Annelise Roberts had a thoughtful essay last week that touched on several key pieces of modern-day burnout. She says a lot of true things that a recovering perfectionist like me needs to hear. Things that remind me to (yet again) set aside the ridiculously high expectations I set for myself and sometimes for my family.
Sometimes we really do make life harder on ourselves that it needs to be. But sometimes, life is just hard.
Whether we live in a family unit with or without kids, singly, or with roommates, no one can get ahead. We can’t even get on top of the mess for a weekend, let alone a few hours. (I will admit, it was easier before we had kids; my friends whose kids are teenagers tell me it WILL get easier again.) But even my friends without children, married or not, find themselves perpetually exhausted with no margins. Especially those dealing with shift work or chronic health issues.
Annelise’s pictures of her house messes look like my messes. Including random kid’s socks in the kitchen. (Why are there ALWAYS sock in my kitchen?? Its like a nightly ritual for me to go around picking up the socks. I only have 3 kids. Where did the 7th sock come from!!!)
My friend Sara Roberts Jones told me last night that when her kids were younger, she “always felt like I should be doing something else. Or something more. Just... not whatever I was doing right now.”
Below are my (half-formed) supplemental thoughts on this topic on a rainy Saturday. I apologize for the less than stellar composition. My internal editor went on hiatus while the writer said it had been too long since we’d published anything.
Most of my circles have come to revere a lot of traditional practices. Part rebellion against the god of efficiency, part recovering of lost practices, part discovery of better ways of living, and part pursuit of better budgeting, slow cooking, slower living, and relationship-building are all things we strive for. It’s life-giving. But it’s also killing us. Ok, I don’t know anyone personally who has died from laboring over a meal from scratch. But we end up spending so. much. time. on food prep.
It was worse (and better) when we had a garden.
Due to some food allergies (none life-threatening, thankfully, just misery making if we eat them), and some other health concerns, we make most our food from scratch. We also don’t live close enough to a metropolis area to easily access an urbane, forward-thinking establishment that caters to the way we eat. Not that we’d have the money to eat there much if such a place existed. There are some nights we revel in our food creations; most evenings though, we’re just stumbling about, trying to get food in the kids by 8pm so we can get them in bed by 9 or 9:30. I envy my friends who put their kids down at 7:30 and have the rest of the evening with their spouse. It’s just not practical for us.
At least once a week since adding a third child, I have mused about how my ancestors survived. How did they handle doing all the things with all their kids (more than I have) and live to tell about later? I, with all my time-saving modern conveniences, can’t seem to keep up with the version of my great-great grandmothers who live in my head (weird, I know). I feel slovenly and guilty that my house is perpetually messy. It’s (mostly) just stuff—toys, random clothes and books the kids have scattered about (ok, and some dirty dishes); the mess of electronics on the dining room table because we don’t have real office space. Like Annelise discussed, our bathrooms are fine—not sanitized, but not totally grody (okay, I’ve not cleaned behind the toilet for a while). But my house IS safe for my kids to live in. That is important. The only rotting food currently is in a Pyrex of leftovers from last week that no one wants—hidden at the back of the fridge. I know it needs dealt with, but it’s in the fridge, covered, so it can wait until tomorrow, right?
Stuff. I think this is part of what makes it so hard.
I don’t think my great-great grandmothers had a lot of stuff. They were living on farms in places like Indiana, Illinois, Arkansas, and Tennessee. They didn’t have a lot of money or things. But they also weren’t starving. They had enough.
Similarly, we’re not starving. But we do have too many things. And it’s the burden of all the STUFF that needs taken care of (organized, put away, maintained, fixed, and sorted through) that is at least partly the cause of my frustration. I’m not saying there was no 19th century version of junk—there was—but people had significantly less stuff to keep up with.
They also had at least somewhat smaller homes. Fewer kitchen items overall. Only a few changes of clothes. I try to have 8-10 days worth of outfits for my kids, not counting nicer clothes for church and special occasions. Maybe this is too much? I just don’t like doing laundry more than once or twice a week.
I recall a conversation with one of my grandmas when I was a kid. She had about half the amount of clothes we do.
I’ve also seen how technology is a big time waster for me. My laptop is a natural draw. Dixie Dillon Lane recently detailed her time unplugging here. It was a challenging read for me. Unplugging is something I’ve frequently wanted to try for a day here or there. Or try using my laptop only during specific times each day. Right now, with littles, though, I have to grab fragmented moments on the fly to do any writing or working or catch up on emails. Or try to relax by playing a game on Board Game Arena with my sister who lives in another state.
It’s not huge chunks of time; I’m constantly interrupted. But those minutes add up.
On the other hand, I do use my technology for my part-time, work-from-home job. And writing on Substack. These are important contributions to our household and my mental health. (Why must I justify my writing as mental health time? Why can’t I just say it’s something I like to do? Or even NEED to do, like breathing. Alas, that is a topic for another day.)
Traditional cooking, sewing (I leave that to my husband! Seriously!), sourdough baking, and homeschooling. All these things are good in theory and I think can be good in practice so long as I don’t try to religiously adhere to any of them. They are practices, not life itself.
Yet they fill up so much OF my life. I do derive pleasure from them until they begin to takeover.
Sometimes, I sigh at the dishes and the ingredients in the fridge and pantry. At the prospect of making a 30-minute meal (which in reality takes 75 minutes), I stare at the ceiling and mumble about wishing we could just drive 5 minutes to McDonalds and get burgers and fries. We could, but our bodies would complain for days and we’d get even more behind on our STUFF.
I’m sure my great-great-grandmas felt this way. Only, they didn’t have McDonalds. Did they look out at their chickens and calculate how much time and effort it would take to slaughter one, pluck it, get it cooking and then later, the bones simmering with some must-go veggies? (I do NOT have chickens. God bless you who do.)
My grandmas probably just reached for a couple of canned veggies from the previous harvest and day-old bread and phoned it in on those nights. Er, telegraphed it.
Extra hands probably helped my grandmothers too. Most of my great-greats had more kids than I do (sometimes 3 times as many). Everyone helped out. You had too. Even my husband, who grew up as the middle kid of 8 on a sheep farm, gripes about his job he had for many years, getting up to feed the sheep early in the morning before he was allowed to eat. Even on chilly, drizzly days like ours today.
He realizes this is normal life on a farm. It’s one of the reasons he’s banned us from having anything larger than a cat or a dog.
We do involve our kids in chores and responsibilities. It’s important in maturing into a responsible adult. But my kids aren’t miniature adults. It’s also important for them to BE kids. Additionally, some of the tasks my grandma talked about doing seem a bit dangerous for kids to be doing.
Yes, I’m a millennial mom and my kids ARE more capable than I often admit. Yet, getting them to do the chores is sometimes more of a hassle than I feel like dealing with. (Don’t ask me about my daughter stonewalling us on cleaning her room. At this point, it’s hard to see the floor. I think we’re just going to box it all up and have her slowly sort through it one weekend at a time.)
Surprisingly, several of my great-great grandmothers did not live near close family. So they had to rely on themselves or the communities they created/joined. This I can actually relate to.
I am not on Instagram, buuuuuut I admit to happily scrolling through all the pretties on Pinterest, looking for recipes, decorating ideas, landscape options. The allure of the beautiful images makes me think I can achieve them too. And sometimes I do. But it rarely looks like the pictures. More often than not, I abandon half-schemed projects for tyranny of the urgent: diaper changes, food prep, nursing a baby, homeschooling.
When we get by, I’m okay. I nurture my dreams that one day the bread will turn out perfect. The beans in the soup will be ALL THE WAY COOKED for once. The dining room table will eventually be bare. Except for a lovely flower arrangement of peonies from my future peony bushes I want to plant.
But the days I just want to stay in bed and let my kids enact their own version of Lord of the Flies . . . well. I have fewer of those days when I remember to take my daily dose of skullcap and take a moment to pray before the day starts. But those days still come.
On those days, and really any other day, good enough really is good enough. And maybe this was the secret my grandmothers already knew and embraced. Well, some of them at least. My dad’s mom was always striving to do better. Always be busy. Idle hands were of the devil. I don’t know what she was running from (or toward), but I know she did rub off on me. I have some of her restlessness. And maybe that’s okay, too.
I don’t think my grandmothers or great-grandmothers actually had it all together. They were probably a fair bit like me (or rather, I’m like them, plus more stuff and technology.) They had bad days, seasons, and years, too. Life was hard then, as it is now. We’re all still Adam, sweating at our labor to produce a crop, make a life, and hopefully, in the evening, after we have tucked our children into bed, thank the God who blessed us with it all.
I recently heard a talk about how millennial (and rising generations) are harder on others, and also, even more so, on themselves, than prior generations (backed up with stats) and we also lack the ability to forget the suffering we see and move on (which is a valid defense mechanism) which leads to anxiety, despair, and overwhelm (backed with brainscience resources). So, it's not just you. Things were different for grandma. Not necessarily better, but they were different.
We are beset with conflicting idealisms as modern parents. I think this is one reason for our constant feelings of inadequacy.