Dear Lord

Deliver us from halfhearted lunch-packing and complete lack of backpack checking. Please see us through the nights when the sun is up later than our kids and yet they have to go to bed because the bus is inexplicably still arriving to pick them up each morning.

Please carry us through the endless stream of May-induced special events and programs and projects and help us to see that they are special and fun and not indeed designed to kill us all.

Please give us the strength to keep our eyes on our kids through baseball games, choir concerts, award ceremonies and soccer matches. Let them feel the love that propels us to sit in on those hard bleacher seats, even while we stealthily play a round of Candy Crush on our phones. Because really, we are barely hanging on and our distraction doesn’t mean our applause is not genuine. We have just seen them do so many of the things this year and our eyes are tired.

Please Lord, keep us from completely throwing in the towel and packing old Easter candy as a main lunch attraction. Help us to at least upgrade to prepackaged yogurt and applesauce and the occasional Little Debbie snack cake. For we must maintain some standards.

In the moments when we are sure we cannot maintain our sanity and help with one more history timeline, one more math sheet or one more book report, please remind us that there is a teacher on the other side that has to grade that thing and make us merciful and remind us to toss a prayer their way.

May teachers, too, be merciful when we ask for a third permission slip to the end of school field trip as of course, we’ve lost the first two. And when we forget pajama day. And when our kids are wearing pants that are too short because we’re barely sliding through to shorts season. And also when my kids tell you that they were up eating ice cream and playing the iPad until 9 p.m. last night. They are unfortunately telling the truth and therefore may not be at the top of their game because the bedtime struggle is real. Please forgive our sins and know that they are sins of utter and total desperation.

Please dear God, let the sports jerseys and overdue library books appear out of the various piles when summoned. Let the clean socks and underwear multiply like the loaves and fishes. And let everyone agree that frozen pizza and waffles five nights a week is a valid new nutritional plan that may lack in variety but will at very least certainly not kill us before June.

And most of all, please dear Lord, let us make it through May without completely losing our minds, our children or the will to go on. Because all three are being called into question tonight.

Amen