Successful Momming. Or Not.

I'm in my Fun Sized office doing a little avoidance work. I'm avoiding the whole parenting thing.

Today has been one of my more hormonal days, where I basically despaired of ever having a hand in authentic, successful parenting. There I was, visiting my eldest at the Prison, talking about the mostly absent son who-just-got-out-of-jail, after scolding the responsibility-avoiding youngest son regarding home school....it occurred to me that my overall parenting day was perhaps just less than stellar. 

My daughter was in good standing, largely because she'd been gone all day, presumably at college.

It's not that I feel myself to be a failure as a parent, not exactly. More that I feel my efforts to be nearly entirely wasted. What is the point? Kids seem like they are going to do their own thing, and about the best I can hope to accomplish is the imparting of bits of wisdom which are destined to fall on deaf ears. It's a lot like flailing about with no result.

So much of the conundrum for me is the ongoing dichotomy of interacting with one child who skips out on his chores, and another who does drugs. How does one parent these situations simultaneously? How about scolding the one who slept half the fricking day while on my way out the door to visit one at the prison?  To have one situation that is so normally irritating, and one that is so outside the bounds of normalcy...and to hold both in my head at the same time is terribly unsettling. It's too much variety in futile circumstances. 

I know how to think about something tragic, like a funeral. It's sad and solemn. Or a baby shower, and all the attendant joy. But to hold both in tandem stretches my mind to feats of acrobatics for which I am entirely ill-equipped. That's sort of what it's like.

I'm tired, is the thing. Tired of trying so hard to impact these young people. Tired of making my life all about all these ungrateful urchins. It's a little temper tantrum, is what it is. 

There is some mention of complaining in Scripture, if I recall my bible correctly. Something about God having little to no tolerance for His children when they grumble and murmur. When the nation of Israel was wandering in the wilderness, they had some pretty valid issues to complain about wouldn't you say? Yet, the Divine Scolding for discontent was always so much harsher than any response God meted out for timid faith or fear. I gather from this that there is something particularly offensive to God about my temper tantrums. Isn't that largely what a little fit amounts to? Complaining? I don't like my lot....IT ISN'T FAIR. How come everybody else gets kids who go to college and get married and have grand babies for their moms? And yet...

If God is Good, and I am convinced that He is, then His admonition to give Thanks in everything is a mandate which I have already been fully equipped to obey. I do not like my kids some days....some years, actually. But I know something about this God I serve. He is Absolutely Good, and He is working, even when I can't see it. He has told me that I have no cause to complain, but rather to live in perpetual Gratitude.

I choose Gratitude. Perhaps this is a fitting theme, given that Thanksgiving is rapidly approaching. Will you join me in seeking to thrive in an overwhelming attitude of thanks and appreciation of all that God is doing both in and around us?

My children, all four of them, are gifts to me from God. I don't need to like the choices they are making, nor the way they inspire me to feel, in order to accept the blessing God says they are to me. I can thank God that He is at work in their lives and that I get a front row seat to watch a miracle unfold. I don't know what He may be doing in them, but it's pretty clear that He is doing something in me. I can be thankful for that, too.

Sometimes I think it's so significant to recognize how hard things are so that obedience can be all the sweeter. I'm glad we've had this little talk.