So I wrote last week that I had reached the breaking point with the children.  It wasn’t pretty.  Thankfully, I have a most incredible husband who worked to bring me back.  I’m on day 5, and I think I’m pretty much back.

You know those meters they show in movies with green, yellow, and red?  And inevitably it goes into the red zone and no one is watching it to turn the machine off that it’s monitoring and then it starts smoking and blows up?  I do my best to function in the green so that when things happen with the kids I have a lot of room on the meter before I get into the red.  But for the last five days I was probably functioning at the beginning of the red zone, so any small incident immediately sent me into the “danger” zone on the meter, and smoke started billowing out, and I exploded.  By Sunday I was in the yellow, by Monday I was on the green/yellow edge, and I’d say today I’m comfortably back in the green.  I have to be careful though because it took a lot of work to learn function in the green, and it’s easy to slip back into functioning in the yellow or even the red.  That little stick can move from green to red really quickly without warning, and that’s just not fair to my kids or Chad, so I have to re-learn to make it move slowly.

My mission here is to teach these Littles to love God, love people, and become adults who can make good choices.  Grace still cries almost every day, Eli still gets angry at me and tells me no, and Ada still subtly checks to see if I’m in charge or if she can take over yet. I have to choose to function in the green on a daily basis with adults in mind, not these Littles who are trying to take over my house.  But on the days when I can’t see the end but instead only the Littles who want nothing more than to break my will… I have Chad.  He protects me from all things.  Even my children.  He did the dishes all weekend, he didn’t question me when I got take out more than normal, he let me go out BEFORE bedtime (we almost never make each other do that alone)… he was my hero.  He brought me back.  He gave me the space to heal mentally and emotionally without ever questioning me or making me feel guilty for what I was feeling.

Here’s my question: Where are you functioning on a day-to-day basis?  Green?  Yellow?  Red?  Are you one spilled cup away from an explosion?  What can you do to bring it down, even one notch, so you have a little extra space on your meter to allow for those times when the kids screw up?  Because let’s face it, they will.  Maybe they can learn from their mommas what to do when they screw up…

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