The Yin and Yang

The entire school year, I can't wait for Summer. I hate saying goodbye to my children every morning and ushering them out the door to spend their day with someone else. I grieve the entire 9 months they're in school. I've considered home-schooling, but know myself well enough to know we'd spend all our time playing and they'd graduate from high school at 35, complete idiots. So I send them out the door each weekday, dying a little inside, and count the minutes until they get back home and tell me everything they can remember so I can share in some small part in their day.

Sounds pretty sad, doesn't it. It's just that I had children later in life, after I had already had my career, and THEY were the only things I wanted to do in the world. Raise children. Stay at home with them. Read to them. Snuggle them. Kiss their boo-boo's, celebrate their successes, be at their side day and night. All too soon, they hit 5 and started Kindergarten.

All that said, they've been out of school now 3 weeks, and they're starting to get on my nerves. I have a good friend that was talking with a Catholic priest, a young man who has recently been ordained, and sharing her struggles in life. She shared how badly she wants children and her grief over not having more. Then they moved onto another subject - her frustration with the children she has. The priest was a little confused. It seems he had trouble grasping the concept of wanting more children while wanting to kill (at times) the ones you already have. She laughingly told me this story, knowing I would understand. Of course I understood. Any mother would understand.

And that's the very complexity of emotions I'm experiencing today. If I have one more crying child come to me complaining that one or the other sibling kicked or hit him or her, I think I'm going to scream. But do I want to send them back to school? The mere thought makes my blood run cold.

We Mom's dance this funny dance between exhausting, sheer love and urge to kill. At times we understand completely the animals in nature that eat their young. But just let one of the children fall off a swing or trip running down the hall, and all those protective instincts kick in.

Ah, Motherhood. So duplicitous, so lovely. So requiring of God's mercy. Send it like rain, Lord, falling from Heaven.