Just about the time I get into the choreographed rhythm of life, the song changes and I get tripped up. We know from early on that “Everything Changes,” but when it does I sit around like a baboon doing Trigonometry. I’m scratching my head and wondering “what the heck” happened. Whenever I think I know what I am doing…BOOM…change.

Like I used to get all spazzed when teaching my kids about not climbing on the dining room table, now I’m standing at the bottom of the 40 foot Magnolia clapping like an excited seal when they race to the top.

I’d go all trauma dentist when they swallowed lint from the carpet when learning to crawl, now they make mud pies and I wonder if I still need to cook dinner.

I was like one of the pageant moms with my first daughter making sure that frilly socks with tiny pink bows matched the frilly diaper cover that coordinated with my diaper bag, now if they all just have clothes on that cover all their personal bits I could care less….navy and white striped pants with your brother’s out grown Spongebob shirt? Good enough, we are just going to WalMart.

Everything changes and I’ve picked up coping mechanisms to still feel like I have a say in my life. The top one is rearranging my furniture within a few days of life changes. I get a obsessive need for a change I am controlling and nothing says “I am master of my destiny” like a couch moved to the other side of the room.

A few days ago we had a big life change. The boys who have brought their noise and boy-ness into my daily life for the past two years are now spending more time with their other parent. Just about the time that I learned to lower the toilet seat lid before splashdown, they aren’t here to do it. So as I struggle to deal with it, I moved a few couches, dining room table and various knickknacks (paddy whack, give a dog a bone…)

About the time I had solo wrestled a couch into a door way, upside down and sideways, getting it lodged in a doorframe like a piece of spinach into your front teeth before you run into Mrs. Always-Put-Together in the grocery store; I recognized that familiar feeling of being out of control and desperately grasping at some semblance of an orderly life. Then when I was carrying the Dining Room table down the basement stairs like Atlas carrying the Earth, I realized I’m pretty ignorant about handling my own life.

I finally got everything placed with a little help from a grunting 5yo girl who is way stronger than I have given her credit for. The decorating looked perfect and although I am quite proud of myself, I also am facing the fact that no matter how many different angles or Fung-ShayNay (whatever…I’m not a believer in a candle on one side and a waterfall on the other side is going to bring me harmony, just a mess) I can introduce to my living room, I have to accept that change is more common that stability and I can’t fight that, but flex with it.

I miss my boys (not so much their horrible pee aim and stinky socks) and this is another change I have to flex through. With all the flexing in the past few years, you’d think I could out maneuver a Yoga Instructor and snatch the pebble from his hand in record time, but I’m just “Me;” strangely inflexible and intolerant of life’s hiccups. I trip over changes like Lego pieces and cry over my wounded feet. When I married as a mom to three little girls to become a mom of three girls plus 4 boys, I never thought I could bend into that and it feel normal. Total chaos became normal and I never wanted that to change.

Father, please forgive me, for I know not who I am nor who you are creating me to be.

So today I bend slowly (be patient, because my back is punishing me for my in-discretionary and misguided Herculean feats of strength of bench pressing sofas) into new routines and the ability to cook for less than a multitude again until they return. It won’t be easy and I’ll probably reduce myself to rearranging the inside of the fish aquarium in a desperate cry of help, but small steps.

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