The Annoying Thing About Motherhood

Yes, we always try to read in our Sunday best...just kidding.  (photog:  Tasha Nicholls)

I have awesome kids.  I love them.  I am passionately interested in everything they do.  From lofty accomplishments to those moments of victory when potty training.  But there is one thing about motherhood that really irritates me.  I find the constant work of it to be at exact odds with the joy.  Keeping that balance between all the things I have to do to keep my family fed, in clean clothes, and a reasonably tidy house compete with beautiful connections to my family in a deeper, spiritual, eternal way.  The nagging of life pulls at my contented bliss.

I have a volume of scripture that I bought a few years ago.  It was beautiful and expensive.  I wanted to cherish it.  From it's glossy pages my children would learn it's truths.  I carefully read from it every day.  My children read from it.  We would prop it up in a cookbook holder at the breakfast table to read while finishing a meal, we would pass it around in the evenings while we sat on the couch and read.  I would pack it in my suitcase on trips and we would read in hotel rooms and beach houses.  By the time we finished for the first time (and that took longer than I want to admit), it was pretty beat up.  The binding had started to come loose, there were a few sticky pages from unwashed hands taking a turn reading, and the cover was scratched from all the travel.  I remember feeling very discouraged that my lovely volume was now like everything else in my life; once pristine and perfect, now worn and tattered.

This phenomenon carries over into the lovely things for my home, my once new smelling car, and even my aging body.  I try so hard every day to keep things nice and every day they seem to deteriorate into chaos.  As I looked at the book I contemplated what it was good for now.  I didn't dare put it on my bookshelf next to all the lovely books anymore.  It would only highlight how I had failed take good care of it.

Then it struck me.  The point of reading the book every day wasn't to keep the book beautiful, it was to get the book inside my kids.  To make it's teachings a part of them.  If it looked as if it had been a bit chewed and digested, then maybe that was the point.  I wanted them to internalize what it was teaching.  I wanted it to be a part of them.  Motherhood isn't about keeping things perfect, it's about working every day towards a perfection that exists on the inside.  It's about using things as stepping stones for the growth and development of these precious spirits that I have been blessed to teach.  With the wisdom of a mother I choose the beauty that is growing on the inside of my children over the appearance of perfection in our routines.

The book doesn't sit on the shelf with all the other leather-bound books now.  Instead, it is the focal point of the family room and we still try to read from it every day.  It no longer mocks my inability to keep things beautiful, but serves as a monument and reminder for the important and slightly messy job of motherhood.