This morning, whilst exploring the blogosphere, I lost forty minutes in the blink of an eye and gained, according to my scale, three pounds in the interim. This hardly seems fair. Yet, there are greater things at risk, things that make me question the wisdom of my bloggy choices. The orange ring in the toilet is gone but you don’t even want to know the state of the toilet reserved for the Big Guy’s personal use. The house-cleaning adrenaline rush I experienced a few days ago looks to have never happened (which is one reason why it doesn’t happen too often because, let’s face it, what’s the gol-darn point?) plus there are no clean towels in the house, a fact about which I can hardly bring myself to care.
Then something happened that made me question “things” even more. My publisher forwarded a review of my book which was so not negative (it’s hard to find one that doesn’t have something bad to say and this had not one!) and plenty positive to boot that I spent about an hour doing a happy dance and emailing family and friends. Then I took a nap because I was exhausted but mostly because the Middle Child needed the computer for her homework (she is so demanding!).
After a decent interval, the Little Guy woke me up because he needed help with something, so naturally I suddenly started to worry that he wasn’t getting enough attention. I dragged him up onto the bed, twisting him one way so as not to mess up the pile of clothes waiting to be folded, then twisted him the other way to spare him getting bruised by the pile of books and papers tossed to the other side, took him in my arms and asked him lots of insecure needy mom questions. I’ll have you know, he passed with flying colors. Still, I knew I hadn’t yet brought out the big guns. That’s when I asked, “Little Guy, what’s the most important thing you could ever do in this life?”
I waited for his answer with bated breath. I had no idea what he would say, no idea what I would say, in any “for sure” definitive way if someone had asked me the same question that same minute, so I assured him there was lots of right answers and that I just wanted to hear his.
“Okay,” he said, “in that case, my answer is that I should serve Jesus and love my family all my life!”
“Really? Where did you learn that?” I wondered aloud in my Insecure Mommy way.
“You taught me that, silly!”
“I did? Are you sure?” And then I did another happy dance because it seems that quite possibly, to some small and narrow degree, my job here is done.
Except that then, I had to make dinner, my most detested domestic duty on the list titled “Things my husband still expects me to do on a fairly regular basis”.
P.S. While I was posting this, dinner burned. Please note, I did not say "I burned dinner". It burned all by itself with no help from me whatsoever. I went to wake my napping husband with the news. He just looked at me with bleary eyes and said the only thing he could, "I love you, Heidi". The man's a gem.
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