Square Peg

for the last several months, i have been wanting to write a post on being a square peg in a round hole. i have been counting down the days still school was done for the year and i could confess what a long academic road it has been. it was my first year teaching four kids at once. first year with a new and much more demanding curriculum. it was overwhelming and there were honesty days when i didn’t think we were going to make it.

i wanted to confess to feeling out of my depth, over my head. i wanted to say that i felt like God brought me to this place where i needed to do something that i just couldn’t do. i kept thinking if i prayed harder or worked harder, He would wave His magic wand and suddenly i would be transformed into the serine, unflappable mom who always keeps her cool or the fun mom who says “the heck with the laundry! let’s play monopoly.” instead, i was the overwhelmed mom hiding in her room watching “antique roadshow” cause she just couldn’t take it anymore.

when i went to write this post about how God obviously mis-assigned me, i couldn’t quite do it. it sounded whiny and ungrateful. ungrateful for all the amazing times we had this year. ungrateful for the experiences i got to share with my kids this year. we laughed, we cried, we conquered pre-alegebra.

when i was preparing to have our first baby, jim used to tell me that trying to get away from the pain only made things worse. if you focused on, looked it right in the eye and called its bluff, it wasn’t as bad. it still hurt but you didn’t get lost in it; you didn’t let it win. i think that’s what i did this year. i kept trying to wiggle out from under the discomfort i was in, trying to reorganize my way out of it rather than accepting it as a natural part of the process.

i often hear people talk about how moms need to make time for themselves because if they are happy and fulfilled then it will trickle down to their kids. i am not so sure that happiness should really be our end goal. what if i am called to be happy in the pain rather than looking for ways to kill the pain altogether? what if God doesn’t give us the luxury of happiness but calls us to something higher? maybe all this time i was making the pain worse by not accepting it as what it really is, God’s hand molding me to His own purpose, the smoothing out of my sharp corners. after all, who is the pot to tell the Potter what shape best fits His purpose?

don’t take this as “therefore, we should be at home full-time, making ourselves (and our children) as miserable as we possibly can. i think God calls moms to all sorts of uncomfortable places, in and out of the home. in an imperfect world there are no perfect choices. only faith in a perfect Creator who we can trust to work on those rough spots out in our ultimate favor.