HappyMama

Well, I’ll keep this brief.  Priority 5 is Everything Else.  God, Self, Marriage (Vocation), Children (Second Vocation), and then Everything Else.  Your occupation, your home, your community, your extended family, and so on and so on.  This is where the to-do lists seem to go on forever, if you don’t take time to reflect and prioritize these items.  There.  End of lecture!

A note on scheduling.  I have always been strongly opposed to structuring our home-life tightly.  After all, isn’t one of the benefits of being a stay-at-home-mom the flexibility to do what I want, when I want?  Well, not really.  Because I’m also naturally quite lazy and inconsistent.  I like to do things when I feel like doing them.  If I get a burst of inspiration, I’ll run around like mad, cleaning every corner of the house.  If I don’t, well hey, no one is scheduled to visit, so who care’s if it’s a bit of a mess, right? 

Wrong.  I have lists of things (mentally & written) that are my responsibilities.  They need to be done whether I feel like it or not.  My experience with the Missionaries of Charity allowed me to better understand the idea of a rule of life.  Regardless of all the miscellaneous variables they encounter each day, the sisters always keep the same schedule.  To the minute.  Mass, holy hours, mealtimes, rest times, rising times, and so on.  And all this, while caring for dozens of homeless AIDS victims around the clock, and without knowing where tomorrow’s food was coming from.  If I had joined a convent, I would have been handed a Rule from the moment I walked in, and it would tell me more-or-less what to do with every hour of my day. 

There are 4 benefits to scheduling your priorities into your daily/weekly/or monthly schedules. 

• First, you will consistently fulfill the obligations of your vocation, whether you feel like it or not, in a spirit of obedience to God’s will for you.
• Second, you will spend time reflecting on your time and figure out how best to put your priorities into your life in a way that actually works.
• Third, you will develop habits to help you live a more consistent life.
• Fourth, your children will benefit from knowing what to expect each day.

An example to illustrate:  Under my Priority 5, I know that my home needs to be periodically vacuumed.  Keeps the carpet in better shape, makes the house look better, and gets rid of sand dragged in by the kids, which is a pet-peeve of my hubby because it scratches the wood floors.  I have discerned that I should vacuum once a week.  So I looked at the family schedule.  Fridays are slow days here.  At 4:00 on Fridays we have clean-up time.  The kids put all their toys away and we clean up everything that is out of place.  That’s an ideal time to vacuum, because the floors are clean. So, Fridays around 4:30 I vacuum.  (Assuming it’s a typical day.  Flexibility is always an option for good reason, granted.)  What happens if Friday comes around and I’m grumpy, tired, hungry, or I feel like doing something else?  Well, then I pray for the grace to do my chores with a spirit of obedience.  That’s what made young St. Therese into a saint.  She had her rule to follow, and despite a hundred excuses she could have come up with, she determined each day to not only obey her rule, but to do it with as much joy and love as she could muster. 

I often fail.  Sometimes I need to re-evaluate my expectations.  Sometimes I’m just too lazy.  I’m a work in progress, but I’m trying to keep getting better each week, each month.  I know that my husband doesn’t always feel like going to work, but he still does it.  Just because I’m not on a time-clock doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t have any accountability at home, either.  Which reminds me, it’s time to go start a load of laundry.  Ciao!