I have noticed a trend, in the course of my life, in my journaling.  When things are going well, I rarely write.  I guess I don’t feel a need.  But when things are going poorly – that’s when my journal fills up.  (Someday, my great-great-grandchildren will probably get a pretty warped view of my life.)

The opposite tends to happen around here.  I write when thins are going well, but when I am discouraged, I struggle to write.  I figure that no one wants to read about my discouragement, because you don’t come here so that you can get depressed.

Unfortunately, it’s getting harder and harder for me to find time to write at all, because life just gets more and more discouraging.  I feel as though it’s all a waste.  Not because my family is not worth the investment of my time.  That’s just it – my time is seemingly never invested; it’s always just spent.  There is never anything to show for it.

For all of our training, our children are, if anything, worse in their behavior and attitudes than they were two or three years ago.  I prepare food, and everyone complains about it instead of eating it.  I buy food, and the three-year-old ruins it, so it has to be thrown away.  For that matter, I buy anything – gifts, clothing, whatever – and the three-year-old destroys it so that it has to be trashed and purchased again.  And it is a struggle to juggle things in such a way that we could buy it all the first time.  We certainly cannot afford to buy everything again.  And again.  And again.  I spend hours cleaning, tidying, and organizing – just to have the children completely trash the space in a hundredth of the time it took to make it nice.  God forbid I should ever try to actually decorate anything!  I can’t even keep it functional.

That is all the tip of the iceberg.  So that’s why my posts have been sparse, of late.  Because that’s all I really have to say right now – and it isn’t really what any of you want to hear.

So I will head to Relevant the day after tomorrow (without a computer, so I won’t be blogging during the conference) and dream that perhaps it will be sufficiently restorative that I can regain some tiny smidgen of hope that will allow “Real…” blogging means having something to say worth saying.  If so, you should be hearing from me early next week.