Homeschool

Road Tripping Through Life

/ Elizabeth Trotter / 2 Comments

This guy. He leads us so well.

No one else sees the hidden work he does. I do. The way he fixes tech problems at church events, at weddings and funerals. The way he guides people through the process of healing. I may never know the personal stories of his clients, but I get to hear the prayers, theology, practical tools, and existential philosophy behind his counseling approach. 

He’s the one who remains calm when the house is in chaos and somehow brings that calm to everyone else. The one who serves in the background when nobody knows. But I know. I see the sacrifice, the secret labor, the invisible support.

He’s the one with the crazy ideas, and for twenty-six years I’ve been happy to be the armor bearer of the Trotter family (in the mold of 1 Samuel 14). The truth about us is that he has leadership skills I don’t have. He’s farsighted, farseeing, blessed with long vision. I might miss the forest for the trees sometimes, but once I catch that vision, I have implementation skills. And let’s face it, a leader isn’t a leader unless someone else is following. 

I’ve said yes to a lot of crazy ideas not everyone would say yes to, and we’ve made it work. Together. Because he’s never once done something without me or my full support — and because he believes I’m his equal partner, à la 1 Peter 3:7.

We’re getting closer to the empty nest years, close enough that we can almost taste what it’s going to be like. This picture is of a recent road trip without kids. It reminded me of weekends with him when we were younger. We would literally spend the entire weekend together, walking, talking, eating pizza (back when I could eat gluten — oh the days), watching movies. Sharing our hearts. There’s something about spending long periods of time together that unlocks something in both of us, and we can go to the deeper levels of our souls with each other.

These days we try to spend as much time together as possible, but it wasn’t always easy the past few years. In the middle of launching our kids my brain and nervous system was so confused. I couldn’t see it at the time; I can only see it looking back. At the time all I could see was my former life—a life I had loved and poured my whole self into—disappearing. I couldn’t grasp what was next, and what had been was slipping away. 

That middle period was incredibly discombobulating, and sadly I wasn’t the best partner to the oldest friend I have. I’d been so singularly focused while our children were growing up that I couldn’t see past that stage. I didn’t want to “grow old together” because that meant losing this precious part of family life, this defining part of myself.

But this guy. He waited.

He waited for my brain to settle and my hormones to normalize. He waited till the girl he fell in love with came back to him. This most recent road trip didn’t feel like we were entering a new phase. It felt more like returning to the early days of our marriage, to the way this family got started. In a curious mirror of our early years, this life still holds the hope of future babies — though this time they won’t be ours. 

So, my dear Jonathan, I want to grow old with you. Who knows? In the end it might be more like growing young with you, just with more aches and pains. But wherever you go, I’m going too.

For more reflections on marriage and motherhood, read my book, The Hats We Wear.

Two Book Reviews and a Substack Announcement

/ Elizabeth Trotter / Leave a comment

I finally got started on Substack! I’m still in the process of figuring out how to share my writing both on this blog, which has been our online home for over fifteen years, and on Substack, but if you’re someone who prefers that platform, I’d love it if you would head over there and subscribe and follow!

As time goes on, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on motherhood and homeschooling, launching kids, creativity and AI, and the spiritual life. For now, I wanted to give you a feel for what kinds of thoughts I’ll be sharing over there, so I’m including my first Note down below.

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I’m a late adopter of most new technologies (case in point: I only joined IG this year). But my daughters tell me Substack is the place where writers and readers gather, so until I can figure out what else I need to know to keep up with this platform, I thought I’d begin by sharing about books that have shaped me and are continuing to shape me. Books are friends, after all.

Today’s books are both from authors I was initially dubious of. Authors whose first books I encountered did not connect with me. But I gave them another chance anyway, and I’m so glad I did—because they are remaking me.

First up, Tish Harrison Warren’s What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience. Years ago I tried Liturgy of the Ordinary and couldn’t finish it. It felt too surface level and just didn’t draw me in. But when a dear friend told me she was reading Harrison’s newest book and told me a bit about it, I was intrigued and thought it might be just what I needed.

It was. I was in tears in the first chapter and underlined most of it, so accurate was her description of life these last several years. Our 40s can be a desolate time. And Tish’s “cure” for what ails is now posted all over my house: “Stay in your cell.” You’ll have to read the book to find out what she means by that.

Next up, John Mark Comer’s Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus. Become like him. Do as he did. I didn’t like the first Comer book I read. The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry didn’t teach anything I disagreed with, but it was written in a style that pained my creative and editorial heart. I didn’t think I’d be reading any more Comer.

But then our church started going through his Practicing the Way course on Wednesday nights, and I thought I’d give it a try. I’m always looking for transformation, after all. That first video session was contemplative and careful, not pithy and punchy—enough of a shift to convince me to buy the book based on the course.

And oh how glad I am. The book digs much deeper into the course concepts, has shed the breathlessness of that 2017 book, and speaks my innate spiritual language—giving words to truths I somehow already knew in my heart yet just didn’t know how to apply.

Books, and their authors, are friends and guides. They form us and change us and can illuminate the path before us. And just as with real-life friends, first impressions are not always correct. Sometimes you have to give someone a second chance. And when you do, your life just might be changed for the better.

Just ask Elizabeth Bennett.

My morning time spot, one of the main spaces where transformation takes place in my life.

Graduation Grief Might Feel Like Death, But New Life Is Coming

/ Elizabeth Trotter / Leave a comment

Nine years ago this August my family slept in tubes. Huge culvert pipes, to be precise. We drove two hours from our row house in Phnom Penh to the top of Kirirom Mountain for a mini vacation before school started. A resort there had created separate sections with tent camping, the tube “cabins” we stayed in, and actual hotel rooms.

We only stayed one night, but it was a delight. There was a playground and a zipline/low ropes course for little ones. That night I read Ballet Shoes to the girls in our pipe. The pipe rooms were just large enough to hold a single 1.8-meter (king) mattress, so the guys slept in another pipe (which probably had less culture than ours).

The next morning we ate a combination Asian/Western breakfast under a canopy with plenty of breeze flowing, and I had the distinct realization that this was the good stuff. We were in the sweet spot of parenting. Everyone was potty trained, and they still lived at home, still liked us, and still liked each other. 

After breakfast I sat drinking tea under the canopy while Jonathan played American football with our kids on a Cambodian mountain and soaked in the moment. I knew the moment wouldn’t last forever. I knew I needed to treasure it. My oldest was about to start 8th grade, and he wouldn’t be around forever.

Sure enough, fast forward to four Augusts ago, and I was taking our firstborn to college. Jonathan couldn’t come with us because he’d just tested positive for COVID-19. Thankfully both boys and I tested negative, because I don’t know what I would have done on that drive home without my other son nearby to contain the edges of my grief.

But family life moves relentlessly forward. Two years later, we took our second to college, and this August we took our third, our first girl — four years to the day after we took our oldest. Many of my friends were taking their oldest to college. I remember the grief well. Four years ago the farewell felt like a death. 

I sobbed outside the dorm before we parted. I sobbed in the car before driving away. And when we had to stop for gas, the act of walking into a restroom and seeing my reflection in the mirror was enough of a pause to get me started sobbing all over again. We had to wait in the car for another round of tears to pass before I could safely pull back onto the highway. Just keep talking to me, I remember saying to my younger son. I couldn’t risk any stray thoughts, or I’d burst into uncontrollable tears again.

After we got home, I cried for weeks. Where was he? He was supposed to be here in the school room, studying calculus and physics. He was supposed to be here in the living room, playing Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” and Aeon’s “River Flows in You” on our upright. He was supposed to be here in the kitchen, washing the dishes. He was supposed to be outside on the trampoline, practicing flips. He was supposed to be near, and he wasn’t.

I knew the transition was going to be hard, and I didn’t plan on doing any work or school the first week after he was gone. I walked around the house in a daze, organizing things here and there but not fully present.

I couldn’t bring myself to throw away his old math and science notebooks, so I tossed them onto the top shelf of the closet instead. He would never look at those notebooks again, but in that moment I just couldn’t part with the reminders of him. I couldn’t pitch the evidence that he really had gone through my homeschool.

The truth is, it feels like a death the first time you launch a kid. And it is the end of something — it’s the end of family life as you’ve always known it. It’s the end of all of you being together automatically. It’s a real loss, and you should honor it and grieve it. 

But death isn’t the end. Because somehow, there’s a rebirth. Family gets reborn, it’s just different from before. And it can still be good. It can still be precious. Family togetherness doesn’t have to disappear, but it does have to change.

They come back for the weekend, and you have a campfire or a movie night. They come back for Thanksgiving, and you reminisce about all those Thanksgivings together growing up. They come back for Christmas, and you still do all your old traditions. 

Then another kid goes to college, and the schedule gets more complicated. But they still come back together sometimes, and of course there are the summers. But then one day your oldest graduates and won’t be coming back as frequently. Or someone brings home a significant other, and you start sharing your house with more people — and sharing your people with other families.

But by this time you’ve learned to roll with the changing schedules. You’ve learned to adapt to fewer people in the house, most of the time anyway. You’re watching all of your kids grow up and make big decisions. And you miss them, and you’re so proud of them for navigating these waters, and you still try to support their process. 

You know that family will never look like it did when you had a bunch of littles underfoot and were stepping on Legos all the time and picking up sippy cups. But it doesn’t have to, because those memories are safe inside your heart, ready to be visited whenever the need arises.

And here’s another truth: Those years were good. Those years were worth it. But young motherhood always came with an expiration date, even if we didn’t know it at the time. Babies are supposed to grow. Children are supposed to grow. And teenagers are supposed to fly away in the end. 

So first-time college mom, take heart. Remember the wisdom of Cindy Rollins, mother of nine grown children, who taught us that home isn’t a place to stay; it’s a place to leave. Our job as parents is to build a home that is safe enough and strong enough for them to launch from. And then to believe in them as they fly away (and sometimes come back to visit).

That picture of us outside the tubes hangs on the wall next to my prayer chair. Every day I can look over and see a family frozen in time — a family old enough to enjoy each other and young enough to still live together, a family old enough to sit still for read alouds and young enough to still appreciate them. 

While those particular details of family life might not be true any longer, the family is still going. We’re still holding onto each other, still spending time together when life allows. More photos will be added to walls and phones and albums as the six of us keep tackling new adventures, but that one at the top of a tropical mountain will stay in my heart forever.

All of us around a campfire two years ago, after having launched half our kids.

For more of my reflections on marriage, motherhood, and all things Christian womanhood, read my book, The Hats We Wear.

Wars, Plagues, and Fires: Is This How the World Ends?

/ Elizabeth Trotter / Leave a comment

Saddled with an anxious mind, it’s easy for me to go bleak. Hopeless. Straight to the end of the world. It’s easy to look around at world or national events and think, it’s never been this bad before.

But this is not a new habit of mine. I’ve been fast-forwarding to Armageddon for years. This tells me it’s not about the age in which I live but about the mind I inhabit.

There is, as always, reason to fear. Recently some have said that we are closer to nuclear war now than we have been since the Cold War. (Note: I originally wrote those words in April 2024, shortly after the war in Israel had begun.)

But in times like these I remember what C.S. Lewis had to say in his 1948 essay, “On Living in an Atomic Age,” and I go reread it. You probably already know it, but here it is just in case:

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors – anaesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

Of course, that reminds me of this George Orwell quote from his 1946 essay, “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” which I’ve also shared before:

The atomic bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

And that reminds me of what we learned in homeschool history class. Specifically, what we learned in Chapter 12 of Susan Wise Bauer’s The Story of the World Volume 3: Early Modern Times. The setting was London, the 1650s and ‘60s. First there was a long, drawn-out war followed by an extremely unpopular governing regime. Then there was a plague. And finally, there was a disaster that destroyed half the city.

Nearly ten years of the English Civil War—violence, unrest, and oppression. An unpopular religious regime for the next five. Two fifths (forty percent) of London succumbing to the Yersinia pestis bacterium a few years after that. And less than a year later four fifths of London burning to the ground all because the king’s baker had been careless one night.

If I’d been living in London in 1666, at the end of all of that, I would have thought the end of the world was right around the corner. I would have thought Jesus was coming soon. Surely. But I would have been wrong. Nearly four hundred years later, we’re still waiting.

What about Matthew 24 and Jesus’s apparent warnings that the end was happening soon? What about Matthew 25 and the parable of the virgins? Aren’t we supposed to be ready for His return at all times? It could happen at any moment. At least, that’s what I’d heard growing up.

But when our Bible class studied this verse, the teacher explained that it’s not just that we need to be ready for His return to happen soon. We’re also supposed to be ready for it to happen later. To be prepared to stay and wait a long time. The wise ones were prepared for a longer wait — and possibly more suffering — and they were rewarded.

Wars, plagues, and fires. Those are the trials that the English people faced in the 1650s and ‘60s. And they are the trials the modern world has faced in the 2020s. It doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the world is nigh, although it might. But things have always been falling apart. 2026 is no different — though it is personal.

So don’t just be ready to receive Him now. Also be ready to wait. Be ready right now, and be ready later. We don’t know the times, and it’s not our job to know the times. It’s our job to be prepared no matter how long it takes. Even through suffering, even through heartache. It’s our job to settle in and make a life, to raise children and plant gardens, even if we have to wait seventy years, or more.

I remember in 2021 my husband Jonathan was working on a landmark article on codependency and the church. He took a couple months to germinate the seed and complete the essay. And all through that time, I knew I wanted to write about Rose of Sharon.

But he was doing something really important, and we were everywhere surrounded by chaos. I wondered if my desire might be meaningless. So I asked him, “Every day it seems like the world is ending. Should I still write about flowers? How could they possibly matter in the light of all this other stuff?”

You know what he told me? He said, “The end of the world is especially the time to write about flowers.” And then he said something about that C.S. Lewis essay I love so much. (You can search our website for his take on the essay and my take on the essay; apparently we love this essay.)

You know what else? Since I started writing this reflection a couple years ago and then laid it down before picking it back up again recently, my relationship with news-related anxiety has changed. I don’t follow the news so closely anymore. There have been so many brushes with apocalypse that they no longer shock me anymore. It’s seemed like the end of the world so many times that I’ve given up thinking it is. 

I’ve tried to order my loves rightly once again. Looking to history, especially London in the 1650s and ‘60s has helped. But so have the words of Jesus in Matthew 25 and the words of Lewis in his famous essay, along with the essays and book listed below. Because someday it will be the end of the world, and there won’t be any question about it. Everyone will know. But until then, God has work for us to do.

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For further reading:

Why I Can’t Care About Every Crisis (on the challenges of living in two worlds)
What George Orwell and C.S. Lewis can teach us about chaos, creation, and a world living in fear
On Living in Terrible Times by Jonathan Trotter
Reading the News When Crisis Hits by Lilly Rivera 
Stop Burning Out for Jesus by Valerie Limmer
Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News by Jeffrey Lyle Bilbro

Just in Time for Summer Book Clubs: A Discussion Guide for The Hats We Wear!

/ Elizabeth Trotter / Leave a comment

Several women have told me they’re planning to use my book, The Hats We Wear: Reflections on Life as a Woman of Faith, for their summer book clubs, and I wanted to develop a discussion guide for them. But you could also use it as a set of journaling prompts if you’re reading through the book on your own.

The book is divided into six sections/hats (Practical Theologian, Emotional Human, Embodied Woman, Wife, Mom, Homeschool Teacher), so I’ve structured the guide around a six-week schedule — although you could split sections into two and take longer if you wanted.

The questions are designed to get readers thinking deeply about their own lives, so a single book club meeting might not be able to cover all of the questions in each section — leaders will probably need to decide which questions to prioritize based on their particular groups. But the discussion guide can at least be a jumping off point for you!

You can download the PDF or access a viewer-only version of the Google doc.

And I’d love to hear about how your book club conversations go or see any photos you might want to share, so feel free to contact me privately with any questions or comments!