Sometimes the wisdom comes from unexpected places

My kids were, in a word, challenging tonight.  Lane was defiant and oblivious to all adult vocalizations, and I hit my breaking point when she fibbed about the whereabouts of the contents of an entire bottle of bubbles she’d been playing with earlier.   Jake is normally my easy-going, happy guy, but tonight was full of evidence that the terrible twos are a-comin’.  In a span of ten minutes he managed to find crayons and write all over the tile floor in the kitchen, and then while Lane and I were cleaning that up (her one redeeming point of the evening when she offered to help and actually helped) he got into the junk drawer in the kitchen, fished out a Sharpie, and wrote all over his left hand and a bit on the carpet in the hallway.  And there was other stuff, but the point of this post isn’t to bitch about my kids.

Mark spent at least a moment or two telling me how he just can’t imagine how I do it…. how these children can be so insanity-rousing, and yet I can, in the next moment, find the energy to be affectionate.  Or more simply, how I don’t go off the deep end and sell them to Gypsies.  Of course he gets the whole loving-them-with-a-fierceness-you-can’t-fathom-until-you’re-there phenomenon, but still.  And I had a hard time expressing it.  I just shrugged and said something like, “You just deal, and then something good happens.”

And then I was reading an article at CNN.com about some meeting that GWB had with some anti-drug people about anti-drug stuff, and the article quoted him talking about the power of prayer in his life, and he ended his thought by saying, “Some days are happy. Some days are not so happy. But every day is joyous.”  Now I’m not into prayer and all that sort of thing, but what he said pretty well sums up being a parent.  I never thought I would quote Bush 43 in an inspiring way, but it truly has been one of those days.