You Push My Buttons, I'll Push Yours!

(Photo credit: Suat Eman)

Togetherness can be a wonderful thing. If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time, you know how I feel about my family—I love them with all my heart. I love being with them. I am so thankful for each one of them.

We’ve taken some great family trips with long stretches of togetherness, and they’ve been great. Being together for an extended time can be rich and rewarding and just what a family needs.

But sometimes it’s just not.

I’ll be honest. The togetherness of the past week got to me, and by the end of our week “off” I had had just a little bit too much togetherness. Seemed like every person in our house was pushing someone else’s buttons.

Especially mine.

I’ve spent the past several hours trying to figure out how this happens. How a generally happy family like ours just completely breaks down and has one of “those” weekends. I guess if I’m to be completely honest, I’ve been trying to figure out whose fault it is.

But, just like the kids’ saying goes, when I point one finger to someone else, I’ve got four pointing right back at me. The blame game just doesn’t work, and it sure doesn’t make anyone happy.

But here are some ideas I’ve had—no solutions, just thoughts. Feel free to chime in if you have any ideas why “those” moments happen.

- We were out of our routine, and sometimes this throws us off.

- I let stuff get to me that I shouldn’t have. Once the little things begin to fester, it just gets worse.

- As Mom, I can do a lot to set the tone for our times together. I just didn’t bother to do that this week.

- I was having a week-long pity party because it felt like we were the only ones who didn’t have family around for Thanksgiving.

- Hormones

- I did not take time to spiritually prepare myself each day. I felt far away from God this week when what I really needed to do was rest in His arms.

There’s probably a little bit of truth in each of these, but the last one really kind of speaks to me. I’ll need to do something about that today.

So how about you? How was your Thanksgiving? How did your family get along? And mostly, how do you get out of a funk? Comments, please!