Holy Sandpaper

I saw a quote online (read: Pinterest) recently that said "Children are holy sandpaper. Raising your kids will expose every flaw and weakness you have. And that's a GOOD thing." 

I've talked before about how motherhood is a refining fire because I've learned first hand that IT IS. 

My kids don't turn me into a mean spirited, short tempered, impatient woman. My kids just expose me for the mean spirited, short tempered, impatient person that I can be. The pressure of having and raising and loving my three tiny little people is the surest and fastest and most efficient way to widdle me down to the very core of my character. 

Women that I see who are loving and giving and patient and kind to their kids aren't that way because they're a Mom. They're that way because they possessed those qualities before they ever had children. And when the pressures  of motherhood came, when the rain fell, and dissolved away their superficial, exterior layers and exposed their core self, that's where their good lived. 

They had worked to store up a lifetime's worth of long suffering and gentleness and peace and kindness and all those fruits of all those spirits so that when they were finally wrung out and tired and running on empty, they were still left with the good inside them. 

I've redoubled my efforts lately to own my attitude because I've noticed lately that when I'm exhausted and the coffee pot it empty and the day isn't done and the supper isn't fixed and the dog's water bowl has been overturned for the seventeenth time, there sometimes isn't much good left in my tank. There're loads of frustrated outbursts and frazzled responses, but no gentle answers and patient ears. 

My kids deserve a better example than that. 

I've formed a habit that has really helped to ground and center me and my impatient, easily irritated, quickly aggravated attitude. Before I finish up my morning Bible study, at the end of my selected readings, I thumb through to Proverbs and read the corresponding chapter for each day's date. There are 31 chapters in Proverbs, so each date of the month will have it's own unique reading, no matter which month I'm currently in. I've been doing this for several months in a row, and it's been awesome.

It's helped fill my soul with loads more of the good stuff that I've been training my heart to heavily rely on as my three kids smooth out my rough spots like the holy sandpaper God made them to be. And, as I'm learning and growing and striving to set better examples for them, I'm able to fall back on those good reserves that Proverbs has given me when my coffee pot has been drained and it's 5:30pm and my casserole still hasn't gone in the oven and the load of towels that I put in the dryer but never turned on has soured into a boiled-egg-and-mildewy-smelling mess. 

I still get short tempered sometimes. I may or may not have cried a little on my deck in an exasperated heap yesterday afternoon when my youngest, Nathan dumped two toddler sized handfuls of garden soil into the 6' blow up pool that I'd just spent 39 minutes emptying, cleaning, rinsing, and refilling. Trying to carry on a phone conversation with me still sounds like a preschool mosh pit is happening in my living room. 

I'm still not Mary Poppins. But then again, I'm not Cruella de Vil, either. 
And I reckon that's a good place to be. 

"A Mom who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and she who rules her spirit is better than she who conquers a city."- Solomon. Proverbs 16:32 
(Katie McReynolds' version)