Minivan Lady and Briars

One of these days if I don't light this blog on fire first, I will get around to telling my whole story, but it is much easier to lay it out in segments. So yada yada yada and I had my first baby. I had ALWAYS ALWAYS wanted to be home with my kids. I had every intention of running my own business from home, but not at the expense of caring for my children.

Unfortunately, circumstances that I won't go into prevented it. I had bills to pay. During that period of dropping my precious beautiful baby off every morning and picking him up much later than I wanted, after a long commute to a job I didn't love, while running a household and sort of running my husband's business partially in the evenings..... I had some women in my life that irked me. Most of them actually. They did not really do it on purpose, it's just they really did not understand my personal desperate plight.

Let me character sketch them for you into composites:

First there was perfect lady whose house was always clean and did everything domestic under the sun with perfection. She truly didn't understand why I didn't have it together like her despite the 55 hour differences in our week.

And of course there was my-daddy (or husband)-has- endless-money girl whose life ambition was to talk about the designer sippy cup that matched her baby's bib.

Then there was multi-level marketing lady. These ladies looked at me like a hungry tick looks at a dog walking by because I had a j.o.b. Their pitch was always something like, "buy my overpriced crap you're not going to use so I can stay home with my munchkins." As if that was a worthy enough cause to give them my money that I earned away from my kids so that they could be home with theirs causing it to take even longer for me to stay home with mine.

As I said, they really didn't understand the stress I was under, or even how I had to spend my whole Saturday doing everything they had all week to do. I was being pressed from all sides on a daily basis and every day that slipped by was a day Quinn got a day older without me seeing it.

One day while I was rushing the kids to one of their doctor check-ups-

-which involved leaving work knowing I would have extra to do in the morning, getting caught at the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel, picking my child up from daycare then running back into traffic to get to the appointment-

I got behind some mini-van driving lady taking her sweet time down a road in Newport News and I yelled something like, "Get your cookie baking in the middle of the afternoon, mini-van driving, got-all-day self out of the way!"

Ahem. Was that me snapping with the road rage at that lady I have never met? Yes, yes it was.

Now that I am finally home with my kids and doing some of the things I actually wanted to do and am actually enjoying life.... and writing about it.....

I woke up today and asked myself, "Have I become that lady?" I mean I know I sometimes bake cookies in the middle of the afternoon.....but have I become that insensitive, oblivious lady? Someone who doesn't think of the shoes other people are walking in?

I am sorry. It snuck up on me. I don't want to be that and I am sorry. If there is one thing I understand it is being in a set of difficult circumstances. It took a long time for God to unwrap us from the briars we had gotten ourselves into- He could have ripped us out, but I believe He knew that the most tender way was to carefully untangle them one at a time. It took awhile. There were consequences for us, and forgiveness, and grace. It is all such an amazingly personal and tenderly meticulous process. So no matter how 'clear' I am in certain areas of life, biblically grace ALWAYS supersedes law and judgement. ALWAYS.