Choices

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.