For 3 Someone Elses and a Dog.

I guess you could say that mothering is a full-time job.  I guess you could, but it would be totally misleading.  Mothering is not even close to a full-time job.  It’s like two full-time jobs where you live at work, and eat at work, and never get to walk away from work like that woman I see walking home from Eden every night.  She jaunts out the door, swings her purse over her shoulder and lets her skirt sashay across the parking lot, across the street, down the sidewalk.  Sometimes she’s on the phone, making plans for the evening.  Sometimes she’s reading a book.  Sometimes she’s just walking, breathing in the outdoor seasons, filled with the knowledge that work is behind her and need not be acknowledged until tomorrow morning.  Sometimes I am positively green, watching her saunter along…how I wish I could saunter!  

I am a mother of two boys, a dog, and wife to one husband.  That’s a lot of needs waiting to be filled.  And they expect me to fill them.  Most days I am honored to be that servant.  I love the old hymn that asks, “Will you let me be your servant, let me be as Christ to you? Pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant too.”  Then there are those other days; those days when that special moment I had carved out of the day just for me gets snatched out from under me and I fall into the my-life-stinks sinkhole of self pity.  My shower is interrupted by a boy emptying out the cabinets looking for band-aids and muttering, “I’m bleeding I think, so I need a band-aid but I don’t see them, and they’re usually here but where are they!? MOM!  Where’d you put the band-aids!?” My reading time is interrupted by a teething baby who won’t sleep, or a four-year old insisting there are crocodiles under the bed chewing on his books.  My phone call with my best friend is hijacked with, “MO-oom!! I need sumpin’!”  That precious mocha I saved my pennies for gets spilled when somebody climbs over the backseat of the car in the grocery store parking lot.  I am interrupted from an exciting editing job by a little one wandering into the room covered in a mysterious viscous substance.  I come upstairs with a sigh after putting the boys to bed to find the dog on the dining room table chowing down on the leftovers I had planned on feeding the family for lunch tomorrow, and yet again, there’s a need.  I am the only one to fill it.  Clean up the mess, bandage the hurt, reassure the fearful, discipline the naughty, find the lost, and so on and on and on.

I had it.  Tonight at the dinner table my husband noted my unhappiness (it would take a seriously self-interested introvert to not notice my dramatic sighs and slouching shoulders).  He asked if I was going to be okay.  With a pout to prove I am my son’s mother I responded, “I just want to take my journal, and a pen, and hike out into the wilderness and stay there forever!”  Luke promptly responded, “Oh no, Mom.  You’d get eaten by a bear or sumping.”  And I laughed, and the laughter turned into crying, and the sinkhole turned out to be a pothole.  I knew he was right.  I would get eaten by a bear!   I would miss little boys who in all seriousness suggest with concern that I would get eaten by a bear. I would miss their incessant yammering and the inappropriate shouting.  I would miss my husband’s distracted fathering, and even his inability to put his pants away properly.  I would miss letting the dog out the back door and shushing him while he tears around barking at birds on the fence.  I would miss filling a need for someone else; for three someone elses, and a dog.