By His Hand

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Foster care is hard. Caring for five children is hard. Caring for two babies six weeks apart in age is hard.

Those three sentences are the understatements of the year.

I would be lying to pretend that this was all easy. Mothering these five came so unnaturally and yet naturally to me.

I was always the one to say “I never want to have twins”.

I can still say that.

I don’t have twins.

I have “harder than twins” because my two are on two different need levels, two different sleep levels, two different skill levels and two different “how I understand love” levels while being so close that they are SUPER dependent.

It is hard. Very hard.

And I am thankful that even in the ugliness of the stripping of myself down to my raw haven’t-showered-for-days self, down to the very depths of my sanity shakings… Grace always finds me there.

I cannot do this.

The schedule is exhausting. The workload is intense. The constant lists, the constant balancing, the constant pouring out of everything that I have and everything that I am…

And yet I am blessed to find a groove. To turn and dry my wrinkled dishwater hands and find them… all five of them… smiling and delighting with large legos spread about. Little Man freshly wrapped in a blanket thanks to my toddler, Lil Red knocking down towers that Big Guy and my Commentator delightedly race to build so she can do likewise. And my dear Lil Blondie mothering Little Man and scooting nearby blocks closer to him so he can mouth them.

I don’t deserve this kind of blessing.

I don’t deserve their little hands in mine.

That’s grace for ya.

By the hand of God, our little mashed family of seven somehow works … even in the chaos.

– Thank you, Jesus.