**Announcement: my second child, a shiny new HP laptop, arrived in the mail today. Expect much more frequent blogs.**



I had a dream last night that I went back. They took me on as a contractor/consultant. Basically I was a freelance recruiter, and they had a base structure they paid me with bonuses on top. It was very pleasant, and it was like I could make my own rules. I got to say how things would go. It had me wondering if maybe I should look into going back – kind of test the waters. But then I remember how many days I left there so stressed and so unsure of things. I would wonder how badly I had messed up this time, and what I could do to make up for it the next day, and what they were thinking about me and saying to each other about me behind my back. If they were asking each other if I was on pills, or if I was having trouble adjusting to being a single mother, or if I was going to get married and leave them high and dry, or if I was just plain stupid. I would complete a project and many times it would be sent back to me for correction – the tiniest, most insignificant correction, or the amount of time I had taken with it would be criticized, or it would simply be ignored. I would make suggestions and they would be cut off at the pass, and I always wondered if they could see my jaw clench, and if they knew how many jaw clenches I was from leaving them. I would be drilled for answers, and when I couldn’t answer them as precisely as they wanted, I would sit there, feeling like a bumbling idiot. I felt like a bumbling idiot about 50% of the time that I was there. About 25% of the time that I was there, I was happy – we were laughing, planning, looking to the future, agreeing with each other, making plans. I never felt like he was quite as excited as I was about things or as she would be. I always felt like he looked at me with varying levels of mistrust or disinterest. And I struggled to truly respect him in return. The other 25% of the time that I was there, I was trying to figure out how to motivate these people that worked for us – how to encourage them when my assignment was to crack the whip. How to manage them without insulting their intelligence. How to keep my cool when they did things that were going to make my life immensely more difficult. I felt like I had to know everything – to have my hands in, on and around the entire operation, and in the end, my hands just weren’t big enough. So I took that on as a personal fault. My tragic flaw, having such small hands. So I have taken that away with me. The Small Hand Syndrome. I am grasping at my job, my daughter, my family, my friends, my home, my church, my budget, my health, my God…and I am finding that my hands just won’t reach around all of it. So I can keep grasping and straining and reaching and ending up frustrated and worried and, once again, feeling like a bumbling idiot. Or I can realize that my hands are not meant to reach around all of my life. That there are hands bigger than mine that hold me and all of the above. And that is where I hope to find peace – in the adequacy of knowing that my hands were not built to hold the world…and that it is perfectly okay.

If I could tell the world just one thing
It would be that we're all ok
And not to worry because worry is wasteful
and useless in times like these
I will not be made useless
I won't be idled with despair
I will gather myself around my faith
for light does the darkness most fear
My hands are small, I know,
but they're not yours they are my own
and I am never broken