How a weak adjective helped restore my focus

What does it mean to be a good mother? To live this season well?

What will my kids remember, what forms of pouring out will fill them up in ways that matter?

I ask these questions when we pause from school. I try to take a breath, to orient myself again towards the most important things. 

What does it mean to live well, today? Answers come at me from all directions like wild animals. 

Have you seen their bedrooms? They need better daily habits; hospitality and service begins in the home, do they even understand that?

Note the conflict! We should talk more about compassion, self control, and forgiveness in this place. Managing one’s own body and spirit is probably the most important thing, really.

But also, the future is coming; do they even know what they’re going to do after high school? They should be asking questions, exploring options, feeling it all out NOW! Don’t waste the life you have been given, children!

Wait, what about playfulness? The checklists can strangle a human spirit! We MUST learn to live and play and be small together. This is how we learn to live under the gospel, to breathe in grace together- God upholds the world, we do not!

So I am over here cultivating an atmosphere of…

productive, driven, mindful, playful grace …. ???  Sure.

What do you do when it ALL matters? 

When you find yourself as a human with limits and impossible, important, competing, valuable goals?

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The other day I was cleaning the school room and I came across this old piece of paper.

“I love how you are always there in the morning.” - Peter

Hard pause.

I could notice the handwriting and spelling: has it even improved, am I failing him in this area?
I could notice that this idea I had once about saying nice things to each other in writing was a good one, and I could wonder why haven’t we continued to do that, and I could start a plan to implement another system, another habit…

But instead I noticed the adjective, the plain, old adjective: there. 

He loves how mom is always there.

Not always patient, always fun, always teaching, always organized, or even always sane!

Just… there.

“I love how you are always there in the morning.”

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Can showing up daily, imperfectly, really be enough? Can this blind, staggering best-guessing parenting somehow really bless these kids, really result in faithful functional adults?

Fear drives me so much in my parenting.  I don’t want to choose the wrong things, to miss the big things, to mishandle the important things and yet I feel like I do that very thing constantly.  If their success depends on my righteousness or enoughness, the weight of it all will crush me. But what if it doesn’t? What if their lives are complicated equations that God is working out, and I am just a factor, and the Creator of all things can take not only my faithfulness but even my brokenness and work it into the equation for their good?

 If i can remember that He is the Author here, 

that He loves them more than I do, 

that He uses crap for fertilizer, 

then maybe I can keep showing up, imperfectly, relentlessly.

God, grant us the courage, morning after morning, to be there.

*Confession- this post was delayed in publishing because I chased the rabbit trail question “Is the word ‘there’ an adjective or an adverb?”  There are plenty of uses for the word “there,” and they’re complicated. So there.