I have nothing nice to say...so I should say nothing, right? I guess I am hoping that if I get all the not nice things off my chest and onto the computer they will not weigh so heavily. Or maybe I just want to gripe......

I am angry, just stressed and angry and feel at the end of my frayed rope and utterly alone in this struggle of parenting and living. I know IN MY HEAD that the Lord is with me, that His strength is made perfect in my great faltering weakness, that I can do all things through Him, but my heart is just turning a blind eye to all that written out so neatly and sweetly. It sometimes is hard to get those words past the screaming and the poop and the stress and the fighting and the defiance and the long lonely hours. I know I am stuck focusing on the negative, but I just can't seem to gather the willpower to change my perspective. Right now I just hate....I don't even know what....the fact that I am alone? The fact that my husband is in a job where he gives 110% of himself (which leaves next to nothing for his family) and is not appreciated for it, but demeaned by the one whose company he is fighting for?? the fact that there is poop in the bathtub and the laundry room right now that I am just too completely stressed out to clean up without totally losing it?? The fact that after all these years, at times like this I still crave cigarettes??? Yuck. Maybe it's the fact that there are times I can fool myself and possibly others into thinking I have things together somewhat and can actually cope well with what my life entails, and then I have a day like today on top of a day like yesterday and all of sudden I feel utterly exposed as the incompetent wretch that I am. How is is good for my children to have a mother like this? How is it good for my husband to have a wife like this? It's not. And yet here I sit, in my wretchedness. I am tired, oh so tired, physically and emotionally and mentally exhausted. And I am not reacting well, I am not acting well, I am not thinking well. Certainly nothing approaching godliness. I just want to leave, I just want to run, I just want to erase all of this for the shame of it being true. How can my outlook be so mercurial?? One day I feel on top of the world, as if I can feel the mighty hand of God leading and protecting me, and then sometimes it's as if I have leaped a chasm He just won't cross. I suppose that is the leap into sin, where God can have no part. It's not that my circumstances are so horrible, far from it. It's just that somedays I cannot summon the energy to react towards them as I know I should. And this has become one of those days.