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I remember my mom making cookies. A cluster of children would gather around the counter adding ingredients in strict rotation. Mom would help the younger kids measure, but let them do the dumping. There were more kids than beaters, but mom kept a supply of spares in a drawer. She’d keep swapping out beaters until every child who wanted one, had one. I remember trying to get every last bit of dough off of the tongue defying shape of the beater.

I remember it all so clearly. But when I begin to describe it, I realize that it is not a single memory. It is a composite of many times when my mom made cookies. Sometimes I’m the youngest of four kids sitting around the counter. Other times there is a baby sister in the playpen behind me. Sometimes I was only allowed to dump. Others I was able to measure. Sometimes I got to hold the mixer and stir for awhile. Others I just watched. All of these different memories of making cookies with mom over lap like pictures on sheer sheets of paper. The central themes are clear, but the edges get all fuzzy. The core of the memories is the participation in making a treat. It was a time when mom was focused on us rather than the hundreds of other things she had to do daily to keep the house running.

I make cookies with my own kids. I let them help measure and stir and dump even though some days I’d rather not. Stirring neatly is a skill my children have yet to master. Each time I do it I know I’m adding another thin layer to their composite memories of “making cookies with mom.” They love it so much that the sound of the mixer summons my children faster than a can opener summons cats.

There are other things we do as a family which are creating composite memories. I carefully encourage these. Of such commonalities are families made. Some of the memories happen without any aid from me at all. The kids interact with each other and play similar games over and over again. I often ponder, while watching them play, which of these games will be the ones that are remembered with nostalgia when my adult children get together. It doesn’t matter to me that any particular thing be remembered, but it is very important that they have lots of warm and loving themes in their lives. Layer over layer of love in thin sheets so that the message is clear even if the edges are sometimes hazy.

I get blood drawn often. That is one of the side effects of having a thyroid condition. They have to test at least once per year to make sure that dosages are correct. Testing is done more often than that if I experience symptoms. I had my annual test 4 months ago, but lately I’ve had symptoms that suggest that I my dosage may be too high. So today I trotted myself off to get my blood drawn.

Most of the time getting my blood drawn is a non-event. I don’t stress in advance. I feel a moment’s nervousness when the needle is poised, but that is about it. Unfortunately some of my blood draws have been very memorable indeed. Once I got stuck a total of 5 times over a 2 hour period so they could get one little vial of blood. I frequently get stuck twice in the search for a good vein.

Today it was less than 15 minutes from the moment I walked into the door until I walked out with a bandaid on my arm. That time included registering. I think this is the first time that a blood draw didn’t hurt at all. It didn’t bruise either. Would that all phlebotomists were so competent.

I’ve been cold all day. It seeps into my bones and my mood. Right now I should be cooking dinner. Instead I’m sitting here at my computer feeling the weight of the cookies I impulsively made and ate. Yesterday I was full of happy thoughts and admiration for my children. I saw them for the amazing people they are. I was inspired to laugh and play with them, to tell them that they are wonderful. Today I just want to be left alone. I keep trying to wrap a bubble of solitude around myself. But they keep piercing it with their sharp requests. Pop!

The weight of the things that I expect myself to accomplish presses upon me. I could get squashed by that burden. I need to lighten the load. It isn’t that I need fewer things to do. I can do all the necessary things. It is the weight of those expectations that crushes me. It is the weight of the self-disaproval which I heap unpon my own shoulders on the days when I just muddle through rather than exceeding epectations. I’ve set the bar pretty high and I can be very mean to myself when I don’t clear it.

I did pretty well today. I just ran out of steam too soon. I came home from the creative writing class and retreated inward. I’m hoping to find a resurgence of energy and enthusiasm for the rest of the evening. I’d like to enjoy putting my kids to bed rather than shoving them into bed as fast as possible just to get it over with.

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.

There is a hymn we sing at church which includes the line “scatter sunshine all along your way, cheer, and bless, and brighten every passing day.” The tune began running through my head about half way through parent/teacher conferences at Kiki’s junior high school. We had 6 teachers to visit. Each of the classrooms had a large whiteboard. Gleek and Patches were naturally bored at being dragged along, so in each classroom they left little deposits of artwork on the whiteboards. They drew little suns in red and green and blue. The red suns were suns. The blue suns were water suns. Neither Gleek nor Patches deigned to tell me what the green suns were. All these suns shone down upon lumpy water, hills, lava and the occasional fish. The hardest part of the evening was prying Gleek and Patches away from the current art project to travel to the next room. We could have been done in half the time.

Our last stop was the band room. The band room contained an array of impressive percussion instruments. Huge kettle drums, and big bass drums, and xylophones of various sizes, and full drum sets, and cymbals, and bongo drums, and chimes, and a gong, and a triangle they all beckoned to my four bored-and-tired-and-hyper children. It is fortunate that the band teacher has children of his own because there was no way I was going to be able to enforce a hands-off policy. Instead he asked that I enforce a hands-only policy. This prevented the kids from taking the gong mallet to the thin skin of the giant drum. We had to wait for about 15 minutes, but the kids didn’t mind at all. They ran from instrument to instrument, experimenting with all the sounds they could make. I wandered through trying to keep the volume to a minimum and to make sure that no damage was done. As I watched I wished that they had a chance to fully explore, to really make a bunch of noise with these instruments. That stuff was all so cool. I wish I could have played with it too.

We finally departed the school on a quest to purchase a dinner. The conferences had been preceded by an appointment and hours of invoice sorting. I had no energy left for cooking. The kids did not lack for energy though. They all ran ahead of me to the car.

Tomorrow Kiki will go to all her classes and see all the sunshine that her younger siblings left scattered behind. The thought makes me smile.