disorientation: same song, 438th verse

i am trying to recover from the month of may, which was filled to the brim with sickness (all 4 of us), out-of-town company, a new puppy, seth's preschool graduation, wyatt's seventh birthday, end-of-the-school year festivities, and all the usual stuff in between. 

i am also trying to transition into school's-out-summertime, and i feel a little panicky. seth was in preschool five mornings a week this past year, and wyatt was in school all day; that meant i had three glorious hours every weekday morning without someone saying my name over and over again, no constant fighting to referee, no games to invent for bored kids, no endless questions to answer. i had time to breathe, space to simply be, to pursue other pieces of who i am. that is all about to come to a screeching halt.

of course i love my boys. love them to distraction, actually, but i am--for good or ill-not one of those moms who, in the words of a friend, "love the dickens out of being a mom and smile all the ever-lovin time." i wish i were, but it is simply not the case. i love my solitude. i love silence. marrying those things with motherhood is one of the great challenges of my life these days.

as i stand on the verge of summer, i think of the way a theologian (walter brueggemann, i think) described the categories of the psalms: psalms of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. i am diving headlong into a psalm of disorientation, and i don't like it, not one bit. frankly, it feels like a kind of death. 

it is a dying that i have to do, a dying to self, and i am not one to go gently into that good night. but this is the way love works, right? this is one of the greatest lessons motherhood has to offer me: that ultimately i am not my own, that life is not a story about me, that i have to lay down my life, in times and in seasons, in any number of ways, for the sake of another.

it is a struggle, though, which is the understatement of the year. thankfully, i have a couple of other mom friends here who are bumbling along like me. we are going to rage against the dying light together, keep each other's kids and each other company, drink coffee together, and maybe throw back the occasional much-needed margarita.

i have been in similar places before, and the surprising grace of it all is that once i enter into what is, once i let myself sink into the present and all the chaos and beauty it holds, all is well. it really is okay.

now. if i can only remember that.