About a month and a half ago, I reached out to a company I admire. They provide a product I love, one that I share with people ALL the time. I was planning some content for April and was hoping they wanted to provide a coupon code or give something special to my readers and especially my course subscribers. Crickets. I tried again. And again. Not even an acknowledgment of my email. To this day, I have heard nothing from anyone in their marketing department. I felt tiny and insignificant. It stung.
Yesterday I took two of my boys to see their pediatrician. The McClure household is under siege it seems with one illness after another. I was able to schedule an appointment online for one child, but the next morning when another child informed me he was feeling sick, I tried to schedule another appointment online before rushing the whole van-load to school drop-off and the scheduled 8:30 appointment. I got an error message. Twice. So I reasoned that I would try to schedule an additional appointment when I arrived at the pediatrician’s office. The pediatrician’s schedule appeared to have plenty of morning openings.
We arrived about ten minutes early. I naively thought there would be no issues. Instead, the receptionist and nurse decided “it would be easier”–their words, definitely not mine–to charge me an additional fee, consider me a “walk-in” and then add my second son to the doctor’s schedule at 10. Then they pawned me off on someone else to take my payment. I was frustrated. To top it all off, the woman taking my payment double-charged me and wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to explain her mistake. Now I will get to call their billing office and wait on hold forever. I felt bulldozed.
There’s the important letter someone told me they sent that never came. The promised email that no matter how many times I refresh, it’s never arrived in my inbox. The return phone call I was expecting that never came.
Sound familiar?
The timing of all of these disappointments aligning with week 3 of sickness in our household left me feeling pretty down. I felt invisible. Thoughts like, “You don’t matter to anyone,” “Nobody appreciates you,” and “Nobody wants to listen to you,” filled my head and stomped on my heart all day. The negativity barraging me yesterday was crushing. I went to bed last night with a tired, broken heart.
This morning, however, is a brand new day. And in the quiet hours of this morning, I had two thoughts that I feel I need to share:
1- Everything happens for a reason.
I know that sounds trite. Sometimes
2- Having sick kids is isolating.
I forget! But yesterday as I felt trapped at home, admiring the beautiful sunshine outside from a window and feeling guilty that I had to postpone the zoo trip I promised our 3-year-old yet another week, a flood of memories came rushing back to me. Like when I was couped-up in a windowless NICU wishing to be able to take my babies outside. Or holding a baby with RSV praying he would take milk from a dropper every few minutes so I wouldn’t have to take him back to the hospital. Or that one time when three little boys caught both strains of the flu and after a miserable week and a half of the flu, one developed pneumonia, one had double ear infections, and the other got strep. It was the longest month of my life. Nobody else knows what you are going through in times like that. And if you are like me, you are too focused on survival to even think to reach out and ask for help.
I’m not telling you what to think or feel. I hope that you have some tools in your toolbox to help you in those
The thing I want to remind myself and you, friend, is that we are not alone. No matter how insignificant and invisible we may feel, we are never insignificant or invisible to the One who matters most. We deserve to feel joy, even amidst the chaos and challenges of day-to-day life. I know this. I hope you know it. I hope you feel it. Deeply. I hope it resonates from the tips of your tired, overworked feet all the way up to the ends of those stray hairs that insist on pointing straight up.
You deserve joy.
