I love my kids very much! Maybe I didn’t fully know what I signed up for when having 5 of them (who does?), but I stand by and live with the choices and the gifts. They are amazing blessings and I can’t imagine life without them. I have to say those things (which are absolutely true) so that I don’t sound like a terrible person when I tell you that sometimes I just want to run away screaming from my house.

Raising young children is one of the most the single most challenging thing I have ever faced in my life. Stand up comedian Jim Gaffigan said it best when he described what it’s like to have 4 children (one fewer than we have). He said “Imagine you’re drowning… and then someone hands you a baby.” It’s true, I feel like I’m barely making it to the surface sometimes and gulping desperately for air before I am pulled back down into the swirling torrent that is parenthood.

These little people we call our kids can be incredibly adorable, inspiring, funny and surprising. Simultaneously they can be incredibly selfish, frustrating, infuriating and annoying. Not to mention, often one of the most maddening things about kids is that they act like a big fat mirror, reflecting back to you all of your shortcomings as a human being.

Oh, and the mess. I’ll admit, I’m not great at putting away my clothes and keeping my desk tidy, but it sometimes seems as if my kids’ sole purpose in life is removing cleanliness from any room they occupy. They are masters at this. It takes them 5 minutes (2 minutes if they work together) to completely undo hours worth of cleaning. Plus the food everywhere. How do you get food on the ceiling? And all of the bodily fluids. All of them! Like I said. Sometimes I just want to run away.

This is where the help comes in and literally saves my children and their on-the-brink-of-insanity parents. The help comes in many forms. It could be someone bringing us a meal or coming in and organizing a closet for us. It could be friends watching the kids for an evening or grandparents taking the kids for a weekend so that Rachel and I can hang out and communicate without having to shout over the noise or guard against the constant threat of interruption. It could be a couple giving us stuff that we might need because they’re a few years further down the road and they don’t need it anymore.

If you are a person who has done that for us or for someone else… there just aren’t words. You are a saint. You are a Godsend. You are an angel from heaven. Thank you, from the deepest place in my heart. Thank you! Because, despite my rambling vent about the difficulties, which are really more a reflection of my poor attitude than they are of our actual hardship, I love my kids so much. The help that you provide, whether in big ways or small, helps me to be a more whole person, and a better parent to my kids. The gifts that you give of your time or resources demonstrate for my kids what it looks like to be generous and what it looks like to receive generosity. The presence that you share with my kids offers them a more diverse perspective on life and how people interact with each other outside of our home.

One day our home will look completely different and we will have the ability to do the same for someone else on a more regular basis. We are excitedly looking forward to that day. It’s not out of a feeling of obligation or wanting to “pay it forward.”. We want to do it because we’ve seen the life and healing that it has brought to our family and how these acts of kindness are helping shape a hopeful future for our boys and the men they will become and we want to be a part of that for someone else one day. We’ve felt the joy of giving of ourselves in the small ways we can now.

If you have been thinking about reaching out to a family that might need help, but you’re worried about being weird or awkward, do it anyway. If you’re a mama or daddy who has trouble accepting help because your life feels too messy, or you don’t want to inconvenience people, or you don’t even know how to articulate the kind of help you need, TAKE THE HELP ANYWAY. The first step is always the hardest. And again, for anyone who is now helping or has ever helped our family, in big and small ways (there really are no small ways), I can’t say it enough… thank you.