Decision Fatigue

I’m starting to think that most of the decisions I’ve agonized over this year could just as well have been decided by flipping a damn coin.

It’s all very Robert Frost, road less traveled, psychological torment.

We are months into homeschooling our kids, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t question whether I should have kept them enrolled. (In fact, we did re-enroll our oldest into remote learning at the end of December, because I’m not afraid to turn this car around.)

I tell my husband, “We may have made a huge mistake. Unless we didn’t.”

Who can say, but this has been gnawing at me and renting a lot of brain space that I really need for bankable tenants.

All I can know is the problems associated with THIS decision: the isolation, the being overwhelmed, the battles over electronics and the fishbowl of messes that is our 1400 square foot home with 6 people.

I see my not-so-little-anymore kids in their teeny, youtuber-obsessed, shriveled little world and wonder how difficult it will be for them to reintegrate in the school next year. How will their anxiety be then? Will they be able to relearn social skills like eye-contact and not punching things when they don’t get their way?

What if I’ve screwed the up permanently between the baking-as-coping and the teaching style that could best be described as “angry avoidant”. That is, when I actually TRY to coax the children to learn, there are a lot of temper tantrums and flailing and low teacher morale. When I decide I’ve had enough of that, I ignore their learning deficits while they zone out on electronics, the baby naps, and I alternate between drinking coffee and perfecting the fetal position (which is the closest I get to yoga).

Then there’s the fostering, which I am both relishing and wary of. I believe with my whole heart that we made the right decision to foster, but the reality of fostering has grown a skin of “what-ifs” over that same heart.

“What if I have simply set my kids up for a ton of emotional pain- is that irresponsible parenting? What will we do then?”

We are already stretched thin in the emotions department.

Why does it always seem that if I could just backtrack a few steps I could find out what we did wrong and fix it?

The trouble is that the theoretical problems of the paths I did NOT take will always look better than the problems I’m actually holding. I can’t feel the pain of those problems or touch their raw edges. They exist behind a thick glass with a rosier-than-life tint.

I talked with my friend the other day and she shared wisdom from her son: It doesn’t help to look back at our decisions and try to decide if they were “good” or “bad”. They are simply the decisions we made.

This is resonating with the over-thinker me.

The problem is that we make decisions with only the facts and perspectives of today to inform us. Perhaps we ended up with negative outcomes from decisions we tried our best to make. But the shame of bearing the responsibility of a “bad decision” feels too heavy. It paralyzes us rather than motivates us. It makes us feel that we are bad or that we created something bad.

And it makes future decisions unbearable because we think that if we could just get the “right one” this time…everything would be OK if not fixed entirely.

Decisions might be ours to make, but maybe the outcome of our lives isn’t quite so self-dependent as we think.

Proverbs 16:9 says, “In their hearts humans plan their course,
but the Lord establishes their steps.”

And Jeremiah 10:23 says, “Lord, I know that people’s lives are not their own; it is not for them to direct their steps.”

We can’t avoid planning or making decisions; in fact, I think it is part of our humble collaboration with God. But perhaps the freedom comes in knowing that even in our planning, God has more power over outcomes than we do. God establishes and directs.

And I have to believe that this also means that God is not bound or limited by my decision to keep my kids home from school or to foster or to start a new job. He is not biting His lip every time my husband and I sit to make a parenting decision thinking, “What will I do if they screw this up?!!”

I suspect the daily pliability of our hearts is far more important than the individual decisions we make.

God invites us into the process, but when we plan and decide we can know that the outcomes are still in His hand.

And He doesn’t require our perfection to accomplish His purposes.

So I’m going to take a breath today and stop wasting energy on old decisions so I can focus on new ones. And I’m walking a little lighter knowing that I haven’t mangled anything beyond God’s ability to use, restore, or redeem.

What decisions have you been wallowing in or paralyzed by? How are you finding strength to keep moving, even if the outcomes aren’t always what you hoped? Where do you find faith in uncertainty?