Sundays are not the easiest days in the Haub household. Doug is up and out the door early to set up and rehearse music with the worship team, and I am left to wrangle the three kids into clothes and shoes and (if we are lucky) brushed hair. I once even used the Teletubbies TV show (which is only on Sunday mornings) to pacify the two big kids while I did their shoes and socks and hair. Yikes!
Our Sunday worship service starts right in the middle of Elijah’s nap, so part of what makes Sunday mornings frustrating is having to wake my sleeping baby, or simply refuse him his nap altogether. And our worship services are far from the twenty-minute sermon variety and so lunchtime for my kids hits about one hour after we arrive. Add to that the fact that once the service is over, Doug is again committed to packing up and relating to his worship team, so I am on my own to herd (literally) three squirrelly, overtired and hungry small ones out the door and back home.
By the time I wheel us around the corner onto Kenwood we are often entering a downward spiral, and just getting everyone up the long flight of stairs, stowing the stroller, and assembling lunch is a feat. I often hear people talk of opting out of the Sunday service component to “church” on philosophical grounds; in my weaker moments I have come close to making the same choice and philosophy has had nothing to do with it! I know that this season of life is short (especially when you have kids as close together as we have!), and that single parents everywhere handle more than this regularly, and that I have a great community that bends over backward to offer us every care and support: but sometimes it is still plain hard.
This past Sunday, I had planned to take the big kids to a neighbor’s birthday party which was scheduled to begin right after church at a park down in Carson. Doug would stay home with Elijah so he could get some homework done (and so Elijah could get some much-needed sleep), and I would take the kids to the party. After the trek home, the frenzied lunch, and printing my directions to the park, I made the mistake of lying down on the futon next to Doug while the kids played. My body ached as it met rest, and my mind flooded with how crazy the afternoon would be dragging my two already exhausted kids to a huge park filled with kids and lots of sugar. The last thing I remotely wanted to do was to move but I knew I needed to rally the troops and get us out the door.
As I lay there with my eyes closed, I said to Doug:
“I feel like Jesus when he was all: ‘Hey, let’s go to Jerusalem.'”
Ah, the lovely chaos of being in ministry with a family of young tikes. God bless you. My wife had to do the same type of thing while we were at another church as I had to be there by 730 a.m. so she became single mother on Sundays. If one of our daughters was sick, she just began not coming and staying home than go through all the “hellaballoo” of dealing with a sick child and a baby and trying to focus on God when it was impossible to do so. Peace reigned when she did that.
I feel your pain, Erika.
When the twins were small, I thought I might die. (Or have a nervous breakdown.) My husband was often gone for weeks at a time, so I was on my own more than not.
I must have held it together pretty well (or appeared to) because the nursery coordinator kept asking me to work more shifts. One Sunday, she cornered me and said they needed me to work more, after all, I have two babies. I broke down in a screaming, crying rage.
The next week, a friend called and said the elders decided I should never be asked to work in the nursery again.
This story makes me laugh today, some five years later. But in the middle of it all, I remember thinking “church is just too hard.”
Now I look for them in the parking lot…those women covered with children. I work their shifts in the nursery and hold their babies during worship.
I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life, but none as challenging as mothering young children.
LM,
Your story illustrates well my point about the many who endure harder…I truly cannot imagine twins, let alone twins with a husband on the road a lot.
I also love the reminder that the day is coming, and it is not so far off, when I can happily serve other moms in the ways I need it most right now.
There should be a universal rule that if you have nursery age children you are FORBIDDEN to work in the nursery!