Things are getting heavy

I haven’t been able to get out of bed this week.

Normally we’re all up around 6:30 for scriptures and breakfast and toothbrush arguments. I get the kids out the door, kiss everyone goodbye, and move into my day.

But for the past week I haven’t been able to get myself out of bed. I’d like to blame Eragon’s last book for keeping my up late (I’ve been trying to read Inheritance for four weeks), but it doesn’t seem to matter if I get to bed at 10 or 2; my body is not responding in the morning.

I was talking to a dear girlfriend of mine who is about four years ahead of my personal longitude. We live twin lives, me following in her well-paved tracks. She, like myself, went through a home schooling phase with one of her sons. I’m not a true home schooler—Rex will get somewhere between four months to a year of my undivided educational attention before we re-enroll him.

As we discussed this chapter of parenting she came clean. “To be honest,” she said, “It was a really hard time. The alarm would go off in the morning and I wouldn’t want to get out of bed.”

Huh. That sounds extremely familiar. Right then and there I knew what my problem is: things right now are super hard and I kind of don’t like facing the day.

It isn’t just trying to teach Rex, it’s having him home all day long making messes. Yes, I make him clean them up with me but even that takes serious effort. In addition, I’m only putting June in the village preschool for two or three days a week as well now because she does so much better with a little more time at home. Basically I’ve gone from having just Georgia and a grip on my housework to three kids at home and drowning in it.

It’s Saturday and I spent the morning slave driving my kids up and down Moby’s six levels of German living, cleaning and vacuuming and dusting and mopping. I jumped in the shower and while getting dressed sent everyone out to the car for Harry’s baseball game.

As I walked down five flights to join them, I couldn’t believe what I was following. It was a trail of dirt from Harrison’s cleats that tracked through almost every level of my house—the same levels I had spent the morning mopping.

Enter really lame, self-pitying prayer.

I’ve recently been called as first counselor in Stake Young Women’s at church here (our regional organization) and have to give a Sunday School lesson tomorrow morning. I locked myself in the office twenty minutes ago and attempted to prepare my lesson. I opened my scriptures to the first quotation reference on my list and saw that it had nothing to do with my topic. I skimmed through it, checked the second scripture reference, and saw once again that neither were at all related to what I’m supposed to be teaching.

I was about to move on when something from the first quote made me turn back. I flipped again to reference one, Matthew 11:28-30, and read:

“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Reference two from Mosiah 24 says, “Lift up your heads and be of good comfort…And I will ease the burdens which are put upon your shoulders, that even you cannot feel them upon your backs…And this will I do that ye may stand as witnesses for me hereafter, and that ye may know of a surety that I, the Lord God, do visit my people in their afflictions.”

It was for me. I can’t do it all on my own and I don’t have to. Man, I love the scriptures.