What Is It That I Do Again?

This picture will make more sense in a minute...

I once told my therapist that one of the most difficult, or at least confusing, things about being a stay-at-home parent is that although I always feel tired and vaguely busy, it sometimes seems like I never actually accomplish anything. Like, at the end of the day, when the kids are all tucked into bed, I often have a hard time pinpointing exactly what I did to fill all the hours.

And then, the days tend to just pile up on top of each other. It can become hard to distinguish where one ends and the next begins. All the while, I know I’m doing plenty of, well, stuff, but it’s hard to get a handle on the sum of all that work. How much am I actually doing? Sometimes it feels like a lot, while other times it feels like nothing at all.

My therapist heard me out and then said, “Well, maybe if you stopped doing all the things you do for just a day—not the totally essential things like feeding your kids, but the other things that can wait—you’d see how much you are actually doing on a daily basis.”

And you know what? A couple years later I finally took her advice and put the extra activities on hold for a day! What an eye-opening experience!

Related note: Can someone please come save me because I’m trapped in my house and I can’t find the floors? Also, I think I just saw a llama in the laundry room. I’m perched atop the grandfather clock like Grandfather Drosselmayer in The Nutcracker. Just waiting him out.