Welcome back to The Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, we discuss what to do when you are struggling with all of life’s expectations. There are times when mothers are asked to continue providing the impossible. It’s important not to lose sight of why we do what we do.
It’s Enough To Make You Freak Out
There are endless memes displaying the often-exhausted mother continuing to show up for her family. If I could describe the moment of life I am in right now, it would be that. This weekend I worked for eight straight hours on our eldest’s homecoming mum.
If you don’t know what that is, you’ve probably never experienced Texas high school football in the fall. Mums have been a staple for homecoming in Texas since the 1930s. Like everything in Texas, they get bigger and better every year.
We will be out of town the weekend leading up to homecoming for my sister-in-law’s wedding, and the following weekend is my dad’s birthday. So last weekend was the only time I could work on crafting the cluster of ribbons, cowbells, and flowers into what became the physical embodiment of passing the generational torch.
My mother and I, along with my two oldest daughters, cut ribbons, made homemade letters, crafted braids, and stapled and hot-glued until our backs and fingers felt numb. But by the end of the marathon, we had completed our first Rooke girl mum.
It was a labor of love in every sense of the word. We wanted it to be full of every saying and extra filler we could think of, in order to make this moment feel as special as it deserved. Sometimes I can’t believe that I have a daughter old enough to be in high school, much less one who is talking about who is going to dance with her at homecoming. Still, like all the seasons of the girls’ lives, I embrace the things that scare me most and love them through it.
All of that to say, I couldn’t be more exhausted. I think that’s understandable, considering our family’s schedule right now and everything on the horizon. Who wouldn’t be?
It’s funny because as I write this edition of my newsletter, the girls are chatting and laughing about homecoming to the sounds of my third daughter singing in perfect pitch the “Ave Maria,” all while doing the laundry.
They are in there completing this massive undertaking happily and diligently because I found a mound of laundry hidden in every cupboard in their room. (Note to self: they probably have too many pieces of clothes.) It was the mother lode of hidden, dirty clothes. My oldest daughter promised they would do it this week as “penance” and as a thank you for working so hard on her mum. I sweetened the pot for my younger daughters by promising a trip to the library should they finish.
It’s just the perfect reminder that, although I am exhausted, what keeps me going is knowing that I am building lasting relationships with my daughters. Not just between me and them, but each other. All four girls tackling a piece of the laundry monster without complaining is a sign that I am hopefully doing something right.
Which brings me to what happened when I found the never-ending pile of laundry. I felt the need to tell y’all this story to let you know that I don’t always handle every situation with composure and grace. And that laundry situation pushed me to the brink.
Most mothers can sympathize with how stressful and overwhelming it is to walk around a dirty home. You ask the kids to take their dishes to the sink or sweep the floor, only to come back a little while later to the same dirty floor and crusty dishes. That was me Saturday. I asked, but nothing happened. Not once, not twice, but over and over again.
Then came the realization that the girls had been cosplaying as pack rats hoarding laundry as if it were imperative to their survival, and I erupted.
“WHY IS NO ONE LISTENING TO ME?” My scream bellowed through our home. The silence was deafening. It’s not like I’ve never lost my temper before, but you could see it on everyone’s face that the yell had the force of all of my built-up exhaustion, pushing it out into the open.
I stopped immediately. I knew I had their attention, but I also knew that what I did next would significantly impact their emotional stability, and I still wanted us to have the fun family night I had planned. So I did something I had never done before: I took a drive.
I said, “I am running out for a bit,” grabbed my keys, and left. I didn’t have anything I needed, but knew I also didn’t have the self-restraint to keep from snowballing into anger. I drove around our beautiful neighborhood, down streets I had never seen before, and passed the local pumpkin patch. I saw people walking their dogs and families playing in their yard.
It didn’t take long for my frozen heart to thaw. But what sealed the deal for me was a family with their teenagers entering the pumpkin patch. That could have been me, but it wasn’t. I was too angry to even carry on a conversation with the people I love most in the world. Call it mom guilt or plain old guilt, either way, I couldn’t get home fast enough.
And when I walked back through the door, I was greeted by the cleaning crew. Every single one of them had a task they were working on. The job was far above anything I had asked them to do in the first place. My husband was leading the way. I can only assume he had a “Come to Jesus” moment with them when I left. Because each daughter, in their own way, came up to apologize for pushing me to the brink.
Not every day do I get to listen to my girls singing in Latin and laughing while they do their chores. Sometimes it comes after a little freak-out. But I know without a shadow of a doubt that all the exhaustion and numb fingers are worth it because I love them and they love me. Sometimes it’s easy to see that, and other times it takes a long drive.
WHAT I SAW THIS WEEK:
Gen Z, especially men, are finding Christianity as a way to bring order and calm to their lives. The New York Times published a piece claiming that this is a sign that these young Americans are a threat to democracy.
Read my thoughts on that HERE.
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