It’s been so long since I’ve written and been such a long week I feel like I could write for 5 hours and not have it be enough! So writing today for Five Minute Fridays. Perhaps a continuation tomorrow.
GO.
Why does it never feel like what I do is enough? Like anything anyone does is enough.
My mom breastfed us all, she doesn’t wear aluminum deodorant. She eats healthy, she exercises. Yet, yes that lump they found? It is cancer. Again, “it’s small, it’s nothing, it’ll be fine.” Once again, I’ve heard that before and it wasn’t true. My heart beats a bit faster. It wasn’t enough.
I gently place heels to toes to paper. Perfect ink footprints. The only thing this mom with take home with her. Healthy pregnancy, perfect, but perfectly still baby. I take pictures, I help my friend and coworker and I walk back into my patient’s room to just sit and listen to the steady babum babum of the ultrasound on her baby. I have flashbacks all week and I wonder if I did enough. Why what she did wasn’t enough.
I work too much, am too tired and feel like my babies childhood is flashing before my eyes. I struggle with guilt from bygone mistakes. The debt of our youth, convicted to pay for it now, sadly, the sacrifices cost more now too. I oscillate daily wondering what is more pleasing to God, to be debt free or to stop putting money first. Somehow I’m doing too much yet not enough.
I ache with frustration. Every night seems to be a struggle. I lie and wrestle with thoughts in my head, never feeling like what I’m doing is enough. Wanting to stop the merry go round and get off for just one moment to catch my breath, to pray a prayer. I feel my walk away from institutional church more acutely in some of these moments. I wish I could walk through a door of someone’s whose job it is to listen to me, to pray for me. I miss ladies bible study “pray time”. A place to unburden, to share the burden.
Who will pray for me? Who will listen? So I try to do too much, again never feeling like enough. I know I am not enough and was never meant to be, but I can’t seem to let go. I always did learn things the hard way.
STOP.
