Team Wendorf Report

I have never considered myself a paranoid person or even someone that struggles with anxiety. But recently I found myself diagnosing Kai (second of four kids) with a heart attack; while on the drive to school he held his hand up from the back seat and said “mom, its not working right.” Then when i look back a second later he was slumped over. Clearly signs of a heart attack.

As I argued inside my head whether or not I should pull over I realized I was wearing Kai’s FM system (attached to Kai’s hearing aids are little audio shoes that are recievers. I wear a transmitter around my neck so Kai has better access to my voice in noisy environments). Instead of pulling over and alarming the rest of the kids (or at least to avoid someone asking 100 times “mama what are we doing?”) I just yelled into the mic on the transmitter, “Kai are you alive?!” Then I watched in the review mirror as his sleeping head bobbed back up to a less than dead position. Satisfied that he was just really tired I kept going.

What is wrong with me? I spent the next 20 minutes of the drive wondering when I became howard hughes? when did I become the overly paranoid person/mom that looks up meningitis online just because someone complains of their neck hurting? I was sharing this story with a friend and they said “yeah, you’d think the more kids you have the more relaxed you’d become.” Yet here I am, convinced that every abnormal bit of behavior means a round of puke is about to travel through our home.

But I don’t think I am abnormal, I think most moms have some kind of illness they fear. But is my fear justified? That is the real question. I cannot control viruses or even bacteria as they travel and land all over their kid-sized world. I have to conclude that I have always been this anxious person and it manifests itself as a lack of trust and a need for control every now and again. So it just all comes back to Jesus and whether or not my heart and my head is aligned with what I know of a faithful God who loves my kids way more than I can imagine.

So a few days after this first ‘almost’ heart attack we were on the way home from church when Kai says, again, “mom my hands don’t work right.” This time I was able to watch closely (since Jason was driving) to see that as he tried to spread his fingers apart he wasn’t showing 5 separate fingers but rather a spockish Star Trek hand gesture… not because he was having a heart attack but because his fingers were sticking together from something he had eaten.

Oh yea, kids are messy. I forgot. So case closed. And my hope is redirected back to Jesus.

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