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Who would have expected the answer to my unasked question to come from such an unlikely source?
After my unwanted divorce I had gotten a job at a hospital close to home. The only opening they had was on the evening shift working three in the afternoon until eleven at night. This left my fourteen year old daughter at home alone until I returned at about eleven forty five PM. I got up at 730 am to drive her to school because we lived close to the school and she absolutely refused to ride the school bus.
I had never before worked outside home until after the divorce, so it was hard on both of us.
I often heard, “Momma since your off today can I stay out of school and spend the day with you?”
“No, Samantha you need to go to school! School is important and if you miss you fall behind on your school work!”
“Please, Please Momma I want to be with you! Can’t we go shopping and have some fun for a change!”
I knew she was being manipulative but I also knew that she was lonesome. She wasn’t used to spending so much time alone. All her life I had been there when she got home from school. My other two children were grown up! One was in college and the other one had gotten married. So now here we were, a single mom trying to parent a teenager. A teenager trying to adjust to a situation she didn’t ask for and didn’t want! She hated everything about our life without her daddy and showed it with lots of back talk at me as if it were my fault.
My supervisor had given me permission to call and check on her during the evening so I called her at least twice during my shift! Nevertheless things were getting progressively worse at home. I was struggling every day to keep from drowning in my own despair and feeling of failure. I was tormented by thoughts that I was at fault and if I had done things differently maybe my 26 year old marriage would not have failed. I was struggling with the upkeep on the house I had bought for us to move into just before the divorce. I was struggling with seeing another woman in the truck with my former husband and hating him and her so much that I would have shot them both if I had a gun and knew how to shoot it. I was struggling with having to work now, when before the divorce I had been forbidden to work because my husband was too jealous to trust me! I felt like I was under so much pressure that I could hardly take more and now had to deal with a mouthy dissatisfied unhappy teenager.
Being the people pleaser that I am I thought it was my job to make sure everyone was happy, and especially the people I loved.
At the hospital, we had an older patient who would holler out a lot when he got lonesome.
“HELPPPPP! Somebody please come help me! Please come here somebody HELPPPPP!”
So we decided to put him in the room closest to the nurses’ station so that when he hollered one of us could pop in and talk to him for a few minutes and calm him down!
One night as I exited the nurses’ station I heard him yelling out so I went in saying,
“What on earth are you hollering about now? What is it you want?
He yelled at me, “I don’t know what I want but if I had what you’ve got I’d have the answers to all of life’s problems!”
It felt like someone had thrown cold water on my face to wake me up, as I realized that I was struggling on my own trying to solve all my problems! The truth was that I did have the answer to my problems but I had not been giving them to the one who had the answers. I was worrying and fretting instead of praying and turning things over to God and resting in him! I prayed all the way home that night and told God what he already knew but what I had thought was up to me to do alone. After that I started praying again and trusting again!
My answer had come in the most unusual way and that night I had heard the Lord God speak to me out of the mouth of that lonesome old guy! His words speak to me even now especially when I tend to forget that I have the one who has the answers’ to all of life problems living inside me! All I have to do is give my problems away to HIM!
Did I get answers’ to my life’s problems? You bet I did!
I finally realized my daughter was depressed. I talked to our family doctor about it and he recommended a pastoral counselor. We made an appointment and started seeing him! We started talking about our feelings and what was going on between us. We worked harder to understand each other and to gain a new mother daughter relationship based on out new life. .
And my job? Well, I went to my supervisor and explained what was going on with my daughter and told them I was going to look for a job on day shift. It turned out they needed someone for day shift on the surgical floor and gave me the day shift because as she said, they didn’t want to lose a good nurse!
