What do you do when the music stops?

What do you do?

When the gentle coos and delightful giggles turn into growling monster faces shouting, “I will NOT do that”?

When the soft and gentle hands pulling your nose and patting your cheeks, pudgy arms wrapping around and squeezing your neck, sweet, dutchy voices saying soft “I wuv yous” turn into flailing arms and legs, intentional hard fists directed at your gut, head butts, and loud, “I don’t like yous”?

What do you do when the quiet happy sounds of two brothers playing turns into loud and violent tears and accusations?

What do you do when the monotony of laundry and dishes and food spilled on clothes and faces all runs together and you’re sure that you are dying ‒ your brain cells are literally shriveling up into desiccated raisins ‒ and you’re so bored. But you’re also tired and overwhelmed? How can you be both bored and exhausted? And what do you do?

What do you do when you just want to quit. Take a vacation. Choose a different career. Call it quits. Do something else ‒ anything else?

You keep going.

You look inside your heart ‒ and your head ‒ and you think about the things that you truly, deeply want. You consider carefully what you want your life to look like in twenty years, and you remember all of the reasons that you want exactly what you have right now, and you keep going. 

You remember that the best things in life take a lot of hard work.

You remember that nothing worth having comes easy.

You tell yourself to pick yourself up out of the dirt ‒ or ask someone to reach down and lend a hand, and you climb up out of the dirt. You put a pack of icy peas on your black eye. You wrap an ace bandage around your sprained ankle, and you keep going.

You remember how much you love those soft, squishy faces that have grown into lean and thin sassy mouths, and you remember that a tender heart still lives inside this stretched-out body. You remember that those babies are growing up and are learning and are trying to figure out this thing called life and that they’re making mistakes and doing things they feel bad about and things they feel great about and that sometimes they have no clue what they’re doing, just like you. And you keep going.

Maybe you have a good cry first. Maybe you enjoy a glass of wine. Maybe you go out for dinner all by yourself. Maybe you hide in your room or watch a dumb movie. Maybe you wallow in anger and discontent and your struggling for two months. Maybe it only lasts for two hours. But you keep going. You give your little ones hugs and pull them into your lap. You remember that you really do love them and that even if they say they don’t right now, they love you too. Like exercising when you don’t feel like it and eating eggs and spinach when you want donuts, you sit down and color or play a game. Anything to reconnect and have fun again so that you all remember that you not only love each other, but you kind of like each other, too, and you laugh and think about how cute they are and how you love to see their eyes sparkle and their dimples squeeze their cheeks, and you keep going. One minute, one hour, one day at a time. 

Note to self: When you feel bad and life isn’t going your way, stop and think about the things that you don’t want to do but that you know will make you feel better, and then go do that. Each day, we make choices. We can choose what is easy and what feels good. What we feel like doing. Or we can choose the action that we know will end in the result that we desire. Sometimes that action is easy and feels good and is what we feel like doing, and sometimes that action is hard. Sometimes it takes days, weeks, or months to take the action. The important thing is that we do it, no matter how long it takes. We have to make a choice to choose the end result that we want, and we have to take the actions required to get there. Our very lives depend upon it.