Bearing their burdens, building our faith

Big kid is well past the age where most kids learn to tie their shoes.  I'm well aware that other people may think we're lazy parents by not teaching him.  It's one of the things that has been on my mind a long time, and as he has grown in height and weight, looking more and more like a true big kid, it has concerned me that maybe his classmates would start to catch on as well and perhaps tease him about his lack of skill in this area.  

Looking back, I can't really say whether I never taught him because just as he emerged from the toddler years, my own life took a turn for the worst and I was too caught up in grief over a baby lost, a crippling financial blow or a myriad of doctors suddenly rushing me through a series of tests and procedures to rid my body of cancer - or if somehow, deep down, I just knew that teaching him would turn out exactly as it did today.

You have to understand, my big kid is the sweetest boy anyone could want.   He is big-hearted and wants to help others in need.   He is helpful and can do tasks independently.  He makes us laugh and when he finds a subject he is interested in, he learns every detail about it.   He, so far, has been a straight A student.   Therefore, one would conclude that he is intelligent.   So why this same child adamantly insists that he can not and will not ever be able to learn a task such as tying his shoes, is beyond me.

As a natural encourager, or maybe it's partly from being a mom, it's second nature for me to go to my Mama bag of tricks.   I pull out all the examples.   You didn't used to know how to do multiplication, but now you do.  Someone showed you how.   Now I'm showing you how to do this.   But I can't even remember all the instructions, he cries.  But you will, I reassure him.  Nobody gets it right the first time, maybe not even the fiftieth time, but you keep practicing.  Well, I better get it right after fifty times!  This thought has obviously upset him.   I try to keep my cool.   How many times did Thomas Edison fail, I ask him.   I don't know, probably a hundred, comes the answer.   Okay, so then you keep pushing through until you succeed.  What makes you different from the people who end up as failures in life is that you don't give up - not when you've wasted money or time or people have told you you'll never do it.  When you finally do it, that's when it becomes a big deal.

But this is different, he says.  Okay, well, you didn't used to know how to build all those huge Lego sets I say as I point to the shelves full of displays he has built.   In his twisted logic comes his response, well, the Legos have instructions and the instructions aren't moving!  Good grief, why is this child so difficult?   It's a shoe. It has a string.  I'm not asking you to train a crocodile to tap dance.

Do you think that you are a stupid boy, I ask.  He hides his face.  I ask again, do you think that you are not able to learn things, that you are stupid?  He's still hiding.  Great, so now I've got a game of cat and mouse which I would much more expect from the three year old.   I remind him that when he was little, he didn't know how to snap and zip his jeans or button a button down shirt.  He tells me that's different because we snapped and zipped his jeans for him.  Yes, but not forever.  Now you do it on your own.  How did you go from not knowing how to do it, to knowing how to do it so well that you don't even think about it anymore?   Well, you and Daddy didn't even teach me how to zip my jeans.  I just learned that on my own!  I disagree and my patience is wearing thin but I resist the urge to strike back.... okay, and so, you'll learn this on your own too, I say.

At one point, he was so frustrated that he threw the shoes.  I remained quiet, searching my bag of tricks and coming up empty.  Was it me?  Great, now the failure complex is settling in to my own brain.    So, I ask him.   Is it me?  Is it just that you don't think you can learn from me?  He says no.  I'm not sure whether to be relieved for my own sake or throw a shoe back and him and say, then WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

I show him once.  I show him twice.  When he fails, I show him why it failed.  I show him where he had placed the laces and he insists that he did not, in fact, hold the laces that way.   And yet, the shoe is still not tied, so gee, uh, yeah, you did.    I begin to question why I did not go directly to the computer and begin to work.   Why did I even make this sudden detour into his room and ask him to get out the shoes that have sat new in a box for over 6 months.  Why, why would I do this to myself without any time to gear up for such an ordeal?   These are the burning questions I'm sure I will have for God upon entering the pearly gates.   Why did you allow my brain to malfunction in such a way that it would only add more stress to my already bowing body?   Somehow, I picture God amused.

And yet, right now, I am not amused.   I'm wavering between wanting to scream, pick up the doggone shoe already and try, just try, that's all I ask - just try - and wanting to take him in my arms and hug away whatever is hurting him so much that he truly thinks he is incapable of learning.   I try the gentle approach, rubbing his back, telling him that it bothers me that he lacks the confidence to try.  It bothers me that he already has it set in his mind that he will fail the moment he sees the task before him.   I tell him that he is strong and smart and capable.  He still doesn't want to tie the shoe.

What is a mother to do when her child is so lost?  How did he get this way?  He cannot go through life like this.  I don't want him beaten down by life or never experiencing the thrill of new things because he was afraid to try.    I ask him if sitting in a desk at school is the only kind of learning he thinks he will ever do.   I tell him that he will be learning new things his whole life, whether it's driving a car or driving a fire truck or flying a plane.  I tell him that people learn all kinds of things like skiing or skydiving and when they first learn, they look like a fool.   I tell him I understand that when he was little, he was just so used to mom and dad helping him that it was easy to say, I'm little, I need help. But now that he's big, he wants to be able to do things on his own.  I get that, but he still has to start somewhere and he can't be so afraid to fail that he doesn't even try.

He is tired of me now.  I can see it.  He just wants me to stop talking and he never ever wants to learn to tie a shoe.   I have encouraged and instructed and even shown him two different ways to tie a shoe and yet he remains defeated.  And so, I am defeated. 
Why is that?  Why as moms are we so intertwined with our children and their emotions that we feel them as if they are our own?   The crazy thing is, this is not the first road I've been down with him.  There have been many other attempts to teach or instruct or encourage and they have turned out the same way.  He freezes up.  His first reaction is that he will fail.   He feels incapable, frustrated, defeated - before he even tries.

There is part of me that thinks he will secretly try on his own, when he's not under the watchful eye of Mama.  Mind you, I offered to go away and let him try on his own but that was met with frustration too.  It's like his brain just locks up and he isn't really even sure what he wants, other than for the task to go away.  He lacks the skills to go through the process of learning, meet the frustrations but push through to the other side.   So, I wonder, is this something that can be taught?  Or, is this just a personality trait that we are born with?  

There are people in the world who just seem to be able to persevere through any trial - the guy who lives for 7 days in the wilderness, treating his own wounds and surviving off berries, the girl who learns to walk again after a terrible accident, the woman who helps her family press on after losing everything in a fire, the boy who refuses to give up his dream of a college degree, despite the poverty he lives in as a child.   There are the people who can survive military boot camp and come out even stronger and there are other people who end up broken, addicted, suicidal.    What makes that difference in people? I am fascinated and terrified all at once. 

When our children are small and we accomplish tasks for them, we don't give it a second thought. We are there to be their caretakers.  But somehow, as our children grow, no one tells us that we, as parents, must grow too.   Oh sure, we realize that we can not send them to kindergarten with a pacifier or diapers, so we take the necessary steps to help them gain some independence.   But somehow, once those main milestones that we've had our eye on for several years have come and gone, we let ourselves fall into a routine and we don't see the other milestones up ahead.

I sure didn't see them coming.  And now, looking back, I'm not even sure what they were.  Should I have forced him to try more things?   Should I have given him harder tasks, but ones in which I knew he could succeed?  Should I have talked to him more about what would be required as he got older?  I just don't know.  I am baffled.  He is a straight A student after all.   I think that therein lies the problem.   Knowing that he is learning and getting high praise from teachers threw me into a false sense of security.  Just because he is smart, does not mean he is confident.   I never realized those two things may not go hand in hand.

But unless this child is going to become some sort of barefoot nomad the rest of his life, I've got to figure out how to fix this.  Or maybe I can't.  Maybe this is the part where I have to lean on God and believe that he will not let my child fall.  I'm not quite sure why that always feels like I am dangling my child over a cliff while balancing myself on one foot, but suddenly I'm feeling the need to read the story of Abraham and Isaac again.  There's probably a faith lesson in here somewhere.  I just wish I could learn it while Big Kid marches past me with his new shoes securely tied to his feet.

Access denied

I have always been fascinated by how the human brain works.    One time when I was peeling an apple, suddenly, out of nowhere, I remembered standing on a playground with some junior high school age kids when I visited a rural school that my friend attended.  That had been almost twenty years ago!   I had only visited that friend’s home and school one time, could not tell you much of anything that we did during our 24 hours together, and furthermore, was no longer in contact with that friend as an adult.    So, why?   Why on earth did peeling an apple spark that memory?   Had I eaten an apple that day?  Was someone on the playground wearing a shirt with an apple on it?  Did somebody make a joke or tell a story involving an apple?   Or maybe it was the knife, or the running water at my kitchen sink, or the rhythmic movement of my hands.    The possibilities are endless and unknowable but somewhere, deep in the recesses of my brain, an entire experience, a detailed memory, is trapped.

I once heard that every single thing we experience, every sight, every sound, every scent, every touch - everything - is all imprinted on our brains. We may not be able to recall even a small percentage of it, but everything we go through in life is there, like a little video in the archive drawer of our minds.

So, I am fascinated.  I am fascinated that sometimes the brain recalls seemingly insignificant details from our lives at odd times, and that same brain can not retain information that is desperately needed such as the babysitter‘s phone number, what time I last gave the child medicine, or when faced with a grizzly bear, how to deter him from turning you into his lunch.   Well, I guess the information is retained, but not accessible, which does me absolutely no good when I'm stuck in traffic, eye-balling the Tylenol, or wondering when is the last time that bear ate anything. 

It got me to thinking, is this what goes on with Big Kid?   Perhaps the very things I get so frustrated over are really not the lack of a common sense gene as I so often say, but rather that the information is in there somewhere, but he’s been denied access.

I’d like to think this is true, because the alternative is really going to make me lose my mind.   There just seems to be no common sense department in Big Kid’s brain, which is frustrating, but equally fascinating on another level because this same child is a straight A student, can rattle off movie and computer game facts by the millions, and has the vocabulary of an English college professor eight times his age!

So, why would this extremely intelligent boy, stand at the back door of our home, with belongings in each arm and say, “Uh, a little help here?”    Really?  I’m fifty feet away, chasing after Little Kid, as usual, and I have to stop what I’m doing because you can’t figure out how to turn a door knob?   So frustrating, I mean, FASCINATING.

And of course, I say to him the same thing, “Really? How do you THINK you might be able to solve that problem?” 

But I swear to you he stood there and stared at me like not a single idea fluttered through his mind, even briefly.    The access door to the common sense department was firmly closed, sealed on all sides, dead bolted, triple locked and set with an alarm.  Nobody was getting near that top secret information!

My very clipped words were an indication that my common sense door swings wide open and has a huge neon, flashing welcome sign on it apparently because I was very quickly able to surmise that if he just, let’s see, SET SOMETHING DOWN, he could then free up a hand to turn the door knob! 

The level of frustration this caused him was very apparent, but I just can’t help getting irritated.   I mean, if his brain were an old tv or a vending machine, I’d probably be smacking it on the side by now and ordering it to work. But as it is, I must fantasize about how wonderful it would be if he was the droid character, Data, from Star Trek, the Next Generation, and I could simply open a flap on the side of his head and start tweaking the circuitry in there.

I am in complete awe of the intricacies that God has placed in our brains, so complex that medical science is a long way from mastering an understanding of  it.    It is a strange irony that human brains are required to understand the human brain, and yet, we lack the consistent firing of all those little connectors to retain the information needed.   Whether this misfire happened after Eve ate that first bite of Apple (hey, maybe I was thinking about sin back on that playground!) or whether God designed it that way, so that he would always be looked upon as the only All-Knowing One, I don’t know.    But, no matter which way this miscommunication in our brains began, I sure wish he would have at least given us some sort of reset or reboot option. 

Big Kid has a glitch, and I just know that if I could “clear” a pathway to that common sense department, then at the very least, we could maybe drill a peephole in that door. Because seriously, if I have to give him step by step instructions on how to perform basic functions for the next ten years, while Little Kid is multi-tasking like a steak knife juggler who is eating an ice cream cone mid-act, I’m going to quickly lose my life long fascination with the human brain.

Jane Austen's got nothing on this kid

I am a worrier.   I can worry with the best of them.    I can obsess about those two little words, “what if”, like my very breath depends on the outcome.  But in all my days of worrying and panicking and probably sending all kinds of stressors to my heart and brain functions, I have never seen anybody worry like my Big Kid.

This child doesn’t just worry a little.   He is a full blown professional at the age of eight.  He can out-fret the little old women in Jane Austen’s novels.   You know, the ones who skitter about and have to take to their beds because they’re so upset they nearly faint every other minute?   I’m a worrier and yet I’ve never seen anything like it.

He’s always been cautious.  He has always taken his time to analyze a situation before jumping in to participate.    He’s always been meticulous in taking care of his things and listened, unlike Little Kid, when I told him not to dive into furniture or other hard objects with his head.   Even so, I didn’t see this coming.  

Somehow, he drove right past Mildly Concerned Court and wound up on Hyperventilate Highway.   I think he missed the exit around the time Little Kid was born, but I can’t be certain because I, myself, was too busy being on What Have I Done Drive.

And yet here we are.  We have arrived in Worryville and I don’t know what to do about it.   This child worries about everything from the fact that he can’t exactly, and I mean exactly duplicate the computer drawn model of a cursive letter for his homework assignment to the possibility that the first rumble of thunder may mean a tornado is headed our way.

He worries that my favorite bush has not received enough water of late, that the cat is going to scratch him, that a tiny speck of dirt is, in fact, a man-eating tarantula and that we don’t yet have a replacement for his near-empty tube of toothpaste.

And poor Little Kid.  That girl can’t wiggle a finger without him jumping up to make sure she isn’t sticking it in an electrical outlet - even though this is, miraculously the one source of trouble she has not yet discovered.   He follows that girl like a Child-Safety Stalker.   He seems to think that every time she picks up a piece of paper or taste tests an inanimate object, she is doomed to severe punishment or tragic injury.   He polices Little Kid like she’s got gasoline on her hands and matches in her pocket.  

I remember a time when we were standing in a Walgreens and I was trying to compare medicine labels, no easy task with two children jabbering the whole time.   But, the task became all but impossible when Big Kid began to give me reports on Little Kid’s every flinch, faster than Ashton Kutcher could tweet his way to a million followers.

She’s touching that, she’s got that in her mouth, she’s trying to get out of the cart, she is, she’s going to, she might….  I finally lost it.    I looked him square in the eye and told him that I have my own tendency to panic, my own irrational fears, my own pattern of freaking out, but even I could not worry that much!
I just can not comprehend what it must be like to live inside his head all day.   I’m torn between feeling sorry for him and wanting to shake the fretting right out of him.   It is exhausting, absolutely bone-tired exhausting to try to get him to stop.

It’s like he’s hard-wired for it, an entire circuitry of criss-crossed wires that can not be undone lest a bomb go off.    I try to talk him down from the ledge with love, but when he still throws one foot off the side, I end up screaming at him because it’s just the most infuriating thing I’ve ever dealt with.

How can a little boy who gets straight A’s in school, wield the vocabulary of a literary genius, garner compliments upon compliments for his manners and sweet behavior, be so tortured with worry within? 

It is mind-boggling.   Is his sister so opposite him in her adventurous spirit that he was thrown into some sort of personality-difference overload?  Have the Other One and I  done this to him somehow?  Did we satisfy his little genius-brained curiosity with too much explanation, too much information when he was young?   Or did I somehow corrupt him unknowingly by simply passing down the worst aspects of the gene pool?

Whatever the case, I sincerely hope and pray that he will grow out of this.    And the sooner the better because if being a mom and having to juggle 963 things a day isn’t enough, I feel like I have to be 14 steps ahead of any sign of danger at all times.   I’ve been a mom for a while now, so I’m pretty keen on being 2 steps ahead, but I can not fathom the infinite ways in which he conjures up scenarios that may destroy our very existence.  

But if I could, I’d probably have a lucrative career as an action-adventure writer.   Hey, maybe there’s hope for him after all…

I am woman! Hear me... please?

When did it happen?   When did I cease to be a woman and just exist as a mom?

I’m fairly certain that before I had kids, I had a life.   But then again, that was so long ago that maybe I’m just dreaming that up to fulfill some need to have stories other than those about childbirth, potty training or homework struggles.

And yet, I seem to remember a little red dress…  or was that a little red wagon…or a big red dog?  Oh, it’s so hard to tell anymore.  It all just blurs together.   

Still, whether “she” ever existed or not, there are times now when I desperately need her to appear or reappear.    When the Other One barely notices me or thinks my greatest need from him is to pick up milk on the way home, I just want to say - uh, hello, do you think I spent forty five minutes putting on makeup and curling my hair while lecturing on attitude with one child and trying to pry the other one off me, so that I could hope to be admired by the cat? 

And it would sure be nice to feel like a woman when I walk into a party or business gathering, but as it is, within minutes, somebody is asking me about the kids.  I mean, come on, I did my best to clean the spit-up, chocolate and play-doh off my clothing, put on a 3rd layer of under-eye concealer and shove my 4 belly rolls into the most snug-fitting clothes I could find; the least you could do is talk about the weather.  

Of course, I can’t blame any of them.  I am a mom.  And the truth is, these kids take up a huge part of my day.   Okay, they take up all of my day, because the little bit that is left after they’re asleep, is nowhere close to a woman, but rather just a big pile of exhausted bones.

So when?  When do I get to be a woman again?  Or did I somehow get duped into giving that up for good when I traded the little red dress for the little red wagon?  

There are times when I want to scream, “I’m still in here!”    But, I don’t think anybody can hear me anymore.   I’m just a mom, or mainly a mom, or only good at being a mom or some combination of all of it.    Nobody else can hear my voice and so I begin to think that maybe I’m imagining it too.  

But I long to step away from all of this.   Oh don’t get me wrong.  I see how fast the time is going when my children learn new words or skills, move up to the next clothing size, understand more grown up concepts.    But while time is flying for them, it feels like it’s screeching to a halt for me.    For though I love them and enjoy them (well until about that last 2 hours of the day) and would never in a million years think of actually, physically “stepping away” from them, there are times when I wish I could both speed up and stop time simultaneously. 

In my desperate moments, I want to speed up time so that I can get a breather.  But in the very next thought I want to stop time.   They are already growing up too fast and I want them to stay little and sweet.  I want to stop time because I know how sad I will be to see it all end, but also because if I could stop time, maybe this woman inside me longing to get out, could find her way back to the surface.

Somehow in my twisted brain, I think that if I can just get someone to see me as a woman now, amidst the whining and sticky fingers and eye rolling, life would be good.   But, the way things are going, that woman inside sinking further and further into oblivion, I fear she’ll never be seen again.  

For you see, I’m very aware of how old I was when I had these children, and thus, how old I will be when they are grown.    It is the imagined image of the much older face looking back at me in the mirror, the face I’m already seeing dreadful signs of, that keeps me clinging to my children’s youth for my own sake as well.    I see it all the time, that we are “growing up” together, and while the end of this road for them is just the beginning of a lifetime of new roads and opportunities, it feels very much like a dead end for me.

Oh, I know I won’t be that old in physical years.  It’s just that I’m afraid once I take off the Mommy robe, rather than discovering a beautiful woman still existing underneath, I’ll just disappear all together.  

Had I known when I hung up that little red dress that it would be for the last time, I may have strutted past my husband just a few more times.   Because now, this road that leads to my children's future is filled with both excitement and concern at the same time.  When my daughter sets out in her own little red dress and my son takes on the world in his suit with red tie, my own red dress will be faded.

It's strange.  I don’t know when it happened, this intertwining of who I used to be and who I have become, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t have a say in it.  

If I only had a brain

I’m not sure what happened tonight.  There must have been some sort of disruption in the solar system or fracture deep in the Earth’s core because somehow, I was allowed to leave the house for a blissful 5 ½ hours without children. 

Imagine a drive without bickering, twenty peaceful minutes without anyone calling my name, ten glorious miles without hearing a single song by The Wiggles or Veggie Tales.

It was like one of those sci-fi shows where they talk about anomalies and blips in the space-time continuum.  I’d been transported back in time, to the eerily quiet era before I had kids, while at the same time remaining at my current age, possessing the ability to appreciate the magnitude of getting five minutes of silence.

I don’t know what it is about kids, but there just always seems to be so much noise.   Even when they aren’t talking, which is almost never, there just seems to be some sort of sound emanating from them at all times.    Laughing, crying, screaming, fighting, whining, babbling, shrieking .   Tapping, drumming, scraping, jingling, stomping, banging, clapping, sloshing, slurping, thumping, rattling, or squeaking.   And those are just the sounds they can make without toys.  Add a few batteries to the mix and you’ve got enough baby dolls crying, toy dogs barking, lasers blasting and sirens blaring to drown out any intelligent thought you ever managed to string together for more than three seconds.

Sometimes the noise becomes so deafening that your nervous system is threatened with a complete meltdown if you should hear even one more small peep out of anybody.     It would stand to reason then, that with 5 1/2 hours to bask in joyous silence, a mom would be able to regroup and think through and solve all the problems that have been plaguing the family for months.   Shoot, with over 5 hours, you should be able to mentally rearrange the kids' rooms to make all their stuff fit inside their four walls, tweak that recipe that's been on your mind for 8 months, figure out what went wrong in last month's budget, plan several creative activities to keep the kids busy next week, take a mental inventory of calories and come up with a workout plan, create no less than five fun games for the class party and maybe even have time left over to start composing a bit of that novel you've always dreamed of writing.

It's a mystery then, that when you turn the key and pull out of the garage, you travel 9 blocks before you even realize you're driving or that you don't remember the last 5 stop signs.  You suddenly become aware, not only of your surroundings, but that your 5 1/2 hours on the clock has been ticking down already and you've lost precious quiet time.  You gather your wits about you, determined to think about important things, big things, adult things.   Then you travel another 6 blocks, realize you've done it again and make a more focused decision to pay attention.  After you've repeated this process about 5 times, you begin to smack your head against the steering wheel trying to jump start your brain. 

You are an adult.  Surely you have important things to think about and a wee bit of will power and self discipline will do the trick.  You try again, only to find that you can not concentrate on even one line of thought at a time.  By the time you berate yourself, an hour and a half is wasted. Okay, positive thoughts, you tell yourself.  You can do this. One task at a time.  Two hours later, you are at your wits end, sipping a frappuccino from the coffee shop drive through and hoping the caffeine will help your brain.  Another hour goes by and though you are now wired, you have yet to complete a single thought.  That's when the psycho analysis begins.   It must be something from your own childhood that causes you to lock up in a quiet atmosphere.  That has to be it.   There has to be a reasonable explanation.  After all, you're a grown woman with many important things on your mind.  And yet, at five hours in, not one of those important things seems to have surfaced.

With only a half hour left to go, you feel the onset of panic.  And then it hits you.  The problem is not you.  It's them.   Those tiny little people who follow you around throughout the week making so much noise that your brain has to restart every 2.2 seconds to absorb a new noise and try not to explode.  The constant rewiring of your circuits that keeps power going to all the right places instead of causing actual smoke to come out of your ears is great for safety, but not so much for your sanity.  You see, your brain, after children, is like a pinball getting whacked by a flipper every other second.  Just when you find your groove, something knocks the sense out of you, ricochets you off several obstacles and then drops you back down, ready to roll along in unsuspecting bliss for another half second.   You can no longer think - at all.

As the weight of this realization hits you and the clock taunts you, you do what any mom with only twenty minutes left would do.   You pull up to Baskin Robbins, order three scoops and then sit in your car and cry.

Five and a half hours.  Gone, just like that.  You will return home to the chaos having solved nothing, no Nobel Peace Prize in the works and no more illusions of seeing your name in print at the bookstore.   You wipe your tears.  You sigh.  You try to look at the bright side.   While it may take you a while to grieve the loss of a fully functioning brain, at least you did get out for a few hours.   And for once, you didn't have to share your ice cream with anybody.

Fear, foes and a fight to the death

It’s amazing to me how quickly a mother’s panic can change to drastic action when her child is in danger or hurt.    There is just something that rises up with a fierceness that you never knew was within you.

Today, as I loaded groceries into the trunk of my car, with my two year old sitting happily in the front of the cart, I had a moment of panic like never before.

I was aware that there was a young man out gathering up the shopping carts, but he was busy so I didn’t pay much attention to him.   That is, until I turned to see him, all within the blink of an eye, say to my daughter, “Let’s get you out of there” and  proceed to lift her out of the cart and into his arms.

In that split second, my Mama eyes did not see his store uniform, or the fact that he was a young guy with a baby face, or sadly even what I saw in hindsight, that I think he was mentally challenged.

All I know is that I went from one end of the cart to the other in single bound and snatched my baby from his arms, screaming at him the entire time.    Panic rose up, shock at what I was seeing, but then immediate action to save my daughter from any potential harm.

Fierceness I didn’t know I had in me.    As I yanked her from his arms and screamed at him to never ever touch someone’s child, and then marched back into the store to confront a manager as well, there was a blind fury that propelled me into action and I never once stopped to think about who I was dealing with.  

Later, after she was safe and I had calmed down, the natural fears set in again.  Would I have been so brave if it had been a big, burly man, or if someone had snatched her and ran?  The fear of seeing myself frozen in place sent shivers down my spine.    But, when I thought back on the actual moment that young man had her in his arms, I knew it didn’t matter who the would-be attacker was.   In that moment, all I had seen was a stranger taking my child, not the details of what innocent thoughts he “might” be thinking.   I jumped immediately to save her, not thinking of myself, or the weakness of my injured shoulder or what I was getting in to.   So, I’d like to think that if the situation had been worse, I would have reacted the exact same way.   Thankfully, this guy didn’t mean any harm and he was willingly handing her over, but I now know that I would be grabbing her with all my might and physically fending off the attacker if I had to.

I told my son later how the manager needed to be told because even if that young man didn’t understand how his actions appeared to others, he needed to be made aware because the next mother or father might knock him to the ground or punch him in the face to save their child.  I told him how, if I had to,  I’d dive at somebody’s feet to knock them down if they were running away with my kid.    My son remarked that then his sister would have fallen and gotten hurt.

But as I told him, a scraped up face or a broken bone can heal.   If a stranger got away with them, my heart never would.

It’s a scary world we live in, and it’s a shame we even have to be exposed to such fears, but thank God He jolted me into action and my baby girl was safe.

Someone you don’t want to be

There are moments in our Mommy lives that we wish we could take back.    Maybe you snapped at them a little too much.   Maybe you told them to shut up.   Or maybe it was worse.   Perhaps you let your pent up anger, rise to the surface and erupt toward the ones who didn’t deserve it.    Did you scream?  Did you scream into a little face?   Or maybe that little one wouldn’t look at you or cooperate or even ran away, so you pursued like some sort of deranged attacker, using your own superior strength to overtake them.  Maybe you weren’t even sorry … at first.

But those moments of ugliness have a way of seeping into our souls and tearing at our hearts.   The guilt is so great.  The empathy you suddenly feel when you see how frightened or sad your child must have been, is enough to drive you to your knees.   You are going along just fine, justified in your anger until you realize that if anyone else had witnessed your behavior, they would have had good reason to report you to the child welfare authorities.   The ugliness of your sin reaches up for a choke hold and digs its fingers into your conscience until you can’t breathe for all the remorse you feel.

You love those children like they are your oxygen.    And yet, they can provoke something in you that you aren’t even sure you wanted to know was in there.  Kids have a way of forcing us to face ourselves.  They remind us that even though we hold jobs, follow the law, lead the Girl Scout troop, bake brownies for the class, host the best birthday parties, give to charity and attend church regularly, we are still what God tells us we are, sinful in nature.

Not one of us can claim to have risen above, to be better than so and so who was in the news yesterday.  We are sinners.   Maybe some days we do better than others, but when our kids tap into that spot inside us that is raw, and we fill with rage before they can blink their eyes, we have to admit that there is something at the very core of our beings that is flawed.

For most of us, it doesn’t take much to become a little snippy.  Maybe it’s a computer that won’t cooperate and a child who has called your name 82 times since the last reboot.   Maybe it’s the hole forming in your pants leg where that little one has yanked at you the entire time you tried to make an important phone call.     But it usually takes a bit more than daily aggravations to really send us over the edge, into that darkest place where the fairly frustrated turns into Monster Mommy, some kind of thug with an arsenal of automatic weapons.

If you’re in the latter mindset, more than you care to admit, perhaps it’s time to deal with what is really bothering you, because you and I both know it isn’t the kids.

Is it the debt?  The constant pursuer who won’t slacken his pace for even a moment?  The rumors of job layoffs?    Is it the phone call from the doctor’s office that turned your world upside down?   Or maybe it’s the best friend, who turned out not to be such a good friend at all?   Is it the suspicious note you found in your husband’s briefcase or gym bag?  Or maybe your Other One just spat some words at you that cut you to the core, left you hyperventilating at the thought that it might be over between you?

Whatever it is, I know it’s tearing you up inside.  You feel like you can’t breathe.  You feel like you have a gaping hole in your stomach where your security used to be.   You don’t know what the future holds and you’d give anything to have more time to prepare, but life isn’t giving you a chance to get ready.  You’ve just been thrown in to the blender, blades chopping at you every which way until you’re too exhausted and scared and hurt to fight back.

And yet, you have to.   As you lay in bed in the morning just wanting to pull the covers over your face, you know that the kids will be up any minute.   You begin to cry and then shake, only to have to pull it together quickly when you hear the first pitter patter of the day.

The demands on a mother never stop.  You never get time to worry or grieve or just cry it out.   You have to take care of the kids, even when you’d rather lay down and die.   The pull of motherhood is so strong, that it lifts you from the darkest pit, even if sometimes the only motivation is a sense of duty or a fear that if you didn’t, someone would come and take the kids away from you.   But sometimes, it feels like you don’t even get to be human.

When the hurt becomes that strong, and the resentment starts to manifest, the kids are the easiest target for your anger.   But as soon as you blow up at them, you know.  You feel the tears from your pillow this morning starting to well up again because that hurt runs deep.  Much deeper than any minor irritation the kids provided.

As a mom, we have to make the hard choices.   So maybe, if more and more frequently, you’re turning into someone you don’t want to be, it’s time to make the hard choice.   Take that step to bring in more income and knock that debt down.   Get your resume in order.   Go see the doctor - again, and get those tests or procedures over with.   Tell your not-so-good friend how she made you feel or join a group and meet some new friends.  Confront that husband!   Trust God that if it’s over, there will be a new beginning.

Sometimes I think we become so paralyzed that we allow ourselves to wallow in the pain.  It’s easier not to make the hard choice.  That’s why it’s called a hard choice.   But you know what?  If you love your kids, and I know you do, it’s time to start thinking about how your avoidance will hurt them just as much as the circumstances themselves.   But then, you already knew that.   You just haven’t committed to making the hard choice yet.

But you can.  You are stronger than you know.  And even if you aren’t, there is one who is, and He will lead you if you let Him.

Open wounds

Sometimes somebody hurts us.  Sometimes it’s just a knick, sometimes it’s a flesh wound.  But other times, it’s a full fledged thrusting of the knife and twisting and tearing of muscle and tissue, slicing through arteries and leaving us to bleed out.  

No matter who the wound comes from, there is pain. But when the wound is a calculated knifing of vital organs from your Other One, you not only bleed out, but die with the taste of betrayal on your tongue.

Has your Other One hurt you today?   Has he become the menacing monster of your darkest nightmares, your deepest fears?  Are you left with such shock that you can not run from your place of victimizing?

When we are hurt by an enemy, we can shrug it off.  We expect those attacks to come.  When we are hurt by a friend, we wince for a while, but most of the time we move on and heal with a dainty little scar that’s barely noticeable.   But there is something about the wound of the Other One that will not, cannot heal, no matter how much you stitch it closed, smother it in ointment and bandage it.    It will inevitably break open again, each time with more depth, more blood until you realize that not even a tourniquet will stop the rush of life draining from your veins.

You have entrusted your heart to him.   You allowed your body to be taken over by uncontrollable forces so that human life could grow inside you, all to reproduce the intensity of love you felt for him.   You gave him the greatest gifts: children, a legacy, your unwavering devotion.

So when he takes that and dismisses it like it is meaningless, you feel the knife strike flesh.   When the demon menace takes over his soul and he attacks the very essence of who you are, a mother, the knife begins to twist inside you.

How could this man, whose love was once professed to such depths that you chose to bear his children, now take the very heart of you and use it for his personal poison?

It is a wound like no other.   You stare into the eyes of your attacker, knowing he will stop at nothing to take your last breath and you can do nothing to keep him from ripping the very heart right out of your chest.

But there lies within you a super power that he knows nothing about.  Your children.   The very children that he implies you are not good enough to mother, are your Kryptonite.   For even though it is the very Other One that you entrusted everything to, now attacking you, and everything within you wants to lay down and die because you can’t stand the violent pain of betrayal, you rise up instead.    You think of the children.  You see their faces, their smiles. You hear their laughter.  You see their innocence and the dreams you have for their future, and something inside you fights back.   

Oh, you may be hurting, you may be bleeding, you may even be dragging a limb or two behind you, but when you think of the pain your children will suffer if you don’t get up, you suddenly just know that you can stand.

On a daily basis, we may rant and rave.  We may scream and even curse.  We may feel like these children are going to suck the very life out of us with their exhausting questions and bickering and disobedience.

But when push comes to shove and you’re the one being bullied, those kids become the very life in you.  They are your lifeblood. They are your heart beating.  They are the miraculous healing of tissue and muscle and bone.    

For when those children grew inside you, a melding began that can not be undone.   They are part of you and there is nothing you wouldn’t do, no attacker you wouldn’t fend off to save them from ever feeling a second of pain.

That Other One - don’t listen to him.   He doesn’t know you.   He may have known you before, but he doesn’t know you now.    He doesn’t understand the transformation that took place when you became a mom.    And he sure doesn’t know that using the kids or any hint of parenting imperfection against you will incur a wrath that he is powerless to overcome.  

Oh, you’ll still be wounded.  You’ll choke down his words until you finally get them shoved so far down they turn your tears to anger.   And he’ll think twice about ever uttering another word.

But be comforted, because I know your little secret.   Even long after you have risen up and fought back and made a safe haven for your kids, the wound is still there.   You loved him with everything you had.   How could he hurt you like this? 

I don’t know.    I just don’t know.

But God knows.

Trust Him.