Spilled milk

Not my floor, but might as well be!

 I came across this today:

"I'm learning to look at the ways that raising a family is most challenging for me, and assuming that this is how God is working to shape me and to teach me to lean on Him." Ginny Sheller from Small Things

I fell on it after I had cleaned up a mail organizer torn off the wall by our three-year-old tornado, and then watched him very deliberately pour his cup of milk on the floor at lunch. After I had listened to one too many whiny voices. After I had surveyed the house with the trail of legos in the living room, the mounds of stuffed animals in the play room, the bed torn apart waiting for new sheets in my room, and the clothes sprinkled on top of everything like a fine coating of sugar on pastry. Layers of work that when peeled back only reveal more work. There was the day I found him up to his eye balls in sunscreen, put him in the bathtub fully clothed and used the shower head like an eye wash. I couldn't find his face it was on so thick and it caked his eye lashes burning the whites of his eyes. Then there was the day he did it all over again, this time applying it to the dog's thick, dark fur. There are the days he uses the potty (hurrah!) and then cleans the bowl himself (oh no!), trying to be helpful, but inevitably splashing from tiny tot pot to big pot. There are the bath times when he floods the bathroom with his enthusiastic splashing. And every mealtime, the milk lands on the floor, the cup intentionally spilled to see the effect and this mom refills it over and over, because he is three and we will not go back to sippy cups if it can be helped. There are the small girls who crave mom's attention and who mom does her very best to attend to. And there is the summer time bickering between a big girl who bosses and a small girl who resists. There is whining about chores that interrupt intricate webs of imaginary play, the mean mom who busts up the delicate fibers of created worlds to ask a seven year old to set the table, a five year old to pick up her shoes. "You're too old for tantrums," I say through clenched teeth, wanting nothing more than to throw one myself.

"The ways that raising a family is most challenging to me": I have learned in nearly eight years of parenting that I am someone who is easily over-stimulated; too much commotion makes me feel like a spinning top. I quickly lose sense of which way is up and I find it hard to focus on a single task. I get easily frustrated. So I crave order. When my environment is in order, all the lights are on--the intellectual, artistic, spiritual parts of who I am syncronize and good things happen. My spirit is peaceful and my skin thick enough to led the day's annoyances slide, bounce, and tumble around me. I'm like a trampoline for all things kid-crazy. And I can rise above. When my day or my space feels haphazard, then so do I. My mind muddles and my patience wears thin. Spilled milk mutates into the day's greatest challenge and perspective is a distant ship on the far horizon. I get anxious and addled and well, weary.

I set boundaries and good intentions galore. I tell myself that the house doesn't have to be neat for my heart to find peace, and I tell myself that this is a season and it is OK if that book I started is a mess of disorganized thoughts on my hard drive, well-intentioned but untended and frankly, poorly crafted. And it is OK that the paint is peeling off my trim and the windows are foggy with a thick coat of pollen and I haven't spent as much time having adventures with my wee ones as I planned to. But then too many things happen all at once, and parenting small kids starts to feel like a circus again, and my oldest is shimmying up the pole of the basketball hoop while the dog is digging up my peppers trying to eat the organic fertilizer he smells around them, and I can't find the boy because he's hiding in the neighbor's shed again playing a game of hide-and-seek that only amuses him. My little girl is in a heap on the pavement because her brother stomped on her pet cricket's carefully constructed house on his way to the shed. And I'm the top spinning circles...who do I help first? The kid fifteen feet off the ground or the one laid low in five-year-old grief or the one I can't even find or the animal who will inevitably spend the afternoon whining by the door with a case of the runs.

"This is the way God is working to shape me and to teach me how to lean on him": Oh my! Really? Because I am on my hands and knees again with that dang dish rag mopping up the milk for the thousandth time and I still haven't learned the secret. How many times before I get it? Don't lean on yourself; lean on me. Come to me all you who are weary, and I will give you rest. There is rest under the table and in the laundry pile and there is rest in tears and in the cries for help from three directions. And there is rest in the jobs unfinished and the ones never begun. And there is rest in the day that leaves no room for writing, for thought, for even sitting down.

This season of life can amount to more than Wake. Feed. Clean. Guide. Sleep. Repeat.

The tasks remain the same, but shift my focus and it can become Challenge. Shape. Teach. Lean. Rest. Repeat. I'm not up for the task, but life isn't always a menu of choices yours for the taking. Sometimes life is gritty and repetitive and exhausting. Maybe that's the point. The challenges aren't cause for despair, but reason to rejoice. A good work begun.

It's easy to say it over and over. Remind myself. But living it. Living it takes a measure of trust and of grace and of laying down my self in order to take up the lives of my children, in order to love above and around and through the chaos. You only get one chance to raise them, I keep thinking. One chance. What gift will you give? Will they feel welcome here? Loved? Encouraged? Peaceful? Free? Or will I pass them the burdens that feel too heavy to bear. There is only one option then. Let the ways that challenge be the ways that shape. Let the ways that challenge be the ways that teach. Let the ways that challenge be the ways that cause me to lean and to rest. So that giving is easy. So that gratitude comes naturally. So that joy is full.

Hand me that rag. There's more milk to mop up.