Confessions

Ok, so here comes the ugly.  I don't really like most of my kids most of the time, right now.  That is not to say that I don't LOVE them and want them right here with me right now.  What is does mean is that they are really trying my Very. Last. Nerve.  I am trying to follow my own advice doled out to girlfriends in the midst of their own funks, to just focus on who God has made them and how wonderfully clever He was to put them all in this family.  At the same time.  Ok, so that last sentence was a smidge of my ugly seeping into the very pleasant notion that I know that God designed this family this exact way for a reason.  I am just scratchin' my head right now trying to puzzle that one out.  I pray.  I think, hard, I mean really, really hard, about the fabulous attributes of each dear child.  Then they open their mouths and I want to scream in their faces that I really just do not want to hear their voices right this very second.  Seriously.  Not one syllable.   Please and thank you very much:)  Hey, I'm nothing if not polite.  So, I am deeply convicted that most of the problems come back to my own short-comings.  In the sense that I have to follow through.  Every time.  No halvesies:(  And, I have to be their mom, because I get to be their mom, because I am blessed to be their mom.  And I have to acknowledge that most of this feeling stems from the lone ranger style of parenting that's been happening around here.  Prior to the back injury, Jeff was not present for most of our days.  It's been hard - not gonna lie.  But I think that now that we aren't in that season we need to regroup and figure out another way to do this parenting thing.  The two of us.  God did not intend for us to do this alone.  Even those who are solo parents, by choice or otherwise, also need others to pitch in.  And it comes back to doing the hard things, disciplining from a place of love and not the emotional hot mess that you've become; it means grabbing them and hugging them hard, when what you really want to do is take their favorite toy and smash it right in front of them (oh is that just me and my black heart?); it means knowing that God's word is dead on when He tells us that we cannot trust our emotions because they are fickle and ever changing, but what we can always count on is that HE is always enough and when I have quite literally reached the uttermost tippy tippy end of myself, He is there and will stand  in the gap for me, in place of me, in spite of me.  And only because of that, can I do it all over again tomorrow:)  That and the fact that Ryan told  me that he would guard my head for me.  Sounds like a good deal, no?