Morning Mercies

I thought this would be the school year we would finally have an even pace.

Everything started out well.  We set all our school books and supplies up in one place.  We minimized distractions near our school zone.  We had a schedule.  We did everything we needed to and much of what we wanted to do.

Soccer season added a faster pace to our schedule – needing to have 4 children at 3 different practices and games, some every day, some only 3 days a week, one only once a week.  It was busy, but still manageable.

The girls all auditioned for the Nutcracker ballet and all were cast.  The rehearsals are only one day a week, but because they’re all in different scenes (which rehearse at different times), those rehearsals take most of the day.  Busy, but still manageable.

The sewing work I took on in the summer picked up pace a bit.  We’re still working on finding a reasonable routine that allows me to do the contracted sewing work in a timely way, and still allows for some just for us sewing.  I have patterns picked out and fabric waiting, but so far I haven’t found the time to get to it.  Busier, but still managing to do what needs to be done.

Then about two weeks ago, my father-in-law was admitted to the hospital.  There was a lot of miscommunication and misinformation, so my husband drove out to them (10 1/2 hours each way) to try and find out what was happening and set up a line of communication with doctors and the hospital.  He returned home while we waited for test results.  The test results didn’t come, because apparently they were never done (see about regarding misinformation).  He drove back out again just a few days later and was told by the doctors that his dad has, as far as they can tell, stage 4 cancer and has a month at most left.

Since then, there has been a lot of phone calls, paperwork (power of attorney, getting added to bank accounts, etc.), sorting through a never ending amount of papers, meeting with people to arrange hospice care, making phone calls to figure out the financial picture for mom.  Husband’s brothers also gathered to do some of the large amounts of work surrounding a rather sudden diagnosis.  This?  Not very manageable.

Beside the emotional aspect of facing the loss of Husband’s dad, the sheer amount of research, phone calls, leg work, and more research to try understand everything relating to the health, housing, and financial well being of another household is pretty overwhelming.   My poor mother-in-law is facing the loss of her spouse and we’re so very far away.  Phone support doesn’t seem like enough.

We’ve moved into a season of what I call Emergency Homeschooling.  Our home is barely clean.  The refrigerator and pantry are unusually bare and seriously lacking in good nutritious food.  Yet the schedules continue.  Husband still needs to work.  We still need to do schooling. There is still a large amount of house maintenance we need to do to prepare for the winter.  Commitments that we made when we had more time still need to be met.  It’s been… well, hard.

We’re working on taking things one day at a time.  I don’t look at next week’s schedule – I only look at tomorrow’s.  I don’t meal plan for the week – just today’s meals. We school one day at a time.  We deal with only the challenges that today brings, because we don’t even know yet what tomorrow’s challenges might be.  It’s a good lesson.  There’s definitely a need for balance between planning for the future and living for the day, but there’s much wisdom in not borrowing tomorrow’s troubles.

As a mother of seven, I’ve frequently been told by parents of two (or one, or three, or four) that they could never have so many children. I couldn’t either.  When I was a mother of one, I had the grace needed to parent one.  When I was the mother of two, I had the grace needed to parent two.  I didn’t have the grace (or strength) to parent seven children when I didn’t have seven children.  God gives us the grace we need for the job he has given us.  He hasn’t yet told us tomorrow’s job.  One day at a time we get through each day, and God’s mercies are made new each morning.  That truth is just what we need for times like this.