been to Morrisons Café. It wasn’t extravagant. It wasn’t the sort of birthday you’d see on social media. It looked remarkably like many other ordinary days in our house.
And perhaps that’s the greatest privilege of all. Not creating extraordinary days. But creating a life where ordinary days already feel enough.
Just sandwiches, fruit, popcorn, pink doughnuts with candles, a book I’d quietly bought myself, two children who wanted to make me smile, and the overwhelming feeling that this ordinary little life we’ve built is enough.
I don’t have the perfect life.
I have a life that fits.
And perhaps that’s all a steward can ever hope for.