Speeding tickets on the parenting highway

I am going too fast.

All this periphery stuff in my day can just wait. Why is it SO critical to me that my house be clean every second of the day, that my clients all feel "personally attended to", that my laundry be done - and folded a la the 1990's GAP stores ridiculolus T-shirt display racks and smelling fresh and clean to boot? (Tide Glacier - tell me, what DOES a frozen tundra of ice smell like anyway? This seems not to be a good marketing idea, but on we go...)

WHY do I get hyperfocsed on these stupid, peripheral things to the exclusion of the much more meaningful (and OBVIOUS, sadly) choices I can be making as a parent? Why? Why? WHY?

Even though my Lovely does the laundry with me now on a regular basis - she is quite the amazing and willing helper - I still am meeting more of MY needs than hers with that task because I enjoy it and it is one of my daily "have-to's". Why don't I let HER choose the activity to involve us in more often? You can bet your frozen tundra laundry detergent it would not be the art of the tri-folded sweater. It'd be Candyland, or Go Fish, reading the Three Trees, or making cards for Harry Potter and sending them to Hogwarts Castle (which is quite amazingly close to Grandma and Grandpas' house). I know those would have been more special ways to spend this afternoon than washing, drying, fluffing, folding, and putting away a series of clothes that will just require this exact same routine again in a week's time. My daugther was my helper but I was not her playmate. I keep missing these incredibly potent moments by not pursuing them and making them happen. Because I am running too fast from task to task - I am just going too fast, period. The parent-police should have given me a speeding ticket today. I absolutely deserved it.

I think parenting becomes more about surrender, more about submission of will, and more about listening and ministering to your childs' heart by getting your own agenda out of the way so you can actually HEAR it. I think it is about grace, it is about selflessness, and it is about recrafting your life around another little person's so that a childhood is artfully created - not haphazardly experienced as a random series of days during which one happens to be a child. There is a difference between living day to day and choosing to live deliberately, making the moments count. Somewhere in the Tide Glacier-induced laundry haze, I forgot that lesson today.

If only you could go to traffic school for these kinds of speeding tickets to erase them from your permanent parenting record. Instead, they get etched as painful, deeply-grooved scrapes on your heart. But it is the pain that will remind me of a lesson I have hopefully forever learned. I am aching for the sunrise right now, just to be able to begin a new day with my babies and redeem my reformed formerly-hurried self.

May the laundry rest well in its' little hamper for a little while. It can just sit there quietly, unheeded, until I have actually slowed myself down enough not to care so much.