Urgent Care

I spend a lot of time here. 

I mean that in the very literal sense of bodily presence at this clinic. My kids' primary care doctor is very popular, so oftentimes we end up here with our strep throat or allergy battles, or last month,-- stitches, and this week--severe poison ivy. Sometimes I wonder that the ladies at the front desk don't know our names by now.

I snapped this photo as we took our paperwork and Zim's prescription and our stickers out to the van. I helped buckle car seats and stared for a moment at these words. Urgent Care. I spend a lot of time here, too. In the very metaphorical sense of frantic parenting.

Somedays I feel like all I offer my kids is my own urgent care. Care diffused with my own sense of crisis. Their urgent needs meet my urgent parenting, and the whole day feels like a spinning vortex, circling around one another's desperation.

And yet, if I take the time to notice, I will see the slower, better parts of our days. The parts where we enjoy each other's presence and the world around us. Where we take time for paying close attention to things, laughing together, being silly. We read together or all crowd in together on the one comfy couch.

Those moments are there, too.

The poison ivy explosion/nighttime urgent care visit/ massive out-of-town grocery haul/cavity-induced dental appointment 24 hours was actually punctuated by mini moments of grace.

Chats in the car with the boys/enjoying salad and tea with a friend/reading on a park bench/one-on-one time with Asher where we talked about his days at school and tried to save the life of a moth in the dentist parking lot/ice cream cones & cherry limeades post-fillings/a friend to babysit for us/painting abstract portraits/reading picture books together before bed.

The moments are there. It's just that I so often forget to even see them. Let alone, give them the weight they deserve.

This past weekend seemed to be especially emotional for everyone at our house, and at one intense moment I said to Seth, "You know, sometimes it feels like the last eight months have been so draining and depressing and have felt like failure. Some days it feels like everything that can become an argument does, and like I second-guess all my decisions, and like we are never on the same page, and our kids are utter nightmares. And other days, or even other hours of those very same days, it feels like the last eight months have been so good, like in them are the victories of some very hard-won emotional battles. It has felt refreshing and restful and restorative and there are some moments where I'm just so thankful for everything in our lives. But I can't decide which story is true because it changes so much. I guess I just think it is both. That both stories are true."

This year has been particularly grueling and particularly life-giving, and there's really no way around the fact that those are probably two sides of the same coin. 

My tendency is to beat myself up for not being an optimist. It is true that I fall on the skeptical and cynical side of any spectrum. Today I am just grateful that I have been given eyes to see the goodness as well as the hardships. 

Maybe being grateful for doctors and dentists and steroids and laughing gas and calamine lotion and cherry limeades and boys that want to save injured moths is enough.

In hopes that I can be one with eyes to see the goodness of the world, I've been reading the prayer of St. Francis: 

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is error, the truth;
Where there is doubt, the faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.