We meant to spend Monday putting things in order after a long vacation, and Tuesday starting bright-eyed and refreshed, with newly cleaned desks and sharpened pencils, back to our schoolwork.
Instead, we all got sick on Monday, everyone but the baby at about the same time. Maybe a bug we picked up in our travels. Maybe there was contamination in the deli meat that was Sunday dinner for everyone but the baby. It doesn't matter. Mark came home sick early from work to find me already shivering and groaning in bed, with the 14yo minding the baby and the 11yo having been sent to the store for Gatorade and canned chicken soup. Six hours later the kids were sick too. Mark slept with the 4yo, I slept with the 8yo, and we each got up to rinse out their buckets more than once. The 14- and 11-yos fended for themselves. It was a long night.
+ + +
Today there was no question of school; we were all in recovery. Mark stayed home, alternately napping and doing quiet work on the computer. I let the children watch movies most of the day. As for me, I rested, but I also tried to keep things running; I put bread in the bread machine, started some chicken soup on the back burner, and began the long process that is Washing All The Bedding.
Hours later the bedding is almost finished. All day long, whenever I judged that the washer and the dryer had both stilled, I trudged up the stairs to process it. Hot, fresh sheets and towels out of the dryer; wet, sopping ones pulled from the washer and stuffed into the dryer; stinking crusty bedding from the mountain on the laundry room floor, gingerly loaded into the washer with detergent and turned on "Hot." And then (after washing hands) I would turn to folding the warm, fresh towels and putting them away, stretching the fitted sheets over the mattresses.
I do not enjoy laundry as a rule, but this particular work satisfied me. My family was in need: drained, empty-stomached and grimy; I fed them, cleaned up after them, made dry, warm beds for them one after another, mother's work if ever there was such a thing. And being tired out myself, it took most of my time and energy; I had to sit and rest, or take a nap, in between loads.
(This being a modern story, I should note that Mark did a fair amount of laundry-processing while I was resting, too. This being a modern story, I also spent an hour or two of my in-between-laundry time removing malware from the laptop. It doesn't quite fit with the cliché of motherly nurturing work, but I assure you, it was both necessary and satisfying.)
+ + +
I wasn't able to do much else besides that minimum, but important, work restoring the household to basic hygiene and health, because I myself was impaired. I'm behind in other things I'm supposed to do this week, and that is annoying, but at some level it's got to be accepted: I can't do everything, and I have my priorities. They are at home.
+ + +
This almost serves as a little fable to me, coming on the heels of some difficult work and difficult revelations that happened in my personal life in the last ten days or so.
I do not write about it often, but: I don't come — originally — from a very whole place.
I live in one now, thanks to a good partner, good friends, all the information I need to ground myself, and a fair bit of determination — to seal up, to heal up, the cracks wherever they might appear.
I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I have zero regrets about concentrating all of my efforts on running a family and educating our children. I had to confront some of the broken places in the past ten days, and it's only strengthened my resolution.
This is not — not at all! — to say that other people can't successfully arrange their lives in many different ways. I see it happen. I admire it where it works.
But you, they, are not me; when I look at myself I know: Me being who I am, it really does take all my efforts to make a home, to mother a family, that is whole. I come to the job just a little bit broken, weakened, and so I have to prioritize. I am far too efficient, far too adept at compartmentalization, far too schooled in the arts of sealing-off, to divide my attention so that some of it would be directed outside and away.
If I had to, I could do it. In a way it is a strength, a latent one, one I hope I won't have to call on.
The better way, since I don't have to rely on that particular plan B (God willing), is to use all my powers where they count, in the place that it is most needed, which is simply being present every day, growing this family. Drawing a line in the sand and saying It stops here: all the crazy, all the meanness, stops right here. Believing every day that the difference I make is a good and right one, and making it come true, one loaf at a time, one day at a time, my life's work, ripping out poor stitches to weave something whole.
bearing blog 