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Ostriches Look Funny: The Torn Up To-Do List: How To Be A Good Christian When You're A Big Failure
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With babies, weeks are blurry even when you get new spectacles.
Four days out from Monday and I'm still in a fog, thinking about sad things, the things that visit when you sleep in a chair all night. I try not to sleep in chairs as a rule, but lately I have been unable to help myself for the following reason:
He didn't develop those thigh rolls all by himself.
I helped...while sleeping in a chair.
Good news! Last night, I started to sleep in the chair (accidentally of course) but Derrick flushed the toilet and the noise woke me up. I told him he has to go to the bathroom at 1 a.m. from now on.
Problem solved!
In today's modern society, three kids in 3.5 years is somewhat of an anomaly and I get some questions, most of which are something like, "How is it?"
It's interesting. I keep my sanity by refusing to go to the grocery store. I send Derrick. This has saved us money, as it keeps me from buying the expensive roast beef.
I don't know why I buy roast beef at all really, since people around here prefer to eat blue markers behind my back.
Sure, it's frustrating and stressful. One kid's temper tantrum leads to the baby waking up, and the patience you practiced fumbles and goes all wrong.
The hardest part is the mental part.
You get tired. No one thinks their best when they're tired. No one acts their best. I find myself giving my children FOUR angry eyes instead of two (HA!). I find myself handing out sandwiches for dinner...and they don't even have expensive roast beef in them!
It's defeating.
Compound my failures and my fatigues with Christian guilt and the list of things I should be doing/cooking/reading/saying/teaching/believing/cleaning and before I can say Nevermore, the black crow of despair is on my shoulder.
I would like to sit in a corner and cry until I fall asleep, but that would just perpetuate the cycle of sleeping while sitting, which leads to crying again. What I'm saying is, sometimes there seems to be no hope, and the bible is a bunch of pages of things I should be doing.
Or not doing.
So I resolve to try harder, to be stronger, when really I just feel like napping and eating ice cream.
These are all distractions, these lists of things to do:
The idea that sandwiches are an unacceptable dinner food.
The standard that mothers must never, ever get mad at their loud children.
The guilt that comes with not flossing regularly.
God wants to make me perfect, but my idea of perfection is not His idea of perfection.
He makes ladybugs with uneven spots.
He made my face asymmetrical. I think perhaps He likes bends and curves and potholes, and maybe even, sandwiches for dinner. I'm not sure exactly what He likes. It seems to me that finding out would be a good place to start.
"All I do should be based on a perfect oneness with Him, not on a self-willed determination to be godly." - Oswald Chambers
