Hi friends,
Do you ever just feel insufficient? Not good enough or strong enough or persistent enough or really anything enough?
I’ve been struggling a lot lately. I found myself standing in the middle of my living room floor this evening just fighting back tears. Totally overwhelmed by all that is around me.
People often say they don’t feel like they are adults. Like they are still kids inside and someone just deemed them worthy of the title “adult” even though they are clearly not responsible enough to own it.
That’s how I’ve been feeling. I’ve been looking around at all of my responsibilities, and I can’t help but feel like I am standing at the foot of a hill that’s way too high for my legs to carry me up.
I’ve decided over the last month that we need a culture shift in our home. See, somehow I had gotten it into my head (thanks society) that doing everything around the home was the mom’s job. It was the mom’s job to cook and to clean and to do homework and to volunteer for all of the positions available. To do all of the laundry and the gardening and the vacuuming and sweeping and everything.
Intellectually, I never would have said that, but in my heart, I felt it.
And so when things weren’t getting done around the house, even if they weren’t my responsibility to do, I still felt the responsibility for it. And so I walked around feeling like a failure all day every day. And contrary to popular belief, feelings of failure don’t actually motivate people to do anything different. They just leave them swirling in circles of shame.
And so I took a moment recently to just think about things. How they are going and how I would like them to go. And I realized one important thing.
I don’t want to raise daughters who don’t know how to take care of themselves. I don’t want to raise them to not know how to cook or do laundry and run a vacuum or fill a dishwasher properly.
No, I want them to know the value of responsibility and to feel competent to lead their lives in a responsible manner. I want to raise holy girls and kind girls and intelligent girls and compassionate girls. But I also want to raise girls who are competent stewards of what they have received and what they have earned.
I think through all of the values I want my girls to embody, and I try actively to try to instill those values in them. Instilling those values is a conscious effort on my part. But I realized that I really haven’t been doing that when it comes to keeping things clean and tidy and organized.
And I decided that would change.
On the last day of school, we were in the car listening to the radio announcer talking about the recent lawsuit where parents had to actually sue their 30 year old son to get out of their house. He said he had never had to do any chores or pay anything towards rent, and so he believed his parents had the responsibility to keep doing that. He said he couldn’t afford to move out, and so it was his parent’s responsibility to pay for him to live there.
Did you hear that? His parents literally had to take him to court, and after the judge ruled that he had to get out, he told reporters that he definitely would be appealing the decision.
That was news story was pretty much the nail in the coffin of my kids’ free ride. Don’t misunderstand me, I would love for my kids to grow up and all of us to go live in some big village where we live symbiotically and I get to keep my girlies with me always. (I know this is 21st century America and that is not going to happen.) But in that big village, my kids aren’t just lying around shirking their responsibilities. They are finding joy and self esteem and pride in their accomplishments.
So all of that is to say that this summer, we are changing the culture in our home. We’ll keep all the good things, but we are adding a huge dose of responsibility. I don’t believe kids should spend their lives cleaning and doing chores, but I do believe they need general responsibilities and they need to feel like they are contributing to the running of the household of which they are members.
So far, they are all for it. It’s fun to do chores that you have never done before. It makes them feel grown up. But it’s not fun to be the mom trying to oversee it all when kids naturally veer away from doing chores when they haven’t been fully trained in them and when they are used to getting out of them if they just procrastinate long enough and make Mom crazy enough.
But we are done with that. I know it’s not going to be easy, and I know it’s labor intensive at the beginning, but I also know that even if it takes them way longer than it should to catch on, that eventually it will be worth it when it has seeped into their character just as much as the other values I have tried to instill in them.
But still friends, it’s not easy. It’s not easy being the boundary, the one responsible for stopping the tide and pushing it back the other way. And it’s not easy to have to juggle so many balls in the air at one time.
And I know you all know what I’m talking about because I am not alone in this. It’s hard to be the one responsible for all the other ones.
And sometimes I feel like I’m not up to the task. Sometimes I stand in the middle of my living room at 9:00 at night and see all I still have to do and just start to cry. Because this is a blessed life and a fun life and the life I would choose among any other that could have been offered to me. But it’s still hard. And I still feel inadequate sometimes.
But one of the blessings of parenting is that we really aren’t given a choice to not be good enough. We have to keep going. We have to do the hard work because the goal we are working towards is the betterment of our children’s souls. That’s not something we can outsource. It’s not something we can skimp on. And it’s not something that we can let slide.
So, with all of you out there I’m sure, I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning, and I’m going to put a smile on my face, and I’m gong to persevere. Because these girls deserve nothing less.
And I should note that my kids were listening to that news story with me and that a psychologist came on the radio afterwards and started talking about how if we want to raise kids who aren’t entitled that we need to give them responsibilities and make sure that they follow through with them. At this point, my daughters may have started screaming loudly from the backseat to try to get me to turn off the radio because they said it was a bad influence on me.
They know the tides have changed. And they are good girls. They want to do their share. They just don’t always remember it.
But I’m here to remind them 😉