I had a meltdown this weekend. Right there in my laundry room.
I had it coming. I started a new eating plan this week: a low-carb, low-fat, change-my-body-chemistry type of eating plan. Mount Laundry erupted continually throughout the week, refusing all my efforts to tame it. We took a field trip to the Botanic Gardens with some friends, and the homeschooling activities I so meticulously planned backfired (the girls were bored).
Saturday was going downhill fast; Cami didn’t clean her room on Friday like I asked her to, so I said “no” to her inviting friends inside to play. It was too hot to be outside (although she tried, bless her heart), so all her friends went home. She harrumphed. She said, “It feels like none of my friends want to be with me.” I couldn’t make it better. Not even a little bit.
Then my husband told me he was meeting a friend at the shooting range after he spent the morning at a gun show.
I kind of lost my mind.
You know how I found it again? I was weeping, trying to (inwardly) calmly assess why I was feeling the way I was. My husband said he felt like he was doing everything wrong. I admitted that I was jealous (of his time with a friend? of his time with his hobby? of his having extra time at all?), that I was believing the lies in my head, the lies that told me what a horrible housekeeper I am, what an ineffective mother I am, what a petty wife I am, how things will never change, I’ll never be any different, it’s no use so why try.
As I began to confess the lies I was hearing, my husband uncrossed his arms and crossed the chasm of the laundry room towards me. And he hugged me. He spoke truth over me, spoke it until I heard it, until I believed it. He hugged me—told me he loved me—until I found my mind again.
Then he went to the shooting range, Cami played in her clean room with a neighbor friend, and I folded a lot of laundry.
Not such an explosive Saturday after all.
Grateful for God’s grace and Michael’s love,
Cassandra
I tried to respond to this earlier, but ended up losing what I typed with one wrong keystroke. I just wanted to let you know that I can TOTALLY identify with what you said. It almost sounded like I was telling it!
I have MS and a daughter who has Anxiety Disorder/OCD. We are still struggling with exactly knowing how to help her at home. It has caused tension between us because we have sometimes approached it from opposite views.
In addition, I have had 3 exacerbations in the last year (not good at all for a person with MS). Not only does my daughter not handle this well, but my husband goes into “survival mode” of focusing on either the kids or the house…mainly because I’m not able to do either.
I married a wonderful godly man, but he is just a man; and…I’m just a woman. We both can easily get wounded by an ill-chosen remark or by not noticing when one of us needs the other. I can easily become jealous of his “I’m going to the office to get some work done” (teaches at a local college) or by his time spent on the computer playing chess.
However, the times when a “sour moment” changed into a time of compassion, prayer, and or really listening…were usually when I either broke down or I apologized to him after I “lost it.” These strong silent types don’t yell (thankfully) or lose their tempers, but I do. Did I mention I also am going through perimenopause and have just finished a taper-down of Prednisone after three days in the hospital on MEGA doses of IV steroids?
I’m so thankful for the husband that God gave me and for how my own illness, as well as my daughter’s, is driving me closer to my Maker and closer to my husband.
Thank you so much for sharing from your heart a story that is “so close to home” for me.
-Sherry
Sherry, it sounds like you deal with a lot of emotions on a daily basis. Praise Jesus for those godly men who love us so well! Thank you for sharing your story.