A Tale of Weakness and Humility

So I'm not perfect.  I might have mentioned this before.  It's something that eats at me so I write about it a lot.  I don't talk about it too much because, goodness, how uncomfortable is it to be in a conversation with somebody who tells you they're not perfect in serious, sobbing tones?  Awkward.  But as long as you and I don't make eye contact, I feel like I can write about my not-perfectness without it being too big of a deal.

So, as I said, I'm not perfect.  Sometimes I wish my not-perfectness swung in a wide arc.  I wish I would take in a whole wide range of shallow flaws that could be methodically shot into smithereens.  I wish I could blow off the top of my pistol when I was all done shooting and shove the gun back into my holster satisfied that those weaknesses of mine would now be resting six feet underground.

But that's not so much how it is with me.  Instead I've got me some good, thick, sturdy, unsmithereenable faults.  Faults that have been around since before I can remember.  Faults that laugh in my face when I say, "Go ahead, make my day."  Faults that like to flake off one smidgen at a time per one-hundred rounds of bullets.

One of those trusty shortcomings is my temper under stress.  At the peril of my conscience that sometimes bathes overmuch in guilt, I read a quote by C.S. Lewis that said something like: the true measure of a person can be found in how they react under stress.  It's dogged me from the day I read it.  Because me and stress...sigh...that doggone temper.  And as you might have picked up from previous blog posts, having four small children sometimes exposes one to stress making it extremely difficult for me to imagine myself a heroine in a book.

So the other day after having flown off the handle and then after having watched my own children fly off the handle in such perfectly executed mimicry, I declared, "That's it.  We will have peace and happiness in our house!"  I sat my kids down and I told them what I was planning on doing to be better and asked them to commit to being better and I asked them if they would help me out and I told them I would help them out.  We talked about ways we could do this and then I noticed that I was losing them because I'd just been talking to a crowd of five and unders for like five minutes about things so irrelevant to their interests that they were left with nothing else to do to entertain themselves but contort their bodies into odd positions on the couch.  So I finished off with a, "What's our goal?"  And I got nothin'.  And I said, "We will have peace and happiness in our house."  And I had each of them repeat me.  And then I said to the Little Linebacker in a sudden realization, "Do you know what peace is?"  And he put out his hands and said, "It's a piece of a puzzle."  So I tried to clarify to him what peace was and then I asked, "And how does that make us happy."  And he said, "Because doing puzzles is fun."  And I said, "Awesome!"  And I let them go.

The very next night as we were getting ready for bed I walloped them again with my message of peace and happiness.  I told them that I felt like they had all done a good job that day but that we all needed to keep working at it.  And then I made them all repeat again what our goal was.  And then, like two minutes later, the Little Linebacker head-butted a one-year old girl who was visiting us and I started into shouting at him like nobody's business.  Captain Kindergarten and the Sidekick were jumping by my shoulder shouting, "Count to ten Mom.  Count to ten!"  But I wasn't ready to count to ten yet.  I had to let that Little Linebacker know just how naughty he was.  CK and SS kept at me though, "Count to ten Mom.  Count to ten!"  After their second reminder I counted to five and then in a calmer voice spoke with the Little Linebacker who apologetically burst into tears.

Captain Kindergarten said, "Mom you should have counted to ten when we told you to."

And I said in a perfect huff of justification, "Well the Little Linebacker needed to know that was naughty."

After that we brushed teeth, and read stories.  My one-year old and the visiting one-year old crawled all up and around us while we read and then one fell and scared herself so she started crying which made the other one cry and I only had a couple of pages to go in the story but CK couldn't take the crying but SS couldn't stand for the book to be done and I lost my temper again.  And CK and SS said again, "Mom count to ten!"  And I was utterly frustrated with them and their corrections.

So I put the babies to bed and then came back and finished the stories and tucked everybody else in too.  By the time I was getting the Sidekick Sister all snuggled in I'd come to my sensible self - that part of myself that thinks losing my temper really isn't too justifiable nor is being a hypocrite - and so I said to the Sidekick, "Thanks for telling me to count to ten today.  You really helped me out to try and be better."

And she pulled her thumb out of her mouth and she said, "That's what families are for."  And she put her thumb back in and closed her eyes.

I'll tell you what, do you want to be humble?  Be a Mom.