For Sanity’s Sake by Taprina Milburn

The kids have gathered their overstuffed backpacks and are calling out to me as I finish putting a quick coat of black mascara on my lashes.

“Mom, we’re going to be late to school,” my son says. “Hurry.”

Usually it’s the other way around—I’m telling them they are going to be late.

“Hurry” is our morning mantra.

I grab my day-planner and stuff a bagel in a baggy to eat at my desk and, yes, grab a quick cup of coffee. As I pass through the laundry room I see a June bug marooned on its back, six claw-like legs flailing.

“I really should help you out little guy, but I’m in a hurry,” I say as I shuffle by and shut the door.

Now some of you are saying, “Gross, she left a bug in her house?”

But I’m immune to June bugs. They really don’t bother me. In fact, for at least one whole summer there was a collection of frozen June bugs in Dixie cups in my freezer—my son's experiment in cryogenics.

As I walk through our garage out to the car, I notice a lot more June bugs flipped over like sunbathers on a beach. A few crawl around, but it seems as if the slightest movement topples them over. Mental note: Those bugs, whose life is about the span of a year, sure spend a lot of time stuck and flailing.

Later that afternoon, I pick up the kids from school and we head home. I hadn’t thought much about the bug since that morning. But when we entered the laundry room, there was our resident June bug, still stuck and waving its legs frantically.

I reached down and turned it over, trying to avoid its desperate, clingy grip. The brown insect waddles a few inches away, teeters and flips. Now if I were a nice person, I would have once again flipped the bug over and put him outside, but I wanted to see if he could actually turn himself over.

It took an hour, but he eventually did; I then set him free.

I’m not so unlike the June bug on my laundry-room floor. I get weighed down with problems or bad habits and spend a lot of time stuck and flailing, uncertain, or not even aware of what my next move should be. Small things and big things alike—schedules, work, people’s moods or problems—have the power to topple me if I’m not careful. Sometimes it’s all the flailing that keeps me stuck. If I’d just relax, I might remember that God gave me a brain to figure out how to flip over, get my bearings and move on.

And sometimes when I’m stuck and thrashing about as if I have no sense, a friend will lovingly set me back on the right track, risking that I might cling like a 2-year-old being left at nursery school.

I’m not sure of the fate of my laundry-room June bug. My hope is that if he did topple again, he didn’t spend as much time down, but quickly set himself back on his path (see related Dot Dot Dish item, “Hal’s Buggy Pals,” home page).