Blog Post #43: Mothers and Mess

Have you ever cried in the shower? And why?

If you have, you’ll know the feeling well- hot water streaming down your back, hot tears streaming down your face, combining with the shower water so you don’t even know the physical extent of tears being shed.

I did today- cried in the shower, that is. And you bet I’m going to write about it.

Now, you might ask me- Laura, why were you crying? To which I’d tell you that the shedding of my tears was over my mother. And to all the mothers out there, keeping it together so their children can let their guards down.

You see, I was standing there, with all the shower thoughts that pass through when there’s no shower music to drown them out, when I realized that I tend to be a very tense person. When I’m stressed, my body will clench up, and I get stressed almost everything one could possibly stress about.

“Where did all this stress come from?”, I asked myself. I let the thought pass, and started wondering if my mom ever sees bits of herself in me or my sister- in the way we smile, perhaps. Because I certainly do. I see her eyebrows every time I look in the mirror, and I see the way our eyes crinkle the same way at the corners.

Then it hit me that perhaps part of my stress is learned from my mother. Because as mothers do, she worries- a lot. About almost everything, except the things she doesn’t think need to be worried over.

And I thought to myself, “Here I am, standing in the shower (and probably running up the hot water bill), feeling so grateful that I can fully relax when I’m home, because my body knows my mother will watch out for me. But who’s gonna watch out for her?”

Evidently, this thought was too much for my poor brain to handle, because it triggered the tears. And there I was, crying in the shower. Pathetic.

Anyways, I’d like to segue for a minute, to an observation I made this week. I spent about 24 hours babysitting this week (not all at once, but a few hours each day). I was in three different households, and the children I sat for were between 3 and 8 years old. One thing that tied all three homes together- the messiness (or simply, the evidence of life). Toys, everywhere. Pillows on the floor. Dolls and candles on the stairs, couch cushions upended, opened bags of goldfish, half-eaten croissants, cups of water on every table and kitchen counter.

To a rather neat college student like me (or so I’d like to think), seeing these kinds of environments was, to put it neatly, chaos. 

Necessary chaos. Because those toys, loose papers with crayon drawings, and board games are how a child learns. And as painful as it is for a frazzled parent to step on a rogue lego piece or Barbie foot, childhood will always seem to pass too fast.

Those homes were a visual representation of what family life is like- messy. I realized just how much parents sacrifice for their children. Many parents wouldn’t even call it sacrifice, but simply what it takes to raise and love a child (in whispered tones: “it takes a village”).

And so I’d like to end this blog post as I usually do- unsure of whether I’ve come to any answers, to questions that I may or may not have asked in the first place. But, as a reminder to myself to simply live with love in my heart, because you never know what mom stepped on their kids’ Barbie foot that day, or travelled halfway across the world to give their family a better life, or is waiting patiently for the day she can let her guard down.