imperfect prose on thursdays: leaning on mary, the mother of Jesus

As of this month I have no one.

My nanny, a girl of 18 who’s been coming since we took the boys in, has moved. Trent has started coaching, so the hours are long in the bleak of winter dark and the kids are so small that I bundle them all up in snow-pants and toques and mitts and they stand for five minutes on the frozen ground outside then one of them loses a mitt, the other one slips on the snow, and soon they’re all piling in with red cheeks and runny noses and it’s unraveling and placing mitts by the woodstove and boys on potties and pulling out stories and toys and hairs. I don’t have many left.

We’ve agreed to keep our god-sons until Christmas Break when their mother will be ready to try again, she says, and I’m trying to fill them up with love these last few weeks but it’s all I can do to get them, along with my two, dressed in the mornings. The clean laundry doesn’t even make it downstairs anymore. I just mix and match from the rumpled pile of t-shirts and pants and socks in the dryer. It’s a lesson in humility, I tell them. But really, it’s just me falling apart…

(come on over HERE, friends, to She Loves Magazine, where i’ll finish telling you the story… but first, link your imperfect prose below!)

**don’t forget, on TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10th, we’ll be linking up at PRODIGAL MAGAZINE for a once in a lifetime synchroblog called BROKEN HALLELUJAH. don’t miss out!**

every wednesday and thursday, we gather together to celebrate redemption. here are the details:

1. link up a post (old or new) that you feel is ‘broken’ or ‘imperfect’ or somehow redemptive
2. put the ‘imperfect prose’ button at the bottom of your post, so others can find their way back here (see button code in right-hand column of my blog)
3. read other’s prose, and encourage them!

so won’t you join us, as we “walk each other home”? (ram dass)

~Chasing Silhouettes now only $10 at Amazon.com; also available at Amazon.ca, ChristianBook.com and Barnes and Noble.

I’m speaking at MentorCONNECT’s teleconference for mothers in June: