To Get to Easter

I am a two decade plus veteran mother.  Enduring twenty-two years of diapers, weathering five adolescents so far, I figure, I've seen enough to not be worn down by the capacity of children to surprise.

I was as wrong as a rookie who claims they'll potty train their two year old over the weekend during Christmas break.   I was as wrong as the mother who boasts of how her kids show remarkable good judgment.  That's the kids' cue to riffle through the tool box and emerge with duct tape, a gooey paint brush and a hammer, leaving Mom to discern, what fire do I put out first?

Today, I cleaned up the upstairs.  No problem, but the rooms seemed oddly spartan, not as many toys as I normally find on a Monday.  I thought, they're getting older, they're picking up after themselves.  Why I indulged this naive fantasy, I'll never know.  The triumph of hope over experience.

I patrolled the main floor and again, it wasn't horrid.

Normally, I do two floors and quit.  But I thought, I'd try to finish the job, and it was then, I learned, where all the toys went. Every...single...toy.

Every bin in the basement also has been dumped.  I mean, you can walk the basement and never touch the ground, owing to the clutter. Even the basketball hoop and the vacuum cleaner have been knocked over, and all since Saturday, because Saturday, I was downstairs, I didn't see this.   This...this is new.

Fight or flight.  I left the basement, but the image of the mess wouldn't leave.  It made me mad.
I was set to work myself into a mother of all lathers over my offspring, and then I remembered a friend of mine, who is clinging each moment, to the twins she carries.   It is a condition very rare, and possibly fatal to both children.  The girls are only 22 weeks, so every second more in the womb brings them closer to being able to thrive outside the womb, and every second is equally fraught with the possibility of death.  This family needs prayers for a miracle, of the twins somehow thriving, somehow enduring up past the threshold for survival.  They need to at the very least, get to Easter.   That's my prayer.  Suddenly, getting worked up over a really big --and it is obnoxiously so, don't get me wrong, mess in the basement seems like a colossal waste of everyone's time.

So please, pray today for my friend and her children.  Pray for them to make it to Easter, and if you come across a galactic style  kid induced mess  or hassle from life that could only come as a form of redemptive punishment for your sins, remember, there are far heavier crosses out there.   

It may take me until Easter to get the basement into order, I hope my friend gets to pick up after her twins one day, for someone else.