Ever since we started attending our new church, Sunday services had provided a safe place in the midst of a week of activities that invariably make me feel not-good-enough. I spend all week burnt out and exhausted working a job that I could have worked without my college education, or even without a high school education, for that matter. So I feel guilty for being exhausted. If I'm tired while I'm underachieving, how could I ever possibly contribute anything meaningful and achieve-y to the world? Day after day I am squandering any potential I may have, and I'm absolutely fatigued from doing it. So I feel like a failure. And I feel guilty.
One of the reasons I give for working the job that I have is that the flexible schedule allows me to be home with my children when they are home, to be a "better parent." But the fact of the matter is that I'm a mediocre, sleep-deprived parent at best. I'm jumpy, irritable, disoriented, and not-too-terribly domestic. I want to engage with my children, but mostly I just want silence and a dark place to curl up and hide.
Socially, I'm pretty much addled with anxiety, which leads to depression, which leads to anxiety, and on and on. So I feel guilty and awful in relation to my friends because I spend most days in hiding, not engaging socially at all.
I also teach preschool dance and I'm lucky if I can get ten minutes of instruction in before they start throwing shoes and licking the mirror. Yet another weekly marker of my ineptitude.
I get that most of these things are a matter of my perception. I understand that probably I am an okay mother. I get that my whole identity isn't bound up in what type of job I have (even if all of my time is). I know that social anxiety is at least a little bit chemical, and that I'm doing the best I can. And I have yet to meet a toddler who wasn't tempted to lick a mirror now and then. But I still feel the way that I feel. I still feel guilty and shameful and wasted.
So for me, looking forward to Sundays had been the one thing that could coax me through the week. On Sundays I could just go and be, and not worry about if I was failing or succeeding, achieving or just pathetically scraping by, presenting the perfect social face or just barely managing to drag my depressed self out in public wearing something other than plaid pajama pants. Sundays were the one time when I didn't have to worry about being not-good-enough.
Of course, church is more than just taking and enjoying (although sometimes it needs to be exactly that, and I think that's okay, too). I want to participate. I want to give. I want to share, and help, and be a part of things. And so I volunteered to teach Sunday school. My husband and I had been teaching elementary kids together at the old church, and it had gone well. They think I'm funny, and the feeling is mutual. I could handle elementary school kids. I understood them. I felt okay teaching them. Not exactly like a teaching superstar, but adequate...which is about as close to confident as I get.
But our new church needed a preschool teacher, and as the universe seems to be conspiring to fill my life with small people at every turn, I was placed with the toddler/preschool group. And I was terrified.
If I sometimes struggle with a small dance class of a half dozen three year olds, what am I supposed to do with a dozen toddlers? And on a Sunday, the one single day of the week where there is sanctuary from my self-loathing and inadequacy? Instead of having something to look forward to, something to cling to in order to make it through the week, there was something to dread and fear. Instead of being a part of something new, and feel-good, and worship-y, and wonderful, I would be confined to the basement never to be seen again. Woe is me! Yes. I know how utterly selfish this sounds. And I'm not saying that I didn't want to contribute at all, but just that maybe I should have signed up to be a greeter, or a communion-give-y person because I'm sure that I will ruin preschool for everyone. And because The Basement Forever. Woe, oh, woe! (I am inadequate and so very many things, but one of the things I am admittedly good at is melodrama. I am so, so good at melodrama.)
But I don't want to be selfish. I want to be selfless and confident. I feel the way I feel, but I'm trying not to be a slave to that. Because how I feel doesn't have to be how I act. I may feel depressed, but I can act out hope. I may feel selfish, but I don't have to behave that way. I might not even die if I go against my feelings. Maybe.
And so I diligently practiced the very-very-scripted story that I was scheduled to teach. I practiced making my hand circle "in a counter-clockwise direction" over the story scenery (because apparently, if you circle your hand in a clockwise direction, Satan wins?). I practiced not inserting snarky feminist commentary into the preschool Bible story, because I'm told they don't get irony. And then I told my inner whiny child to be quiet. And I made my way to the basement nevertobeseenagain. And I braced myself. Because I was going to mess this up so badly.
An then something surprising happened.
Preschool was amazing.
Not perfect. There were weeping children, and bickering children, and children who just flat out did not like the song that we were singing, and children who ran too quickly to be caught, and children who absolutely would not put away the Play-Doh because their creations should be immortal. But all of the children were wonderful, too. They listened, captivated, to the story. They didn't even mind that the women didn't have names (I will have to work on that...they should mind). They shook my hand and offered me peace in manifold adorable ways. They took communion in as solemn a manner as anyone could ever hope for preschool children. And when we were done, I didn't feel defeated, or sad, or hopeless.
I didn't feel anything about me at all.
It turns out that the preschool children are exhilarating. They gave me energy. They made me smile and forget myself and all my crazy, neurotic baggage. I'm so excited to see them again next week. Even if they cry, run in circles, and fight over markers. Because even if I don't manage to construct the perfect Montessori-style preschool Sunday school class, I can for sure love and welcome these beautiful little people. I can marvel at how their eyes light up, and how their voices sing, and how curious and creative they are, and how they try so, so, hard to learn to live with each other.
It turns out that I can meet God in the basement just as readily as I can meet God in the sanctuary (or the social hall, in our case). God is there in the midst of the little children. Of course, God is.
Thank God for the little children. And thank God for the Sabbath. And thank God for every new opportunity to practice (heels dragging and heart racing) selfless giving and humility. And thank God for the knowledge that I never will or can be "good enough" at this selflessness. And thank God that there is love and grace enough anyway: love and grace that look an awful lot like Play-doh, goldfish crackers, and sticky little fingers.
And honestly, I don't know if I can conceive of a sanctuary constructed of anything more beautiful than that.
