It's been a long road

The past several months have been hard months. The kind that while you are in them you feel so alone and troubled but as you start to lift out of them you realize how much God has used the difficult time to teach you so much about yourself, your spouse, your family.

We've had some really big things happening in our lives since the end of September 2010. We were presented with some difficult news and a difficult decision. We decided we had to go for custody of my stepson James. We won custody but we also lost all contact with MaKayla. My heart breaks and the tears fall as I say that the child we have raised as if she were my husband's own daughter, we are no longer allowed to see per her mother's request. We never were legally binded to her so we must now honor this request although we will still pray everday that someday our family will again be whole. Due to this at some point you may see her name removed from my list of children. She will always be our daughter but it's unrealistic to say I have six children when in fact I will now only be parenting five.

This alone was a lot to deal with and made blogging difficult as words just seemed to escape me, but then I had my accident. On October 30, 2010 I fell off a ladder at my brother's house while helping him do some painting for his softettes. For the distance I fell it's quite obvious that God watched out for me. I had a mild concussion, from knocking myself out when I hit my head twice on the ground, and I broke the talus bone in my ankle. This was a miracle. I was okay and within a few months would recover, but it would also start a journey into self discovery of how my household should run and what my role in it truly was.

 You see I was sold on the myth that the mother should be the one doing most of the cooking and cleaning and diaper changes. Yeah I would have my older children help out but I thought they needed their childhoods and to make them do too much would deprive them. Wow, what a bunch of bologna, right? The first week or two of sitting with a foggy head from pain meds and my ankle up high went okay due to a lot of friends and family stopping by to help with the cleaning and the kids. Then Steve was back at work, the friends and family were back to their lives and we needed a plan.

Stay tuned for part 2 tomorrow.