Column Post by Laura Hyers
This weekend was one of those. I bet you know the kind – moody, hopeless, helpless, draining for no good reason. I wasn’t feeling well and I was tired from the week, but it wasn’t just that. It felt dark and I was cranky and weepy and all the things I didn’t have time for.
Sometimes I just get overwhelmed. By everything, kind of. And I know from talking to lots of women that I’m not the first person to experience this bleakness, this whirling sense of it all being too much, or me not being enough, or both. This time it was most assuredly both.
My husband was preoccupied with a million things and friends were busy and I was sick and maybe contagious anyway and leaving people alone out of consideration for their health, but none of those were really the reason I felt so completely alone. But whatever the dumb reason was, I felt absolutely, most definitely alone.
I pushed all my responsibilities away from me the way a stubborn toddler pushes away that plate full of insert-food-they-just-decided-they-don’t-like, and I hid under my covers the way an angsty teenager does when she insists she isn’t going to school, not today and maybe not ever.
The post I needed to send to my editor? I didn’t want to write it, even if I could come up with something to write, which I probably couldn’t. The mountains of laundry that needed washing and folding and putting away? They could sit there a little longer. The kitchen, disastrous beyond recognition and possibly becoming a biohazard or something? Don’t even go there, because I sure won’t.
The truth is that some days I get the life sucked out of me. And sometimes I’m feeling froggy enough to push through and follow through on what needs to be done, but sometimes I just don’t. This was one of those latter days, and I was content (or discontented?) to wallow around in my whatever-was-making-me-moody-ness.
When I finally got hungry enough to do something about it, I pulled myself from bed and book and headed downstairs to the kitchen, which wasn’t quite as bad as my imagination had painted it. We at least didn’t need to call in a HazMat team—yet.
I pulled out some soup and started making a sandwich and I wondered aloud what on earth my problem was and why I couldn’t shake myself out of it. I cleared off the table and sat down with my lunch and felt a nudge in my spirit. It was totally from God, and it was my mom’s voice saying, “Be here now, my love. Be here now.”
I looked down at my lunch—the lunch of almost every sick day of my childhood—and I remembered that some days are just hard days, often for no good reason.
Then I ate, and I thanked God for my food and for His nearness in the random, hard, weird and difficult days.
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Laura Hyers is a Tampa native, writer, and the newly wed wife of musician Caleb. She recently graduated from the University of South Florida with a bachelor’s degree in psychology with a concentration in literature and is currently teaching preschool. When not chasing a class of two-year-olds, Laura is writing and fighting fierce bouts of wanderlust. She loves music, reading, being near the ocean, and dreaming big over huge cups of coffee with her best friend Lakin. Laura blogs at http://littlebirdmarie.wordpress.com.
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and that, my lady… might just have been what he was after.