Hotdogs for Breakfast

I think it's considered cool these days to either float high above stress in a practiced, zen-like haze of detachment or flame out in a bucket of Cheetos and whiskey. The truth, of course, is rarely so extreme.

I've been feeling a bit stressed out lately, which means I'm more or less okay but doing things like sleeping too little, eating too many fries, and forgetting Billy Joel's name.

(Seriously: imagine me in a car, on the way home from work, muttering "Piano Man, Piano Man, Piano Man" with increasing panic. I may or may not have run inside screaming "The guy who married Christie Brinkley-- WHO WAS HE? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHAT WAS HIS NAME?"

To which my husband just might have answered, "I dunno-- Piano Man?")

We're all right around here, most of the time. We're like a well-oiled machine when it comes to daily life-- wake up, coffee, prayers, shower, wake this child, wake that child, breakfast, make lunches, potty, KEYS! then work, schools, and work, respectively. It sounds like teamwork, but really it's parallel play. The four of us orbit around each other sometimes in four tiny, separate atmospheres.

And there, I think, lies a deception: Such innovation! Such independence! Such autonomous mastery of our various domains!

Let me be the first to admit that I love synchronicity. It's nice to have a morning sometimes when everyone's on time and nobody's lost anything or peed on the stairs.

But sometimes it's only when all hell breaks loose that we really wake up to our loved ones. It's when the laundry starts to mold and the cat is incontinent and we can't find homework five minutes before the tardy bell that we are reminded of our frailty, our weakness, and occasional utter incompetence.

And, being helpless, we flail.

If we're lucky, we'll bump smack into each other.

Where would I be without them? Where would I be without children who so cheerfully accept that Mommy worked late, groceries didn't get bought, so breakfast is hotdogs and jelly? Where would I be without a husband who single parents for three entire days so I can make a deadline, cross-eyed with typing and Mike and Ikes?

It's in waking up to them that I so often wake up to God-- this God who begins the work of drawing creation to himself by drawing us toward each other. He binds us like glue, certainly flowing between us when times are tranquil, but most strongly felt when the cogs gum up.

I'll admit that I look forward to things calming down. I would be all over a little less typing, some clean towels, and some afternoon naps. And then I'll grow confident, and maybe a little smug, and the dial will shift back to craziness for a bit, not because I've earned it but because the dial just does that. But even when it does, I will be grateful for the reminder to reach for the help I've been provided. I will reach for a boy who loves planets and a girl who loves fairies and a man who loves comics more than he'll readily admit. The four of us will muddle along together.

We're about the business of chaos much of the time, though we're blessed with a God who continually points us toward order. I am grateful that order is never discovered alone. I am grateful, even, for that which disrupts, because sometimes it disrupts complacency. And complacent is just a fancy word for boring.

I know I said I was too busy to write and would be re-blogging from the archive, but it turns out I had a new post in me after all. How 'bout them apples?