My thoughts prod me, they keep me awake at night, like last night, they poke me, tell me to crawl away, find a quiet place, away from the maddening crowd, somewhere I can think.
The classic dread I have always had for seeing my thoughts in written form at a later date has left me. I don't even have the time to re-read now. Only time to scribble and scrawl. I don't know what the urgency means and I do not dare to speculate. I just know that I feel it and that is enough.
My thoughts vacillate from last year to many years past. They seem like another lifetime ago. Where did those days go? Those days of feeling so swollen, heavy, hot and achy. Excited and hopeful. Those days when every thought was directed toward the future and none to the past.
All was perfect because it was all new, unsubjected as yet to my failures and insecurities. All was still a dream.....and dreams aren't real. They are what we make them...and want them to be.
Reality comes soon enough to try us, to prick us to the core. But for a time, maybe just a moment in time, reality is kept at bay by the untried dream. The untested, flippant statements that all children who have not had children make,
"I'll NEVER be like MY parents were",
"I'll do it SO much better!",
"I won't make the same mistakes MY parents made",
"I will ALWAYS be there for my children and they will ALWAYS love me because I will love them SO WELL, so perfectly."
Things like this are so easy to say; I said them many times, if only to myself. They are so easy to believe, because of our ignorance. Simply said, it IS ignorance.
How can one who has never known the demands of multiple children waking you up hour after hour in the middle of the night know the weariness that attends the mind morning after morning? How can one without a nine year old know the panic that makes your mouth go dry and your blood run cold when they encounter a flasher driving right through your own "safe" neighborhood? How can one without a child suddenly turned adolescent know the stark raving fear that accompanies the night hours when that one is not home, safe in bed, and you don't know where they are?
Fear will make you do and say things you never said in your dreams. Weariness will cause you to fold in on yourself and wonder if you have lost your mind. Bone weariness, my mother-in-law called it. I have known that.
Some children are relatively easy. If those kind are all you are given, it is easy to pat yourself on the back and inwardly praise yourself for the wonderful job you think you did. Others are not, and patting yourself, even if you could reach way back there, is not what you think you deserve. I have been given all sorts. Just as I ponder the successes of one I am reminded of the unfinished job of another.
My ideals have been shattered many times over. Not my ideals for my children. My ideals for me.
How many times have I heard my mother's voice, or my father's voice, the voices I said I would never emulate, coming from my mouth? How many nights have I berated myself for not living up to my preconceived notions for that day? The standards that no one but me, no one else, not even God, had set for myself.
It was one of those days when I lay myself down to sleep at the end of it and plead, "Redeem the day, Lord! Redeem the day!" It was one of those nights when I confess my need of the Lord's strength to attend me just one more day. Just one more day, Lord, one more day.
"Because He lives, I can face tomorrow,
because He lives, all fear is gone,
because I know Who holds my future,
then I can face the living
just because I know He lives"
Bill and Gloria Gaither
