This weekend my house will filled with “normal”. Frankly, that doesn’t happen very often. We do not live an orderly, quite, predictable, “normal” life. We hosted the girls from our church’s youth group for dinner Saturday night. The youth were on a “retreat” of sorts through a program called D-Now (Disciple-Now). Our church was the host of over 350 youth from area churches. They met for group sessions with a dynamic speaker and band. Then they broke out into gender-specific smaller groups by church. While we were not the host home for spending the night, we were host to all the girls and their youth leaders (about 25 in all). The leaders had requested a “formal” dinner, something “girly”. It was fun to oblige.

White linens, red roses, Italian food and chocolate fondue fit the bill. Before dinner the girls and grown ups did karaoke, acted goofy and laughed. It was great to have all this “normal” teenage energy in the house.

Don’t get me wrong, LuLu was far from normal during all this. In fact, she had a rough weekend brought on by a variety of things we’re still trying to sort out. But “normal” was showing up at our house for a change…and I was highly focused on making sure everyone was fed and happy.

Yet…I was annoyed with “normal” as well. Most days that I long for things to be more “normal” around here. When I see glimpses of “normal” 10-year-olds and glimpses of what a family is like when children are healthy, I feel twinges of envy (sometimes the envy is bigger than a twinge…) But as I eavesdropped on “normal” conversation of “normal” moms about “normal” kids, I was filled with all kinds of negative emotions. Not envy as much as disbelief at the amount of complaining and energy that is expended on such trivial matters as what the child wears, a child’s broken glasses or what someone said at work. I have a vague recollection of being annoyed at those things too. But who has time for that when your crises are so much larger?

If any of my church friends are reading this, lest you be offended, my annoyance was an interesting struggle between wanting to yell “you think you’ve got problems” and longing for the time and energy to complain about the exact same thing. In otherwords, it’s not “normal” people’s fault that I was annoyed, because I would be doing the exact same thing if I were you. And it doesn’t make me better or stronger than you…only different. If you were in my position, you would have survived the trials you remind me that you “don’t know how I survive”and would be feeling equally “abnormal”. It’s just that you have the luxury to worry and be bothered by things I do not have the time or energy for. When I used to be bothered by those things I had no clue the unimportance of them or that there were people who weren’t bothered by the same things. I had no clue when our family was “normal” what a blessing that truly was. Nor did I know that I could survive a child ripping holes in her clothes, getting suspended from school, breaking family heirlooms. I had no idea that even those wounds (which seemed insurmountable at first) would heal and the pain would fade away. And the priorities of life would so drastically change.

Yet…seeing “normal” brings such a flood of emotions. And widens the chasm between me and “normal” parents even further. I have no way to relate. It's truly like being on the outside, looking in. I want “normal”, yet I know that if I awoke tomorrow and everything in our world was back to “normal”, I wouldn’t be…I’m forever changed. And that is very disconcerting for me.

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