Woe is Me

For most of the last few years (how is that for precise?) Daniel, who is both my husband and the one who came up with the name fundynutter, has been teaching at the community college. He only teaches during the fall. If, as a teacher, you were to pick one quarter to teach, the fall is the obvious choice. You set the tone for the year. You don't have to be aware of what the last teacher taught. For his program he doesn't have to coordinate the first half of the huge two-quarter student project. Or the second half of it either.

But for the wife of the teacher it is not the best quarter to teach. Prep begins in August and fills up September, the two prettiest months in our region. Classes take up one of his days off every week all the way up to Christmas.

I'm not all together thrilled with any three month period where Daniel works six day work weeks. But I am especially not in love with it during the few weeks before Christmas.

The reasons are probably obvious. I'd like to share them anyway. Sometimes a girl needs to share.

1. It gives me only the evenings after a long day with the kids, in the dark and rain, after feeding them, cleaning up the mes and putting them to bed, to go out and shop for Christmas gifts for them.

2. I have to take the kids all by myself to all of the family and church holiday festivities. This has been going on long enough now I wonder if my cousins might be worried about our marriage.

3. It gives us Sunday afternoon, after church, lunch, and the baby's nap (so around three o' clock in the afternoon) to do any kind of family holiday fun. And of course about three o' clock is when Miss Three Years Old gets tired and cranky.

4. All of the above and the pathos of most Christmas music work together to make me lonely.



It feels good to get that off of my chest.

So good, in fact, to give my complaints a permanent place in the universe, that I feel like counting my blessings.

1. A husband who has work.

2. Two healthy kids I can buy gifts for.

3. A family that gets together for holiday events every year.

4. A church that teaches the Truth.

5. A bunch of girlfriends at said church who understand and listen and keep me company when I am lonely.

6. A bunch of on-line girlfriends who understand and listen and keep me company when I am lonely.

7. A couple of girls who cross over from online girlfriends to friends in my home.

8. A Savior who descended from unimaginable heights to the lowliest of lows, becoming a person so that I could become his friend. So that I wouldn't have to live eternally separated from Him. That's a love story more romantic than meeting Daniel.

I feel this lonely when I only get one day a week with Daniel--and all the hardest thing I ever did for him was deliver his babies. It may be beyond trite, but it brings to mind how lonely my Savior who gave up glory in heaven to live in the hot and terrible desert, die in shame on a cross, and then raise again to be rejected over and over by his creation, must feel when I only give him one day a week.

So this post is sort of rambling and will probably be edited more than once. I am thinking of ending it with some scripture and thoughts on what it means to have the Holy Spirit here as our comforter. But I need to go back and read and think on it some. I don't want to talk about it lightly, as I think God was trying to teach me something as I wrote this post.