My Real Life

“I don’t know how you do it,” is a phrase I hear a lot.

When I hear it, I smile and say “I have really good kids and a really supportive husband,” because it’s the truth.

Then they say “Yeah, but still, I don’t know how you do it.”

I often wonder what exactly this “IT” is that they think I do.

And I certainly hope that “IT” doesn’t equal “ALL” because I don’t do it all.

One of the blogs I read, “Tiny Twig Goes Out on a Limb,” covered this very topic, last week, and I thought she did a beautiful job.

You can read her take on doing it all here.

As for me, I certainly don’t do it all, either.

Here are my contributions to Tiny Twig’s list:

1.  I don’t deep clean my house.  In fact, I have a cleaning lady that comes every other week.  She scrubs, she shines, and does the deep cleaning I could be doing instead of hanging with the monkeys when I get home from work.  Let’s be honest…we’re in the midst of play season.  Add that to my teaching day, plus piano, and I’m leaving at 7:15 in the morning and not walking in the door again until 5:30, sometimes 6:00.  I wanna play Wii tennis or chess or cut stuff out of construction paper with the monkeys.  I don’t want to have to deep clean the house.  So, for about 3 hours, once every two weeks, my house is sparkling clean.  The rest of the time, it’s clean enough.

2.  This brings me to point number two.  I love to play games and do stuff with the monkeys.  I do.  But, I don’t want anyone thinking that’s all I do when I’m home.  I would think that’s evident just from the mere fact that I write this blog, which takes up a bit of time.  But I also like to read, to run on the treadmill, to play the piano, and do other things to relax, and a lot of these things don’t involve my kids.  My children are my life.  But, my children aren’t my life.  I have other interests, as well as being a Mom, and I think that’s just fine.  On Facebook the other day, my Mom posted that she called here to talk to Baby Monkey and while they were on the phone, he called over his shoulder to his siblings, “I could use a little quiet, here.”  He got that from me.

3.  This comes as no surprise to regular readers, but I suck at laundry.  I simply cannot stay on top of it.  Can. Not. Do. It.  In fact, (and this is absolutely no joke), if I knew someone I could hire to do our laundry, I would.  I don’t like spending money, but this would be somewhere I would absolutely spend my money.  I hate it.  I don’t know why I hate it so much.  It’s not the washing or the drying.  It’s the folding, hanging and putting away.  And the fact that I’m doing laundry for 6.  So, we’re all always looking for this shirt or those pants and my answer is always, “It’s probably still dirty.”  And sometimes, we wear it dirty.

4.  I don’t do it all, because I don’t have to.  I have an incredible husband and we’re a team. You want to talk about someone who does it all?  Talk about a single Mom.  My friend, Jodi, does it all and does it by herself and does it beautifully.  She’s who I look up to.

So, these are just a few of the things that I don’t do, or even that I don’t do well.

No one does it all.

No one should even try.

I do the best that I can and try not to beat myself up over the stuff I’m not doing as well as someone else is doing it.

Because, odds are, I’m probably a rock star at something they are struggling with.