It's a Disease

Lately Israel has really been difficult.  He is growing up, but as is the case with most toddlers, he is not doing it very gracefully.  In his newfound desire for independance, he throws the most spectacular tantrums when anyone tries to help him do anything, from putting on his pants to opening a candy wrapper.  He has just started doing this in the last few days.

I began to notice a few other things about him, like excitability and aggression (mostly toward his brother, but he did bite me the other day), sudden mood changes (it's amazing how fast a toddler can go from smiling to screaming), excessive drooling (I don't even know what that's about), eating substances not normally eaten (why must everything go in their mouths?), and delirium (he keeps talking about seeing a green kitty in his bed). 

While most would chalk this up to "being a toddler", as so many children act this way when they are that age, there is one other explanation, a disease which has all of those symptoms.  The answer is quite simple.

They all have rabies.

Not the Only One

Anne Lamott said in her book Bird by Bird, "Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal koran and you should die, infidel."That is pretty much how I feel most of the time. But there are usually a few shining moments in every day that make it all worth it.

One moment I will never forget happened a few weeks ago. We were getting the boys ready to go somewhere one evening, and I had had a really hard day with them that day. I had knelt down to help Malachi with shoes or something similar, and Izzy walked up to me, smiling his sunshine smile, like he had a delightful secret. He put his little chubby hands on my cheeks and said, “Mommy, you bright!” And the way he said it, I felt like it was the best compliment I have ever received. Especially because at that moment, I didn’t feel very bright. I feel more like a shriveled banana peel or a storm cloud.

Those moments are really important. As a stay at home mom, sometimes I feel like life is pretty monotonous. It’s not very exciting, I don’t get paid for it, and my children seem to scream an awful lot. At me. Every day. It can be wearing.

One of my teachers at Christ for the Nations, the Bible College where Aaron and I met, used to say, “Surviving can drop dead! I want to thrive, not just survive!” But most of the time, I feel like I am definitely more surviving than thriving.

Some days I am not sure my kids will live to adulthood. Other days I am sure they will, but I question whether I will still be sane when they do.

But I take courage, knowing that I am not the only one. I am not the only one who is going through this right now. I’m not the only mom who feels exhausted at the end of the day.

Sometimes when I’ve had an especially difficult day, and I feel like a terrible mother, I think how unfair it is. It is unfair that if Aaron had a job that he felt he just wasn’t at all good at and it wasn’t working, he could quit and do something else. But you don’t get to quit being a mom. Even if you really are a bad mom, quitting would make you a worse mom, not a better one. So you just have to keep going, and trust that one day, you’ll see some fruit from these little “plants” that you’ve put so much of your life into growing. I look forward to that day.

And I know, I’m not the only one.