The Seven Day Switch

by Kelly Harms

Haven’t we all had those moments where the “road diverged” and both roads ahead are equally fascinating and equally cool? But you take one or the other and your life happens after that. —Susan Baroncini-Moe

Drink coffee and make three lunches, two with no vegetables for your children and one with nothing but vegetables for yourself. Put a tiny pouch of Goldfish crackers in your own lunch bag at the last moment and feel rebellious, then wasteful, because some mothers would buy a large bag of Goldfish from Costco and divide them into reusable snack cups themselves.

The stress level in my house is generally a bit higher than I’d like, and I do drag around some mom guilt with me everywhere I go.

kind of wish the sinewy forearms I once enjoyed so much spent more time loading and unloading the dishwasher.

Sometimes what looks powerful on a man looks rigid on a woman at first glance. The trick is to look harder.

It is hard to be compassionate to a woman who seems to put herself ahead of me. Who believes her paying job is more important than my full-time dedication to my family’s well-being.

Amid the chaos is a bag of cleaning cloths—the kind you have because you tried multilevel marketing in an attempt to make friends and extra cash and have nothing but a box of a hundred cleaning cloths to show for it.

Wendy must be a far nicer mom than I am. No wonder the house is a pit and the kids seem to think they don’t have to take care of their things.

Who I wanted to be, with every bone in my body, was solely and exclusively my daughter’s mother.

Am I busy with purpose or just busy?

I bet all Wendy’s problems would be solved a lot faster if she’d only just raise her expectations and demand some help.

This, my mom would have said, is what it means to commit yourself. It doesn’t mean you’re never lonely or distracted. It means you’re lonely or distracted and you give your whole heart anyway.

In every fundamental love relationship, we ask our partners to be both solid as a rock and thrillingly fun at the same time, and it’s utterly unreasonable when we get annoyed that they can’t do both.

this is my time right now. Mothering may well be the only thing I’m good at.

How much we all give up, we mothers. How much we willingly hand over. Our bodies. Sleep. Sometimes safety. Often passion. And, of course, our dreams. We’ll give up our very dreams, if that’s what it takes to see to theirs.

They are the dream.

And yet all the success in the world won’t change who I married and what kind of man he’s become.

who has the time to think about happiness? Happiness is for people with nothing better to do.

Snobbery is just something I’ve bought into to explain my choices.

the secret to not thinking about how awful things are is just staying very, very busy.

all I want in this world is to walk into that kitchen as myself and have a normal, noisy morning with them. I would do anything for that.

not the stuff I do that gives my life meaning. It’s the people I do it for.

Why have I taken the life I always dreamed of and turned it into something that has to justify its own existence?

“My dream is to be the kind of mom that’s ok with pink laundry. To enforce the chore chart even if it’s more work than doing it myself. To get Happy Meals for my kids without shame, but also to sit down and eat our McDonald’s together like a family sometimes.”

“My dream is healthy adult offspring who can figure out what makes them happy and then make it happen. And when they’re not happy, I want them to believe they can weather the storm until it passes, knowing full well that it will.”

the way I’ve been running my life lately, if something’s not on fire, then it doesn’t get dealt with.

We’re not a balance sheet, my value doesn’t come from what pennies I save us, and I’m not on my own at the end of the day.

I’ve spent too much of our marriage wondering what’s wrong with him to love me so much.

“This is just what perfect looks like.” “Messy,”