I feel like I’m in a do over. As a Christian, this frustrates me because why didn’t I get God’s lessons right the last time? I’m talking about lessons learned while pregnant, but the issue isn’t really about having another baby. The issue is dealing with the same old feelings about the same old things and hearing God echo exactly what He’s said to me on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth go around.
I’ve learned these lessons before, why do I have to relearn them again?
I recently read a book called the The Sacred Echo by Margaret Feinberg. She talks about this exact issue: why we keep having to hear the same thing from God over and over, and how this is really a Biblical principle, that God is okay with repeating Himself to us, in fact, God is the author of this echo and we should embrace it as Christians.
As a parent, I see the do overs and echos all over our house. Every day I tell my kids the same things. I get after our younger boys for splashing water all over the bathroom as they bathe. Worse yet, I’m constantly on them for peeing all over the toilet, the wall behind the toilet, and the floor around the toilet. Sometimes the window sill beside the toilet. Do they whip around to look out the window at the birds flying by while they pee? What is so hard about hitting a toilet bowl?
I remind our 13 year old to take his soccer stuff to school for practice each day. He’s been playing soccer for nearly a decade now, practicing nearly every afternoon with a team, certainly he knows those cleats and shin guards need to walk out the door when he does each morning. They’re like his nose and ears, practically a part of his body, how does he still forget them once or twice a week?
I ask our daughters to do the dishes or put away the laundry. One girl helps with the dishes, the other with the laundry, and they’ve done this now for the past several years. Yet both will walk by dishes overflowing the sink and laundry to the ceiling without a pause in their dancing teenage steps. They must think the house-cleaning dwarfs arrive when Snow White takes her leave. Normally, because they are good girls, I cheerfully do their chores for them when they don’t get around to it, but nothing is normal right now, or maybe this has become the Bicknell normal every few years: Mom is pregnant again and has hit that magic 19th week where contractions kick in.
This means bed rest. Do over time. Surrendering to God and where He has me, pregnant and on the couch or in bed for hours at a stretch and we don’t even have TV now to dull my whirling mind, spinning with all the things that need to be done in a house where eight people exist in all their mess-making peopleness.
From the couch, I get to watch a two-year-old make his own sandwich and then live with the mayonnaise on the walls until a teenager takes notice. My point exactly: what teenager notices mayonnaise on the wall? They don’t even notice mayonnaise around their mouths. Perhaps if you smeared mayonnaise over the iPod they might clean off that little magic screen to carry on with that very important business of teenagerism: texting and facebooking and music surfing and what have you, but mayonnaise on the wall?
We won’t even talk about a two-year-old making a sandwich…
So I am suppose to lie here pregnant on my left side staring at mayonnaise wallpaper and soccer cleats that didn’t make it out the door this morning and a ringing phone with a junior-higher on the other end saying he needs his cleats by 3 p.m., all the while being grateful and joyful and filled with the Holy Spirit and I find myself once again crying out to God to have mercy on me because the joy hasn’t come yet and the Holy Spirit has told me He’ll arrive when I’m done repenting of my frustration.
To get past this frustration, I’m presently running down my thankful list, starting with the fact that in the past two years several of my close friends have died of cancer. These precious, beautiful, vibrant women spent time on the couch and in bed because they were too sick to take care of their families before they died while still in their early forties leaving toddlers and teenagers and shell-shocked husbands behind, and here I am with life in my womb in my forties, that little bambino fluttering around like a butterfly in this old flower and I think, wow, I’m still blooming after twenty years (I was expecting 20 years ago too in this same month and on bed rest with contractions midway through my pregnancy then as well). Each pregnancy has brought some bed rest lessons and a big dose of trusting God to get me through it.
Along with a huge dose of humility that life goes on without me all the way around. The soccer cleats somehow make it to school each day, the mayonnaise eventually gets scraped off the wall. The Snow Whites realize the dish and laundry dwarf has fallen and can’t get up and they finally dance around to doing their chores. I will rise from the couch, walk to the bathroom, forget about the boys’ pee all over the toilet seat, and sit down wiping away that problem, too, because… this too shall pass.
Even do overs pass.
In the meantime, as my prayer partner so graciously reminded me today, I have plenty of time to pick up my Bible and focus on God. Such a helpful prayer partner have I…
Honestly, it was easier in those younger years of pregnancy to focus on the TV. The Telly (as the British fondly call television) didn’t expect me to repent of a bad attitude. Twenty years ago, I spent the day on the couch in the month of November mindlessly watching Good Morning America, Regis and Kathy Lee, a soap opera or two, and news on the rising of the first Gulf War. And when I went for a potty break, the toilet seat was dry, and there wasn’t a half dozen little tooth brushes with toothpaste still smeared on them, scattered from the door to the loo like a trail of breadcrumbs for the dwarf with the damp hiney to follow back out to the couch.