I’ve been trying to write about Evelyn’s recent gasping for air-turning blue-ambulance-hospital experience for a couple of weeks.  I’ve come to the conclusion that it is not meant to be written–at least not now.  So I am putting it away and writing about something else.

People often ask me how I do so much.  Because I am asked it so often, I have given it some serious thought.  I’ve come to some conclusions.  People ask the question with some incorrect preconceived notions.

The bottom line is that we all make choices about what we do.  And I am here today to destroy any respect you may have previously had for me 🙂  No seriously.  You probably think that I do everything that you do plus the things that you see me doing–like schlepping Evie to umpteen appointments, that you don’t do.  No.

I don’t clean.  Nope, I’m not kidding.  I have a housekeeper.  She comes once a week and digs us out of our filth and clutter.  Were it not for her, we’d be in some serious trouble as proven by weeks that she hasn’t been able to come.  Sometimes I will run the vacuum quickly across the floor but that is pretty much the extent of my domestic efforts.

I don’t really put laundry away.  We mostly live out of laundry baskets.  I’m not exaggerating in the least when I say that we own 10 baskets for clean clothing and 4 baskets for dirty clothing.  I do a pretty decent job of getting dirty laundry clean.  I actually empty the clean baskets—once a month?  Maybe?  On a good month.

I don’t iron.  Nope.  Not at all.  It doesn’t make sense to me.  So we wear clothing that we don’t need to iron.  I haven’t ironed in years and I’m not ashamed that I choose to spend my time in other ways.  In fact, I am proud of it.

I neglect my appearance in other ways too.  I don’t style my hair-it is almost always up.  I don’t wear makeup.  I don’t get my haircut but a couple of times a year.  I don’t color my hair.  I don’t shave–maybe a couple of times in the summer.  I mostly bathe with my children.  I steal a couple of adult showers a week but that’s it.

I sleep perfectly well when there are dishes in the sink–amazingly, they are always there in the morning for me to wash.  I don’t have much to shovel in the winter because we have our driveway plowed.  In the summer, we have our lawn mowed and raked and I just take care of the fun stuff like planting things that make me happy.  Truth be told, if it were up to me, I would turn our lawn into a field of wild flowers, tall grass, and vegetable gardens that someone else takes care of.  But I have been vetoed on all of these whimsies.  Well, I am slowly achieving the wild flowers but shhhhhh.

So now that you’ve lost all respect for me, let me try to build it back up to a normal level.  I am pretty much a single parent during the week with Scott being down in Boston.  He is home for about 48 hours a week.  We don’t want to spend our weekends cleaning or doing yard work.  We want to spend time as a family.  And quite frankly, I need to spend time alone rejuvenating and energizing for the long week ahead…so I do.

We have a lot of therapies and appointments during the week.  My calendar would probably boggle your mind.  When we aren’t doing those things, we chill.  That doesn’t necessarily mean sitting on our bottoms and doing nothing; although, sometimes it does.  It means we don’t do anything that we don’t feel like doing that doesn’t have to be done.

I had to let a lot of things go in order to be happy.  I’ve spent too much of my life worrying about things that don’t matter.  When I am old and look back on my life, I want to see days that were filled with laughter and love.  I don’t want to wait until I am 80 to realize that there is no prize for having pressed clothing or the most organized home.  I want my children to remember long hot summers filled with swimming until their hands look like prunes, bare feet, and a mother that encouraged them to seize the day and get dirty.  And eat big fat ripe strawberries right off the vine.

So yeah, back to my point.  I don’t do nearly as much as you think I do.