"I know you guys probably think I don't ever clean but I really do all the time..." to my kids who almost interrupted me with their shocked response of "Mommy! We don't think that at all!" I heard variations of the response in stereo because more than one child spoke out with each word drowned with incredulity.
Listen I wasn't fishing for compliments in either of the above scenarios, and those are 2 examples from a bank of probably thousands.
Feeling actual guilt. If I cannot facilitate perfection and enrichment to the richest depth of their respective definitions, I don't feel disappointment or annoyance. I feel full on guilt. I feel physical cramping in my stomach and a knot of grief wringing its way into a secure twist each time I try to swallow. I want to articulate this as well as I can because I know this for sure. I am not the only one that holds this standard for myself (but strangely not for any other living, breathing, sentient being on the planet). I am not alone in doing this. I want to get to the bottom of it, so we can take these broken pieces and reconstruct them into something with better integrity than what existed before.
A couple of months ago, I was encouraged to dispense with the personally ubiquitous notion of "should" in relation to how I spend out my minutes on this big round ball. The idea seemed so trite when I was first presented with it that it has taken me months to actually sort out what that means. Tonight it hit me like a ton of bricks.
There is a fine line between self indulgence and self care. There is also a fine line between self depracation or negative self talk and healthy, beautiful humility. Want to know what separates them? The gaze of the subject. We self reflect and even use mirrors in the physical world to maintain and grow, but balance is needed here. We would show signs of real disorder if we spent disproportionate amounts of time just staring at ourselves. It would be equally unhealthy if we never gave regard to what is going on with our outsides. Not caring and letting things go is evidence of a loss of something important. I want to create these parameters so it's abundantly clear what I'm trying to convey.
Guilt is a weird thing. Healthy guilt over something you willfully destroyed can lead to recovery. False guilt almost always does nothing but damage. Survivor guilt. Guilt from what is left of lies we have been told about what is our responsibility *hint - you're never guilty of something someone else does. Not even God thinks that.
False guilt makes you do weird things - at least it makes me do weird things the primary of which is that I have a hard time enjoying anything. Sometimes that means sabotaging something an old lie tells me I don't deserve. I also tend to stay wound pretty tight. I just stay tense - constantly worried that something is going to crash to the ground into a million irreparable pieces because my hands failed at keeping safe the thing that is important to me or someone else.
Cinderella syndrome of not being allowed to do anything until ALL your work is done. It is healthy to teach kids the discipline of keeping order. That is vital. Mine just got perverted and not by my parents. The truth is, we absolutely need to cover bases of order, but attending to your tasks does not make you MORE deserving of good things in life, and having things left on your to do list does not make you less deserving nor does it rob from your loved ones.
Here's a window into my life: 5 years ago I left my marriage for reasons that are my own business. Suffice it to say, I felt it was absolutely necessary to leave and had been battling against leaving for upwards to a year. There were three reasons I battled so long and wrestled so hard, and they each came with my chin and a middle name I picked. I would tell myself all the time "I can deal with this. This isn't so bad. Being unhappy is not the worst thing. I don't want my kids to have a broken family." I STILL don't want them to have a broken family, but the day came when I knew that I had spent my very last night in a shared house with the five of us.
Listen I have healed in so many ways and grown past so many things, but memories of that day and the months afterwards while I watched the unraveling of an entire life's worth of dreams and a decade of time will ALWAYS cause a stinging sensation in my stomach and a choke in my throat. But despite that pain, I will always carry with me the knowing that leaving was the thing that had to be done.
I was right, though - about the broken family. It broke my kids' family, and until really the last few days, I have carried with me this singing guilt over that.
After I "struck out on my own", my standard of living became much lower than any I'd ever experienced before. I mean, I lived in a homeless shelter for 10 weeks and then scrambled to find a small apartment because the shelter was going to kick me out for being there too long. (Sidenote: please try to completely build a life in 10 weeks with almost no financial help or local friends - it's impossible. Spare a little grace next time you see a homeless person) No longer did I have a way to do a single thing for my kids that I had spent their entire lives doing. No longer did they get to have the version of a mommy and daddy that they deserved. And I just felt terrible...for years. Every time they came home to me, my heart grieved for the time we'd spent apart. Every time I scraped together a little money to feed them (meaning I didn't eat - goodbye 45 pounds), I grieved over not being able to give them something really delicious. We didn't get to see my family for over a year and 3 years respective to certain members. They had one pair of shoes at my house for a while, and weekends were spent doing sometimes boring things sometimes in the heat because they were free, and sometimes it meant just staying home because I couldn't spare the gas to drive to a park because I needed it to be able to drive to work. And then there's the time. I have missed out on so much time with them - time that there is no earthly way to recompense. I will never know what it was like to watch my now almost 6 year old spread out her arms to balance herself while she took her first steps. I'll never be able to infuse into the memory banks of my older two kids dinner conversations and homework sessions and birthday parties and Christmas mornings that we spent apart. Honestly, I'll never be able to give them "normal", and it has just killed me.
So i have tried to do what I could which is just basically being their mom and being a safe place for them to get hugs and finish homework and cry sometimes and play board games and make memories. And I've still never been able to really give them anything fancy - I have just always wanted it all to be whatever version of "perfect" I could offer them - and perfect is a farce so I have spent many days after they leave home here to go home to their dad just sitting in shocked regret at how I had, once again....failed.
Again with the failure. What is that? Every time I would express this regret to those with whom my heart is safe, they seemed confused - like the standard I had set was some obnoxiously rare unicorn. I still didn't absorb why they were confused. I just plopped down in the delapidated sitting room in my head and listened to the record play - the record of lies. "You're not a good mom"..."a REAL mom can..."..."Shouldn't you have (or be) xyz by now?"..."the kids don't even like it when you..."..."Did you only give them xyz?...They deserve better...They deserve more" for years.
Part of getting older is learning, and part of that learning is understanding you must continue to always learn. Something I learned today was something someone said to me when I recounted some of my feelings. Guilt and shame are strange things, remember?
Guilt and shame do not belong to me. There are some parts of my story that resulted in the way that they did because of choices someone else made. As far as the parts that were the result of decisions I made, there are still things that cannot be changed by anything ever, and there is a God who writes my story who has cast away guilt of any wrong or selfish choices I made and forbids shame from touching my life at all. If I accept guilt for something for which I have already brought and confessed before the feet of a loving God or if I accept shame for something that was He chose to put to His own account, I am committing a thievery because He is the only One who had enough of what it was going to take to pay for all that. See, Jesus didn't just pay for our sins by His sacrifice on the cross so he could give us all good things (in fact ONLY having good things isn't promised anywhere in the Bible so...people should stop telling other people that and people should stop saying that bad things happen to people because they weren't enough of something or too much of another...anyway). Him hanging on the cross and paying the price for ALL GUILT AND SHAME means that He OWNS THEM! He holds dominion and ownership of them, and anyone who has been willing to give their guilt and shame to Him to pay for those things must keep their hands off. It's wrong to take something that doesn't belong to you, isn't it?
So there goes my guilt and shame. I sold it, and I got a gift of beauty and forever hope in exchange. And I am NEVER going to be a perfect mother...or wife or friend or daughter or sister or anything, but perfect is a farce and love isn't and love covers a multitude of sins (or shortcomings or what have you).
So when my kids come home to me next, I'm going to remind myself that they don't even want perfect. They just want me. They're not looking for any compensatory experience or feeling to cushion the blow of what they've lost. They're every bit as thankful for every single thing we have right now. Just as it is. For them, that is perfection.
Here's a window into my life: 5 years ago I left my marriage for reasons that are my own business. Suffice it to say, I felt it was absolutely necessary to leave and had been battling against leaving for upwards to a year. There were three reasons I battled so long and wrestled so hard, and they each came with my chin and a middle name I picked. I would tell myself all the time "I can deal with this. This isn't so bad. Being unhappy is not the worst thing. I don't want my kids to have a broken family." I STILL don't want them to have a broken family, but the day came when I knew that I had spent my very last night in a shared house with the five of us.
Listen I have healed in so many ways and grown past so many things, but memories of that day and the months afterwards while I watched the unraveling of an entire life's worth of dreams and a decade of time will ALWAYS cause a stinging sensation in my stomach and a choke in my throat. But despite that pain, I will always carry with me the knowing that leaving was the thing that had to be done.
I was right, though - about the broken family. It broke my kids' family, and until really the last few days, I have carried with me this singing guilt over that.
After I "struck out on my own", my standard of living became much lower than any I'd ever experienced before. I mean, I lived in a homeless shelter for 10 weeks and then scrambled to find a small apartment because the shelter was going to kick me out for being there too long. (Sidenote: please try to completely build a life in 10 weeks with almost no financial help or local friends - it's impossible. Spare a little grace next time you see a homeless person) No longer did I have a way to do a single thing for my kids that I had spent their entire lives doing. No longer did they get to have the version of a mommy and daddy that they deserved. And I just felt terrible...for years. Every time they came home to me, my heart grieved for the time we'd spent apart. Every time I scraped together a little money to feed them (meaning I didn't eat - goodbye 45 pounds), I grieved over not being able to give them something really delicious. We didn't get to see my family for over a year and 3 years respective to certain members. They had one pair of shoes at my house for a while, and weekends were spent doing sometimes boring things sometimes in the heat because they were free, and sometimes it meant just staying home because I couldn't spare the gas to drive to a park because I needed it to be able to drive to work. And then there's the time. I have missed out on so much time with them - time that there is no earthly way to recompense. I will never know what it was like to watch my now almost 6 year old spread out her arms to balance herself while she took her first steps. I'll never be able to infuse into the memory banks of my older two kids dinner conversations and homework sessions and birthday parties and Christmas mornings that we spent apart. Honestly, I'll never be able to give them "normal", and it has just killed me.
So i have tried to do what I could which is just basically being their mom and being a safe place for them to get hugs and finish homework and cry sometimes and play board games and make memories. And I've still never been able to really give them anything fancy - I have just always wanted it all to be whatever version of "perfect" I could offer them - and perfect is a farce so I have spent many days after they leave home here to go home to their dad just sitting in shocked regret at how I had, once again....failed.
Again with the failure. What is that? Every time I would express this regret to those with whom my heart is safe, they seemed confused - like the standard I had set was some obnoxiously rare unicorn. I still didn't absorb why they were confused. I just plopped down in the delapidated sitting room in my head and listened to the record play - the record of lies. "You're not a good mom"..."a REAL mom can..."..."Shouldn't you have (or be) xyz by now?"..."the kids don't even like it when you..."..."Did you only give them xyz?...They deserve better...They deserve more" for years.
Part of getting older is learning, and part of that learning is understanding you must continue to always learn. Something I learned today was something someone said to me when I recounted some of my feelings. Guilt and shame are strange things, remember?
Guilt and shame do not belong to me. There are some parts of my story that resulted in the way that they did because of choices someone else made. As far as the parts that were the result of decisions I made, there are still things that cannot be changed by anything ever, and there is a God who writes my story who has cast away guilt of any wrong or selfish choices I made and forbids shame from touching my life at all. If I accept guilt for something for which I have already brought and confessed before the feet of a loving God or if I accept shame for something that was He chose to put to His own account, I am committing a thievery because He is the only One who had enough of what it was going to take to pay for all that. See, Jesus didn't just pay for our sins by His sacrifice on the cross so he could give us all good things (in fact ONLY having good things isn't promised anywhere in the Bible so...people should stop telling other people that and people should stop saying that bad things happen to people because they weren't enough of something or too much of another...anyway). Him hanging on the cross and paying the price for ALL GUILT AND SHAME means that He OWNS THEM! He holds dominion and ownership of them, and anyone who has been willing to give their guilt and shame to Him to pay for those things must keep their hands off. It's wrong to take something that doesn't belong to you, isn't it?
So there goes my guilt and shame. I sold it, and I got a gift of beauty and forever hope in exchange. And I am NEVER going to be a perfect mother...or wife or friend or daughter or sister or anything, but perfect is a farce and love isn't and love covers a multitude of sins (or shortcomings or what have you).
So when my kids come home to me next, I'm going to remind myself that they don't even want perfect. They just want me. They're not looking for any compensatory experience or feeling to cushion the blow of what they've lost. They're every bit as thankful for every single thing we have right now. Just as it is. For them, that is perfection.
