Phantom Day

I first met my phantom a few years ago. Before that night, I knew of her existence, but I didn't know her name. I was driving home from the grocery store listening to a cassette tape by Dennis and Barbara Rainey. They shared their own phantoms and invited their listeners to identify theirs. Mine is akin to Mary Poppins - "practically perfect in every way." Just add a better wardrobe and subtract the rooftop dancing skills.

Your phantom is your ideal self, the flawless person you are always wishing and resolving to be. But I haven't stopped with a phantom self. I have a phantom day too. It's that perfect schedule I keep revising but never actually living. It's a day where I get everything done and remain patient, calm, and joyful from sunrise to sunset.

This day could happen, I'm sure, if things didn't keep getting in the way. Many days I have trouble just keeping myself in line. But other days I'm trying, really trying, and no one else will cooperate. The baby is fussy and won't take his nap, and the two-year-old and four-year-old are squabbling over a toy. My husband calls and needs me to look up an address right away. While I'm thumbing through the phone book for him, the two-year-old needs to go potty and the four-year-old needs me to watch her latest stunt. Then the baby bonks his head by crawling straight into the wall. I hang up the phone to comfort him and realize I smell something burning. In the kitchen I find a pot of blackened oatmeal, still on high. We haven't had breakfast yet.

Not every day is fraught with dramatic interruptions. But selfish as I am, it takes only one or two unwanted intrusions for me to fume, "Why can't they stop bothering me so I can get something done?!?"

Another thought interrupts that one: "What would there be to do if no one bothered you?" If the husband and the children and the baby went away, there wouldn't be any oatmeal to make or messes to clean or addresses to find. There wouldn't be questions to answer or performances to watch or owies to kiss. There wouldn't be any Meatball Minutes. There would just be me, completing that perfectly empty schedule.

Last week someone gave me another article by Dennis Rainey. He quotes C.S. Lewis on this topic of interruptions:

"What we must do is to stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life, the real life that God sends us day by day. What we call our real life is but a phantom of our imagination."