Tears the other night. Despair. My new teenager has been fighting against doing anything. The latest is homework. She's decided she doesn't like science or maybe just the science teacher. Not a big deal normally, but my husband has fallen prey. If we know she's a real smart kid and can handle middle school science, is a B good enough, when clearly she is putting in zero effort? He posed the question, not me. I know she's faking it, but he's thinking that maybe it is too hard. So he asks - does it really matter what her grades are?
I kid you not, I just asked a similar question in my small group that morning. I have been struggling greatly of late with my role in this world, and I asked - I'm not using it any more, what does it really matter that I spent all that time in college? Some good it did me. So his question really pounded the nail in a little further. Does it really matter how hard we try? Especially for us girls, who mostly seem to end up watching the kids, cooking the dinner, and doing the laundry. I could do all of that when I was 12.
I've had some time to think about that - yesterday it was while edging the lawn and weeding the beds, today while doing laundry and cleaning house. What does it matter?
I've also been reflecting on a lecture I heard on Galatians from a retired doctor. The speaker was a woman who was head of one of those review panels where doctors go to rehash cases that went bad. She's seen a lot of bad things, but she stressed that the focus of the panels was not to point out the errors and chastise the maker, but rather to discover how the situation could have been handled to produce a better result. Sometimes there was nothing that could have been done, the doctor had done the best that could have been done. How does this fit into Galatians? 5:7 says - You were running a good race. Who cut in on you and kept you from obeying the truth? Running a good race - what does our God want from us, to run a good race for Him. God wants our best in what ever we do.
Now I'm not going to lie. I have never done my best at being a housewife. Not even close, I have fully put in D-effort. "Who cut in on you and kept you from obeying the truth?" I have fully bought into the feminist mumbo-jumbo that tells me I can have it all, I should be on the corporate ladder doing great, successful things. They tell me I am so much more than a housewife. A housewife is from the repressed decade of the fifties, where a woman's only place was in the home. We are modern. But in reality I am a housewife. Just a housewife, and I've been a pretty crappy one at that. When I think about it, it's pretty lame to say that I can't keep a clean house. Is it hard? Well, no, not really. So why am I pretty crappy? Just because I haven't felt like it.
So why am I surprised that my daughter acts the same?
