Slow down, and nobody gets hurt with a fork

Some days I go too fast. The summertime is no exception. I try to rush and fill their days with ‘summer fun’ or check activities off our to-do list. “Hurry, we must have fun, only a couple weeks left!” my brain screams.

I rush around keeping things in order — picking up a million toys or nerf bullets, scooping poop from the yard, folding endless laundry. That’s a switch many mothers just can’t turn off. Things must be in order—there is no other way.

We rush out the door to make it anywhere. After we leave anywhere, it’s usually a rush to get home for dinner and bath and a rush to get them to bed so I can sit down for the first time that day. It’s always a race to the sweet freedom that bedtime brings each night.

Sometimes my rushing around causes some guilt at the end of the day. Did I hug them enough? Did I tell them ‘I love you’? Did I really listen to their knock-knock jokes or just drown them out with the vacuum?

Sometimes the rushing around causes a nagging sense of being unfulfilled, even though everything technically got done that day. I hate the feeling that I rushed around all damn day and did a million things but not one of them made my heart happy. I don’t remember laughing at anything with them most days.

And then sometimes all my rushing around can cause me some pain. Not emotional pain— I’m talking about real, physical pain. Like ‘being-impaled-by-a-fork’ kind of pain.

That kind of pain came tonight when I was again rushing, racing to do the dishes so I could finish the laundry to get the beds made up to get the kids in those beds. My hands were not running as fast as my brain was, so when my left hand was putting away a stack of forks in a drawer, and my right hand decided it was time to slam the drawer shut, that was when one dinner fork sticking up got caught on my middle finger (the same middle finger that is put to good use sometimes while I’m rushing in interstate traffic) and pierced through the bottom half of my fingertip then came out the other end of my fingertip.

My rushing around mentality failed me tonight. It’s not working anymore. Being everywhere and anywhere at nonstop speed just can’t be maintained.

While I’m ok and my finger is ok (ask me how fast impaled forks can be ripped from human flesh)— I learned a lesson here. F-ing slow down. Your life isn’t a race. My kids won’t remember if I left a dirty pot in the sink, or that I didn’t fold the towels, but they’ll remember if mom listened to their stupid jokes. They will remember my laugh. They’ll remember that I kissed them goodnight.

So just slow down.

Because being impaled by a dinner fork is seriously not fun.