A career choice or life choice

Every since I was a little girl all I ever wanted to be was a housewife, and a mother. Boy was I ambitious. I mean that quite literally because this job is exactly that- it's ambitious, and one has to have nerves of steel to attempt it. If you start becoming a mother, with no prior training, witness to good motherhood, believe me, you'll need the Lord's help to keep at it: once you find out how much it takes out of you. You also gotta have serious ambition to want to continue pressing on each day after reality sinks in. Yup, each day is ever-changing in the roles I must master, and acquire in order to keep myself motivated to do the work. I never knew that I would have to be a cook, a teacher, a tutor, a referee, a house cleaner, a shofar, and not to mention all the dinner parties I have to be an excellent host at, I usually gotta be the cook, waitress, and maid at those dinners too. Dinner parties, slumber parties, pool parties, birthday parties, and parties just because 5 over-grown 16-year-old boys have decided to turn your backyard into a football field. Then of course because we waited 10 years to have our second child I would have triplet little girls. They were all born healthy, and our church family has helped a lot. We decided to not look at the sonogram, and boy were we surprised. The doctor wasn't, though. You'd think he would have told us it was triplets, and just left out the sex. However, my husband is old-fashioned and wanted to do it just the way his Grandmother did. That's who raised him, and he likes doing things like she did. I was adopted, so I really have no frame of reference or treasured childhood memories from the way I was raised that I would like to include children's lives. There was one, I never told anyone this, in my heart, I believe it was God's way of giving me a pleasant memory from childhood that I didn't realize that I had. You know in the orphanage, I always had a friend to play with. I was never lonely, there were other kids near my age within usually an arm's distance. I have read books about lonely only children, and I'm glad I wasn't one.

But now we get back to my present story 35 years plus later. I'm still only a head turn away from a different face in the house. My girls are all quite different looking and acting. The petite blonde; Cydney is very much the shrinking violet. She blushes anytime you say her name aloud. For example, I might say, "Cydney, honey I need you to come here, please." And she looks at me with such a delightfully embarrassed look, with eyebrows raised very high, and large periwinkle blue eyes, with a wide smile, which appears wider each time I call her name. One might think this would think her dimples get tired of dimpling. No, no that's not the case, though. Then we have Allyson, now she is even more petite than Cydney, shyer, and timider. Those two are fair complected with blonde hair and blue eyes. But my middle child, well she is freckled with beauty marks all about her face and arms. She also has the most dynamic red hair, it's so gorgeous it looks like it is straight out of a bottle. Do you remember Cyndie Lopper from the 1980s? Well, she has Cyndey Lopper red hair. Her eyes are hazel too, with a bit of mint green mixed in with the blue. She is something special, and humble as they come. You know if kindness were a superhero trait, each one of them would be a superhero.

Being their Mom is challenging, with a husband who is on the road driving a truck 9 months out of the year I find myself wondering how my dream career, which is being a full-time stay-at-home Mom is not as rewarding as I imagined. I just thought I would rather have kids, clean house, change diapers. At any ungiven time clean up puke from a sick child, keep up with multiple vaccination requirements for the school for the kids. My job also includes running errands all day, cooking 3 meals a day, packing 4 separate lunches. I also wash clothes, take kids to soccer, ballet, football, cheerleading, gymnastics, both boy scouts, and girl scouts. Then I make sure I scrub 3 different toilets at some point during each week. Why did I think being a wife, and mother was more ideal than going to college and having a career for my future. What a vocation I chose, it's rewarding, but I have to schedule in time to enjoy the rewarding part. Most of the time my schedule gets interrupted by unforeseen life events. I really had no idea that the workload in this career choice was so jam-packed. But if I knew it beforehand, I wonder if I would have chosen it. Nah, probably not, I would have been something a little less stressful, like a cop, or female firefighter. At least with those jobs you know what you are up against before you take the job, You know I wonder if Jeffrey Dahmer's mother wanted to have a career more than being a mother. You know motherhood is a really risky business because humans have free will. Motherhood is the most expensive career that I know of too. The cost is unfathomable, but at least I am not responsible for providing everything for the career that I have chosen. My mother paid some, then her mother, and her mother's mother, and all the way down to Eve. If we are going to go all the way back to Eve we surely must include Adam. Most importantly the Lord God paid the ultimate price through his son Jesus Christ. I guess that is the model parents use when it comes to sacrificing for their children. Thank you, Jesus, for sacrificing for your children.