Mental Vomit

It's 10pm here and the boys are still awake.  After begging them to listen and perform one task after another, my willpower has shut off.  Their father is a night owl.  If they want to stay up till midnight, I'm still going to bed after this post.  Welcome to my life as an imperfect wife and mother trying to keep it all together and make sure everyone is alive and  reasonably happy at the end of each day.  As a special treat to myself I started this blog in an effort to find more of myself and not lose who I already am. 

Don't get me wrong, I love being a wife and a mom.  I don't take one minute for granted.  Okay, that's obviously an exaggeration as evidenced by my effort to pee all by my big girl self.  I have prayed to be a wife, that God would set me up  with someone that finally "got" me.  I prayed to be a mom amidst fears that maybe one of my greatest dreams wouldn't be realized.  But we all know that along with being a wife and a mom there is a part of us that existed before these titles and will exist long after the chidren have left and our husbands pass on before us. 

So here I am, writing while  I occasionally yell at the boys for playing soccer in their room with the lights off.  They're supposed to be asleep, remember?  I also have a daughter but she hasn't moved out of her crib so I know where at least one of them is!  At this time in my life I'm a stay at home mom and my husband is a computer tech.  We both have our dream jobs but there's always a story behind the smile.  Sometimes sad, sometimes challenging but a great story.  Everyone has one.  We just have to take the time to listen, to care more about them than what they can do for us.

 I had another blog that I haven't written in in almost a year so I decided to start fresh.  We are in a period of starting over.  My husband lost his job at the beginning of the Great Recession and we struggled for three  years while he got odd computer jobs.  I worked as a teacher in an infant classroom so when I say struggled, I mean it!  We started drowning in debt and lost our home to forclosure last year.  We have three children in a two bedroom apartment but the crazy thing is, this apartment is bigger than our house was!  If there is one thing that the whole experience has taught me it's that God is going to take care of us.  Through things that happen to us, because of our bad decisions, whatever brings us to the bottom of the pit, God will bring us out.  I used to pray for God to just throw me a rope, just let us out, let us come up for air.  When he didn't answer, I stopped asking.  Now, the saint would have realized that this was a time for learning, to "be still and know".  Even though I knew all this, I also knew I was mad.  Mad at God, mad at my husband, myself, the world, you name it.  It is hard to draw close to God when you are so angry.  And yet he waited.  He kept us afloat and waited.  Waited for me to give up my plan, waited for me to stop giving him the silent treatment.  It's crazy, but in my journals there is a huge empty space during this time.  I was not cleaving, seeking, doing all the things I had been taught to do or preached to others to do.  I sat down on the road and instead of running the race I quit.  There isn't much to say when you've said all you can and God either doesn't talk back or doesn't give you the answer you want.  My prayers were always the same and so was his response, or lack thereof.  Like I isaid, I'm not perfect and I'm not trying to be an example to anyone.  There are lots of people who probably would have done the right thing. 

My moment of clarity happened when I opened the door and found the eviction notice.  I can tell you, that felt like rock bottom but it wasn't.  Rock bottom is being out on the streets.  Rock bottom isn't even being in a homeless shelter because at least there you have a roof over your head.  Rock bottom is when you both lose your job or a death sentence of cancer.  But there are people out there that may tell you that even those things aren't rock bottom.  When you realize how little you have, you get grateful real quick.  I woke up, I let go of the house.  I had us all packed to move within two weeks and we found a place to live.  God has protected us from things that could be so much worse. 
I apologize for the mental vomit on this page.  I'll clean it up over time.  God is still working on me.