The book came three days late.

But it wasn’t a big deal. We could read one devotion in the morning and one at night and be right back on track in three days.

Except the first night we got all caught up in talking about the awesome day two boys had a school, how one made a really pretty picture of a flower in art class and another got one more jumping bean in his GT class and how he just can’t wait until the moths come out of the beans and he can release them into the wild.

And then we listed all our thankfuls and talked about how Mama, on the way to work, saw a homeless man in a wheelchair with a patch over his eye, holding a sign with three fingers instead of five, and how I didn’t have any money or food in my purse to give him.

We just never got around to that second-of-the-day devotional.

But there was always the next day, and we were still only three days behind.

Then came the weekend, when schedules run more fluid and kids get to play and a mama and daddy try to put back together all the ways a house can fall apart in a week, and instead of reading extra, we skipped a whole day of the devotional.

Four days behind now.

I tried hard to ignore it, but failure clamped a heavy hand on my shoulders and stared me down and whispered, This will mean the ruin of an Advent season.

This will mean the ruin of children.

Because they need to be taught what this season is really about, and I wasn’t doing my part.

Expectation tied its knot around me.

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Expectations have always tied their knots around me.

They were never imposed, at least not that I can remember. But there was a dad who left, and I was expected to prove he’d made a mistake. There was a mom who worked three jobs just to make ends meet, and I was expected to make the home life as easy as possible. There was a future, because a mom sacrificed herself, and I was expected to make the most of it.

They were all my own expectations, but they were big and real and heavy.

And then came valedictorian and voted-most-likely-to-succeed and a full-ride college scholarship that could only be kept with a 3.8 grade point average.

That first semester of college, I sat in a history class my high school history teachers had sorely prepared me for, and the teaching assistant handed back a test, and a big red C- sat at the top.

I had never in my life made a C. I had never even made a B.

The whole room blurred around me, and the back of my throat burned, and I willed myself not to cry, not here, not now.

I waited until I got to the hallway, until I stumbled into a communal bathroom, and then I let loose as silently as I could.

I would never recover from a C, that’s what I thought. I would lose my scholarship, and my family didn’t have money for college without it, and my whole future had just gone down the drain because of this one test.

In a less emotional moment, I made a plan. I scrawled dates and descriptions on flashcards, and I wrote practice essays and I studied until my eyes crossed.

I aced every test after that first one.

But the expectation, the fear of failure driving it, never really left me, not until that final A+ posted on a permanent transcript.

It would take me years to learn how to breathe past all the pressure I could put on myself.

It would take me years to learn how to spot unrealistic expectations and banish them to their rightful place.

///

Even today, I am still learning.

Here, in this crazy season when kids are in school and presents need wrapping and a job is sucking me dry, it’s easy to cave to expectations.

Because if we don’t read about the birth of Jesus every single day, they will forget it in all the holiday hype.

And what if they don’t choose the way of Jesus because we didn’t read day 3 or 4 or 6 days of that Advent reading, and what if they miss the whole point, and what if I am setting them up for failure like mine—inconsistent and sporadic and only when we have time?

I read about all those other people, somehow doing these devotions with their families, walking kids through a formal teaching time, and I want to be them, but, you see, I started reading this morning, and one of the twins needed to use the potty, and if I’m not there watching he’ll have every Band-Aid in the first aid basket plastered to the floor, and he’ll dump rolls of toilet paper in pee water, and he won’t even decide to climb on the potty before he wets a little in his pants, since there are much more interesting explorations to make.

And then, by the time he strapped himself back in his seat, another one spilled his milk, and it went all inside the cabinets and into drawers, and it took me 10 minutes to clean it all up, and that’s how long it would have taken to read the dang thing.

And, see, they’re talking anyway, and no one is really listening, and I have to interrupt every other sentence with a Please be quiet reprimand until my face burns and my hands clench and those words come screaming out, like a didn’t-get-her-way 4-year-old: NO ONE IS EVEN LISTENING!

I slam the book closed and toss it on a counter and walk away, trying to breathe, and my boys watch me with wide eyes.

I was listening, Mama, my oldest one says, but I can’t meet his eyes.

Because I’ve tried and we’re never going to catch up and this season is just ruined.

But mostly because this is not who I want to be.

///

Two years ago my oldest started school.

Before that time, I could take long mornings to read my own devotionals, and I could take long minutes to read them to my children, too.

Before that time, I was doing my part in this spiritual teaching.

Every morning I would set out a yellow and a green and a blue plate, and my boys would eat in silence while I wove those Biblical stories around them, and I could hear and feel and see the truth sinking into their hearts.

And then school started, and those mornings had a deadline, and I had to get breakfast on the table and lunch packed and somehow, in the middle of feeding two infants and three other boys and helping a 5-year-old pack up in time and signing all the necessary papers that hadn’t gotten signed yesterday because we were playing kickball out in the cul-de-sac, I had to read a Bible story and a devotional.

We tried an Advent study that year, and we made it 17 days before we got too far behind to catch up and just put it aside for another, easier year.

We tried again with Lent. Twelve days into reading we quit, again, because we had fallen too far behind to catch up.

Morning devotionals were patchy, because mornings were unpredictable, and I felt frustrated and discouraged and disappointed that this wasn’t going exactly the way I’d planned.

What kind of mother couldn’t find the time to read a Bible story to her kids before their day began?

Sometimes the pressure is just too heavy for our shoulders to bear.

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Sometimes we just need to let it go.

Because the truth is, there will be mornings when a kid is sick and we’ll have to clean up a mess in the bathroom that we weren’t expecting, and our presence and our patience and our soft-spoken words are the gift of Christmas to that child.

And there will be mornings when the 8-year-old is dragging his feet and we need to leave already and there’s no time left on the clock to read that Advent selection, but our peace and mercy and commitment not to hurry is the gift of Christmas to him.

And there will be evenings when we will be so completely engaged in conversation or a game or laughing at the brother who just burped in the middle of a word and sounded exactly like a monster growling, that we won’t even think about playing catch-up to all those readings we’ve missed, but these things, engagement and laughter and just being, are the gifts of Christmas to them.

I can beat myself up about falling behind, about sleeping those extra 10 minutes, about not predicting the argument that took 20 minutes to resolve, and I can step away from the morning feeling bruised and battered and bloody.

Or I can remember that the greatest gift we can give our children, ever, is our presence.

Love lives in the words we speak and the life we live in front of them, not in the pressure we put on ourselves to read someone’s Advent book every day this season.

Our life is writing its own Advent book, every single moment of every single day, when we choose love in the hard places and seek understanding in the mystery places and welcome acceptance in the wish-they-were-different places.

They see Christ most not in words written on a page, read aloud at the same time every morning, but in the words we, their parents, write on their hearts every time we set that book aside and say without words, You. You are important enough to tend to, right now, this minute, even though I had other plans.

This is the spirit of Advent.