The One About the Girl With the Sharp Tongue Who Sometimes Cuts Her Own Throat...

OK, so… Boy, I seem to start a lot of my writings that way :-) 

But anyway…

Yes, it’s been a long several months since I last published anything; no, I’m not going to go into a lengthy explanation of the whys and wherefores of where I’ve been.  I will say this, though: Several months back, I read a blog post that a friend of mine shared about being careful not to spend so much time blogging about our lives that we forget to live them, and it really hit home for me.  So, I’ve been taking some time off from blogging and just kind of focusing on simply living life each day with my family and friends.  And life has been exceptionally busy this year, so… Yep.  That’s where I’ve been :-)

So, tonight, I was sitting here on the couch in our new apartment (we moved over the summer… yeah, that was actually one of the more fun parts of the busyness :-D ), listening to iTunes and working on my mental list of people I now owe apologies to for running my mouth (What?  Don’t tell me I’m the ONLY person out there who does that every once in a while… ^_^ ), and this song came on:

I’m like a promise, I’m like a promise
I’m like a promise broken every time I open my mouth
Open my mouth, I open my mouth

OK, yeah… That’s me, right there, encapsulated in a single sentence.  It’s like I know I’ve got so much potential in me to do good, to do the right things, to love people and treat them like I want to be treated….

And then I open my mouth and all that promise just gets hurled to the ground and shattered into shards of glass that fly everywhere and cut the people who most need me to be gentle with them.  The Bible says in James 3 that the tongue steers our life like the rudder of a ship, that unlike any other wild animal, we cannot seem to tame it, no matter how hard we try.  The human tongue is like a flame that sets the forest ablaze; in my case, it seems more like a scalpel that strips the skin away and leaves the nerves frayed and loose and open to all the grit of daily life…

Under the surface, under the surface
Under the surface sometimes I wanna slip right out of my skin
Out of my, slip right out of my skin

Sometimes, when I hear the words that come out of my mouth, all I want to do is find a way to pretend that I’m really someone else, a good twin who can deny all knowledge of anything “that other person” has said.  I wish there was someone else that I could shrug my shoulders for and say, “No, that wasn’t me… Must have been that other chick who just happens to look like me and live around here.  I think I saw her go off in that direction…”  Maybe, just maybe, 38 years ago, my mom actually gave birth to identical twins in secret, and then the government wiped her memory and took one of the twins away to train her as a black-leather-and-spandex-clad secret assassin, and now there’s some kind of super-secret spy agent out there who looks exactly like me (only in leather and spandex... which I, for the record, would never wear together...) and is now running around all over the Chehalem Valley doing whatever she can with her words to mess up my life and my relationships and my reputation so she can murder me and bury me under the new patio in the backyard and then seamlessly take over my life…

No, wait… that’s a show on Netflix.  Never mind.

Well, until my clones start showing up on my doorstep, I guess I’m stuck with the knowledge that, nope, it’s just me using my own tongue as a weapon of mass destruction to take out half the population of Newberg.  Sigh…

And tell all my secrets
And open my scars
Break into pieces
Cause at the end of me, at the end of me
That’s where You start

Now there’s the hope in the situation…  God doesn’t expect me to be perfect all the time.  God doesn’t expect me to be perfect any of the time.  Which is really good, because I’ve always sucked at perfection (just ask my sister… the real one, not the long-hoped for evil twin one ^_^ )  But when I get to the point where I’ve completely FUBARed things, that’s where God can come in and make the biggest difference.  Not that I should go around trying to screw everything up… but since I seem to be so darned good at it sometimes, it helps to know that God can salvage anything and turn it into something beautiful in His way and time :-)

Do you remember, do you remember?
Do you remember when I was young and I knew everything?
I knew everything about everything

(Yes, before she even comments, my sister will definitely confirm that this was totally me when we were growing up... and that at least 2 of my 3 kids take after their mother in that regard... and that she was NEVER like that at ANY point in HER youth... ;-D )

Such a long time, such a long time
Such an uphill climb just to finally get over myself
Over my, I’m so over myself

So tell all my secrets
And open my scars
Break me to pieces
Cause at the end of me, at the end of me
That’s where You start

I don’t know where, I don’t know how
Maybe a prayer, maybe a cloud
I don’t know where, I don’t know how

So tell all my secrets
And open my scars
Gather the pieces
Cause at the end of me, at the end of me
That’s where You start
                     --Bebo Norman, "At the End of Me"

You see, that’s what I absolutely LOVE about God: He takes us right where we are, and then moves us forward from there.  His grace isn’t about making me feel really crappy about the stupid thing I’ve just said— I already feel crappy enough about that already, thank you very much :-P  God’s grace says to me, “OK, yes, you messed up here, I concur.  Now here’s what we’re going to do about it… You go and do what you can to apologize and make things right, and meanwhile, I’ll go and take care of the rest of it.  Then we can leave this in the past and move on to our next crazy adventure…  Hurry up, gotta dash. Things happening. Well, four things. Well, four things and a lizard...”

(OK, so I'm still waiting for one of God's plans for me to include a lizard... Darn you, Netflix...)

I find that, when I’m stressed, I tend to lose what little control I have over my mouth, and then out come all sorts of sharply sarcastic, mean-spirited, “I was just joking…” sort of comments, armed and loaded and just ready to take flight and stab people straight in the heart.  And yes, I’ve been stressed recently… There’s a lot of stuff going on and way more running around and trying to fit everything everyone wants to do into the schedule somehow than I ever expected going into this school year.

But…

If I know that being stressed makes me more of a sharp-tongued shrew, then I have an obligation to try harder to keep it under control when I am stressed.  Because honestly?  None of the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time comments that come flying out of my mouth ever seem to make life easier or less stressful for anybody, myself included.

So this is why I’m writing this now…

First off, if you’re at all like me and you find yourself at times mistaking your tongue for a Ginsu...

... Don’t beat yourself up.  God loves you, He’ll forgive you if you ask Him to, and then He can help you get up and move on.  Apologize to the person you’ve hurt and ask for their forgiveness; they might forgive you, they might not, either way, you’ve done what you can to make peace (Romans 12:18, one of my favorite verses :-D ) and now all you can do is move forward anyway.  Maybe if I’m honest about the fact that I screw up waaaaaaaaay more often in this area than I’m proud of, it can help someone else too.

Second off (Second on?  Secondly?  Maybe it’s just Second…), I’m writing this to ask for people to help hold me accountable.  Sometimes (as God has been pointing out to me recently), I say things in the moment and then just kind of walk away thinking everyone’s laughing and every thing’s fine and everyone understands what I really meant… and I have absolutely no clue until days later that someone’s been lying on the ground behind me bleeding out from their soul because of something stupid that I said.  And let me tell you, that is one sickening realization to come to, especially when the person bleeding to death is someone I love almost more than life itself.

So, the next time I say something (or write something, or you’ve heard that I’ve said something) and it hurts, tell me.  I can’t do anything to make things right and try to bandage up the wounds I’ve caused unless I know about it.  And as a Christian, I want to make things right,  I want to heal wounds and make things better…  Just as I’m supposed to be an ambassador for Christ (2 Corinthians 5:20) and help to bring peace and healing between God and people, I need to do everything I can to bring peace and healing between myself and those that I have hurt.  Even if it’s embarrassing, even if it’s awkward, even if people never forgive me and I end up alone in some cave somewhere waiting for my evil clone twin to show up and finish the job I’ve started… 

No, wait… Too much Netflix is apparently bad for my blogging life :-P

My most recent parenting fail... Sorry, but it's not a funny one this time :-/

I'm beginning to think that the hardest part of raising kids is letting them go.  Now, none of mine are quite old enough to leave the nest yet, so I'm not talking about the big, scary, drive them halfway across the country and then leave them there so they can attend the college of their dreams sort of letting go (though a dear friend of mine just got back home from doing that very thing with her oldest... you are one brave woman, Melinda :-D ).  No, I'm talking about the kind of letting go that comes from realizing that the time has come to step back as a parent and trust your kids to make their own decisions, even if and especially when you're not there to make sure that they do, in fact, make the RIGHT decision.

Today, one of my kids made the wrong decision, and I was at work in another town and completely unable to do anything about it.

Now, before any of you who know me start emailing me with questions of "OMG!!!!!  WHICH KID WAS IT AND WHAT DID THEY DO???  HOW MUCH BAIL MONEY DO YOU NEED AND HOW MANY MONTHS UNTIL YOU WANT TO HAVE THE BABY SHOWER AND WILL YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE COVER DETOX OR WON'T THEY???", let me just assure everyone that no, none of them are pregnant, all of them are home and not in jail, and they've all already finished their homework and are currently already in bed-- each one by themselves, too, just in case some of you (really, seriously?) were going to go there :-P  What happened this morning was in all actuality a very minor thing, with no foreseeable long-term damage done.  And I'm pretty certain that it's not an ominous harbinger of an oncoming storm of teenage rebellion either.  But it DID bring me to a place of questioning whether or not we've been making the right decisions all along the way and discovering that, honestly, I'm not as great a parent as I thought I was :-/

As parenting goes, I've always been a big fan of natural consequences-- sometimes parentally engineered "natural" consequences, but more-or-less natural, logical, reason-led ones all the same.  Toddler daughter refuses to pick up the pieces of her puzzle in a fit of "YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO I'M ALMOST FOUR AND SO I'M ALMOST ALL GROWN UP AND YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF MEEEEEE!"; toddler daughter watches as said puzzle pieces are thrown into the trash can along with the rest of the garbage on the floor.  Son #1 decides to throw wet paper towels all over the school bathroom to see how far up the wall he can get them to stick and whether or not he can actually get them to defy gravity and cling to the ceiling; son #1 gets to spend an afternoon helping the custodian clean up said bathroom.  Son #2 decides to ignore the warning about coming home before curfew from his friend's house (which, incidentally, is only 100 yards down the street, so he theoretically could have just hollered to say he'd be late); son #2 finds himself grounded and disallowed to go by himself to a friend's house on his own for the rest of the week.  Basically, you make your choice, you evaluate the consequences, and then you decide if it's really worth making that same choice the next time... pretty simple, no?

We Christian parents especially like to put a hedge of protection around our kids by making sure they only watch the right shows, listen to the right music, read the right books, hang out with the right friends, etc.  We figure that if we only give them good role models to follow and we shield them from negative examples, then they won't know to choose the wrong and will generally make the right decisions all throughout their lives.  We bet that if we raise smart, moral, good church-going kids, we can help them to avoid so many of the pitfalls of secular life... and it's actually not all that bad of a parenting plan, to be honest.

The downside is that we often end up sheltering our kids' decisions so that they only have good options to choose from and gentle consequences to remind them of the unconditional love of God.  And that, as I look back on things tonight, has been the parenting road we ended up on; I'm hearby pleading "GUILTY" to trying their whole lives to protect them from the consequences of their own native stupidity :-(  As kids get older, though, we as parents need to give them more responsibility for their own actions and more freedom in taking those actions.  And sometimes, this means letting them step out of our sight and hoping, with fingers crossed and eyes closed, that they'll have learned enough to not choose the door labeled (in big red, dripping, invisible letters) "This Is the STUPID Option... STAY AWAY!"

It was hard this morning to drive away, knowing that, though I had given my child specific directions and a definite answer to their question of "So, Mom, can we...?", I was leaving them in a position of temptation with no way to enforce my will and preferences in the matter.  And I knew that, theoretically, my child might choose to disobey and do what they wanted to do, hoping that I wouldn't find out.  But because love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things, I trusted that my child, whom I love with all my heart, would resist temptation and do the right thing simply because I had asked them to.  I honestly thought that, because I said "No, you can't... Sorry...", it would be enough to ensure that they actually did what I wanted them to do.

Not only did my child do what I had specifically forbidden them to do, but I had to find out about it from a sibling who couldn't keep their mouth shut.  (Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's going to be some holy Christian smackdown going on as soon as they all head out the door in the morning...)

But you know what?  This is a part of letting go.  At least it was a little mistake, and not one that's going to shape future generations of our family.  At some level, I needed to realize that my kids are not just extensions of my own self-worth, reflections of my ability to parent like a boss.  Each one of my kids is their own independent human being, with their very own imperfect nature and their very own will, with just as much of a right to be wrong as I have.  They're going to go off and make their own choices, and sometimes those choices are going to be "Screw that, Mom, I can make a better decision on my own, thank you very much."  And when those decisions have been ripped out of my grasping, clawing hands, then sometimes the consequences are out of my hands as well, and I won't always be there to catch them when they fall broken to the ground.

This time, though, my husband and I have to-- get to-- assign the consequences.  And we have to walk the fine line between realizing that no lasting harm has been done and not wanting that harm to come knocking at our kids' doors in the future.  How do we assign a consequence for disobedience that's fair and proportionate to a (really pretty minor) offense but still teaches them that, hey, Mom and Dad aren't idiots and you really should listen to them sometimes?  How do we make sure that we don't overreact and punish them too harshly simply because our feelings are hurt and our trust broken?  Or how do we make sure that this consequence gives them something positive that they can hold on to for the rest of their lives and pass on to their own kids someday (who probably won't listen to or obey them any better than they do us right now...)

To make the situation even stickier, tonight I had to admit to myself and to my husband that I've been making parenting decisions all along that have helped to create the situation that tripped my child up this morning... How do I go now to my child and apologize for my own parenting fail and still expect them to respect my wisdom and authority as their mom?  I'm really, really hoping for and counting on the fact that the Bible says that God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble (1 Peter 5:5), because I'm really going to need His grace tomorrow as I share a big ol' slice of humble pie with my child :-/

Actually, strike what I said in my first sentence... maybe the hardest part of raising kids is the not knowing how badly you're screwing them up until it's too late to do anything about it :-/

(I seriously need to start cruising Facebook or hanging out with my daughter's genius friends again... This blog and my sanity are both looooong overdue for a funny post for a change... o.O  But for now, I think I'll just head to bed with this song running through my head; I'll probably end up playing it tomorrow for my kid and pretty much every time I screw up again from now until forever...)