A Full Moon

The Full Moon and other Happenings…

What a week the full moon has brought us!! Did I mention I have four teenage daughters and a teenage son?!?! The full moon tends to bring about some very confused hormones and attitudes and behaviors and this week was no different! There are so many days, so, so many days I get down on myself for my own hormonal rages, or temper tantrums due to pain or whatever angst I am going through, but I have really been working on being a better disciple of Christ and working on being a better mom by being a better example to my children of how to cope with stressful and painful situations and how to make things better rather than worse, but I tell you, I was not prepared for this past week and the waves of emotion and turmoil and joy and excitement and sadness and disappointment and despair, you really would have thought someone was dying…

I am supposed to be the calm and steady rock, but I didn’t know if everyone was going to survive. Add to the hormonal chaos a pre-teen who was perhaps feeling like she wasn’t getting enough attention, so she had to do something terrible at school and get sent to the principal’s office, then we had to deal with a telling of a lie over the incident, and add to teh mix two birthdays mid-week of two of the hormonal teenagers and then add all the jealousy and horrible feelings that come from one person feeling like the other person got something more or better or whatever, no matter how hard you and everyone else tried to go out of their way to make each girl’s day special, it never seems to be enough.

One day they are happy and sweet and wanting to feed the missionaries and have them over for dinner and the next day, I can only get 10 out of 12 to get up and go to church. I thought there was going to be an actual fist fight over it as the Bishop and one of our Stake Presiden’t were there to visit prior to our Ward Conference taking place later that morning. I forgot to mention we also had a double slumber party for the double birthdays, resulting in 12 children over the weekend, instead of six, so as they are arriving to talk to my children, who had been repeatedly warned to be ready for church by the time they arrived, it took at least 15 minutes to get them all to come downstairs in various stages of dress and half-awake stupor.

I love my children and I want to give them so much, but sometimes, I just want to take so much away and scale things back to a much simpler place and time. These kids are growing up in a world that is forcing them to know things they don’t understand and it makes for such a tumultuous ride. They are faced with so much information at their fingertips and communication devices I could only dream of as a kid, but now am so thankful I didn’t have them to distract me from making friends in real-life and learning how to play and communicate and work things out in person, instead of growing up in a world where cyber-bullying and creating fake images of yourself run rampant, I am so happy to have grown up without these things so I can teach my children to ignore those things and to use social media and the internet to spread good and not more negativity in a world that is dark and ugly enough. I hope we can all find beauty and happiness in something each day.

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I am so thankful to be grounded in the gospel and I hope that I have given and continue to give my children a strong enough foundation to navigate their way through all of the worldly noise and distractions. Even after all of the fighting and yelling all week, I couldn’t help but smile to myself and be proud of my little missionaries, always inviting and bringing their friends to church and youth activities. They might not realize it now, but I know they are laying the foundation and planting a seed in those friends and as I looked at them all in my rear-view mirror and had to laugh at what a motley crew I was taking to church, I was also proudly humming the song “the Armies of Helamen” as I was thinking these are today’s stripling warriors, right here in my car. Maybe this convert mom is not doing so bad after all…