this week, i'm living with my cousins (amelia & greta, 15 & 12) while my aunt and uncle are out of town. it's only been 24 hours, but i feel like a scatterbrained , failing mom already. i left the back door open and there is currently 1 wasp and 1 bumblebee hovering around in the now-barricaded sun room (while we wait for them to die). i locked myself out of their house this morning, after i asked amelia for the garage code and promptly forgot it. i dropped greta off and forgot to make a plan for picking her up. they went to bed a whole hour later than they were supposed to last night. i can't even look at greta's busted up ankle (much less wrap it) without getting woozy.
why the space cadet lately? well, i think a constant parade is marching inside my head: all the wedding details, all the vbs details, all the apartment details, piled on top of the everyday things like bills and deadlines and friendships and family crises. (life can seem so selfish).
and yet, i know this time is absolutely critical. the times i get to spend with these girls has become less and less. i know the words i say, the actions i repeat, are being watched by wide-eyed, scrutinizing faces. (anything you say or do can be used against you in a court of law...)
we have something rare - we still have our extended family structure intact. what used to be completely standard (those extended families, living in little circles of huts, cousins carrying around cousins, grandparents teaching grandchildren, aunts and uncles admonishing nieces and nephews, all this interaction and community developing effortlessly between generations on a daily basis) is virtually nonexistent in america today. we can strive for this in a church setting, but overall, it's hard to find in our individualistic culture.
all this to say: i have a responsibility when i am with my cousins. a unique responsibility that a mom or a peer can't fulfill. words like "discipling" and "mentoring" spring to mind, but even that can sound a little artificial. i guess i hope, above everything else, that i give them a healthy dose of Jesus. not the fake, syrupy christianity guzzled down by the appeasing majority. but a sacrificial understanding of what it means to a take up a cross, and follow meekly in his footsteps. with the understanding that you're gonna fall, but that there's also gonna be a hand to pick you back up... whether it be his hand, or mine.
i hope a little progress was made in that direction. yesterday, when the girls got home from school, we huddled around the island in the kitchen for over an hour, processing the car accident of a 16 year old girl named Candy (another cousin - joey's - girlfriend of over a year). we talked a lot about life and death, and then we told lots of goofy stories to get our minds off the sadness. amelia and i went for a run later. we were both panting in the heat, hardly saying a word, but i kept trying to match her uneven rhythm, stopping when she stopped, starting when she started.
i'm nowhere near perfect, but i hope those moments will add up to enough.
:)
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