“Ahh!!!!! Mommy Come!”

I heard the scream, but I didn’t react. Here is why: it was a crying-wolf situation. Her brother is always going in her room and she is always screaming at him. If I haven’t heard it once, I’ve heard it one-thousand times. I figured it was her yelling at him, and then at me, again. So, I kept on talking to my husband.

It wasn’t but a few minutes later my son shouted from the top of the stairs, “Mom. It is serious.”

I ran up there like the wind. And, there was my daughter, hair-attached to a dancing ballerina figure going round and round in her musical jewelry box. Her hair was getting eaten up in the circling wires of a rotating doll.

My girls’ face looked terrified. As if she was wondering, “Is this ballerina going to eat my whole head up?”

I got some scissors and, while she was still screaming, I cut her hair, where the demanding plastic figurine was devouring it.

Then she looked at me, with rejection in her eyes, and said, “I called for you, mommy. I screamed for you…and you didn’t come.”

My stomach sank into my chest (which makes no sense at all, but somehow this is exactly how it felt in the moment). The last thing I wanted my daughter to think was: Mommy is not there for me.

But, she was right. I wasn’t there for her.

Maybe people weren’t there for you either. Maybe they didn’t come when you needed them. They didn’t listen, when all you needed was a listening ear. They didn’t side with you, even though we were right. You were left screaming and crying, and rejected. Calling out for help, yet, fending for yourself.

I wish I could go back to turn-back time. But, I can’t. What I did is as done as done-is-done.

But, what I can do is trust that – in the gap of me being a good mom, God is a better dad.

Sometimes, in people letting us down, we can come to see how God holds us up. I pray my daughter might come to this realization. Because, I will never perfectly be there for her. I will never give her all she needs.

And, neither will people ever perfectly be there for us.

But, God always will be. God will always be perfectly there for us, if we just turn our face towards Him. If we let Him be.

Why not invite in God’s healing today? Into those places and spaces where people let you down, abandoned you or rejected you? There is a Father, much better than any earthly Father or Mother, who wants to love you whole-again.

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