Kasher’s been so sick this weekend it’s infected all of us, our spirits mostly, and it’s hard to stay up when your children are so down. you try and read the same Curious George book over and over, with as much enthusiasm as you can muster but the laundry is obscenely high and you wonder if maybe you could just bury in beneath the colors and sleep, because there’s “no rest for the wicked,” or for the mother.
and i find myself Saturday night with a glass of red wine and the boys asleep, finally, Kasher all drugged up and the ear of his bear in his mouth and the humidifier on and me begging God to let him be well enough to attend church the next morning.
because i need church.
motherhood is lonely. it’s not for the faint of heart. it requires courage and sacrifice and time, it means wiping snotty noses with your fingers because you have no Kleenex, it means sitting up with your son when he won’t sleep and watching movies with him, or just holding him by the open window so the cool air can soothe his lungs, it means praying over their heads, over their beds, over their bodies and then crawling weary into your own to make love to a husband who misses you.
and you miss yourself.
you wonder how you got lost inside this frizzy-haired woman with the bags under her eyes and does the housework never end???
but strangely enough, there are moments when it does. your house is never clean, no, but you come to a point of making peace with yourself. of collapsing within yourself and deciding, it doesn’t matter.
not in a depressed kind of way, but more of a surrendered playing on the floor with your children while the laundry piles high kind of way. because you’ve suddenly noticed how long your son’s legs, and you’re letting hems and sighs and cries for the way you both need him, and the way you want to be alone. the way you want space and silence and solitude. and church.
we were made for adult companionship. we need each other. so i’m begging God to let me go to church but then i’m finding him, in my loneliness, too. because he is there–all of him: all three of him: Jesus the son, God the Abba father, and our holy mother, the Spirit, and they meet us where we’re at. and i want to be friends with them, even as i fear them. and i want my children to be friends with them too.
so in our loneliness, let’s not turn automatically to people. let’s turn to the trinity who will never turn to someone else and talk about us behind our back. let’s turn to a God who has fought so desperately for our love that he died for us. let’s spend some time asking Jesus to confide in us, our brother, for the holy spirit to create joy and contentment within us and for the Abba father to sing his love songs over us.
because we won’t always be able to go to church.
but we can always be church for our children.
(sharing this with michelle and laura)
this week’s Imperfect Prose on Thursday prompts:
this week at imperfect prose you can choose between a PHOTO prompt (this picture of my adorable Kasher looking out the window) and a WORD prompt (believe). see you Wednesday at 5 pm MST!