Sometimes I just want it done. To ask for the room to be cleaned up, the fighting to stop, the school work completed.  But my children are the masters of excuses. They will spend twenty minutes defending or complaining about a job that would have taken five.  It’s easy to feel angry when they don’t just get it done.

But I am not much better. The minutia needing to be addressed, undesirable tasks avoided. I’m good at creative procrastination too. I’m too tired. It’s so hard to concentrate when the kids are so loud. I need to come up with a schedule or system that works for me. I’ll start tomorrow. I’m not proud of this, but I also don’t want to accept it as unchangeable.

Getting words onto the page is rarely easy these days and sometimes I just want to give up. I question why I’m fighting so hard when my voice is only one in a seas of many. But I don’t want my excuses to define me. I don’t want to be that woman who could have finished that novel but she was always too tired. The mom who wrote one devotional and had ideas for two more but never published because her kids were too high maintenance.  I can’t give up on the work just because the timeline isn’t what I thought it would be. A year or two lost to circumstance doesn’t have to be the end of a dream, unless I let it be.

I am more than my excuses, but I won’t be unless I get past them.