to try

This weekend was… urglfarphblegh.  Not easy.

It was stake conference (for you non-LDSers, our church is divided into wards, like a parish, and groups of wards make stakes, like a diocese - we have 15 wards in our stake, so twice a year we meet together) and because we live so far out there and we’re in the Madison stake, going to all our meetings over 2 days would be about 5 hours of driving time.  The Saturday night meeting is just for adults, but since our usual baby-sitter couldn’t make it, we were going to have to take both kids with us.  Even if we could find another sitter, I couldn’t leave WonderGirl with a stranger for 5 hours.  I’m not worried about WG - it was more about the sitter.  She’s not someone you inflict on amateurs.  So, the solution was to get a hotel room down in Madison for the night.

Husband had a afternoon meeting without me, so I took the chance to head to Target and stock up on the essentials with the cranky kiddos in tow.  Then we headed to our meeting.  With the kids being kids, we had to sit alone in a back room and listen to it over the loudspeaker.  Then a night in a hotel with a kid and a baby is always a blast, right? … I just hope the people in the rooms near us wanted to be awake at 4am and 6am.  Needles to say, that plus forgetting to pack some things made me feel as dreary as it looked outside.  As we sat in our morning meeting, I felt so defeated.  Here I was, all dressed up so I could sit in a back room filled with other parents and their cranky children, straining to hear the talks but only managing to hear every other word while trying unsuccessfully to get my psychotic daughter to stop yelling and play quietly.   Why do I even try when it’s always so darn hard??  And I felt more isolated than usual.  Like this bumpkin vising the big city which just reminded how much I am NOT suited for small town livin’.  I NEED A SUBURB.  It’s my natural habitat.  I didn’t know a soul except my own family and two of them were acting horribly (three if you count my sour mood).  WG had just about the worst attitude I’ve ever seen and the Dude has awful allergies and is sick.  I kept thinking “what did I do so wrong as a parent to have kids that act like this in church??”  The Dude probably has allergies because I didn’t nurse him and WG is a terror because I’m a bad parent.  It was enough little things to make me just want to hang my head and cry.  Which, being Reva, I did.

And then by a small miracle (tender mercies, we like to call ‘em), there was a teeny tiny lull in the screaming and I heard this quote:

“Sometimes as parents we feel we have failed when our children make mistakes… Parents are never failures when they do their best to love, teach, pray, and care for their children. Their faith, prayers, and efforts will be consecrated to the good of their children… . No family has reached perfection.” - Robert D. Hales 

That right there made the weekend worth it.