I must warn you before you continue reading. Proceeding may cause irreversible damage to
the way you see yourself when you look in the mirror, or at least try to look
in a mirror that is smudged with handprints and water splotches. But if you consider yourself among the
brave, the courageous, continue on, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
You are not really a mom.
It is a lie, a myth now debunked.
You . . . are you ready for this?
You are actually a reporter.
Yep. That’s
right. All good reporters know they must
drop everything they are doing as soon as a story arises, whether it is good,
bad, or ugly. And they must run to the
scene of the crime, be in the middle of the action so they can get the story,
the full story. And you, my fellow mother
friend, do just this. Your stories are
created by the angels and monsters, depending on the day, who live and breathe
and somehow really did come from you.
And we all know a good reporter cannot simply stop
there. She must continue on to
report. And report is what I do all day
long. I report to my husband’s initials
on my caller id. I report to the frantic
screams from the child who’s being chased with a dart gun. I report to the dishes, the laundry, the
bills, the yard, and the list goes on and on and on. But most importantly, and I think you’ll
agree, there is one thing I report to numerous times a day that keeps my life
halfway on track. Without it, I am totally
lost, as are my kids who will never end up at school with the appropriate
necessities if I fail to report here. And
not only must I report once a day, but hour after hour, because the list on
that report is so long, and my memory so fried from motherhood, that I’ll
forget important things like Katie’s friend’s birthday party or Caleb’s snack
leader day or Nate’s swimming trunks for his PBIS party.
So if you’re still confused, go check your calendar, report
to it, because you probably failed to do so first thing this morning, and so
now you don’t realize today was the day you were supposed to reinstall your
mind before proceeding with the day’s activities.
When I report to my calendar, I see a plethora of events,
responsibilities, activities. Most of
them, if I really think about it, are actually quite trivial in the big scheme
of life. But there is one activity I list
on there that never fails to have lasting impact. Camping.
Maybe your calendar doesn’t say camping. But I hope it occasionally says something
that denotes you intentionally setting aside time to have fun with your
family. Life is busy, as our calendars
so clearly relay, but life should never be so busy for us to fail to make
memories with our children.
I remember camping with my grandparents very well. My grandpa died 8 years ago. My grandma died 4 days ago. And as we laid them to rest, memories flooded
over like a sea of joy. My grandparents
understood the importance of family, and they took time to simply be with
us. In an ever-increasingly,
speed-of-lightning paced world, it is hard.
I know. But I also know I didn’t
stand at my grandma’s casket and remember fondly all the dishes she washed, all
the laundry she folded, or all the bills she paid. I remember all the love she showed when she
simply spent time to connect with me on a very personal level.
Connect. We all know
in our minds that we need to connect with our children, especially as calendars
fill to the brim. But do we really know
the lasting legacy we leave? When our
children are called to also become reporters, reporting on the events of our
lives and the memories we left them with as we go on to meet our maker, how
impacting will their story about us be?
I want my story to be one to write home about. I want the pages of my life to fill them even
after I’m gone. I believe as moms, we
all want this. But somehow, we report
too much to the trivial and not enough to the treasured. So we must stop in the midst of that story of
chaos, and pursue a better story, one that will make headlines for years to
come, a story to write at home about.
