Mulish Monday

Journal entry from Monday, October 21, 2019, edited for grammar and readability: This morning I barely had time to read 2 verses of Thessalonians before Amber and Rose had their first argument of the day. Right afterwards, Rose had her first meltdown of the day, over her socks not fitting perfectly as usual. I used to accept effort over duration with scripture study, but now with Come Follow Me, that feels like failure and slacking. I did read one paragraph of a conference talk too--the one by Elder Peter M. Johnson about the power to overcome the devil's three D's (deception, distraction, discouragement). He said that we need to do the everyday spiritual work so we can "resist the discouragement that diminishes our capacity to feel the love of our Heavenly Father and His Son." I need to read that part every day! While I am rather resilient to the other "wiles of the devil," I get discouraged too easily.

And yet right after reading that, I got discouraged again. Ugh. Monday. Cloudy, cold, and gray all day.


It's not just that: Jeff was home sick today and this morning right before the kids' arguments and meltdowns, Jeff had to go set things up for his sub. But he lost his school keys so I had to find them for him (since he was walking around aimlessly and making no progress in his slow sick haze). I said a little semi-annoyed prayer in my head ("please help JEFF find his keys!"). I probably didn't deserve to have that cranky lazy prayer answered, but it was answered. After another few minutes of looking, Jeff was about to give up. I realized that the last time he had used his school keys was on Friday night when he went to senior night at the football game. "What were you wearing on Friday night?" I asked him. Light bulb! He went and found his keys in one of the pockets of whatever pants/sweatshirt/jacket he had been wearing on Friday. I refrained from being smug and said a mental prayer of thanks as my sick grouchy husband left.

All of this happened to the soundtrack of Jay's loud plunking piano practice. Why do I still think mornings are good for my personal scripture time? Eventually I managed to read an entire chapter in 1 Thessalonians, but it was slow rough going with all of the noise and interruptions. Thessalonians is hard enough without noisy interruptions! I could not focus enough to get a single insight out of the verses and it made me feel DISCOURAGED yet again. Boy the Bible is a discouraging book. And the CFM manual says "write down the insights you have while you read or else you will forget them!" And when I don't have any insights I feel dumb and lame. Jesus healed dumb lame people all the time! But most of those people were dumb and lame for a long long time before they were healed. Hmph.

After I finally got the big kids out to the bus stop, I sent Mom a whiny hopeless [discouraged] text and then sank onto the piano bench to play some peaceful music and work the angst out of my system. I opened Enya and Yanni and a few other faves in my "beautiful piano songs" book, and played them till my frustration eased a bit (in spite of my many fumbles and dissonant chords). Then I risked the return of my impatience by pulling out my violin, trying not to feel totally self conscious about crunch-squeaking through a few songs with Jeff in the house listening.

Halfway through my piano playing, Mom's reply buzzed on my phone:
"Ohhhh There are just NO emojis suitable for a morning like this. I'm positive that your heavenly parents would NOT NOT NOT want you to feel like a slacker or a failure for getting in less CFM study than you wanted. Effort matters. And you seem to be "blessed" with many "opportunities" to develop charity: which suffereth long and is kind. I think that the ability to be loving in the midst of it all is supremely Christlike, and is a far greater success than any other more measurable activity! I love you, Shaina. I have you in my heart (Phillipians 1:7) Sending you as many millions of mom-hugs as I can fit in a text message."

My mom gets me every time. She always knows just what to SAY when I'm at my wit's end.

Amber had preschool this afternoon. She was ready and waiting buckled in the car for about 20 minutes before it was time to leave. Consequently, I did not do a quick hair-and-apparel check on her before we left for preschool. I forgot to tame Amber's wild bedhead curls; she had simply shoved a crown headband on top to hold most of the mass out of her face. She was wearing neon pink baggy sweatpants underneath a sleeveless faded floral sun dress with a sparkly mauve cardigan on top and her classic pink rubber boots--a different shade of pink than her pants and sweater. Don't forget the pink plastic crown-headband (also a different shade of pink) plus her zebra backpack. It was quite the ensemble, but she was happy and proud of her independence.

During preschool, sick-grumpy-determined Jeff and I worked on enrolling in the new school district health insurance, but something went wrong with the website and we weren't able to finish. It was not my ideal way to spend preschool time at all. Then I had to leave early to pick Amber up early so I could bring her home and then turn around and drive straight to cross country practice by myself and coach practice all by myself. Waaaahhhh! I was feeling a bit shaky with nerves at the beginning of practice. I was dreading the ordeal of getting through it alone. I knew it would be hard but I still had to do it anyways. Wild wrestling teenage boys are worrisome. An energetic team of 40 to talk over made for difficulty. I survived and let myself overlook certain flaky behaviors and avoidance patterns that bug me (most of the girls hid in the bathroom during strides, several slacker boys goofed off and walked half of the loop, etc.).

During my solo-coaching not a single person got punched in the face by a teammate, so it was automatically better than my last solo-coaching day. Deep breath.

When I got home from practice, I sat in the van in the garage for about 20 minutes basking in the silence, messaging a friend, and mentally prepping myself to re-enter the household fray sans-spousal support. When I walked inside, however, Jeff greeted me in a non-grouchy way for the first time in 36 hours! For the record, he isn't actively grouchy TO me when he's sick, but he exudes this aura of irritable misery (due to the discomfort of being sick) and it FEELS like he is angry at me even though he isn't, and that vibe wears me out! Anyways, when I walked in after practice, Jeff said he was feeling much better! Miracles happen. I was so relieved to be able to talk to him about everything. It's hard doing everything alone when he's sick, from church solo with our three kids yesterday to cross country practice with large quantities of teenagers today.

We had leftover pulled pork on rice for dinner again. While I ate, I stared at the Come Follow Me book, hoping against hope that I'd find something biblical that I understood enough to talk about with my kids, since I hadn't found anything this morning. At last, on the last column of the last page of the lesson, I found 2 Thessalonians 3:13 "be not weary in well-doing." I had each person read that same verse aloud (even Amber repeated it), then we took turns saying what it means to us. I told them that right now to me, this verse means that even though some things are hard (like having family scripture time), they are still worth doing. I asked how we can help each other when we feel weary in well-doing but had to be more specific: "I feel weary in well-doing during family scripture time! How can we help each other during this time?" All they said was "listen," so I added "hands/body parts to yourself, stay in the room, and participate!"

Jeff helped with the kids' bedtime and then we had ice cream and watched a show on Netflix.

[end journal entry]

I don't always have time/energy to write a long detailed journal entry, but boy it helped get this Mulish Monday out of my system.

After talking with my renewed happy husband, I walked past the kitchen table and this golden still life scene was another balm to my worn-out heart. We keep our Come Follow Me lesson book and Bible open on the kitchen table everyday so we don't forget to read them, and my mom brought those beautiful flowers when she visited last Friday. This was the first time the sun came out from behind the thick gray clouds all DAY. That ten minutes of beauty was worth the wait. Here's my Instagram caption/summary of the day: Today was about as mulishly Monday as Monday can be, but then the sun busted through that cold gray barrier and gave me a moment of gold at the kitchen table.

 I tunneled through our long skinny house to the back windows in our bedroom and enjoyed a little more of the molten buttery sunlight before showering away the last of the mulish Monday.

Amber in her self-dressed glory, building a castle. Her curls completely swallowed the tall pink plastic crown, but it's somewhere on her head.

*Sometimes I feel the need to separate religious thoughts from "normal posts," but that really doesn't work well for me because religion is an important part of my life! It is woven into nearly everything I do in one way or another, so I kept those spiritual threads in place and told the whole story about my mulish Monday.