Caught in the Middle

Day 2 in the Hospital

My second day in the hospital awaiting emergency abdominal surgery.

A few days ago, I was moving slowly around the house—half doing, half resting, not fully committed to either—when my husband looked at me and said, “You know, you are awfully busy for someone that is supposed to be resting for the next six weeks.”

It wasn’t harsh. It wasn’t even critical. If anything, it was observant. But it landed in a way I couldn’t shake.

Because he’s right.

I’m only just beginning to recover from a cecectomy, and already I find myself drifting back into motion. Not fully, not like before—but enough to blur the line between healing and doing. Enough to make me wonder if I’m actually resting, or just convincing myself that I am.

The problem is, this season doesn’t lend itself to stillness.

Outside, spring is in full swing. The farm doesn’t wait. Seedlings stretch taller by the day, needing to be watered, hardened off, transplanted. The rhythm of it all is constant and alive, and it pulls at me every time I look out the window. This is the season where so much is decided—what takes root, what thrives, what becomes something worth harvesting later on.

At the same time, the school year is winding down, but not gently. There’s a particular kind of urgency that comes with these last weeks—loose ends, final pushes, the quiet pressure to finish well. It’s not a season that asks less of you. If anything, it asks more.

And just as that begins to crest, farmers market season opens its doors. The very thing I’ve been working toward—growing, making, building something of my own—is finally here. There’s momentum, and excitement, and a sense that this matters. That showing up now matters.

So I find myself standing in the middle of all of it, while my body asks for something entirely different.

Rest.

Not the kind that fits neatly between tasks, or the kind that comes after everything is done—but the kind that interrupts. The kind that demands space where there doesn’t seem to be any. The kind that slows everything down whether you’re ready or not.

And I’ll be honest—it doesn’t feel natural to me.

I am used to moving forward. To responding to what needs to be done. To carrying things because I can. There’s a rhythm to that kind of life, and I know how to keep up with it.

But this is different.

Now, every choice feels like a negotiation. I start something, and halfway through I feel it—the quiet reminder that I shouldn’t be doing this, or at least not this much. I sit down to rest, but my mind doesn’t follow. It lingers in the greenhouse, in the classroom, in the long list of things that feel like they’re waiting on me.

It’s a strange place to be—needed in so many directions, and yet limited in a way I can’t ignore.

And maybe that’s why his words stayed with me. Not because I didn’t already know, but because they named something I’ve been trying to work around instead of through.

I am supposed to be resting.

Not squeezing it in. Not earning it at the end of a productive day. Not redefining it to fit everything else.

Just… resting.

There’s a part of me that resists that. That worries about what might slip, what might stall, what might not get done in the way I had planned. But there’s another part—quieter, but steadier—that knows this isn’t optional.

That healing has its own pace.
That not everything will fall apart if I step back.
That maybe the things I’ve been building don’t rely on me pushing through at all costs, but on me staying well enough to continue at all.

I don’t have this figured out. I still find myself caught between what I want to do and what I need to do. I still reach for things I probably shouldn’t, still underestimate how much rest actually means in a moment like this.

But I’m starting to see that this “in between” isn’t something to rush past.

It’s a place I have to learn how to be in.

Where the work continues, just differently.
Where growth is happening, even if I’m not the one driving all of it.
Where rest isn’t the absence of progress, but part of it.

And maybe that’s the shift—learning that staying here, honoring this, is not falling behind.

It’s just a different kind of moving forward.