I was scrolling through pictures a while back, I do this from time to time. It’s when I put on my rose coloured glasses. I look at the past and remember only the good, or I remember the bad to be not as bad as it actually was.
Of course, I’m speaking at mostly a surface level here. I know from personal experience that there are some things we can look back on that were bad then and continue to be bad now. There are no glasses in the world rosey enough for those experiences.
I’m mostly talking about when you are up to your ears in your children and laundry and dishes and “The same meal again?!?” and laundry, and toilets, and yelling at your kids to stop yelling, and getting anywhere on time, and balancing work with home, and hormones with reality, schedule demands with sleep and daily battles with one of your children who in the last five months has gone from sweet and helpful and agreeable to confrontative, combative and disrespectful. Another child is lonely because none of the other boys in his sphere will play with him. Another child is crying for no reason or freaks out because he’s so tired and he’s peed!
calgon, take me away
So, at this moment in my life I feel a little like I’m drowning. I go from feeling good to feeling like I could drop a waterfall of tears at the wrong question or comment. My stomach vacillates between nauseous and ravenous and no I am not pregnant. Things can be going smoothly then, without warning, one of your kids is metaphorically told to eat an onion while all the other kids are given chocolate bars and all I can think is how @#$&* hard life is sometimes, but I feel shame any time I complain about any of it because I’m not a refugee or a single mom or terminally ill so I keep my mouth shut about it because - to whom much is given much is required - instead, I keep my head down and vent to Brad or my sisters for solidarity and I rarely take it to God because sometimes I just need to be angry about it.
I once told a young mom who was struggling with parenting that as parents we need to imagine ourselves as a rock cliff and our children are the crashing waves. They can crash against us all they want but we will not move. And while it is good, encouraging advice, I felt like a big phony because I’m more like the sand dunes; easily washed away by the sea.
Sometimes parenting feels like deep sea diving and you don’t have enough oxygen in your tank. I’ve come across so many parenting articles that tell me to be the adult, the kids don’t know what’s going on, you have to teach them. But I get caught up in wondering how to do that. So many things come up and I don’t have the answer. My son who none of the boys will play with - what do I tell him when all my school years this happened to me - no one gave me an answer. I grew into a massive ball of self doubt.
Or my other son that has flipped 180 in his behaviour - he has told me he’s homesick and wishes we had never moved. Well, me too kid, homesick up the wazoo, let’s be miserable together.
So, off I go to look at pictures and remember a “happier time”
Do you know what’s really amazing about this picture? The day this ukulele was given to him it brought up all kinds of tensions and hurts form my own childhood (that is a post for another time). And that this ukulele has been the source of so many fights in this house and if I dwell on that then this picture loses all meaning, but if I only see the ridiculously absurd cuteness of it, it becomes meaningless too.
I think we have a need for happiness and easy all the time, but then where is the satisfaction in that? How do you know true joy if you haven’t experienced deep pain? When you come through the struggle, don’t you feel that much more victorious? I’m learning I need to start looking at my "now" as if I'm looking at my “then” accepting the challenges and working through them all the while keeping my rose glasses on, expecting the joy that can be at any moment. This, I believe, is the daily physical example of our faith.
“..the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see” Hebrews 11:1 NLT
