Only God could get away with doing this to me.

Sometimes I think I know what God wants, or at least what I want, and then God does something that throws me off.

Today was one of those days.

I teach middle school kids, okay? I love teaching these kids, but there are not usually times when you feel "maternal" towards them. At least, not in the comforting, carrying, worrying sort of way. Sometimes, for certain reasons, but not as often as possibly teaching younger kids, I might imagine.

My point is - I see teachers who have kids or parents of kids get really empathetic towards some of my students. Not that I don't - I have a lot of fondness for my kids, I like them. I have the best kids in the world. In fact, I call them kids and confuse people when I mean students...
Anyway, this all sort of made me think I wasn't, perhaps maternal. And one thing led to another in my mind and I was thinking, "God, I know you want me to be a mom. I adore and fawn over my nieces and my friend's little kids. I could raise small children."

I feel the tenderness towards children of all ages, don't get me wrong - but there was just something that wasn't there - the instinct that comes with being a mom. I have a coworker, for example, who has eight kids and is just great at seeing things in a different (and more forgiving) light than I do.

So all of these things enter my head and I often despair at being in my thirties and single and childless. Maybe God thinks (knows) I would suck at being a parent? But I want to be a parent! And so on, so forth.

Today God threw a wrench in all of my plans, or at least ideas, about what He thought of me being a parent.

I took my students to a science fair in another town, and the science fair coordinators assure me every year that I do not need to plan for extra chaperones, they will keep watch over my students. Guess what? After two and a half hours of my kids supposedly being fine, watched over, and with their group, the coordinators cannot find three of my kids!!! So for ten - twenty minutes I'm running around on a community college campus trying to find three junior high kids. And my initial annoyance at this trouble quickly escalates to a prickly, panicky, terror.

I've never experienced anything like that. It had nothing to do with my job, or something self centered like that, it was purely that I could not find three kids and something is very wrong. Because my kids? I might rag on them a bit, but they are awesome. Especially in public. So if they went missing, and it wasn't something silly that I could figure out in a minute or so - something is very likely, very wrong.

I could feel my eyes burning, and I couldn't even think. I couldn't even think to pray or anything, it was that bad!
Well, I ended up finding them and of course the first thing I did was yell at them.
Then I got their story and found out that it wasn't even their fault - they were left behind and didn't think to ask anyone about it. (So not completely their fault)

Anyway, so hours later I'm relaxing in a bath and realize the mistake I just made: I decided to relax from this very stressful day - and suddenly I burst into tears. I just kept replaying those moments of complete panic, the unformed ideas of what could have possibly happened to these kids.

So I guess God was telling me to chill - I'm already sort of a mom.

Though I may be a tad too much like my own mom...