April Showers bring (May) Flowers

It’s that time of the year again for me.  I don’t know what it is about “Spring” but I think it should be renamed “Sprint”. If I were using a mental pedometer, I know for a fact it would have combusted into a million pieces by now the way my mind is constantly spinning.  Every different aspect of life seems to be converging into a huge tangle, all dutifully notated on the calendar in a mash of dates and times and notes in a myriad of carefully designated colors.

Can anybody else relate?

And yet here’s the crazy thing…I really do enjoy everything I’m doing.  I sit around and try to think of what I could cut out, how I can take my mother’s advice of “You’re just going to have to quit doing so many things” and my mental exchange goes something like this:

I could quit being a mom.  Except not.  And I wouldn’t want to.

I could not have so many kids.  Except it’s a little too late for that.  So what, give one away in front of Wal-mart like a stray puppy?  How would I choose which one, anyway? Well maybe that wouldn't be so hard.  (Just kidding!) Not exactly a practical option at this point.

I could cut some of the kids activities.  Except what they do really isn’t unreasonable.  Maybe I should tell my 12-year old he can’t go to church activities every time they are offered just because he wants to so he can have more time to sit in his room and brood or watch TV or get hopelessly addicted to online gaming and have to go to Africa to break the habit one day? (Not that I would know anything about this by the way).  But…ah…I think not.

I could quit my volunteer mission work.  Maybe, perhaps only if God ordered me to for some completely silly reason that only He would understand and agree with.  But I would pout.  A lot.

I could quit staying up late to have any semblance of husband/wife and personal hobby time.  Which would be the emotional equivalent of, say, refusing to eat for the rest of my life.  It might yield some pleasant results in the short-term, but ultimately it would kill me.

I could never go to sleep.  An appealing option, and one that I have sort of tried.  But on a daily basis it doesn’t work much better than the quitting eating idea.

So I have come to the conclusion that the only option is to hang tight and continue to fight through the busy seasons.  The Aprils of life might bring showers (aka great deluges of precipitation that laugh in the face of a mere umbrella) but certainly the Mays (or July as it tends to be for me) will at least bring one day to watch movies and scrapbook while boycotting my email.

And one ultimate day, I will be able to un-scrunch my shoulders forever, wipe the computer-screen stare-frown from my brow, quit running from room to room in an effort to save 2 minutes, and hear the blessed words that I have done my job(s) well.

And I will laugh and sit surrounded in a field of shower-kissed, non-allergy inducing flowers.