By Brian J. Lane
Sunday morning. I slept in. It’s 8:30 or maybe 9:30, who the heck knows? It’s a Sunday after all. I roll over and wipe some drool from my cheek after a disgusting yawn. My arm is asleep, dead-weight and I can’t help it from limply smashing down onto the two loads of clean laundry neatly folded on my wife’s side of the bed. I’ll get to picking that up later. I walk over to the bathroom, petting our two dogs on the way. They’re wet and somehow actually smell decent for change– someone must’ve given them a bath. The bathroom is clean too, wow. The dried toothpaste has even been chiseled off the sink.
That afternoon, I walk past a massive pile of dirty dishes and what seems like at least 15 articles of kids’ clothes and sneakers strewn about the kitchen, right into our living room. I’m just going to relax on the couch for like, one or two minutes to regain my energy; an hour later, I’m woken up by clanging dishes and my wife responding to five different questions about what we’re having for dinner. She’s still in workout clothes from the run she somehow fit in. She’s training for some new race to raise money for another charity.
It’s not just the small, incessant daily tasks that we need around the house. The ones she does on top of everything else in her life. And it’s not just the way that she can go from morning to night, day in and day out without doing a single thing for herself. It’s also not just how she instinctively knows when to push through and find a solution for one of the thousands of issues that pop up for our kids/house/family/pets/me/etc.
It’s everything.
- She holds a successful career
- She runs a non-profit
- She’s on the Board of another
- She’s everyone’s most reliable friend or family member
- She handles essentially everything for our five children
- Who are all between the age of 5 and 10
- Who ALL do multiple activities – often on the same day
- One of which has a rare disease that she knows more about than anyone on the planet
Is she motivated? Determined? Inexhaustible? Unrelenting? I’d think twice about betting on the Sun in an endurance contest.
All of that, and where she shines most – where most moms shine most – is as an advocate for her children. That’s where the hidden gear kicks in. It’s not just an extra energy reserve or the ability to do one more call or meeting with teachers or school administrators or doctors or whomever. It’s more of a feel – that she innately knows when something seems off or unfair or worthy of just one more question or in need of a bit more explanation. It’s not that she’s trying to give anyone a hard time unnecessarily. It’s more that half answers or just following the status quo aren’t sufficient when the discussion is around her children. She’s like a drilling rig with a superdeep drill – tunneling through all the bullshit that the rest of us normal people accept and somehow adapt to and she’s simply looking for the best solution for her children even if it’s deep, way down there, underneath millions of tons of earth, somewhere near the Earth’s core. She’ll find it.
Is she the only mom with these traits? No, of course not. And the rest of us are all fortunate beyond our wildest imaginations to have them in our lives.
