Because Sometimes You Just Break

I thought this tonight when I had to hit my knees on the worn carpet and bury my face in the armchair so that only God could hear me cry.

Sometimes motherhood breaks something inside you.

She’ll be three years old tomorrow and tonight I indulged and read more than “just one more” and put her back so many times and tried and tried again and finally broke.  I shook my fist and I spanked in anger and she wailed and I broke.

Yet, even in the shattering she reached out to me.  She held out a hand, still baby chubby three years later, and I gathered her up against me and begged forgiveness.  She hugged that little arm with dimples at its elbows and marker on its fingers around my neck and gulped quiet sobs and nodded when I said, “Forgive, mama, please?”

Breaking.  It hurts.  It burns to realize I sometimes teach forgiveness by having to ask for it.  

But, in all that ugliness, she was reaching out to me.  Jesus in a child-baby.

Grace in a toddler’s hand.

Have you read this post today?  I found it at just the right moment, when these words were already formed in my mind.  Another one of His thousand gifts.