No Longer Fit to Be with the General Public

The other day I was taking Josiah to teeball and it all seemed so silly. All these parents out there trying to get their kids to play this game because it will be good for them. Last time I checked, people grow up just fine even if they don't play team sports. Earlier in the day I had been to speech therapy with Nathan. Now there is a place that you see real life going on. Real people with real problems that need help to succeed. Mothers on phones with school districts and lawyers trying to find out if services are still going to be paid for, putting it on credit cards until they find out. Meanwhile, their children stare at walls and repeat phrases over and over. Real people with real struggles.

Then I go to teeball at the top of a hill and park behind shiny cars and join a group of pretty people who count my children and gasp at four then comment to each other that "she says she has 5!" Josiah wouldn't go out there just as Grandma predicted. He sat there and said that he "wasn't ready." Katie Ann did homework, Maury walked around, stole balls and cried in my lap. Nathan played with gloves and threw himself on the grass crying because he wanted his shoes off. I muttered to the child in the baseball uniform next to me, read spelling words out loud, chased and held the baby, and ignored the child who knows perfectly well how to take his own shoes off. All in all, I looked like a lunatic.

But in my mind, I thought. These people have no idea about anything at all.

Today I we went to a playdate for Nathan and a friend of his. His friend has just had his yeast medicine upped and was not acting himself. :) I sat there with Nathan and Maury playing and our playmate over on the floor crying and thought, now this, this is real life. Here is a child struggling to get well and here is me, who has been exactly where my friend was today many times and it just felt so REAL. No apologies were shared, no explanations needed. We went about our business and planned to meet again when we were done. There's just something about being with someone who KNOWS and I mean really knows what you are going through.

So that is why I can't go out in public. My actions and mannerisms are too odd. I ignore my screaming child, I narrow my eyes at people with 2 perfect quiet children and a fake laugh at the "you have your hands full" comment. I've been warped, altered, changed. I have been blessed in abundance and am learning to never take that for granted.

Now I just need to work on reaching out to and loving the shiny, plastic people of the world...

Perhaps that shall be my next project... ;)

- Julee

Current Project:)