I don’t know about any of you, but as a coach and as a friend, counselor, sister…all-around “tell everybody else how to make themselves and their lives better while my life under a microscope looks like a rare flu epidemic that’s prone to choke the life out of a summo wrestler within seconds”…I’m a little challenged.

Great coach, love my clients and they me, but man, every time I give advice, I have to be tested, slammed, right in my face in my own life. I’m telling my clients that they need to make their children more responsible and more involved in the maintenance of the home and my children think Alice, Florence, and Geoffrey (if you don’t know who they are, just watch TVLand this weekend) live with them. I have slacked of the charts because I thought they had a routine. When we homeschooled, I taught whole lessons on forming good habits and maintaining your role in a home. For what? For 4 months to go by and I feel like they are going out of the world backward. But it’s not just them, my husband and I are putting much going through a lot and we are just trying to pull ourselves out of the fog. I talked to God last night and said, “Hey, I know we have to grow and be better, but do we have to have growing pains at the same time and does it have to take some dayum long?” Ok, it wasn’t completely like that, but close enough. Our children are watching us, watching our lead and we are not good examples.

My bedroom…stone cold mess. FEMA would surrender and declare it a natural disaster. I feel like I’m cleaning and putting away clothes all of the time, but they keep jumping out of the drawers and closets and landing on the floor. My daughter, who was told that if she didn’t keep her room straight (now that she’s solo at age 13), that she would get evicted…well, her room is…shall we say…a smokin’ hot mess. Now, she has broken bookcase/unable to hold her books/CDs, etc., a bedframe that is so broken that if you bounce a little, the bed is on the floor and a closet not big enough for 2 coats, a suit and a sweater holder. No, I’m not making excuses, but she does have some challenges. I read organizing books, watch all of these HGTV shows, but all I can think about now is “How quickly can put everything in a pile, short of underwear and a couple of my favorite shoes, set it a fire and get out before the house has any real damage?” The kids would be fine because I’ve had them pack their clothes in suitcases since all of their dressers are broken and are barely holding the clothes anyway.

Oh, gotta tell you all about the purity classes that my oldest daughter is taking…yes, she’s taking even more classes. I know many of you disagree or are not sure if it is necessary or if it makes sense, but at least I know that girlfriend will not be confused or ignorant and her choices would be made with complete consciousness…no naivete going on in my camp. We are preparing or better yet, I am preparing myself for her to go to high school and while I know she will do well/be alright/have what she need, my seven year old lets me know that he’s been listening. He has a girl that he likes in his class and after she communicates that she likes him too, he says…”N, I have been through the girlfriend-boyfriend thing and I got into some trouble, so let’s just be friends. It’s better that way.” Yes. That boy is something else and while I’m trying to process what’s going with him, the kindergarten teacher pulls me to the side and says, “K’s mom told me that I need to separate him and Niara because she wrote him a love note and gave him her phone number.” I tried not to laugh. She doesn’t even talk on the phone! His mother thought this was necessary at age 5. Wow, we live in an interesting world, but I went to my daughter just to get some clarification.

When I talked to her, she said, “He is my friend and he told me what to write because I couldn’t even spell best friend.”

“Do you mean boyfriend, honey?”

She said, “No. I just wrote on mine what he wrote on his letter to me.”

“Oh, he wrote you a letter.”

“Yeah, but I lost it, so I wrote him one back.”

“What did it say?”

“I like being your best friend and I love you and I put my phone number at the bottom.”

I felt silly having this conversation, but at the same time, if I’m talking about relationships with everybody else…I gotta talk about it with the baby girl too. Life…has someone found the manual on this thing yet?

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