Lately I have been really struggling to overcome myself, to get out of my own way. It can be very frustrating for me to be constantly stuck with, well being me. As a wife and Mom and as our family's main housekeeper, I tend to be very lazy and selfish with my time. Why scrub the kitchen tile when I could watch a little tv during nap or waste time on facebook? So my house gets messier and messier and then suddenly I am living in a disaster area and the idea of cleaning it all up is so overwhelming that I just don't. I don't even try a lot of the time and I don't like it. For a long time I have made excuses based on our life circumstances; I've been pregnant or nursing or mourning a miscarriage for a minimum of 9 months of every year since 2004. Pregnancy is rough on my body and the emotional toll of various other things in our life plus being an introvert while being a Mom to very extroverted children are not small things I can just toss off.
Still.
Still I wake up so often and hear this little prompt in my head saying "maybe you're over-doing the whole I'm too tired thing". Generally I have squashed that voice like a bug and happily continued stepping over and around the heaping piles of toys and laundry and dishes that pile up. Overall I actually stay at least partially caught up on dishes and laundry purely by necessity(tough to eat and leave the house if you have no clean forks or pants) but months have often passed between toilet scrubbings and the floors get so crunchy and full of dirt we all just wear our shoes to keep from feeling the crud. Now that I have typed that sentence I am ashamed of myself, because that's just pretty gross. And unsanitary from a parenting perspective. And just icky. Wow.
So now that I'm completely embarassed, and all my readers(both of you!:) are mentally vowing to never set foot inside my house again let's move on shall we?
At any rate the whole point of all this is that since 'Little One'(aka my youngest child) was born I have been feeling pushed to do more, be better, set a more industrious example to my little tribe of future adults. I have no idea how to accomplish this but I am trying. And really trying, not just pretending I tried and it was too hard. Little One is such a delight and a blessing to us, she just fills my heart with light and joy and makes it tough for me to justify whining about a cleaning my kitchen or wiping down my bathroom. So many people would love to have a house full of babies, if it meant they could be parents. Or get back what they've lost. So many have to worry about whether their water is safe enough to drink or clean with, or whether there's any food to even cause dirty dishes. There are just so many things that could so easily be so much worse or more difficult. Maybe its time I stopped slacking off and starting living like I notice how blessed I am. If my pastor is right, and living from a place of joy is based first in my own choices then now is the time for me to choose. So I am working on choosing gratitude and contentment and resisting my instinctive tendency toward anger and indolence.
I have no clue if this will last or be a successful endeavor. I'd really like it to be though; I think I will find much more satisfaction if my days are spent actually doing something than when I just sit around grouching at my kids for interrupting my computer time. Plus my kids won't get lost or crushed under mounds of unfolded clothes.
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