Shower Curtain Days

Hello there lovelies! Today I wanted to talk to you about a phenomenon in my life that I like to call “Shower Curtain Days”. Now, they are something special, and I’m sure they happen to you, just under another name in your world. These are the days that you are waking up tired, maybe a little groggy, but determined to be “on” anyway; to be the best mom, wife, employee, whatever, you can be – and then any combination of the events listed below begins to happen…usually, in my case, several in a row during the same day. And yes, these are all the actual things that have made up my shower curtain days in the past few months. Any one of them is not a big deal, but you all know THE day where they will just put you on the edge…and then 5 of them happen all together, just because.

  • You deal with 5 potty-training accidents before lunchtime and throw everything in the washer and are proud of yourself for taking care of it right away…until you open the washer and realize you inadvertently washed a pullup and now there is diaper gel all in the washing machine and the clothes you just washed.
  • You decide to let your kid eat rice (because what about a toddler and rice sounds like a bad idea?!) and spend the next 30 minutes picking up “Every. Single. Grain. Of. Rice.” from your carpet, Mulan-style…or you accidentally bump into something when cleaning up and fling rice everywhere as the fork catapaults through the sky. And as if those experiences didn’t make enough of an impression on you, you decided to add rice to your toddler’s sensory bin..and again, do your best Mulan impression picking up and vacuuming grains of rice from your carpet for the foreseeable future.
  • You buy the kids little play cars, and are happy to hear them giggling together for once and so you stay in the kitchen to finish the dishes, only to find out that the giggles meant your rented apartment’s wall now looks like the Daytona racetrack…if you’re new to toddlers, excessive giggles should be a giant red flag!!
  • Your morning usually starts super early anyway because your toddler doesn’t believe in sleep, but today it started at 4:45 am when the trash truck emptied the apartment dumpster right outside her window…the sounds of the apocalypse are a great way for a baby girl to start the day! And then 75% of the time, this day usually rounds out with the landscaping crews coming to mow the grass, blow the sidewalks and generally do all of the loudest things possible exactly at naptime. The trashmen and the landscapers are in cahoots for sleepless days, y’all!
  • You’re normally a pro in the kitchen, but in the span of 20 minutes cut through your thumb fingernail (why is it always the thumb?!), melt a plastic spoon, and ruin dinner – that is TALENT people, I’m telling you!
  • You slam your new mirror in the car door on the way back from the store and now have a spider-web version hanging in your bathroom because you’re too cheap to get another one.
  • Trying to find a bathing suit, you grab one intertangled stringy piece from the rack and then all of the hangers grab ahold of each other and 65 things fall from the rack onto the floor. You try to put them all back but spend 15 minutes fighting with it. Hangers. Why are they so annoying?!
  • You have plans later tonight and attempt to paint your nails during naptime so you can feel a little more like a lady and a little less like a hot mess, and…enough said. We all know THAT never goes well.
  • You wake up tired and with a headache and try to get your coffee to blood ratio back where it belongs, reach into the cabinet, and realize that you forgot to buy coffee filters and proceed to go throughout the house like a drug addict, trying to find something you can use to brew your coffee….socks? pantyhose? PULLUPS?!
  • You wake up to realize you forgot to run the dishwasher overnight and all sippy cups, utensils and plates are still grimy. The handle breaks off of the dryer when you try to liberate that load of laundry that has been sitting in there for 4 days. You walk out into the darkness of the fresh new day and straight into a pile of cat puke.

Need I go on?

This is just LIFE and it happens to us, but when these things all happen on what I call my “Shower Curtain Days”, it feels like they are just holding down the “UGGGGGGH” button on my spirit and I swear that if I step into my shower at the end of the very long day, and that cold, slimy, billowing, plastic shower curtain touches me one more time, I’m going to just rip it out of the wall and air some colorful language as I destroy the bathroom because it was just the last straw! I HATE the shower curtain touching me in the shower…anyone else? It turns me into the Hulk in a matter of seconds because I hate it so much, and Lord help any innocent bystanders if it happens on that day.

But you know the real truth of it all is that I would be a shower curtain mom every single day if it weren’t for the Holy Spirit, because life happens, it just does. And if we aren’t really equipped to handle it, it makes us not the best versions of ourselves. And its some law of nature that it all happens at once – perhaps a test, perhaps just our perception that day, who knows. But it does.

I need Jesus and I need the power of the Holy Spirit working in and through me to keep me from being a shower curtain mom every single day. I want to get mad at things. I want to scream and shout and pout when things don’t go my way, or are harder that I think they should be. I want to selfishly guard my time and my energy and not share and give to others first. Without God, I’d act like every day was a shower curtain day for sure!

But the Bible says that when we come to salvation in Jesus, we are gifted the Holy Spirit to live within us to change us, mold us, guide us, and impart to us wisdom and supernatural gifts. Galatians 5:22-23 says that the “fruit” of the Holy Spirit is “ love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.”

Notice that it clearly says that the fruits of the SPIRIT are….not the fruits of ME. Me trying harder to noy get frustrated isn’t going to get me anywhere. Me just WANTING to have a good day isn’t going to get me through. “Positive energy” won’t do a thing to change my life. Me having any patience, love, forbearance or peace in my crazy day is directly a result of me having access to the power of God through the Holy Spirit and being gifted with those things. Now, let’s be real – on the shower curtain days, I’m usually less connected to the source, usually by my own design, and so my humanity starts to peek through and tries to destroy my day, and consequently, my bathroom.

The things in my life that I care about so deeply, have prayed for, and over, dreamed about and given myself totally to, exhaust me…in a good way, but exhaust me nonetheless. They bring out my humanity in such a sharp way that it’s sometimes painful. BUT they have driven me to the arms of Jesus in a way nothing else has so I can look past the iffy parts and rest in Jesus, refresh with the fruits of the Holy Spirit and have joy in the midst of it all because God put me here, God put THEM here with me, He’s got it all. And we are ok. Shower curtain days happen, but they aren’t a shower curtain life because of the grace of God. So thankful for that because if it was just me, it would just be a mess. A big mess.

So I give thanks, ask for continued strength to grow and change…and I continue to pray for a stand up shower.

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