My life has been full of changes and revelations lately. Some of these have been
subtle knocks on the door of my heart and others have been like a battering ram breaking down the door and then exploding in my face.
The past 4 months have been rough - extremely rough... In a nutshell I was confronted with an ideal that I thought I must be in order to achieve holiness only to realize that I could NOT live up to that ideal. What a crushing blow. How could I go on living knowing that to continue on the same path meant I must be miserably unhappy and that to change course meant failure and then again I'd be miserably unhappy.
I had to strip away all those nagging mantras from my brain - you know the kind that tell you that you MUST do this or you MUST do that in order to be what God wants you to be. I had to get back to the basics - What Lord do you want from me? What Lord do
You want from me? Lord make me the woman You want me to be. I had to try to empty myself of all my own prideful ideas and my own silly hang-ups. I had to rely on His love and mercy. I had to remember that He loves me and that He is in control. There was much crying - wailing even. Tim got more than an earful and found the whole mess confusing and frustrating to say the least. What can I say? He married a woman who is passionate and fiery and sometimes those fires burn too hot and can get out of control!! I want, more than anything else in life, to please God. That's it. That's what drives me. At times it drives me bonkers!!! I agonize over how I should best serve Him. What would be MOST pleasing to Him? With the arrival of Christopher I tried to be the woman I thought I should be. I was coming up short time and time again. I'd scream at the kids, I'd go a whole day without hugging Monica once, I'd have a
heapful of dishes in the sink to welcome Tim home from work with, I'd not shower for 3 days, School was indefinitely on hold yet a constant nagging worry in my brain, I'd make frozen pizza for dinner for 4 days straight...Simply put I just couldn't hack it! I could not be the wife, the mother, the teacher, the woman I thought I must be and I was hating myself for failing!
With prayer and the good counsel of my new found spiritual advisor, Fr. Bill, plus a lot of wisdom and comfort provided by good
ol' mom, plus many a night spent crying and hashing out the real expectations/demands vs. the imaginary ones I've formed in my own mind, I'd finally come to see how complicated I'd made things.
I decided to put the girls in school. They go to our parish's school now and they LOVE it! This means less work for me but more work for Tim. I
resisted this path for a whole host of reasons. The 2 biggest stumbling blocks for me were feeling like a total failure as a "good holy catholic mother" and also shifting the burden from my shoulders to my poor overloaded husband's. School is expensive and so is the gas to drive them back and forth etc... I felt like sch a loser for "throwing in the towel" and having to have Tim pick up the pieces...
I searched and searched for an
article or a blog post about this very topic. I could find nothing! I just needed to hear that there was another mom out there who made the choice to put the kids in school and still could feel like it was the very BEST thing for her family. I did NOT need any more guilt!!!! I did not need any more horror stories about the big bad world out there and how it
undermines the faith and the morals we try to instill etc etc etc... I just wanted to feel like a GOOD PERSON who just happened to not want to
home school any longer....did a woman like that exist? And then I found her.... Her post called
Quiet Desperation was just what I needed. It's linked to in the post prior to this one cause I STILL don't know how to do that...her blog is titled
Raising Five...
Somehow God got through to me. I've stopped wallowing in self-loathing despair and I've begun to feel PEACE about my chosen path in life. Ever since my re-conversion to the faith ten years ago I have been plagued by guilt and self-loathing. The more I grew to love God, the closer I was drawn into a love affair with my Jesus, the more I found myself feeling totally unworthy and second rate. Somehow I needed to strike a balance between recognizing how great God is and how unworthy I truly am, but yet how loved and special I am to Him all the same. I needed to know that yes, He has a narrow road for us to reach him. The road truly is narrow which leads to God and everlasting life. But, and that's a BIG but, there are many narrow roads.
My road is not your road and yours is not mine. God has a very specific path for each of us to follow not because He wants to play "gotcha" when we stray off and get lost, rather because He knows us so well that He has made a path that fits us precisely.
The road IS narrow but it is a road paved by the blood of Jesus just for me and no one else. I must walk this road towards my Savior and not look back, not look to my left or to my right at others with envy nor pride. I must walk forward in faith.
Jesus has a plan for me and He will make me the woman He wants me to be, if I will only let go of all of my own self-imposed crosses and just carry the ones He wants to give me.
I love my kids. I love them more than they'll ever know. But that's not as it should be. They SHOULD know how much I love them!! Often I get way too wrapped up in the particulars of the household. I rage over mounds of laundry and I cry over spilt milk and juice and lemonade...I say "hurry up" way too much. I say "you're a great kid!" way too little.
