At the close of my last column, in September 2023, I announced that I’d be taking a brief sabbatical and expressed my hope that I’d return to writing early in 2024. Well, here I am!

In that column, I explained my need for a fall sabbatical: Of our five children, three were entering new schools.  We’d have one child up in Burlington (one hour to the north), two in Ripton (30 minutes to the southeast), one in preschool (a blessed 10 minutes away), and one child still being homeschooled. There were assorted fall sports, music lessons, and a driver’s ed class. We’d gained a puppy over the summer. And my husband was returning to teaching after a year’s sabbatical. 

Those are just the facts. 

Here is what the facts don’t tell you:

The facts don’t tell you that, between 2016 and 2019, I homeschooled all my children. One of them told me that they consider those years “The Golden Days” — and they were. We read wonderful literature, wrote, and learned together in the mornings. The afternoons stretched long; I remember them as seen through the window above our kitchen sink: my four oldest children dressed in various costumes, romping in the amber light with the boy next door or assorted friends — there was always a spare child or two around in those days. 

The facts don’t tell you what our particular experience of COVID was like, with a baby still recovering from a stint in the ICU for respiratory distress, and isolation from our beloved friends and homeschool community. How our eldest child turned 13 alone in her bedroom, celebrating with the faces of friends arrayed on a laptop screen, and how she spent much of the next year behind her closed door. 

The facts don’t tell you about the freak tornado that ripped across our front field in March 2021, destroying the house next door. So the boy next door doesn’t live next door anymore. 

The facts don’t tell you how, when the pandemic restrictions started to lift, we broke apart our little family homeschool because our despondent middle schoolers needed friends, and no amount of belief in the benefits of homeschooling was worth compromising our children’s mental health. 

The facts don’t tell you that, although our children have been happy at school and made friends, our homeschool has continued to break apart a little more each year. And as our children have grown older and developed various interests and friend groups, they’ve also broken a little further apart from each other — and from us. 

The facts don’t tell you how hard change is, especially for young people. What it’s like to have a child who’s deeply unhappy for months on end, missing the past and not yet settled into the present. How a sad child can look a lot like an angry child — angry at YOU — who pushes you away when you try to reach out, so that there’s nothing to do but watch and wait while their pain plays out. 

And the facts don’t show how, as autumn swelled and shriveled, all you felt was despair because everything was falling apart and you couldn’t see how it would ever fall back together. You’d had a dream and for a while it was real, The Golden Days, and then it crumbled like the dead autumn leaves crunching under your feet. And maybe it was due to unfair circumstances beyond your control, a pileup of trauma on the highway of life — but maybe it was because you made a series of wrong choices, so it’s all your fault. 

But there were many early mornings when the grass in our neighbors’ field was still high, covering the tarp-wrapped foundation that used to be their house. When the light hit the grasses just so, it revealed a city of delicate spider webs spun between the blades, beaded with dew that sparkled in the golden autumn light. 

The garden died back after a lackluster summer, but as I brought the geranium pots into the garage to overwinter, I’d often find a single brilliant blossom amid a dead cluster, like a tiny reminder not to give up, that there might still be life in what looks like death. 

As the daylight hours contracted between fall and winter, the sky started showing off. Luminous pink, purple and orange; my children likely got tired of me gasping with wonder as I drove them from school to activities, “Just look at that gorgeous sky!” 

Shooting stars were easier to see, too, when walking the dogs after dark. 

On one particular dark dog walk in December, my husband and I spotted a strange phenomenon in the sky: A string of five little lights that bobbed along together, spreading out and contracting. Is it Santa Claus? we wondered. A UFO? The end of the world? Who were the proper authorities, and should we alert them? We stood on the driveway, transfixed, torn between marveling at the sheer loveliness of what we were seeing and the nagging sense that all might not be quite right. 

Back inside, I looked it up online. The most likely explanation: SpaceX launches its satellites in chains. So our night sky miracle was courtesy of Elon Musk. It was still breathtakingly beautiful. 

And on one dark night in January, as I was shuttling a child to an appointment, I noticed that in the middle of a hedgerow in a dark field between two houses, someone had strung lights on a single small tree. They glowed in deep darkness where few people would notice them, an unnecessary and extravagant light. A little like grace; a little like hope. 

A week earlier, one of our daughters sat at our New Year’s Eve dinner table and, reflecting upon the year’s lessons, shared, “I learned that even when you’re really sad about something, things will get better.” 

So that’s what I have for you after a season’s sabbatical: Things will get better. Eventually. Usually. It may sound trite and cliché. It may also be the most important thing we need to remember. 

One more thing: A package arrived for me around the new year. Inside was a gift from a dear old friend, a sweatshirt that she’d had printed with the words: “THIS IS ALL NOT WORKING OUT HOW I PLANNED.”

If I’ve learned anything this fall, it’s that that statement is not a complaint. Things get better, gradually, in little glimmers like tiny beads of illuminated dew, or twinkling lights in the darkness, but it’s not all working out how I planned. And when I look closely enough, I can see that it’s better that way. 

Faith Gong has worked as an elementary school teacher, a freelance photographer, and a nonprofit director. She lives in Middlebury with her husband, five children, assorted chickens and ducks, one feisty cat, and two quirky dogs. In her “free time,” she writes for her blog, The Pickle Patch.