Flash by Rachel Anne Ridge Read Free Book Online Page A

paint, and the postdated rent check only reinforced that they were way out of our league. Ugh.
    In truth, this little spat over Flash’s name had brought up insecurities I’d been trying to squelch. The change in our location and scenery hadn’t changed the fact that I was coming up short on all fronts and that my failures kept bubbling over, no matter how hard I tried to keep a lid on them. The razor-thin edge of the will-we-or-won’t-we-make-it pursuit of our artistic dreams seemed to amplify my shortcomings. Being confronted with a gorgeous couple who seemed to have it all only made my flaws all the more obvious.
    But I couldn’t think about that now. I needed to paint a princess-themed nursery for a client, and I hadn’t quite figured out how I was going to get it done in the time I’d allotted. I rushed to sketch the design on the wall and quickly lost myself in the work.
    â€œMom, did you forget to pick me up?” Grayson’s voice on my cell phone brought me scrambling down my ladder at the job site and hurrying to the truck in a fit of panic. How could it be 4:30 already? He’d been waiting an hour for me.
    â€œI’ll be right there, Gray. I’m so sorry! I forgot about the time.”How could I have been so thoughtless? It was Grayson’s first day of middle school; I’d vowed that on this day I would start doing a better job of staying organized, and I’d already failed.
    â€œStupid, stupid, stupid!” I chided myself as I sped the seventy miles from the job site to his school. “I am so stupid!” I arrived an hour later to find him sitting in the darkened school office, a secretary keeping him company as the poor kid waited for his negligent mom to come. Happy first day of sixth grade, son. Mommy loves you. She just forgot about you.
    My failures as a mother stacked up relentlessly. I remembered how I used to have a nice dinner on the table at a decent time, and how I kept the house picked up and tended our children’s needs with focus and energy. These days, keeping our heads above water meant putting in long work hours. Loading ladders and equipment each day exhausted me, and my evening hours were spent planning and sketching upcoming projects.
    On the one hand, I enjoyed the work and loved the creativity, but I was a distracted parent, and one with a short temper, at best. I missed the simpler days, when my goals as a mother had been clear and I had the time to be intentional in my parenting. I hated pulling shirts from the bottom of the clothes hamper and fluffing them in the dryer with antistatic sheets, trying to pass them off as clean. This system fooled nobody. Chipping frozen ground beef in the frying pan while my hungry family gnawed on chips at 8:00 p.m. demoralized me. Bedtime devotions with the kids? Ha.
    â€œ Inadequate .” I dug the word into my journal with my pen, tearing the pages with the force. My distractedness, my inability to complete a task, my failure to see the things that were important to my husband   —it was a recurring theme in our marriage when things got tough.
    We are fortunate; our conflicts are few and far between. But when we have them, it seems they center on differences in priorities, and I take it hard. He’s the planner, while I work off of a hope and a prayer. He’s the one who measures to the centimeter, while I eyeball and guess. He needs things tidy, and I don’t see the mess. When you’re the “close-is-good-enough” partner to a “do-it-right-or-not-at-all” person, it’s easy to feel like the biggest failure-wife of all time. It wasn’t Tom’s fault I took things that way. . . . It was mine. I’d hear him make a small request for, say, remembering to buy toothpaste, and I’d naturally assume it meant I was completely inadequate and worthless.
    My focus got lost. I got lost. Yes, the Texas landscape was beautiful, but I