Maybe this is a second kid kind of a thing or a new baby situation, but man, I miss having my act together. Two short months ago, I totally felt I was rocking the work-at-home mom thing. Then baby #2 arrived, and while he is delightful and wonderful and a much, much easier baby than I deserve, there is no longer a single, solitary aspect of my life I am not ragingly behind on. Thank you notes unwritten, blogs not maintained, friends not called, books, hell, magazines unread. And we'll not talk about the tumbleweeds of pet fur all over my house or the disorganized cluster-you-know-what that is my work life.
So I found this essay, from Parenting (my least favorite parenting mag), of all places, very reassuring. Writer Margaret Renki posits that the kind of thinking we tend to do as mothers is just as meaningful and important as the stuff we once thought, and sometimes still do, about politics or art or The Meaning of Life.
I especially loved this:
"Motherhood forces us to understand, if only so we can teach it to our children, what really matters in the small space we each have between birth and death. And the easiest way for me to learn this lesson is by living in deep, penetrating kinship with other human beings -- by living, in other words, in a family."
I needed that, that reminder that this stuff matters even when it feels so small and trivial that the best thing I got done today was to keep everyone alive and loved.
