DailySusan Humor Blog

BORING MOTHERHOOD

Some so-called woman wrote an op-ed in a Texas newspaper recently that pretty much said motherhood was boring and hooray for day care, nannies and year-round school so that mothers can ‘’work’’ instead of doing all the dull, routine stuff that comes with rearing children.

Motherhood: boring. Riiiiiiight.

I was awakened at 2:30 a.m. yesterday by a ringing phone. It was my husband, calling from Beaumont, Texas, where our 16-year-old had just hit a home run at the national tournament of the American Fastpitch Association. They were playing at that hour because of a rain delay. The last time she made a home run, it was on a hilariously bungled bunt that the other team fielded like a bunch of Keystone Kops. But this was the real deal, and it was at Nationals. I guess she also made the final put-out with a missile-like throw from right field to first to seal the win. Her real name’s Eden, but we call her ‘’Beamer’’ because she smiles all the time. I knew she was smiling real big at that moment. It will go down in The Lore of the Beam.

Is that boring?

Then I’ve been bustin’ my buttons over the two weekends’ worth of garage sales put on my our two older daughters, Jordan, 21, and Neely, 19. They did well last weekend, but, using the principle of ‘’If at first you don’t unload, try, try again,’’ they reprised it. This weekend they have sold stuff I never thought would sell, with fun signs like, on the ancient vacuum cleaner: ‘’Ugly, but it works beautifully,’’ and on the aquarium, ‘’Everything you need but the fish.’’ We’re calling it the ‘’Yes, You CAN Get Blood From a Turnip Garage Sale.’’

Then yesterday I spent three -- count ‘em -- three hours catching our 4-year-old Maddy and her friend Kaylin at the bottom of a water slide. Now my face and shoulders are beautifully golden tan and everything from the chest down is mushroom white. But oh, well. Every time she came down, Maddy did something different: making rude bathroom noises on her arm . . . sitting ‘’criss-cross applesauce’’ . . . diving forward like a dolphin . . . I came home utterly exhausted but the two little girls could’ve gone on for 12 hours.

It was anything but boring.

Then the 19-year-old walked in, grinning from ear to just-pierced ear -- finally decided to get her ears pierced, and boy, did they look great on her.

Behind our backs, though, Maddy had tippy-toed back out into the garage sale inventory and ‘’rescued’’ a dinosaur stamp set. She took off her shirt and stamped black dinosaurs all over her belly, shoulders and somehow on her back. So now I had one child with piercings and another with tattoos.

Yeah, motherhood: boring. Riiiiiiiight.

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Prayer request: There’s a youth minister in Missouri, Scotty, who has an old football back injury. He has had a couple of surgeries but still can’t pick up his two precious little kids. He is in constant, horrible pain all the time. Sometimes he’s afraid he’ll be in too much pain to stand and preach. Father, we lift up Scotty to You as an example of faithfulness through suffering. We ask for relief for him, and supernatural endurance. (2 Corinthians 12:7)