Losing Sight

I joked with my wife yesterday about my gratitude journal that is me complaining about my life. The entire intent of starting this was to do the opposite. It started with being given cheer as my word for the year at church while my father was on his death bed and my mother has her own waning health issues. This didn’t and still doesn’t look like a year for cheer.

I started this to keep myself out of the darkest hole of depression, because I know what that looks like. It looks like me ignoring the real world completely and throwing myself into some activity that gets me nowhere.

Gratitude is hard. It is tough to look at our lives and see the good parts. I often doubt my relationship with my kids. It feels like I hardly saw them yesterday. They came home as I was wrapping up an hours long project of printing a ton of documents. Combine that with my tiredness from driving all day the previous day and I just wanted to relax. I saw them briefly as they screamed through the den chasing each other, but there wasn’t much interaction, and when I try they yell at me for not being mom.

Tonight is soccer practice so either I will take them to that or we will go as a family. I do think having mom there is good because last week one had a bit of an emotional overload and when I tried to help he yelled at me for not being mom. My first priority to my kids is to get them the help they need and if they will only accept mom then that’s what I will try and give them.

When it comes to soccer they are at least having fun now. I do think they are learning and will keep improving each week. The big problem is when they are confronted with something they aren’t good at right away they want to quit, but the problem with learning something new is we’re all terrible at first. We can’t jump from activity to activity until we find what we’re a natural at. We have to do what we enjoy and get better at it.

That is a lesson I wish I learned long ago. I wish my parents had forced me to stick with things a little bit more. In some cases I did, but often I would quit when I wasn’t good enough right away too. Today I am grateful for those lessons I learned that I can pass on to my kids. I made the mistakes so they don’t have to.