People have asked me, seriously, how I manage.  How do I keep a smile on my face (usually, when I’m not being a whiny Eemoyore brat) and the guys happy and my attitude mostly positive and so on.

It’s because God knows what I need to have in my life.  He has given me small gifts where they are most appreciated and utterly needed.  How do I know?

A day like today is how I know.

I have been tired, as y’all know.  Tired and feeling worn out.  I’ve been “on the job” pretty much every single day without fail, sometimes for up to 20 hours a day, since mid-December.  And I was under a great deal of stress before then, too, with one thing and another.  Many of my days are marathons of endurance, balancing teaching basic things — like facial expressions and courtesy — and monitoring medications and keeping appointments and assuaging panic attacks, and so on.  Some days are just “I need five minutes. Just five.  Okay?” kinds of days.  Days where things are pretty okay…mostly normal…but there’s an edge to them.

And then, there are the gifts of days like today.

Waking up at five (totally a good time for me) and reading with Builder until the other alarms go off.  Making sure Cyclone is up and ready for school.  Making Spousal Unit’s lunch.  Getting the dishes washed and the laundry shifted. All these nice, normal times.

And then, there was peace.  Today, no teachers are coming. No therapists are scheduled.  The only to do on my list is to fill Spousal Unit’s water bottle with filtered tap water so he has it cold when he comes home. (*Note to self:   Do this as soon as this is posted.*)

Today, I put aside most of my obligations as Builder has been happily designing away on SketchUp. We have looked at office supplies, laughed at old jokes and discussed our upcoming vacation.  Peacefully, with laughter.  And he has given me space and I have given  him space and it’s been…

Lovely.  A gift.  God sends me days like this when I need them.  Today, I must have needed it.

How do I manage, someone recently asked me.  I have my escapes into fiction, certainly, and I have the grace of God Almighty, who watches over me as he watches over the sparrow.  I’m not doing a whole lot right now on a grand scheme of things, but sometimes, it must be important to the Creator of Heaven and Earth to let one tired mom have a break. He loves me enough to send me this kind of day.

Sometimes, we cry out for help and expect something big and obvious to be sent to us.  A huge influx of cash, maybe, or a dramatic shift of circumstances.  The change of heart of someone close to us.  There are a lot of things we THINK we should be given.

But our God often sends us what we NEED.  And sometimes the gift is so subtle, it goes by unrecognized.  I pray that isn’t happening to me.  I thank God for days like today.

Remember:

Builder and I had a rough night the other night.

Some nights are like that.  He mostly grew out of his sleep disorder when he was five years old, so I am thankful for that.  I have had a couple of years now, when I can mostly count on him staying asleep at night. Mostly.  The other night it was getting to sleep that was the problem.  Builder will latch on to a negative, build on it, blow it out of proportion, and decide the whole world must die to expiate the irritation of not getting what he wants.  Which is, in these cases, impossible.  For example, we are not moving to Mars next week.  When I say “impossible,” I am not just being obstinate myself.

Now, as a mom, I deal with each of his gripes a few times, knowing that his mind works differently (albeit often incomprehensibly) from mine. But then, tired of repeating myself and tired of him scratching at the same irritation over and again with no relief in sight, I tell him, “We are finished talking about this.”  And, the other night, after I said this over and again, I resorted to simply calling to him, “I love you, Builder. Go to sleep.”

Every single time he started up on one of his rants.

But while all of this was going on, and truly it was something of a marathon, I was asking God to give me the right words to say.  Not asking “for wisdom” necessarily, but just the right words for the situation.  Specific to the need of my little guy.

And where the rationale of why moving to Mars is impossible, why taking a plane to school isn’t going to happen and why we aren’t all going to die with our insides coming out (a favorite image of his that I meet imperturbably) doesn’t always get to him, the simple repetition of “I love you, Builder.  Go to sleep,” was enough. Eventually.

The Lord says that as many as he loves, he rebukes and disciplines. As many as he LOVES.  And he LOVES with the strength of the world. Sometimes, his rebukes and disciplines seem terribly unreasonable to us.  Sometimes, we think we should get/have/do more than is reasonable, from the Divine perspective.  But with each one of these rebukes, with each reminder, he is telling us what I told my son, in essence:

I love you, my child.  Rest in that.

We will still fight about it. Still complain. Yet he loves us enough to know when it’s time for just the reminder.

May we be wise enough to take him up on it and just rest in that.