Worked On

Demand. Demand. Demand.  Look at me! Feed me! Pick me up!  Be excited! Be frustrated with me! Fix this!  Show me! Love me!  Feed me! Change me!  Rescue me!

I'm like a piece of dough. 

Being hammered with requests, prodded, pounded on, pulled out, pushed, mashed, rolled and flattened by these two lives with all their needs.

Requests and whining, pushing and shoving, crying and yelling, BAM.  I'm thrown to the counter again.

I literally feel like I might explode today.  I cannot possibly receive any more input.  How can they demand so much of me?  I just want to be left alone.

I feel like screaming.  Locking myself in a room and ignoring the mess.  Will small hands stop kneading and prodding me?

But then I read something like this:
"Here's where parenting can help us take that next step in spiritual formation, for parenting certainly exposes an ill-tempered or touchy disposition like nothing else.  To be a parent is to be provoked.  Kids regularly tend to bring out the best and the worst in us.  If we have an ill-temper, if we're touchy or edgy, raising children will certainly reveal our weakness....Are we modeling to our children the spirit of Christ that responds to others the same way he did- with gentleness and patience?  No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to un-Christianize society than evil temper.  For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for withering up mena nd women, for taking the bloom off childhood; in short, for sheer gratuitous misery-producing power, this influence stands alone." - Gary Thomas from Sacred Parenting

Oh God.  These lives are shaping my character but it's not nearly as fun as it sounds. My attitude stinks.  Is it their fault I stayed up until midnight working on "my work" and greeted the day with fatigue and annoyance?  Is it their fault I desire clutter-free living more than granting un-divided love & attention to them?  Is it their fault they have needs that my role is specifically designed to meet?  Is it their fault I asked for them in the first place?

Forgive me God, I want to love like you do: selflessly, completely, wholeheartedly, and unconditionally.

If only it wasn't so stinkin' hard...