Left to my own, I tend to be a big picture kind of girl. Thirty-thousand foot kind of thinker. Broad swashes of the planning brush. I’m your girl if you want help knocking down a wall to open up your living room. I’m probably not your girl if you need detailed help putting all the baseboards back.
Motherhood changed that.
Because babies come with all kinds of daily details that have to be attended to. Even before they are born. Getting to all those prenatal appointments. Thinking through that baby shower registry. And let’s not even get into filing all those insurance forms.
Then that baby is born, and more details come online. Pediatrician appointments. Developmental milestones. Adorable clothes that are outgrown in the blink of an eye and need to be organized and stored for a future sibling. Preschools to consider and permission slips to be submitted.
Add more kids to the mix and you quickly find yourself immersed in a daily tide of small details all day long. Chores that need to be repeated frequently. Dish after dish, diaper after diaper, day after day.
That was one of the things about the admin duties of motherhood that came as a big surprise to me; it’s just so…daily.
I wanted points for getting those invisible chores accomplished. I wanted some kind of acknowledgement that I’d put all those chunky puzzles back together again after a toddler dumped them out for the sixth time this week. I wanted someone to notice that the daily things were getting done.
But you know. You know it well. That’s generally not the way it works, the invisible internal engine of running a family. There aren’t gold stars awarded at the end of a long day. And there were days, particularly when my oldest children were little, when I was wildly outnumbered, when I had a whole passel of small people underfoot whose sole aim in life seemed to be undoing what I had just gotten done, that it felt as if I was spending my days in insignificance, doing insignificant things. Day after day. And honestly, day after day was bogging me down.
I mean, the noble calling of motherhood still felt big, still felt like an ideal and a mission revered through the ages. It was just the monotonous daily stuff that didn’t feel all that epic. Or fun. Or creative. Or transformational for the long haul.
Fast forward a bit.
My sixteen-year-old sixth child Journey is currently upstairs, brushing her teeth. She has a hype song she plays while she brushes her teeth, a ridiculous heavy metal anthem from the 80s that she blares as she brushes each day, morning and night. (Her humor is the best; I seriously birthed a comedian when I had that one). I hear her moving about her bathroom, rinsing the toothbrush, putting things away in her cabinet, going through the motions of getting on with her day. She moves down the stairs with a nod to me, to the laptop in my lap, to the cup of decaf by my side. And she heads to the dining room, where she’s working on a project for school. And it hits me.
Day after day, I reminded her, oversaw her, motivated her, compelled her to get those teeth brushed. To pick up the bathroom. To get to her school books. Day after day.
And now, she does it on her own. And has, for a good long while now. It’s just another payoff of day after day that I miss when I don’t pay attention.
Day after day has its own economy, an economy in my ‘big picture’ kind of nature I can fail to see. Day after day pays compounding interest. Day after day builds independence in my kids, which ultimately builds my own as I move away from having to so closely oversee all the details in their worlds. Day after day doesn’t fit well in a meme, doesn’t feel as sexy as overnight success, doesn’t sound like a secret strategy people would pay big bucks to go to a seminar for.
But day after day is powerful. Transformational.
It’s what allows there to even be a thirty-thousand foot view. It’s the ingredients of the big picture.
Be encouraged. Those ‘day after days’ in your life right now, they do matter. You are building something, something bigger than the chores, something of greater significance than the laundry, something that echoes longer than the reminders and cajoling and scolding.
Day after day is greater than the sum of its parts. Day after day, you are building a life, a legacy, a springboard from which your children will launch, the story that is yours.
Ready to be inspired to think bigger of the little things in your life? Take a look at my newest Bible study from Abingdon Women called Footnotes. We dig into the lives of four minor characters in scripture who have a big impact on our today. Their stories will help you rethink what really matters and how you evaluate the assignments in your own life, both the notable and the anonymous. Want to know more? You can check out the first session for free by clicking here.
