Moms make the world go 'round...or at least keep it tidy

Have you ever asked yourself what would happen if you stopped doing everything you do around the house? 

I have...often. Apparently I'm the only one in my family with the special gene that allows you to actually see when things are a mess. It's so strange. Apparently certain family members were born without that one. How does that happen? Because of that, I've often lamented, sometimes to myself and most often NOT to myself, what my family would do if I weren't here. I was sure they would eat nothing but cold cereal and eventually end up on an episode of hoarders.

The last ten days we got a real peek into just what that mom absence would look like. With back to back events, I was out of the house every day, all day. At the end of the first event I came home, unloaded a Suburban full of stuff and deposited it in the living room floor in order to make it to the next event. That was Saturday....it's still there. It honestly looks like a bomb went off in almost every room of my house. Some of the kids were home during those ten days and in their defense, they did SOME things...like pulling a backyard full of four foot tall weeds. Props for that guys! And I came home at the end of the event last night to find the oldest mopping the kitchen floor, so I have to give them some credit. 

Here's the thing. They just don't see things through a mom's eyes. They can't...they're not moms. They are incredibly willing to help and do anything I ask of them, they just don't always see the need on their own. They don't have the same "mom standards" I have. My boys know I mean business when I tell them to "mom clean" their room. They know it's about to get serious!

One unintentional outcome of my little unofficial mom experiment is that I realized how much I love being home and doing all those little things that I so often complain about. It was nice to wake up this morning, sip my coffee and work on putting things back in order. There's peace in order. I know that, but I had been missing out on the peace that getting things in order can bring because I was so worked up about the fact that no one else saw the needs that were so obvious to me. My frustration caused me to miss out on the blessing.

So today I'm "piddling". The washer and dryer are humming along, the kitchen's clean (or was ten minutes ago when I came upstairs), things are getting put away, we're packing up our oldest to leave for two months and we're slowly working our way back to normal....I'm discovering I really, really like normal.