Addicted Moms

I heard about this article from Working Mothers Magazine while listening to the radio the other day - more and more mothers are using alcohol and drugs to deal with the ever increasing demands of every day life. http://www.workingmother.com/BestCompanies/special-report/2010/10/addicted-moms-drink-drugs

While the article focuses on moms who work in high profile professions, moms that otherwise appear to have it all together, I think it is a wake up call for all moms across America.

Hearing stats like "1 out of every 4 kids has an alcoholic parent" is enough to make me cry.

I am a stay-at-home mom and proud of it, but being a full-time mom has its fair share of stress. I never have enough time to clean my house, keep up with the laundry, or fulfill all my duties as school and church volunteer. I go to be each night completely exhausted, and yes, I all too often feel like I'm going to lose it - and sometimes I do - for an hour or two, until my daughter comes to my rescue with that contraband 1 lb. bag of M&Ms.

So I can't even begin to comprehend how a mother can balance a full-time job AND all the responsibilities of being a wife and mother. There is simply nothing funny about the corporate powerhouse mom who died along with most of her children in a car accident because she was drunk and high.

I have to wonder if this is what the Women's Rights Movement intended. Yes, we women can have it all, do it all, but at what price? I for one don't want it all, don't need it all. I get stress. I get pressure. I get depression. That's part of being a human being living a human life, but if our lives are so busy, so "together" that we're really falling apart, then what we're really doing is throwing it all away.

What soothes my nerves best at the end of a hectic day is not a cup of wine or a pill, but spending half an hour with my two-year-old on my lap reading through a stack of picture books. Oh, and that extra handful of M&Ms doesn't hurt...does it?

RAIN, RAIN

I admit it - I am not the best housekeeper in the world. Sadly, if I were to keep a prioritized list, cleaning my house would tie with exercise for last place. Yup, I've got cobwebs in my ceiling corners, dust on the tops of my picture frames, and all sorts of treasures stashed beneath my sofas. (Kids, where IS that video we checked out from the library a month ago????)

I do clean once in a while - when I'm not spending hours a day in my car or desperately trying to catch up on the laundry (yeah, right!) - and when I do, I usually pick some task that has been ignored for so long that I have to carve out a good portion of my day to deal with it.

Friday I decided to tackle my living room carpet. It's one of those 6X8 rugs that you find displayed outside of Wal-Mart once in a while, nothing too fancy but affordable. Of course, it's a magnet for every speck of dust and dirt in the entire house and looks grungy most of the time. I do vacuum it, but it doesn't seem to help much. That's probably because every time I buy a new vacuum, I just can't bring myself to spend more money than I did on the last one and always end up with the second to last cheapest vacuum Wal-Mart offers. (Second to last so I feel like I'm not leaving with a totally worthless piece of machinery.)

Well, Friday I vacuumed and it didn't make much of a difference. What to do? In the "old days" people used to hang their carpets outside and beat them, right? Okay - sounded good to me. I rolled it up, dragged it out onto the front porch, and draped it over a wall. But I had nothing with which to beat it (closest I could come to those old wire beaters was a coat hanger). True to form, I decided to deal with it later.

The next day was Saturday and I was too busy to deal with it. The day went by and as night fell, guess what? Yup, it started to rain. Not just any rain - thunder and lightening and major downpour kind of rain. And it's been raining ever since.

So I've got this soaking wet Wal-Mart rug hanging in my front yard. Can't bring it in until it's dried and who knows how long that will take in this weather. According to one friend, at least all the dust will be washed away. Hmmm... This could be a silver lining to my otherwise black cloud - or I've just managed to procrastinate cleaning that rug until spring.