supermom wannabe + word of the year

Do you ever look around and think, "Oh yeah, I got this"?  (Yeah, me neither.)  Or at least "I think this is actually going to work and then life will be AWESOME"?  And you have this amazing plan to organize your entire life, so that your prayer life will be deepened, your marriage will be perfect and fulfilling with nary an argument, your house will be clean, your budget will be flawless, your children will be polite and precocious, your parties (oh yes, you'll throw parties) will be gorgeous, your plan to get in shape will actually happen, and you'll finally get around to reading all of Shakespeare.  Those plans always work out exactly the way you anticipate... right?

Any Myers-Briggs aficionados out there? Yeah. INTJ here.  I'm always trying to come up with an overarching solution, a master plan that will solve and organize everything.  And while I do actually enjoy planning and scheming and such, it can be frustrating when those plans don't come to fruition.

(Pinterest recipes, anyone?)

Cari at Clan Donaldson posted recently about asking the Holy Spirit to help you discern a word of the year-- a word to meditate on and try to build your life toward.  I thought this was a lovely idea, but I was a bit skeptical that I would be able to come up with such a word. And if I did, how could I be sure it was the one God wanted me to discern?

Enter New Year's Eve.  The prior two nights had been full of late-night rocking, fussy babies, and multiple awakenings. I already knew there was no way I was going to make it to midnight. I felt like I was post-call in residency again-- that nauseous, dizzy, please-I-will-give-you-money-if-I-can-just-lie-down feeling.  And then Josie, my poor teething runny-nosed baby, was refusing to go to sleep. I was deliriously tired (at like 9:30pm, haha) so I gave in and just brought her into bed with me.  Now, we're not really co-sleepers. She's been in her own room for months. Normally I would feel like this was backsliding, and beat myself up with Mothering Angst. But as I drifted off into blessed sleep, the word that popped into my head was "peace."

Peace with this situation. Peace with things not being perfect.  Peace with a little mess in my life-- not as if everything must be all peace, all the time.  I remember a story I read once about a king who held a contest for all the artists in the kingdom to illustrate the concept of peace. Most of the artists painted scenes such as beautiful landscapes of blue skies, green fields, and calm lakes.  But the winner's painting depicted a thundering waterfall crashing over a cliff in the midst of a raging storm-- with a mother bird sitting contentedly on her nest behind the falls.  Peace in the midst of chaos.  It's easy to feel peaceful when everything in your life is going right, but that's not the test of true peace.

I do struggle with the idea of how to keep a balance-- how do I make peace with where I am without becoming complacent, or just plain lazy?  I mean, I don't want to be unreasonably hard on myself, but we should all of us strive to be better than we are, right?

Maybe it's more about letting go of frustration. Not so much thinking that problems don't need to be fixed, but accepting that they don't need to be fixed right now.  Realizing that it's okay to stop and take a breath.

Wishing you peace in 2014.

(PS- I don't know why this post initially appeared way down at 12/27, since I wrote it long after that.  Editing in the hopes that it will now appear in the correct order.)