One of my fears in blogging is that I will aspire to a sort of public persona, one that falsely portrays me as having it all together. In selecting material for my blog, it’s easy to skip over the mundane and jump right to the noteworthy. Problem is, as a mom, most of what we do is not particularly significant on the surface.
Think about it. When a husband walks in the door at the end of the day and poses the question, “what’d you do today?”, how does a mom respond?
I kick it off with a big fat “Ummmm…” Because whether I’ve been out running errands or in running the household, none of what I did makes the cut as “spectacular”. Or even interesting, really. Like 95% percent of the time. Motherhood is not, nor will ever be quantifiable.
But if I were to add up the laundry loads, the number of times I swept the floor, or picked up dirty socks, or applied a bandaid, or read a story, or sang a song, or held a hand, or assembled a puzzle, or prepped a dinner, or volunteered in a school class, or gave a reminder, or any number of things that fill my days, I would see that the mundane are simply building blocks for the extraordinary. I’m raising humans, peeps.
If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be doing it day in and day out.
But since enumerating thankless tasks does not a blog post make, I mostly churn out content that either I want to record for posterity or that will hopefully be of benefit to someone. Family systems that work, art lessons, fun family vacations, special occasions in our lives, etc.
To avoid portraying an inaccurate public persona, I hope to dedicate a blog post here and there to the average day. The boring, the unremarkable. Quintessential motherhood moments. Like this:
Yep, that’s Vaseline. All over his legs, clothes, arms, hair and my bathroom floor.
To my credit, I’m smart enough not to keep it in his room, something I could not say 15 years ago, when his older sister Anna did the exact.same.thing. Yes, in her bedroom. She covered a lot more ground because it was “quiet time” so I left her pretty much unsupervised for at least an hour and a half. A toddler can inflict a whole lot of damage in that time.
It took me four days to get it out of her hair.
Okay, it just occurred to me that maybe this little anecdote does qualify as remarkable. Just not in the way we mothers might want. This is the stuff motherhood is made of. Day in and day out. Who wouldn’t want this job?
