By Brian J. Lane<\/p>\n
Sunday morning. I slept in. It\u2019s 8:30 or maybe 9:30, who the heck knows? It\u2019s 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\u2019t help it from limply smashing down onto the two loads of clean laundry neatly folded on my wife\u2019s side of the bed. I\u2019ll get to picking that up later. I walk over to the bathroom, petting our two dogs on the way. They\u2019re wet and somehow actually smell decent for change\u2013 someone must\u2019ve given them a bath. The bathroom is clean too, wow. The dried toothpaste has even been chiseled off the sink.<\/p>\n
That afternoon, I walk past a massive pile of dirty dishes and what seems like at least 15 articles of kids\u2019 clothes and sneakers strewn about the kitchen, right into our living room. I\u2019m just going to relax on the couch for like, one or two minutes to regain my energy; an hour later, I\u2019m woken up by clanging dishes and my wife responding to five different questions about what we\u2019re having for dinner. She\u2019s still in workout clothes from the run she somehow fit in. She\u2019s training for some new race to raise money for another charity.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s everything.<\/p>\n
Is she motivated? Determined? Inexhaustible? Unrelenting? I\u2019d think twice about betting on the Sun in an endurance contest.<\/p>\n
All of that, and where she shines most – where most moms shine most – is as an advocate for her children. That\u2019s where the hidden gear kicks in. It\u2019s 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\u2019s more of a feel \u2013 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\u2019s not that she\u2019s trying to give anyone a hard time unnecessarily. It\u2019s more that half answers or just following the status quo aren\u2019t sufficient when the discussion is around her children. She\u2019s like a drilling rig with a superdeep drill \u2013 tunneling through all the bullshit that the rest of us normal people accept and somehow adapt to and she\u2019s simply looking for the best solution for her children even if it\u2019s deep, way down there, underneath millions of tons of earth, somewhere near the Earth\u2019s core. She\u2019ll find it.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Brian J. Lane Sunday morning. I slept in. It\u2019s 8:30 or maybe 9:30, who the heck knows? It\u2019s a Sunday after all. I roll over and wipe some drool … <\/p>\n