Running the Race

I'm realizing more and more every day that life is a marathon.   It's not a sprint that can be done in 9.76 seconds, even if I were Usain Bolt.  It is a race of endurance and I have to stay the course.  It's not run on a single terrain, going round and around on a track.  It has hills and valleys, rock, mud, water, asphalt, and grass.  When running, a person has to be aware of what is ahead, but not distracted by the obstacles, so that one does not get tripped up by them.  One needs to be aware of the water tables set up for the runners to rehydrate in the race without stopping. 

This has been one of the most challenging weeks of my life.  I have run endlessly from one thing to another.  I don't know if I have ever worked so hard with so little to show for it.  I ran track throughout junior high and high school, and even got some red ribbons.  But Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and today have all been about running.  The race goes on and on and even getting rehydrated has been on the go.  I'll give you a small snippet of the last few days.

Nyssa and I worked Friday morning to clean her room from the boys' whirlwind play and did a pretty good job at getting it nice and orderly.  I worked on the downstairs hall, kitchen, and bathroom, and decided we were doing a good job at getting everything done.  Well, evidently, my older two children have gotten bored with life at home and are quite ready for school to begin, and, quite frankly, after the last few days, so am I.  Friday afternoon, I was folding laundry in the family room while the children were eating a snack in the kitchen.  They wanted some fruit, so they were sitting nicely eating peaches...or so I thought.  The baby had been playing contentedly in the corner of the room with me when she decided to join them.  I figured there was no harm in it.  I heard laughter.  It was gleeful.  It was pure joy.  It was...how do I say this?  Unsettling.  I hate to say it in reference to laughter, but there comes a certain tenor of tone when they are up to something.  So I decided to check it out.  I wish I had checked just one minute earlier.

I walked into the kitchen to the sound of four wonderfully jubilant children.  Benjamin, my 3 1/2 year old was sitting on the table holding a 28 oz. can of powdered baby formula.  Opened.  Upside down.  Empty.  Gabriela was sitting on the floor just to the left of the table, christened with said formula.  She looked like a snow baby.  The others were playing wholeheartedly in the floor as if they were in a sandbox.  I hauled Gabriela upstairs, hoping against hope that she wasn't breathing any of it in and sent the Three Musketeers up to the bathrooms for a bath.  I got her undressed, bathed her, put on her diaper, and heard the laughter again.

I found them all in the same bathtub along with all my clean towels.  By now you can guess I was not a happy camper.  I found a dry blanket, dried them off, sent them to their rooms for clothes, and got Gabriela dressed.  By time I got her in her crib I realized Nyssa had still not come to get dressed and was nowhere in sight.  I ran around looking for the Comrades in Crime and found them, again in the kitchen.  To his credit, Nathaniel was using the little vacuum cleaner.  Nyssa and Benjamin, however, were once again skating to a tune in their heads, delightfully spreading the object of their current affection.  Take two for baths. 

As I sent them upstairs yet again, I saw creamy footprints in the green carpet in the family room and the trail of dust, literally, formula dust, that had been left down the hall and up the stairs.  Since he was actually trying to help, I let Nathaniel finish vacuuming while I supervised Butch and Sundance in the bathtub.  I helped Butch get himself dressed and went quietly into Sundance and Sleeping Beauty's room to yet another disaster.  Nyssa was evidently quite unhappy that I had interrupted her play and expressed her disappointment.  She had emptied her closet of all clothes and dumped said contents on the floor.  Her drawers, and those of her sister, were also nicely clumped in front of her dresser. She remembered that whoever makes the mess gets to clean the mess.  She also got to come help me mop the floor.

By time Richard got home from work, I had the kids in their rooms...for their own safety....while I finished cooking dinner.  He asked how the day went.  I told him.  An hour later, after everyone had eaten and been put to bed, I was sent away.  I drove away thinking of what a horrible mother I was, wondering if I ever did anything right, and questioning whether my daughter would live to be a teenager and if I would survive the next week.  I went to Starbucks to drown my misery in a caramel light frap.  I walked around in Barnes & Noble, glancing at titles, and picking up a couple to take home to read in my spare time...aka in the bathtub at 11:30 at night.

Then I saw it.  The book?  His Princess by Sherri Rose Shepherd.  It wasn't for me, not completely, but for my daughter.  I heard that still small voice telling me to get it so we could read it together.  All day I had been running, trying to catch up, trying to catch my breath, trying to outpace my daughter.  She ran faster.  She was determined to win.  What she didn't realize, and what I didn't realize, until it was almost too late, was that what we really both wanted was to run side by side, not to compete with one another, but to encourage another.  She was trying to get my attention and felt more like a rugrat than the princess that she is.

My children are just that, my children.  I love them.  I care for them and I need to nurture them.  Especially when they try my patience, they need to know that I love them no matter what.  I can't just stop because I don't feel like it.  I can't just yell and scream and stomp at them for acting like children.  I need to teach them lovingly, patiently, how to learn acceptable behavior.  Else, how will they learn?  I keep going, with an occasional Starbucks run for refreshing and cool down, because I know their lives and their character are at stake.


Back in May, I agreed to do a 5k.  It was an unorthodox one, because I knew I had to do it on my own, as I was unavailable for the actual organized one.  But I made an agreement to do one on my own and I was going to follow through with it.  I couldn't just decide one day to participate and then just go for it, but rather I had to work up my stamina.  I trained for it regularly, committing myself to doing a little more each day.  When the day came for me to do it, I had to keep going until I had gone the distance.

Sometimes I ran, sometimes I walked, but I kept going, getting water when I needed it, and hearing encouragement from others to keep it up and not give up.  The encouragement came not from physical people there, but from the voices of my children in my head when they had told me I was going to be great, from their memory.  My legs ached, my breath caught at times, but I couldn't give in.  I had made a commitment to follow through with something.  I wasn't racing against others; I was racing against myself.  I had to deny my selfish desires to quit and push through...and when I completed it, I won.  There was no trophy, no red ribbon for second, no blue ribbon, but there was the knowledge that I did it...and the realization that even though it seemed I ran on my own, I was surrounded by a cloud of invisible witnesses.