Ask for an hour, get a day

This morning began with a bang.  K woke up at 5 a.m. and wouldn't go back to sleep.  I rocked him and nursed him, letting the tenderness of the moment pull me away from my anger at being woken before dawn towards the joy of the new day. And then, llama style, that boy pulled back his head and spit the contents of his mouth in my face.  The remainder of the morning was as follows: K alternates between spitting and shrieking--"Aaah! aah! aah!" Spit breakfast in mom's face. "Aaah! aah! aah!" Spit for the heck of it. And on. And on. And on.  By 7 a.m., I was ready to throw up my hands and crawl back in bed. I wrote the first desperate email to Mark:

K won't stop spitting and shrieking this morning. I gave up on breakfast and put him in the playroom and he's still in there doing it. I'm going crazy with frustration and it's only 6:50 a.m. I'm truly at the end of my rope.

Then I had a good tired-out-mama cry. What is wrong with him? Why the repetitive behaviors/sounds? Why is he fighting against our morning routines, the ones that typically comfort and soothe him?

Enter E and A.  They were all smiles and snuggles until it was time to get E ready for school. Before the next hour was out, A was in her room having her first tantrum of the day, K was crying with his face on the floor, and E was bumbling around getting herself ready as best as any five-year-old can. Picture crazed mother still in pajamas, hair wild, eyes wild, and head throbbing from lack of coffee.

And so it went as we stumbled and tripped through our morning: Keys nowhere to be found.  Grab the spare sets and shove children out front door. Arrive at school. Discover that van doors have somehow frozen shut en route.  E crawls over two rows of seats to climb out drivers' side and announces: "Mom, I touched the steering wheel, and it felt like I was driving." Thank goodness she wasn't! Drive the fifteen minutes home with open door signal beeping the entire way (head pounding, still no coffee). Another email:

I am having a hard time keeping my head above water.

Why do so many mornings go like this even though I tell myself again and again that I will rise above the circumstances that frazzle me. "Lord," I repeated with every trial, "redeem this hour."

"Redeem this hour."

"Redeem this hour!"

"Save me!"

K took an unexpected nap this morning, while A and I snuggled on the couch and read stories. Then she volunteered to help me fold laundry and after many tries became a pro at face cloths.  Saved for now, I thought. But I still felt defeated about the day. Cheated out of the equanimity I keep striving for, keep failing to achieve lately.

On the way to get E from school, another minor mishap.  I started to hear it as soon as I got on the highway.  Sheets of ice sliding back and forth across the roof of the van threatened to loose their weight and fury at every bend in the road.  At the last stop sign before the school's entrance it happened.  Heavy snow and ice at least four inches thick and five times that in length and width came crashing down around us on all sides.  Though I knew it was coming, it still caught me off guard, set my heart racing and my hands trembling. The sound from inside the van was deafening as the ice and snow came to rest on the front windshield.  I was blinded. It felt like the sky had fallen on us. I stretched my neck to see over the white and inched my way forward into the intersection and finally into the entrance to E's school.  Still shaking, I emerged from our igloo and cleaned off the car checking the wipers and hood for damage. All's well that end's well, I thought.

How like my morning that moment was.  The metaphor was not lost on me.  All I could think of was the story of Chicken Little who thinks the sky is falling when an acorn lands on her head. I'd been pinged with those darn acorns all morning, one small event after another, piling up, until it felt like the whole day was caving in.

Last night at Bible study I shared a heaviness on my heart: With K's first year behind him, we've jumped headlong into the second with a huge increase in therapy. It's wonderful he has access to such gifted and compassionate professionals. But we are suddenly overwhelmed by it all.  Add to that the news that K will not be able to attend the same Christian school we planned to send our girls to.  What do we do with that? Where do we begin searching out the best choices for his education? Where will those best choices lead us in the next couple of years?

A dear friend mentioned a woman from her church whose son, now nineteen, has gone through the local public school's special needs program. "You should talk to her. I'm sure she'd be willing. She might be able to help you sort through some of these questions." I made a mental note to call her when I got a chance.

 Fast forward to the trip home from school. I needed a few things from the store and in a last minute decision I steered the car into the Walmart parking lot instead of heading to my usual store. I hate Walmart, but as I neared it I had this feeling that I was better off stopping there.  Maybe the deals are better there this week, I thought.

Just as I was about to head to the check out, I glanced one last time at my list. Tomatoes, forgot those. So I weaved the cart and three kids back to an aisle I'd passed earlier.  As I came down the aisle, who do you think was heading towards me in the opposite direction? Yes, that's right, the very woman I had made a mental note to call for advice last night.  She smiled and stopped.

"Hi, how are you? Who's this little guy? Are you babysitting?"

We hadn't seen each other in a while, so it had escaped her that we had added another member to our family.

"This is Kaleb, and he's our littlest one."

"Oh! I didn't even know you were expecting again! What a surprise!"

"Yes, he was!" I laughed. "First, when we found out he was on his way, and second, when we discovered he had Down syndrome."

"Don't I know what you mean," she exclaimed and smiled.

"It's funny I bumped into you," I added, "because my friend mentioned I should give you a call, that you might have some words of wisdom for us concerning school choices for K."

"Oh, I would love to talk with you! I'd love to go out any time! How about next week?"

And so the conversation continued.  She told me more about her son and I told her a little about K. And then we discovered the girls knocking cans off the shelves and decided to pick up our conversation again later. But before we parted, she reached out and gave me a hug. "Every mom needs a hug too sometimes," she said gently.

"Thanks," I looked at her. "I did need that. It was a rough morning."

"Well, we'll talk more."

And that was that. I had been asking God to redeem my hours of frustration, and in a ten-minute conversation he redeemed a whole day. Days, actually, of anxiety about the future.  I had forgotten to trust, and he gently reminded me that not only can I trust him with the known future, I can trust him with the unknown, too.

I found this in my journal this afternoon:

Psalm 63:3
Because your love is better than life...my soul will be satisfied with the richest of foods....Because you are my help, I will sing in the shadows of your wings.  My soul clings to you, your right hand upholds me.

What a promise for our future, for K's future: a love better than life, a soul satisfied with the richest spiritual food, a heart light enough to sing.

I stopped staring at the sky and returned to the path cut out for me.