The Grace of Losing It: Part II

“Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me.
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” (Mt. 16:23)

Week Two of Swim Camp and things are going well. My four older swimmers are progressing and my two-year-old tag-along is behaving.

Which is to say, she’s still a handful. But she hasn’t, like, thrown herself into the pool in protest or anything.

In general, all the moms are doing well. The mom who “lost it” the second day has seemed happy ever since. There are bits of stress here and there as is expected, but in general, we’re all holding it together.

So far.

Anyway, as promised I’m coming back to last week’s post to tell more stories. That is, after all, what we moms do best, I think; we cope in the retelling.

We all want to be a better mom, I know. (Do you know of a mother who doesn’t? For heaven’s sake, I hope not.)

We all want to be “in control”. (Or is that just my obsession?)

Sometimes, though, we’re just not. (In control, that is.)

For example.

I dealt with my having lost it on the first day of swim camp by going to a movie with a dear friend. It was the perfect end to a pretty hard day, and yet…

My friend has her own story to take away from the evening.

While we were watching the movie, her cell phone buzzed. The kids were home with a babysitter because her husband was out of town, so not surprisingly my friend was vaguely alarmed. “They never phone me when I’m at a movie,” she murmured, and quietly exited to take the call.

Turns out the kids had heard a loud noise outside. The babysitter had checked and all seemed well. My friend talked her children through it and returned to the movie.

Later that evening, though, as she was walking the babysitter to her home a couple of doors down, my friend saw the cause of the loud noise: someone had broken into her garage, and had literally wrenched the garage door off its frame to get inside.

For whatever reason, the arbitrator left without taking anything. Not that it mattered to my friend at that point: it was late and her husband was out of town, remember. Feeling thoroughly freaked out, she packed up the kids and spent the night in a hotel.

The story gets better.

The following day, a neighbor came by and told her that he had seen a couple of kids skateboarding up and down the hill at the top of her cul-de-sac. Together my friend and her neighbor pieced together the real story: the garage had not been broken into. It had been smacked into by a skateboarder, so hard, in fact, that the imprint of the kid’s forehead was clearly recognizable on the door.

Which is pretty funny, if you think about it.

Stupid kid.

I am struck by this story for a couple of reasons. One is the comment that my friend made to me early on, when she called me from the hotel and was still under the impression that her house had been broken into. She said: “I’m such a bad mom.”

Why? Because something bad had nearly happened to her children (she thought), and she hadn’t been able to prevent it.

The other image I have is of that skateboarder returning home to his mother. She probably felt the same way as my friend when she saw the goose egg on her son’s forehead: “I’m such a bad mom.”

Why? Because something bad had happened to one of her children, and she hadn’t been able to prevent it.

Do you recognize the syndrome at work here? Sure you do: it’s mommy guilt, in full force.

And of course it’s silly of us to take on the guilt of an event we had no control over, and yet we do it all the time. We “lose it”, and we often lose our perspective in the process.

Losing it doesn’t make us a bad mom, though; it makes us human.

The grace, I think, is in seeing that we are so not “in control” for all our trying.

Just one more story before I let you go back to your business. I’ll tie it in at the end, I promise.

Another friend was telling me about her twenty-something son and about what had just happened to him at the swimming pool. He was doing some sort of combination cannonball/flip type thingy off the high board, and hit the water face first (ouch).

He broke his nose and a bone punctured his sinus cavity. Half of his face filled up with water.

Oddly enough, my friend was totally calm in this story’s retelling. (She is a very holy gal.) Her son is fine now, thanks be to God, and is back at his summer construction job. What was really funny for the both of us, though, was the way my son Stephen came into the room during our conversation. “I have a splinter,” he announced.

And what is really funny for me is that all of this talk about “losing it” began…at a swimming pool!

I ask you: are cannonball/flip type thingies what I have to look forward as an end-result of all these lessons?

(Excuse me as I run screaming from the room.)

I’m back now to say: perhaps.

I don’t have much control over that, though, do I? And that’s the point.

And there’s the grace.

I know that I’m going to lose it from time to time when bad things happen. My hope is that I’ll be a better, more faithful mom as a result of having lost it.

Because in the end, it’s what I’ve gained that really matters.

With tomorrow being the beautiful feast of the Assumption, let’s look to Mary for assistance. In general, she had it pretty much together, don’t you think? And even when she didn’t, she did.

If you know what I mean. 😉

Have a blessed day, everyone!

Love,