On gentle reminders

 Another helping of Thankful Thursdays.

It was 1 a.m. and the night continued to torment me with a wailing toddler.

Henry had a cold. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't sleep well, and we had been up and down for closing in on two hours.

For what felt like the hundredth time that night, I left my screaming boy in his crib and went back to bed, pulled the covers over my face and prayed.

I was angry.

I couldn't figure out how to help my very tired child and I had no assurance of ever getting my own much-needed dose of restorative sleep.

Hot tears poured over my cheeks and dripped beneath my earlobes, drenching my pillowcase.

I wound myself into a knot of self pity and whisper-yelled abusive snipes at my God. I criticized him for claiming to be someone who cares about our prayers, yet sometimes sees fit not to answer them.

There was a whole world out there filled with economic crises, wars, cancer, abused children and in my own home -- an inconsolable toddler and an exhausted mother.

My personal grief paled in comparison to the rest of the world's ills, I'll admit, but beneath the fog of a sleepless night it seemed to me a fitting summary.

Just when I began to believe I might never be delivered from those accursed conditions, I heard something else begin to harmonize with the screaming from the bedroom next door.

I stopped my torrents to get a better earful.

What was that?

Henry's hollering retreated for a moment and I heard a tiny, scratchy voice forcing out a disjointed, sleepy refrain of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm."

It was our 4-year-old, Calvin, also tired, beleaguered and verging on a full-blown cold of his own, trying to get his roommate, and himself, back to sleep.

Only in Calvin's hands-thrown-up, last-ditch-effort to get some peace in the house, he didn't sound wretched or resentful. He sounded like an angel.

I stopped crying and so did Henry. I began to ache a little.

Guilt replaced my anger, but before I could turn sour that sweet reminder of the whole parts of a family working together when one hasn't the strength to carry on, I caught wind of my goal this month -- to find ways to be thankful.

It wasn't until the next morning, after we all had slept in and had been delivered into the freshness of a new day, that I allowed my heart to soften a bit.

I was thankful -- not just for sleep at long last, or that if I hadn't been effective in getting Henry to rest, that at least his big brother had been.

Instead, I was thankful that the reminder to halt my rage and self pity came not in a lightning bolt from the heavens, but rather in the form of a whispered lullaby from the room next door.

I find it much easier to accept criticism that way.

And I continue to be thankful that in spite of the certainty that I'll lash out again in a midnight rage against elusive sleep, that I am not fully responsible for loving my child in the midst of adversity.

There's a whole houseful of people here who are loving him right along with me.