The job that never ends

So here I am, laundry piling, dishes piling. I did dishes twice yesterday and then made a nice meal, which made more dishes. I do not own a dish washer, though I keep hinting, which has now turned into begging, for one. Laundry three times just to have two more loads to do today. Swept the floor once and tried to get around to mopping, but my son made another mess on the floor and I just wondered what was the use? It's just going to get messy again anyway... Where does all this work come from? I truly do believe there are people living here that I haven't met yet.

I feel this need to upkeep my home. Not just for cleanliness, but for that "just in case", for safety, and for unexpected company. But why? I am working around the clock picking up, putting away, wiping, scrubbing, just to do it all again in twenty minutes. So why? I take pride in my clean home, but why? I feel my family walks right by the mess, ignoring it until it overtakes that part of the house. But then I still need to clean it. I do love cleaning, but I am the only one doing it. But why? Those who make the messes should clean them, am I right?

I'm not ungrateful in any way, but after nearly ten years of picking up everyone else's mess, why? Should I have laid down the law early and refused to pick up the messes created by others around me? It would have ended in many fights and a filthy house from everyone refusing to pick up after themselves, so I took it upon myself. Should I have taught my husband, my children, to clean the messes as soon as they are made to prevent having to scrape applesauce off the kitchen chair, to prevent missing a dirty shirt under the bed or socks under the couch after the laundry is already done? Should I have to check under the couch and bed every time I do laundry?

So many unanswered questions. I am a housewife, a stay-at-home mother, but that does not mean I enjoy it. Some days I dislike my "job". Some people could claim that's ungrateful, but it is a thankless job. I get zero pay for it. I don't get a paid vacation. I don't get designated lunches without jam hands in it. I don't get designated breaks to sit without a child on my lap, pawing at my breasts. I do not get the luxury of a full night of sleep without comforting a child or two when they wake multiple times per night. I do not get the luxury of just walking outside for a breath of fresh air without children bursting out of the door and having to wrangle them back in. I do not get to even do dishes without children climbing up my legs or make dinner without a child climbing on me and having to physically move them to prevent burns.

Does that make me ungrateful? Does that make me a terrible mother? I do not have a babysitter. I do not have family nearby. I have never spent more than an hour or two away from my children, and even then, it may be once every two to three months. I have not been on a date with my husband without children since before we were even married. Does it make me a bad parent to just want a break? To want to escape to some quiet during the day so I am not wasting my nights getting quiet just to lose sleep and do my "job" on four hours of sleep. It's a never-ending cycle. Please tell me I am not alone. Please tell me I am not the only one contributing to the household chores. Please tell me someone else has taken a strike and made a difference.

I am grateful my husband works hard to provide for our family monetarily. I am grateful for my husband, who repairs the things that are broken, does upkeep on the vehicles, mows the lawn. I am thankful that my children are happy, healthy, and intelligent. I am thankful to have a roof above my head, clothes on my back, food on the table. But is it too much to ask to be able to enjoy those and for everyone to contribute, even a little bit on the every day chores? Is it too much to ask for clothes to magically end up in the hamper, dishes rinsed and nicely laid by the sink, folded clothes to be put away instead of dug through and dirty clothes mixed in over the course of a couple days? It takes just minutes to bring the vacuum five feet and vacuum up the cereal from the floor.

But I will keep doing it. I will keep doing it because I do it faster, more efficiently. I do it better. I actually do it. It gets done because I do it. I can't slack off because it's my job. But should it only be my job? How does everyone else's household work? Was it ever different? How did you make that change?

So I guess I go back to doing dishes, doing laundry, cleaning that mess yesterday that my son made that has since dried onto the kitchen floor. I have fought this battle many times in the past and I've just done it and kept quiet, assuming it was part of my job description. I have gotten some cooperation as milk now gets rinsed, sauce gets rinsed, most clothes make it to the hamper, but there is still so much work to do in teaching the household how things should work. Is it really too much to ask? I'm drowning in dirty things in an otherwise clean house.

Rant over.

Love In All Forms

This one is going to be huge and very personal for me, but I believe it needs written down. I believe it's what has made me into who I am today, the many forms of love I have given, been given, or robbed of. Love truly does make the world move. Love has energy that is limitless. It gives mothers super human strength, it makes even the toughest men do things they could never imagine doing. It makes people cry, laugh, sing. More words have been written over love than any other emotion, object, or idea. Love has fueled me, drained me, and literally has saved my life.

Love has come in many forms for me but my favorite is definitely the love that I've found in my husband. It wasn't always my favorite and it wasn't always what I had hoped for, but it's always been my biggest love. It's always been the most energizing, even if not always a positive. It's been the most honest love, the love that hurt the most and even the love that healed the most. Love has been the center of my universe since I was born. I either thrived from it or I found a way to survive without it until I found a new form of love to enjoy.

Love can be different from person to person - a passion, a person, a hobby, or something completely different. The word love has truly lost its meaning over time, thrown around like it's just another word. To me, it is powerful, it goes beyond just words. It is a promise. It is a bond. It is something I give so freely to those who show the same to me. But it isn't given easily. A person earns my love as they earn my respect and trust. Love is also not given or shown in the same way from me to every person. My love for each person in my life is different from individual to individual.

I guess I'll start from the beginning.

Growing up, I had two parents who loved me, sometimes one more than the other, but always constant. I was hard to handle sometimes - a bundle of never-ending energy, constant curiosity, always finding something for my hands to do, including cutting all of my hair off once I ran out of baby dolls to work on, projects that always resulted in the biggest messes. Always making messes, always doing a little more than needed, or never doing enough. I was a tough child to love, but my parents never once wavered from showing me more love than they were shown as they grew. That's all we try to do as parents, is do better than the generations that came before us.

I relied on this love heavily through my childhood, always finding comfort in the love of my parents. I trusted them as others had broken my trust by showing me the evil ways of humanity during my early childhood. I was robbed of love from those I trusted long before I should have known how that felt. As I grew, it became increasingly harder to give my love as freely as most children do. As I once did.

I watched as other children grew with two parents who were madly in love and I longed for that. My parents loved each other in different ways at different times. They were in constant turmoil with each other, and, while I knew that wasn't my fault, just knowing they didn't love each other the way I knew love could work broke my heart. Our household was broken long before the divorce, but it fully broke when my parents divorced when I was nine.

I confided in friends, all of whom were from households whose parents were together and loved each other. They looked at me with pity. I didn't want pity, I just wanted a friend, an open ear. I started seeing judgment in children's eyes, the ones that shout in silence, "this is going to mess up your entire life". They were right and wrong at the same time. It wasn't long before it had gotten back to a teacher. If you search enough for comfort in the wrong people, that energy you are putting out will find the right ones.

I confided in this teacher for some time just about my feelings over the divorce, how I still loved both parents, regardless of their mistakes and their lack of love for each other. I asked the hard questions like, "How do I love a parent if I am not allowed to see them?" and "How do I love a parent if they were abusive?" and "How do I love a parent when the other parent has nothing nice to say about them?" I believe this teacher realized that I had grown up long before this divorce and he answered these questions honestly with personal experience. "I went through the same things, Amanda, and I was not much older than you are now." Over the school year, I confided in him and he confided in me. He was inspirational. He went on to have a healthy marriage with a loving wife, and three loving children. If he could survive a broken household and go on to thrive, I could too. I had hope from that year on.

Each year got a little harder, not because of the divorce, but because I had no idea what to look for when it came to love. I knew how it felt, but I didn't know what it looked like in forms other than family. I searched for love in friends but they never understood me. I was that crazy friend who tried to make it all seem okay when it wasn't. I truly believed I could fake being okay when I wasn't. Even through the years as I would remember connecting with my teacher and the conversations we'd had, I knew something was missing. I knew there had to be a secret to love that I just couldn't see.

Skip ahead to seventh grade. I was at a friend's house and a song came on. It was one I barely remembered but I could not shake the thought of my father when I listened to it. I thought it would be much like a song stuck in your head that if you listened enough, it would get out of your head. I was wrong. I listened to it a lot over the course of the weekend I stayed, relived some memories I had of my father with my friend and she helped me find a way to contact him. I was nervous because I knew how my mother felt about him, but I had to make that decision for myself, and, being a little more mature emotionally than my peers, I knew I was ready. We called any familiar name in the phone book until we came upon a friend who put me in contact with him.

We agreed to meet as he knew the area and I had zero intentions of telling my mother. She never had a good word to say about him anyway, so I would judge for myself and I would make the decision when to tell her. I met with him once and he loved me then, in that short moment of awkwardness, but the love was unfulfilling. Something was missing. Little did I know he was not sober then. Alcohol was his drug of choice. I still let him know that I loved him and I didn't see him again until three years later. I do believe my friend's parents told my mother, but I could be mistaken.


The next year, I had my first boyfriend. I searched for love within him but instead found anger, frustration and very unloving words from him. I thought I was doing everything right but nothing I did could make him happy. I saw sides of him that even his family did not see. I learned to hide within myself and shied away from those I loved and who loved me. We broke up after a relatively short time because he wanted a physical love I was not ready for nor old enough for. I learned then that sometimes love means different things to different people and just because they call it love does not make it the right kind of love for everyone, including me.

I spiraled as my family changed, more siblings were introduced. I was no longer the baby and I had to share the attention with others. I had no issue with that, but it left me feeling like my life was not as important (not in a bad way), and that I needed to just help with my siblings and not get in the way. The stresses were high as my mother accepted a love less than she deserved from someone who was not raised with as much love as he deserved. Love or lack of love can truly shape people so differently.
I began to cocoon myself, locked away inside my thoughts. I began to write, put my feelings onto paper. I began to do and think for myself while I watched everyone else making the wrong choices. People selling themselves short. People denying themselves the love they deserved to comfort others. I vowed to never settle for less than I deserved. I actively looked for friends who were interested in my best and sought for people to add to my life who genuinely cared for me the way I cared for them. I had so much trouble finding this until the summer before my sophomore year of high school.

I was depressed, always locked away in my thoughts. I thought there was no person who was going to take the time to learn who I was. To allow me to break myself in half to see the light shine through. I thought I would never find a person who wanted to know it all - the fantastic parts, the scary parts, the doubt, the guilt, the fear, everything. I never thought I would find someone who would allow me to melt into them and release those thoughts that held me captive for so long.

And then I met my husband...

This is where my story gets uncomfortable and raw. This is the part that hurts to tell. Admitting that I had hit my lowest point so early in life is shameful but it is my life and I embrace it. He was, in one way or another, my divine intervention in life. My miracle, the one who literally "saved my life". He had no idea how much of an impact he had made just being himself and loving me for who I was until much later.

The day I met my husband, I was prepared to take my life. Phew, that's always a hard thing to admit. I was at my lowest and faked it so well that nobody knew. I tried to make excuses to shake him. I tried to use everything in my power to stray away from the conversation with him, but something about him kept pulling me back. "He is messing up my plans," I thought, "There is nothing else for me." He kept the conversation going, not knowing how much my soul was crying but my heart was singing. It was my most conflicting time in my life. Two opposing feelings, voices, pulling me, dragging me, nails dug in, kicking and screaming one way and then the other as he just told me about himself.

I was mostly quiet the first night we spoke. I was a whirlwind of emotion, thought, and false, projected opinions of myself. I was so caught up in worrying about the parts I hadn't even gotten to, to fully enjoy the moment. But I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it so much that I could still, fourteen years later, tell you every detail from that point forward. When you find a love that's true, your perspective shifts, you find meaning in the small things. Your eyes open, your world opens, your heart breaks and pieces itself back together simultaneously. You begin to see yourself from another's point of view as they listen to your life story, tell you theirs, and you hear another perspective, a simpler perspective, of the life you've always over analyzed.

Twelve days after we had spoken on the phone for the first time, I met my husband in person. I had always heard people mention "time standing still" and I would laugh. That doesn't happen. Oh, but it did. When he walked around from the back of the house and I saw him, my heart stopped, time stopped. I swear the car driving by his house behind us on the road stopped, or at least slowed. He took my breath away.

I went to his home to play paintball and one of his friends gave me a ride there. I didn't know how to play paintball. I figured it was simple, and it was, but I was about to make a fool of myself, being the only girl there. We played, we had fun, but I was shy on purpose. I was still hesitant. If this didn't work out today, I was going to fall back on my original plan. Something inside of me wanted the whole day to be a failure. Surviving after you'd already made your choice that this life wasn't for you is stressful. But those few hours changed my life and my view of love forever. It showed my value and I found myself worthy of love again. He redeemed me just with a smile.

As we were leaving, I tossed a friendship bracelet at him. It was unfinished. "What is this for?" and I just smiled. "Wait, what is this for?" He had called me so many times before I was even home. My mother relayed the message as, "You must have made an impression, he's called you at least five times." His house was roughly 15 minutes away. I must have intrigued him.

I called him back and the first question was "What is this for? Why did you give this to me?" and I responded, "It is not mine, I was making it for my sister, so I will need it back at some point." This meant I would have to see him again, if he was interested. We didn't make proper plans to see each other again until my mother mentioned later that night while I was still on the phone with him. "You can invite him to your sisters birthday party next week". And I did.

It was a pool party and I had always been self-conscious about my body once I became a woman. I wasn't fat, but I was a curvy girl. I had stretch marks, I had imperfections. Everyone does, but I was never told this. My body image was never spoken of, I was never told how things work. It was vague and very to-the-point, just as generations before. I wore a bikini because it was all I had. I spent most of the time covering myself. Once we were in the pool, it created a reason for him to hold me. If he was holding me, he wouldn't be staring, right?

He later told me he thought I was beautiful, and that name stuck, even now, married with two beautiful children. I had never been called beautiful from the opposite sex. It was always a word or name that was terribly inappropriate, awkward, or unwelcome. I was falling in love, and quickly. On the way to take him home that evening, I spent the ride tying that same unfinished friendship bracelet (which I still have) on his wrist and trying to hide holding his hand. I knew my mother already approved of him as she would have let me know very early in the evening had she not. As we were turning into his road, I yelled over my mother's music, "Will you be my boyfriend?" and he said, "I thought you'd never ask". I spent the whole ride home staring at the stars, falling madly in love with someone who just came into my life less than twenty days prior.
We spent every waking hour either speaking with each other, seeing each other, or going places. Not long after we began dating, he got his license and together, we explored. He took me placed I'd never been, showed me the wonders of our local world. He lived a totally different life and I wanted to know every detail. He was a book I just couldn't put down and knew, before it even got to the good parts, that it was a book I was willing to read over and over again. He was an ocean I'd never reach the end of. I'd never met someone so intriguing, so real. I was young, but something clicked with him.

He was in a car accident our senior year and survived. I got the news in the most devastating way. I had gone through my entire day at school, not knowing he had been in an accident that morning. I walked my usual walk up our long driveway, thinking about how much I couldn't wait to speak with him and when I reached the top, my life shattered. My mother's boyfriend peeked his head out of the truck window, "Your boyfriend was in an accident this morning" and drove away. I ran to the door and my mother told me everything she knew.

He had a broken neck that could have easily been much worse. When I first visited him, the nurses allowed me to wipe the blood from his arms, face and head. If I am not mistaken, it was per his request that I be the one who did it. I cried the ugliest cries and he still loved me, wiped the tears from my face and told me he was okay. I stayed with him in the hospital on an uncomfortably hard baby blue leather couch that the nurses pulled from the visitor's room. I stayed for his entire stay. I laid at the foot of his bed, knowing what a mother would feel like. I watched him, I lost so much sleep. I shot up at every movement. I got him anything he needed, helped him with everything he needed. I talked with nurses, asked the doctors questions, fought for him, cried for him, worried for him. He had surgery and I hyperventilated and paced the floors the entire time. I knew he was in good hands but I still worried. He came out of surgery and I believe he stayed another two days before being released. I stayed then, too.

In the next few months, I had a looming uncertainty about our entire relationship. I began doubting myself again, searching for love in all the wrong ways, from all the wrong people. I kept thinking that the love he was providing would fade over time, especially as we butt heads a lot in those first couple years. I strayed, I left him for a short time in search of something that felt more real and I didn't find it. All this time, his love unwavering. He was angry, which was justified, but he still loved me through it. He loved me much more than I deserved, especially after all I had put him through while he was recovering.

We reconnected and the trust was hard to rebuild. He began questioning everything and I began doubting my ability to ever love someone fully. I began doubting that I ever deserved a love like his. It led to argument after argument and he moved forward in life, leaving me to figure out my own issues. I fought hard to get his love back and failed for the first year until I gave up and moved on the best I could so he could enjoy life the way he was meant to. I moved away from home, fled into the arms of an older man who could have left me on the street with not even the bat of an eye. He was terribly cruel to me. He was not physically abusive, but those scars would have been less painful than the abuse I endured while I lived there. I longed for that gentle love I took for granted. I cried myself to sleep every single night, wondering where I would be in the next two, three, four years. Wondering if my path would lead me back to that love I had lost.

When I moved back home, we tried to reconnect and it was awkward. We had seen things and been places that were uncomfortable to talk about but we spoke of them anyway. We bared our souls, once again, to each other. It was us trying to connect but the sockets were rusty, abnormal, missing pieces. We continued to try and I gave it everything I had. I put every piece of myself into trying to win back his trust, his love. I lost myself somewhere in trying but I pushed through. All I did, all I knew how to do, was to do anything he asked of me. To not ask questions, but do what was in his best interest. I was a welcome mat for some time as we figured out the new dynamics of a relationship that didn't have a real name and soon, love began to blossom again.

He had quit his job and I supported us for a little while. I changed jobs when I was not making enough and he supported me through that. He was easy to care for and I was willing to do anything to make and keep him happy. When my hours began getting cut at my new job, we made the decision (via a coin toss in the parking lot) that I would go in, put in my two weeks notice, and we would move into the home he had bought when we were apart. We moved an hour and a half away from home.

I think we still battled with trust until we moved away from the places we grew up. I was still devoted, ready to prove to him that I was worthy of that love I craved. I spent hours, writing, thinking, analyzing every word I'd said, thing I did, thing I should have done, and just kept improving myself. I didn't do it all just for myself, but for him. I refused to lose him again. We were truly terrible to each other in those first years, learning and relearning everything we'd chosen to forget, learning to live with each other. We both worked a lot in those first couple years but otherwise we were free. We knew nobody, we spent a lot of time together, just free. When my job became stressful, I quit and began furthering my education. Not long after, we got married and pregnant. I had our first born just weeks after getting my Associate's.

Even being together for 8 years prior, I learned more about my husband in those first two years of being a parent with him. Being first time parents destroyed our love, we lost that spark somewhere in the multiple wakings per night, the struggling to find a new normal when our families were busy with their own lives or otherwise just too far away to make constant trips. I spent an awful lot of time at my mother's, nearly two hours from where we lived together and I never noticed how much of a strain it put on our relationship. I'd beg and plead for love but I was ignoring his basic needs for connection, for quality time spent together because I was away 50% of the time. It was the hardest part of our relationship. It nearly ended in divorce, if I have to be completely honest.

And then we got pregnant with number two. Something changed. I still can't put my finger on what, but something big happened when we realized our entire world was going to turn upside down introducing another child into our lives. We began evaluating every relationship we had with others and began slowly cutting ties with those who were toxic, burning bridges that led to paths we never wanted to visit again. We eliminated people with big mouths that shouldn't be heard by little ears. We made massive changes, ripples that turned into a wave that washed our love clean. We started communicating, loving, connecting again. We started undoing all of the wrongs we'd made by moving forward, learning about each other and really giving it everything we had.

The biggest change was cutting ties with my family. I did not expect it to happen the way it did, but I am accepting of everything that happens in my life, good and bad. In my family, there has been abuse. While it wasn't always physical, it was very emotional to watch everyone fight anytime I would visit and nobody listened to voice of reason that came from anyone. Everyone, at some point, tried to stop the fighting, to exit the ride to save themselves. Everyone stuck around, but nobody said what needed said and even when you did, it was interrupted, shut down, or downplayed. "What happens in this house stays in this house", just wasn't going to sit well with me when I had two children. I planned to teach them differently, to speak up against injustice, to love through hardship, to never give up on love but to stand up against anything that wasn't genuine. How can I teach them something I wasn't following myself? So a letter was in the making. I needed something that could be read, without interruption, and without me present.

I sent that nine page letter in early August and a weight lifted from my body. That dark cloud that loomed over our marriage had dissipated and I found comfort in the arms of my husband again. I was home to stay and we were going to work on us, enjoy being parents again, and raise our children in nothing but love. And we did. It was not taken lightly though, and most of it was misinterpreted, but I stuck behind my word. The truth can be uncomfortable sometimes, especially for those who have to live it. I still loved and still do love every member of my family. Over the years, we began to lose sight of that love, we started doubting our ability to show it, our worthiness of the love we all tried to show each other. Instead of communication, it was always just frustration.

I broke the family apart with my words - sticks and stones in the form of strings of letters and thoughts. It was not my intention to break an already broken family, but I needed time to heal, time to learn, time to just "be". I wanted to gently parent my children, to do better than those who came before me and I couldn't do that in a household that was always at war. I needed to learn who I was as a mother, as a wife, as an individual, and I'd never learn that spending 50% away from the life we were trying to create together. I did it for myself, for my husband, for our marriage, for our family. I stand behind that. Sometimes you have to sacrifice a relationship with those that you love in order to nurture a relationship with yourself. Sometimes you have to do what is right even if what everyone else is doing is wrong. Even when it's hard to make that decision, sometimes it needs to be made anyway.

Many people will not understand the choices you make in life but they are not others' choices to make. I make my decisions with love. Everything stems back to love. A doubt of deserving love, a need for more love, feeling there isn't enough love. I have loved and been loved. I have gained, lost, and gained love again. I have loved others and I have learned to love myself. I have created life within the walls of my body. I have ripped myself in half to bring them into this world. And through the pain they've caused, both inside of my body and outside of my body, I have loved them through it. I learn to love the people around me in new ways every single day. If I am not exhausted from loving by the end of the day, I try harder the next. I am human, I make mistakes, but I never fall short of loving the ones who show me the same love in return. I am worthy of the love that I put into the world.

It took me a long time to get to where I am now. It took a lot of heartache, uncertainty, surrendering, and uncomfortable self-evaluation to get here. It took so many hours, days, weeks, months, years from my husband, just reminding me that he's not giving up on me so easily like some people who have came before him. It's taken nearly a decade to just feel comfortable accepting true love and convincing myself that I deserve every bit of it. I am a lovable person. And the more I watch how my love has changed others over time and how they, in turn, put that love back into the world, the more I see that love can change the world. When my life gets to be too much, I find that I just need to apply more love. It's never failed me yet.

I hope that every person reading this finds a love that makes their heart sing. I hope that the world can learn that it's easier to love than to ridicule someone you never took the time to truly know. It's easier to love someone who has wronged you than it is to spit venom, to say words you can prevent but never take back. I hope that every person can feel worthy of love. I hope that more people learn that you can not truly find love within others until you find love within yourself - it's so cliche, but it's true. People are sabotaging their relationships and starving the relationship, themselves, and their loved ones of such a basic necessity. Everyone deserves to love and be loved.

So go out and spread some love to those around you today. Hug your loved ones a little tighter. Tell them how important they are, how much value they have in your life. Tell them how much brighter your world is just with their company. You will always be surprised how much your day can change just by spreading love to another person. Even if you're so angry you could scream, keep loving. The best cure for humanity is love, and if it doesn't seem like it is working, you may need to increase the dosage.