Day: September 29, 2007

Sometimes we have to choose between important things.

This evening was a general women’s broadcast for all the adult female members of my church. It is an annual event which is very spiritually filling. I love going. But today was a day full of events. Howard cooked 5 dutch oven pizzas for a crowd of hungry men on a shooting trip, then came home and scoured out all the ovens. It was an exhausting effort for him even though he enjoyed it. I was gone to a baby shower even before he returned. I loved the baby shower. It was a chance to meet some new people and visit with a few familiar friends. And there weren’t any compulsory baby shower games, just pleasant visiting and yummy food. As I drove home from the shower I found myself saying out loud that I didn’t want to go to the broadcast. This puzzled me because I usually love it.

Then I arrived home. Gleek was bouncing off the walls bored because she’d been trapped inside all day by sleeting rain. She was solving her boredom by irritating Kiki. The kitchen was filled with the shrapnel from three or four semi-supervised craft projects. Link was hungry and needed help cooking. Patches was also hungry. Patches and Gleek also wanted to take a bath. They needed the bath badly. Howard was hiding from the chaos in his office, too limp to move much.

I surveyed all of this and realized that I’d expected to find it all. I knew that I was coming home to chaos and that abandoning it to head back out, would be abandoning my post. I would have loved to go to the women’s broadcast tonight, but my family really needed me here. They needed me to run the bath water. And negotiate the Bead Crisis. And cook food. And wash hair. And clean up the kitchen. They needed me to be cheerful, and competent, and restore a sense of order to a day already slightly askew and poised to go seriously awry. So I stayed home.

Sometimes the pressure of so many needs feels as though it will crush me. Sometimes I feel trapped by it all. But today I did not. Today I was happy to feel so needed and essential. I think some of the difference is that everyone was willing to let me go. They were willing to muddle through so that I wouldn’t have to miss the broadcast. But there have been so many times that Howard has dropped everything to meet my needs, it would be wrong of me not to do the same when presented with the opportunity.

It was definitely the right choice. The moment I announced my intention to stay home, all of my people relaxed a little. Gleek in particular expressed gladness that I would be staying. She needs me more than the others I think. She depends upon me to reign her in when she can’t do it for herself. Thus she misses me more when I leave. The following hour was a chaos filled with request upon request as everyone simultaneously turned to me for things they needed. The hour after that there was calm and clean and peace.

I’ll listen to the broadcast off of the internet some other day. For today my family needed me more. Since my religion is founded upon the family I think this means I have my priorities straight.

Sometimes inspiration coalesces rather than strikes. That was my experience as I contemplated the state of my house and my lack of time and energy to accomplish everything. I realized that I was doing too much picking up after the kids. This sort of maid work is a poor use of my time, and yet it needs done. The obvious answer is to make the kids pick up after themselves. Unfortunately this often takes more effort than just picking up after the kids, which is why I haven’t been making the kids do the work. I pondered this situation over the course of several weeks and a plan slowly came together in my mind.

I realized that I needed to institute a system of rewards and consequences. Not just for the kids, but for me as well. If there is no reward for me in making the kids do the work, then the system will have a very short lifespan. One frequent mistake in trying to institute reform is to take on too much at once. Total reformation can work if you have time and energy to really focus on it. I have too many other things, so I needed to pick a few areas of focus.

I decided to stop the accumulation of clothing on the bathroom floors. Those piles of shed clothing grow until I scrape up the archeological layers and put them in the laundry. I put up a sign in each bathroom that announced “Clothing is not allowed on this floor. If I find your clothing here, I will make you clean it up and assign you an extra chore.” That extra chore is the reward for me. By enforcing the rule I get some small task done by someone else. This makes the effort to make a child work, worth it. The extra chore is also a consequence for the kids. Ideally they’ll just stop leaving clothes on the floor and enforcement will never be necessary.

The front room is also a big clutter accumulator. The kids walk in the door and dump backpacks, coats, books, shoes all over the room. The same rule applies for the front room as for the bathrooms. If I find their stuff there, then they have to pick it up and do an extra chore. I didn’t hang a sign with the full rule on it, but I did hang a reminder sign over the couch. It says “this is not a dumping ground.”

The third area that was causing big problems was the video cabinet where we keep our games and movies. I kept finding discs left laying around with no cases. Controllers were left all over the room where they could get stepped on or broken. Games and movies teetered in great stacks. I cleaned the whole area up then hung a sign that says “put it away or it goes to jail.” In this case “jail” is our jail box. Kids can only get stuff out of the jail box by doing an extra chore. I announced to the kids that I was going to be very strict about movies and video games. I’m no longer warning or giving second chances. If these things are left laying around they’ll go to jail.

I’m almost looking forward to them leaving stuff laying around because the extra chores will make my house cleaner.