All I Can Do.

This week has been a whirlwind of last minute, procrastinating, waiting, dealing, preschool drop offing, first day of AWANA 20 minutes lateing, therapists knocking, speech preparing, potty training, packing, craziness.

I leave today for Blog Sugar.

The conference itself isn’t until Sunday, but sweet friends crossing the country beckon me to come earlier.

We have plans.

Girly pink plans filled with window shopping, eating, yapping, giggling and other assorted silliness.  Plans bursting at the seams with promises of dreamy happy moments.  And getting lost.  Pretty sure that’ll happen at least twice.

My inbox has been a choatic disaster with email strings 685 messages long.

Coordinating, joking, lines of nothing more than a simple exclamation of excitment.

Through all the excitement and planning and general allowance to be a little girl getting together for tea with her friends after a 2 week chicken pox isolation, I started to panic.

Like, really, truly, ohmygoodness I can’t believe this panic.

I’m speaking at this gig.

I’ve done plenty of public speaking when I worked at my Big Girl job.  I’ve stood before a crowded room of 600 people in college when a rushed whisper “Quick, Jeannett…go out there and keep them occupied, we need a few more minutes…”

Don’t get me wrong, I get butterflies right before and that weird sweaty feeling and you’re not actually sweating thing happens.  But generally, I don’t really stress about public speaking.

But this is different.

The session I’m hosting with Julie: Using Your Blog for Good.

Pressure.

I have to have something good for people.  Something worth their conference ticket.  Not just the expected, ‘duh, we knew that already’ kinda thing. 

I gotta bring it.

And then that gets me thinking: dude.  people paid money to come to this.   their hard earned, personal bank account money.  and even more stressful…lots and lots of people not only paid the entrance fee, but they traveled…in some cases as far as New York!…to come to this thing.  That’s airfare, and hotel, and food, and maybe even rental cars.  To hear me, and an amazing group of girls speak.  I keep seeing the list and wondering how on earth I got on there.

I’m just Jeannett.  I’m not fancy.  I’m not special.  Just me.  A girl with a blog.

My everyday unglamorous normalness feels really obvious right now.

Will I fall flat?  Will I sound silly?  Will I disappoint?  Will I cry?

Almost a for sure yes on that last one.  No doubt.

But I keep thinking of the words Jill’s Neurologist said to me once…

You know those times when someone says something to you, and it just resonates deeply?  They have no idea how much they’ve impacted you or that you’ll remember that random sentence for years to come.  They were just talking.

After Jill had her first seizure, with panic on the tip of my tongue and clearly drawn all over my face, I asked: “what if she has one in the middle of the night???  or during a nap????  how will i know to go help her?”

She told us to either have her sleep in our room (which was  a disaster where not a single one of us slept for weeks)…or have a video monitor on her and keep an eye on it.

A helplessness I have never felt before as a mother crept into my heart and started wriggling its way deeper to get nice and comfy cozy.

“but…she doesn’t make any noise when she’s seizing…how…would I…?” tears caught in my throat.

In a single second, I felt helpless, angry, annoyed, and downright terrified.

You see, Jill needs meds to stop her seizures.  As far as we know, she would seize for a very long time if left to her own devices (her last seizure lasted an hour and took three rounds of valium to stop it).  Seizures aren’t a big deal, albeit scary looking, in general…unless they last too long.  We have no idea how long Jill would seize if allowed, but we are pretty certain it wouldn’t be short.

And this sweet woman…with her big smart Neurologist brain…put down her clipboard and said:

“All you can do is the best you can do.  As long as you know you did your best, then you know you did your absolute best.”

I can’t tell you how often her words have rung through my head.

About Jill.  About parenting in general.  Keeping house.  Trying to be a good mom.  A good wife.  A good friend.  A good blogger?

So on Sunday,  know I’ll be doing my best.  Because that’s all I can do.

If you’re there say hi.  And give me a nice big dose of grace…

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jeannett

I'm a mom to four. A wife to one. I believe in story. I love telling you about mine and would love to hear yours. There's really no sense in wasting our suffering and not sharing in each other's joy. We're all in this together...even if it doesn't always feel like it.

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