I feel extremely overwhelmed today. I feel like I could use a two week vacation from everything, maybe one that would be so wonderful that I wouldn’t come back. I feel like that vacation spot might just be out my front door, just away from the domestic life.
I really think that if I wasn’t writing right now, if I was loving on my children or cleaning my kitchen maybe I wouldn’t be so sad. But I need a shoulder to cry on none the less and this computer is all I have, it seems. First of all, I hate holidays. I hate them because prior to them I am strong and once they get here, I can barely function. I question everything that I am, everything that I believe because I have been called away from my family that I love, and a life that I understood, and a goal that was within reach. All I know now is what I think God maybe wants from me, what Paul tells me that God wants. I stay at home with my kids, I keep a clean house, I eventually home school, I stay involved in the church, I have a core group of friends that I love having coffee with or meeting for a play date. It’s all an illusion. I stay at home, lonely and bored. I stare at my cluttered closets wondering how on earth I will tackle the task. I stare at the mounting pile of laundry, dreading it, feeling like maybe it is smothering me along with any self-respect I ever had. I feel like shouting, “I can’t do this anymore!” So I treat my children like dirt, leave them in their bedrooms to take naps, stick them in the crib for five minutes of peace. But it isn’t peaceful because the guilt of being a crummy Mom is a heavy burden to bear. I tell Paul and he meets my anxiety with scripture and comments that are supposed to be reassuring, “you only have two kids,” and “See, you are definitely not ready for foster children.”
And that’s the thing, I do feel called to this. I do want the domestic life but I feel like I can’t do it. I was raised in a loving family on a horse farm, I don’t remember learning how to stay at home all day. I don’t know how to home school, I don’t know how to have a baby on me all day, non-stop. The only analogy I can think of is the boy who was found living with the wild wolves. He had been raised that way and when he was brought into the real world, he died within months of being assimilated. I feel like maybe the weight of the expectation might kill me. And I do give it to God, I pray for strength. I pray that He would comfort me with His word. I can’t help that the only love I feel right now comes in cardboard boxes from North Carolina. I can’t help that the sound of my Grandma telling me that she misses seeing Jake draw makes me want to just go to my eternal home. Maybe that’s the whole point of this blog, that I am getting to a point where I just yearn for Jesus, for a relationship so tied in with him that I can’t survive without it. And I am there, if it wasn’t for the Lord, I would be gone or hyped on anti-depressants, which my skin crawls for on days like these as I try to understand what God wants from me.
Don’t get me wrong: I do belong at home with my kids. I believe that moms typically belong at home, but not me. I feel like I can’t give them what they need. Every parenting book I read seems to conclude with that message: your kids need YOU, but I am making a mess of this. Jake’s not potty trained, Sonora sleeps connected to me or she screams endlessly. I’m trying to keep my eyes on the cross, but today it feels like I have a hard hill to trek before I find it. I keep hearing news of our church wanting to teach young women how to be wives, how to be moms and I just want to scream, “sign me up!” But I feel like I’m hiding away in the hills of Mi-wuk, miles from civilization raising kids I can barely keep up with, taking care of a husband whom plunders and murmurs every morning, “I just can’t find any clean socks in this house,” even though I do a load of laundry every day, and the words from my mouth come so easy, “I want what God wants, more kids, more ministry, ” But today I feel like I’m sinking.
Paul has reassured me that God will meet me where I’m at, that He will prevail in my weakness. I know these things, of course, AND I believe them. I also know that I can’t be that terrible of a Mom because I think about the nature of my mothering abilities 24-7, that’s gotta count for something, right?
I know it’s just a season, just an attack. I get it. I just counseled another mom-friend of mine several months ago as she told me she was sinking, “it’s ok, this too shall pass,” I told her. See, I know the right answer. Two months will pass and I’ll be spending the better half of the Summertime with my family. Two months will pass and Sonora will be walking (she is very frustrated with her current inability). I feel like such a hypocrite since I recently blogged about having peace in my spirit. I had peace because things were “going my way,” and now that the road is bumpy, I have to choose to live out what I know to be true, that the Lord will give me peace in my spirit. I wrote the first half of this blog earlier, before my husband walked in with a Day-O express for me. That definitely helped, and has cleared a point I wanted to raise earlier that Paul is not the culprit, he is my greatest support. He’s tried to stand behind me in my insecurities but I can feel insecure anytime I want. “Babe, your best is good enough for me.”
“So you think that my best is crappy?!!”
See how that works?
Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that there are a few people I trust, few that understand my heart and still, in my sadness the vulnerability of it all will cause the ones I love most to manipulate the situation and my broken heart, to no avail, unfortunately.
It comes down to a lot of things, but the root of what I’m struggling with is a desire for contentment, and the need for a servant’s heart. If I could just die to myself. If I can get those things down, I won’t need to have vent days like these anymore. Oh well, thanks for listening. Still, any of you veterans wanna take me under your wing?
