I AM NOT READY TO BE A MOM

I AM NOT READY TO BE A MOTHER THIS IS TOO MUCH RESPONSIBILITY OHMYGOSHHELPME

This week was a little stressful, but I think I am recovering.  Minha filha is Sister Mareski.  She´s from Parana, if I´m spelling it right.  It´s in the southern part of Brazil.  Yep, that´s right, she´s Brazilian.  You have no idea how much it sucks to try and train someone who is not having any difficulty with the language, does not have any culture shock, and is bossy.  

Okay, rant somewhat over.  She´s a good companion, but I was so nervous the first few days that my Portuguese was terrible, and she basically has no confidence in me as a trainer or senior companion.  I don´t know if it´s just my own lack of confidence as a trainer being projected on her, but whenever I take charge she just looks at me like she knows I´m basically bluffing my way through this whole thing.  I had to ask her to stop talking for me when people don´t understand something that I say, because it was getting really annoying.  She just takes charge all the time, and it bothers me because I should be the one doing that, not her, but I don´t really know how to take charge.  I was also feeling bad for a couple days because I was remembering how timid I was when I first got here, and how Sister Mareski is not even remotely timid about anything we do.  I had to remind myself that I had serious language barriers and culture shock when I first got here, and she doesn´t have these problems.  

She´s also already seen me cry, so that wasn´t great.  I was crying because we went to visit a new member for the first time together, and he told us that he´s not going to come to church anymore because he´s going to do the Catholic sSnday school program now.  We left his house, and I just sat on the curb, burrowed into the scarf that bishop gave me, and started crying because I was so discouraged with everything that went wrong this week.  Because seriously, everything felt wrong.  Sister Mareski, trying to help I think, told me to get up after a few seconds and that we needed to follow up on some more names in the neighborhood.  I resented her a lot in that moment, because one, I knew that we needed to finish those names, I wasn´t going to sit on that curb for the rest of the night, two, I´m the one who´s supposed to be in charge, and three, there´s nothing wrong in just letting the sadness out all at once and moving on instead of letting it build up inside.  It feels like she´s dragging me around and telling me what to do all the time and I´m both resentful and glad, and annoyed that I´m glad that at least one of us knows what we´re doing.

I don´t know.  I´ve just decided to try and use these next two transfers to try and learn as much Portuguese from her as I can.  I don´t know guys, I don´t know if I should try to be more assertive, because I don´t actually feel like I know what I´m doing.  Do you guys have any advice?  Em, did you train any people on the mission that you had a hard time with?  Mom and Dad, I know you´ve done lots of training stuff, how do you do it?  I´ve done a lot of praying and I read a talk in the Fall 2016 general conference that talks about not focusing on your inadequacies and trusting in the Lord more, so that´s been helping.  I feel like my spirits are improving, but this last week was hard.

Anyways, enough about me.  I loved all the photos you guys sent me of graduation!  Em, you look kickin in BYU blue.  And your pants were pretty awesome.  I wish I was there, but I´m really happy for you.  Only one more semester to go!  Oh, and I got the letter you guys sent me with your drawings of your swaps from cousin camp.  They were very cool.  

Sorry for the kind of bummer email.  I´ll try to write something more interesting next week, but our time is up for today.

Love you guys, I miss you lots,

Lizzy