I love it when a rhythm breaks—it's such an amazing opportunity for learning.

Just kidding, I am not that sanctified yet.

In fact, on Wednesday I walked through my disaster of a house to sit down and write this email because my timeblocker said it was time to do so. I have to admit that it was hard to avoid cleaning everything in sight and sit down for work. Every time I stepped outside of my bedroom this past week, my cortisol levels shot through the roof.
 

The kids have been doing their Morning Lists faithfully, so it’s definitely not their fault. It’s actually no one’s fault. It’s just a fact of life: sometimes rhythms break.

Related: Identifying Your Productivity Season (Are You Surviving, Reviving, or Thriving?)

The Rhythm That Broke And Why

The rhythm broke right before our recent trip to North Carolina. I found myself fighting a feeling that crops up once every 4-5 months as a year-round homeschool mom: I found myself dreading lessons.
 

This is not my normal. In fact, dreading lessons is so abnormal for me that I knew immediately that there was definitely something else going on. I shelved it while we were traveling, but I suspected it was the same thing it always is when I feel this way: our school spaces weren’t working anymore.
 

I knew this point would come—being eight weeks postpartum and having so recently “moved back in” to our renovated house.

With limited time before the baby's arrival, we had prioritized essential spaces like the master bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom, while the homeschool area in the living room remained in disarray. With my due date drawing closer, I decided to call it and shoved the thrown-together boxes of homeschool materials in the kids' closet where I could blissfully ignore them while focusing on the baby.
 

She came. We recovered. I healed. The children were hungry for normal, so I grabbed out our morning basket and restarted our rhythms. Our homeschooling was back online and going along swimmingly… until it wasn’t. (Collective friends—remember when I almost impulsively decided to fix it days before leaving the state for a week?)
 

This realization set off a chain of events that led to everything that typically belongs in a closet being scattered around the living room floor (and I’ve got kids, so that means things alwaysscatter further—aaaand since we’re talking school and craft supplies, they get turned into half-baked projects). Things are just messy enough to make dishes, laundry, and general clutter slow down, adding to the chaos. Plus, I’m trying to get the hang of cloth diapering, meaning a lot more laundry.
 

Yeah, it’s an adventure in here. (I should probably press pause on the cloth diapering until we get things a little more under control. 🤔)
 

But let’s get back to the rhythm that broke to make this situation unfold this way.

When You Can’t Ignore It Any Longer

It’s not like any one big thing happened. It was more like a hundred tiny things. But when a hundred tiny things even just slightly slide off track, they still start colliding and gumming up everything. None of my typical strategies were getting us back on track. Then I woke up on Monday and just really felt like I didn’t want to teach school.
 

Dread is my signal that it’s time to pause and reevaluate what we’re doing. 🚩
 

I immediately located the pain point. It was, of course, our environment again. As a working homeschooling mama, I have to preserve as much creative and emotional bandwidth as I can for raising children, teaching lessons, and running a business.

So when I find myself spending 15 minutes during golden time while the baby’s sleeping (when I should be fully engaged with the big kids) digging through a massive disorganized box in their poorly lit closet to find the things we need—every single morning—only to emerge and find the children disengaged, waking up the baby from playing broncos right outside her door, and making themselves a peanut butter sandwich right next to our fresh print outs… well, I start feeling a little spread thin.
 

Forcing Rhythms Never Works

There’s a Biblical principle that applies in a situation like this.
 

“Prepare thy work without, and make it fit for thyself in the field; and afterwards build thine house.” — Proverbs 24:27
 

It is important to prepare one’s sustenance (in this case, an environment that supports consistent rhythms) before trying to depend on it.
 

Trying to force peaceful rhythms in a difficult environment is like trying to live off the land when you haven’t cultivated it. When we try to impose structure or routine in our lives without first addressing underlying issues, we set ourselves up for constant friction and even burnout.
 

In my case, the disorder in our homeschool space was more than just physical—it seeped into our emotional and mental states as well. The children sensed my stress, and their own frustrations grew as they tried to apply themselves in an environment that no longer supported their focus.
 

So after turning the children out to play, I sat down with my planner to troubleshoot.

I micro-journaled about my pain point, and quickly figured out a solution. We would pause our school rhythms and focus on the space together.

Annoyed, I Knew I Needed a Reframe

We homeschool year-round, and summer is typically our heaviest season academically, so I didn’t want to pause lessons. And I certainly didn’t want to do the next-right-steps I needed to in order to finish the house projects (if it was just school supplies, that would be one thing—but it’s also boxes of papers and other totally random things you’d rather just forget you have rather than sort through it).
 

I knew—between the new baby and the kind of projects my husband and I are tackling together in the family business—I’d be working on the house in the margins. Which meant that typical school rhythms would be paused and the environment would be super out of order for at least a week, if not two.
 

I wanted to just fast forward the whole thing and get to the part where we were back to doing school in a peaceful environment, enjoying the normal we’ve been craving since moving out of the house for the renovations.
 

I prayed for perspective, not wanting to blur the next two weeks out of frustration. The Lord nudged my heart, reminding me of the first step to obtaining wisdom and peace.

I had to start with gratitude.
 

Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and listed three things I was thankful for in that moment. So elementary (something I tell my children to do all of the time), but so needed. I felt convicted for being frustrated about something so petty in the grand scheme of things.
 

Yes, there was a lot of hard work in front of me—but I had a freshly painted house, a sweet new baby, kids who were hungry to learn, unity with my husband, and a rapidly growing business.
 

I remembered a post my friend Hannah shared on her Instagram earlier when she was up until the wee hours canning her abundant harvest.
 

I was indeed overwhelmed… but with blessings.
 

With this reframe, my eyes were opened to spot more good aspects of being in a season with upset rhythms:
 

1. Broken rhythms can mean your life has outgrown what was once working. As you get into a place of thriving and making amazing progress on goals that are being Developed by Providence, your life may expand to such a point that you find yourself thrown back into survival mode! This is a sign that your plan has actually been working(!)—and now they just need to be further developed to handle all of the abundance that came with it.
    
2. Broken rhythms are an invitation to make improvements. As I was organizing the living room with my eight year old (during the block of the day when we would typically be doing math lessons), I asked her casually what she would study if she could pick out all of her own school. Her face brightened to a degree that pleasantly startled me, and she grabbed her gaping mouth with stars in her eyes. “Oh, Mom. That would be amazing! I would study the Bible, focus on money for math, do book club, and keep learning Hebrew. I want to learn ALL of the languages. Oh, can I, Mom? That would just make school so easy for me!!” (Guys. 😭) A little bit later, I found my five year old walking around with the tape measurer I’d been using, measuring everything and reading the measurement out to himself—making sure he had the units of measurement correct. “Is this side centimeters, Mom?” (😍) Both moments gave me ideas about what improvements I wanted to make to our school rhythms when we return to them in September, as well as motivated me to get our Montessori homeschool spaces updated to match my son’s developmental levels (he’s still learning how to read, but so hungry for knowledge—I don’t want to be his bottleneck!).
    
3. Broken rhythms are an invitation to slow down and tend to hearts. Good rhythms keep plenty of space for heart-tending, but when we get into a rut with trying to force rhythms because we’re too anxious at the thought of letting them “break,” I’ve found that relationships tend to get displaced by a dedication to checking things off a list in an effort to outpace the stress. When the rhythm finally breaks, you feel the freedom to just respond to the emotional needs right in front of you. This can be such a healthy reset for relationships—and if you lean into it, you often find yourself feeling really thankful things broke down so you could stop and see exactly what had been going on under the hood.

What To Do With a Broken Rhythm

So if you find yourself in a place right now where you’re also needing to let a rhythm break so you can return to the drawing board, take a deep breath. It doesn’t mean you’re failing. It doesn’t mean the rhythms will stay broken, either.
 

Close your eyes and count three things you’re thankful for right now. Get a big drink of water, and then take a slow walk outside (sans the music or podcast) to really think about things. Take time to look your loved ones in the eyes the entire time they’re talking to you—and enjoy it.
 

Then sit down with your planner and figure out what pain point you need to tackle first to get things back on track. (Listen to this episode for deep encouragement on that point.)
 

Once you’ve figured out the essential lifestyle change you need to make to get things back on track, pour a cup of coffee and put your hand to the plow.
 

You’re in the messy middle, and with a bit of work, things will be back in order again. Take heart—you were made for this.
 

You are overwhelmed, yes.
 

But if you look closely, you might just see that you’re actually being overwhelmed with blessings.
 

“Where no oxen are, the crib is clean: but much increase is by the strength of the ox.” — Proverbs 14:4