Inadequacy

This is the worst gingerbread house ever. Completed a good month after the holidays. Things kept coming up like the stomach flu and ear infections, and, well, gingerbread people need a place to live all year round, don't they? The roof was broken in many peices so we turned it into a patio. And it sort of went downhill from there. It looked nothing like the picture on the box when we were done with it. This gingerbread house is just one tiny reminder of many things that make me feel inadequate. There is a song from Grey's Anatomy that says, "Miss Almost, Miss Maybe, Miss Halfway." Sometimes, in moments of exhausted surrender, I feel like Anya Marina is singing about me.

The hardest thing for me about having a job that I have to go to on a regular basis is this overwhelming feeling of inadequacy. It is always creeping in, like a dense fog, and I am always trying to push it back so I can breathe. As jobs go, mine is flexible. Three days a week, I have patients coming in to be monitored as they exercise. Those are the days I try my best not to miss work. It is stressful for my nurse, who happens to be one of my best friends, to be left in the lurch on those days. She handles it well and never complains, but I try hard not to put her in that situation if I can help it. The remaining two office days are easily negotiable. These are the days I try to schedule things such as haircuts, dentists, doctors, class mom duties, and groceries. Of course, life does not always come in a neat little package wrapped up with a bow like that. There are many factors that do not always adhere to my schedule. The snow buries my van in the driveway or the ice makes the curves and hills of my crazy blacktop too treacherous to attempt the drive with my precious cargo. Kids throw up or spike a fever. Kevin gets an injection in his back. Sometimes there are places I feel like I need to be more than I need to be at work.

Sometimes I feel like I have a thousand strings tied all over my body and the only direction I can go is toward the string that is pulling me the hardest. When I do miss a work day for unexpected reasons, I feel inadequate at my job. I feel guilty for placing the extra burden on my nurse. I don't want my patients to consider me to be unreliable. When I forget to send the dollar so Madison can buy a drink at her class party at school that day, I feel inadequate as a mother. Or when the kids mention whose mom was at the class party. Sometimes I take kids to Grandma's house when they are sick instead of staying home with them myself...if it is a patient day at work. How wrong is that?

I am gone most days. As with most families, the evening shuffle includes dinner, dishes, laundry, homework, bath time, and bedtime(which includes quality time rocking a baby). Add to this the fact that the wood stove needs wood in it and the cows need checked as we had our first calf this week. Kevin has been having some bad days with his back so I am the one in the gum boots and snow, both up to my knees. He has been cooking some to balance things out, but all of this adds to more feelings of inadequacy as housework piles up and people are pulling their clothes out of laundry baskets instead of their dresser drawers. When I considered what I wanted to be when I grew up, I am confident that I never said I wanted to be half of a mom and half of a wife or half of an employee and a partial homemaker. I just wanted to be a wife and a mother and to work in a job that I enjoy and that helped people in some way.

I am a wife and I am a mother. I do like my job and I almost always feel like I am making a difference with my patients. But in trying to encompass every facet of my life to make me the person I want to be, I feel like most of the time I am inadequate on every side. Like I am doing everything half way so I cannot do a good job at anything. I see women who never miss work. I see women who never miss a function at school. I see women with immaculate homes. I do not see any of those women when I look in the mirror. I see a woman who loves her family. I see a woman who likes her job and feels abundantly blessed. Mostly I see a woman who has a long way to go in figuring the rest out.