Word Therapy

Disorganization: The Beast that Adulthood Can't Even Tame

Day 4 of the Write31days challenge.

I attended school conferences yesterday.  It’s always fun to hear where they are doing well, and where they could use some improvement.  I loved hearing from both boys’ teachers and realizing that though they have unique learning styles and challenges, they are both very bright and capable.  

 

One thing that stood out was the disaster factor…those boys can cram a paper into every nook and cranny of a desk or a folder.  Bless their teachers.  I talked with one teacher about strategies for desk organization. She asked me if we had anything that worked at home, such as certain things always going in certain places.  Girl, I wish so bad that we did.  I told her I was open to suggestions, and then I gave her a little vignette into my own childhood and tried to shed some light onto why maybe these little apples didn’t fall far from this red-headed tree.

I vividly recall looking at my room that had stuff shoved EVERYWHERE. I’m thinking like, Barbies in my underwear drawer maybe?  My mom said the usual mom thing: “clean your room”.  I remember looking through my 3rd grade eyes and seeing ALL THE THINGS.  “I can’t! There’s too much stuff! I don’t know where to put it!”  So my mom, ever so patient, and a much more orderly person by nature, started to grab one thing at a time, said out loud “Where does this go?” and proceeded to put it in it’s home. She then instructed me to do that with each and every thing in the room until I was finished. I remember talking out loud to myself to get that sucker cleaned, and I probably sounded like a little lunatic, talking myself through how to put my stuff away.  But, it worked.

I actually still do that, but it’s internal dialogue now because I’ve found that when I talk to myself, my kids freak out a little.  I still do talk to myself out loud sometimes because I’m weird, but I try to keep it to a minimum.

 

Anyway, as I told the teacher this story, I tried to explain that there’s actually no one in our house who has a Masters in organization. I did have my huge planner with me, and told her that was my giant coping mechanism to try to not forget all the things all the time.

(at least it's cute.  In a weird way.  Like if you have to pack a giant book with you everywhere you go, it's better if it's polka-dotted with some seasonal stickers inside the back cover)

Basically I had NO IDEA how much organization adulthood would require. Grocery lists, husband’s schedule, kids’ schedule, chore schedule, doctor/dentist checkups, bills due, budgeting, meetings, date nights, birthdays, dinner plans, holidays, school extracurriculars…the list goes on.  It makes my brain swirl into a soupy mixture of angst, stress, and details.  I HAVE TO get it all on paper or I literally die.  There’s just no iPhone system that’s ever going to work for me. I tried it for a year and the wheels came off.  I went back to my freakishly large binder-looking organizer calendar and I’m finally feeling sane again.

 

I don’t know that I’ll ever get into a groove where organization feels easy and effortless for me. Until then I’ll continue toiling at it out of necessity, and I’ll try to give my kids a leg up on figuring out systems that work for them. But if they never get it either, I’ll just believe that they will still be awesome, even if they are leaving a disaster in their wake everywhere they go.  Bless the hearts of all their future friends/teachers/spouses.  Mama tried.

Why? Reconciling Pain and Love

Today is day 3 of the Write31days challenge.  I had no entry yesterday because I couldn’t think of a possible thing to say in light of the tragedy in Las Vegas. Instead of spending my evening writing something witty or fun or introspective, I spent my evening after I kissed my kids goodnight, reading story after story of beautiful lives taken in a most horrific fashion.

 

I felt it was both necessary and appropriate for me to not only forego writing, even though I purposed to write every single day this month, in order to spend time grieving the loss of life and the very real prevalence of evil that was, once again, shoved to the forefront of our collective consciousness.

 

I guess when I was a younger person, I labored under the illusion that human beings were basically good.  When something bad happens or a massive amount of evil occurs, we rush to figure out what exactly happened to make an individual careen so fast off the rails, and take so many with him.  We all want to know WHY. If we know the why, maybe we can avoid the ugliness.  If we know the why, we can innovate ways to improve humanity to ensure that stuff like this doesn’t keep happening.  But as I’ve grown, I’ve come to believe that WE actually don’t have a lot of hope at changing the world.  Educating people, creating positive self esteem, and legislating what we think will create a safe society, will never be the answer.  NEVER. If that’s where our hope is, we are in a dark place that’s doomed to incur repeated traumas. Nonetheless, there are always well-intentioned platitudes that rise to the surface and are hungrily devoured by our society, as we look for any place upon which to hang our hope.  

We ache for a solution that will ensure that these kinds of atrocities will not continue to happen.  We long for a world where we don’t have to worry daily about sending our kids to school, sending our husband to the airport, or taking a fun family outing to a sports arena or a concert venue.  We long for a world where human life is not disposable.

 

How then, do we move forward?

 

What I’m going to say is probably going to sound irritating, trite, naïve, presumptuous, arrogant, or downright idiotic to some of you, but I have no other answer.

 

The ONLY way there will ever be peace on earth, is when this whole planet and the cosmos that it inhabits, is finally under full submission to the one who made it all.  When sin is eternally and ultimately devoured and done away with, when those spiritual forces who have preyed upon humanity since the beginning of our existence are forever put away, then, and ONLY THEN will we have peace, joy, happiness, freedom and life.

 

This is not the answer I always want.  Sometimes I want a guarantee of earthly safety. I want to be able to kiss my boys goodbye in the drop-off line and never have to refresh them on what to do if they go into a lockdown.  I want to kiss my husband goodbye as he heads across the country for work and not think each day of where he is at, and whether or not he’s making an exit plan for each place he’s visiting. (I know he’s smart and if I was with anyone in any sort of terrorism situation, I’d want it to be him.)

 

This however, is not reality.  As much as I want to grow old with my man, sitting on the front porch watching our grandkids play, that’s not a promise.

As I talked with my 9 year old last night about the shootings in Vegas, I could see him mentally going through the idea that nowhere is really safe.  We talked about that.  We talked about how we are never guaranteed that our life will go the way we want it to.  Morbid? Maybe.  But here’s the thing: I want my children to be able to come to grips with the reality of this world and then be able to reason and think their way through things. I want them to have a solid worldview grounded in the un-moveable bedrock of God and and the way He has ordained things.  This is not always easy, and sometimes we are left with uncomfortable questions about sovereignty and how to reconcile the good, loving character of God with tragedy and evil that seems to go totally unchecked in a world that appears to be hell-bent on destroying itself.  

 

My son and I came to the conclusion that although there are unexplainable things and scary realities, the only thing we can be sure of is that because we are with Jesus, because we believe that He came to earth to save and redeem humanity and made that available to ALL people, we know how this ends.  

 

It might hurt in the meantime, it might cause untold amounts of sadness and pain, but we know that in the span of eternity, this will seem but a breath.

 

There is really no other hope than that. I’m not hoping in you to be better. I’m not counting on you to raise perfectly wonderful humans who will never make mistakes or go their own way to spawn their own evil plots in this world; You actually can’t control that. Neither can I.  The only thing each one of us can do, is exactly what Jesus told us to do:

 

‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.’

God is not complicated. He actually gave us really simple marching orders.  Whether or not we choose to follow him on this will actually determine whether or not we flourish or we perish.

 

That’s my hope.  I’m focusing on loving God and loving the people around me. And I know that ultimately he will make all things new and beautiful and free of the earthly pain that seems to be crushing us right now.

Impromptu Adulting: a series about all the ways I’ve found myself unprepared for Real Life.

 

Well, here we are in October! For the second year, I’ve decided to do a 31 day writing challenge with the goal of writing once per day around a central theme.  

 

My theme this year will recount the rough terrain of adulthood that continues to catch me off-guard and leaves me wishing I had paid a little more attention to what my parents were doing all those years ago.  

Maybe you’re not like me though.  Maybe you sailed into adulting with a comprehensive knowledge of how to balance and reconcile all of your bank accounts; maybe you gleefully launched your journey as a parent with a full-on strategy for how you were going to establish your Alpha status with your little pack from Day 1; maybe you listened to all of the experts and did a thorough and rigorous schedule of pre-marital counseling appointments; maybe you went to Dave Ramsey school before you even went to college and you entered your 20s with no debt; maybe you figured out that eating ice cream every night will make you gain 10 lbs in a year, so you mastered self control before that soul-crushing metabolic slowdown of the 4th decade made you wonder what in the heck kind of screw up happened at the factory where they make the same pants you’ve always worn.

 

But if not, if you find yourself wondering if you’re doing anything “for real” and not just faking it and hoping no one discovers your fraudulent adulting, then come along with me for the next month as I dive into all the ways that I’ve discovered how woefully unprepared I am to live this life, but how I’m showing up anyway and hoping for the best.