Dear Kitty,
I dress like a typical housewife/mom most days. Loose shirt, yoga pants and crazily swept up hair pinned with a barrette, rubber band or a clip I found on a bag of chips. Sometimes I wear the shirt with the bleach spot and sometimes I remember I wore that shirt yesterday (or maybe it’s been three day – I lose count) I am the picture of “hotness” and I know you are jealous. I try to keep all that hotness in check as I scrub floors, soak pots, cart 10 tons of laundry through the house, feed the animals, cook the dinners and wipe the butts. I’d hate for my beauty secrets to get out.
OK…let’s be honest. Most days I hardly feel like a woman at all. I feel like a robot on autopilot and the only time I am reminded I am a woman is when my cleavage has caught food that I was trying to shove in my mouth before a roaming band of free range kids descends on my plate and wipes it clean. To tell you the truth, some days I get downright mad that I have little use for dress-up clothes or nail polish. I begin to grumble in my heart that I am nothing more than Cinderella before her glass slipper days.
It gets really bad when I wash my hair and attempt some style and the girls wander in the room asking me if I am going on a date with Daddy or something. Like I only wash and style my hair when I have someone to impress or somewhere to go. Actually there may be more truth in that than I care to admit some days. So I grumble.
The other day I was doing some chores and the 5 year old girl was playing games on my phone (so I thought.) It was actually a chore I adore; brushing out the horse. After I was done, she came up to me to show me she had accessed the camera app and taken pictures of me while I was on dirt and tangle removal duty of the 800lb beast. I looked through her series of shots and what I saw made my heart ache.
It wasn’t the fact that I was standing by a huge horse butt holding the tail. It wasn’t the fact that there was mud caked halfway up my legs and a nicely placed set of muddy dog paw prints on my shirt. It wasn’t the hairstyle that looked reminiscent of a cave woman. It wasn’t the lack of makeup and the uneven complexion.
It WAS the scowl on my face. The eyebrows squashed down that showed frustration. The downward curl of my lips that showed bitterness.
Yes, I was doing one of the few chores that I enjoy on a list of many, but I no doubt was going over the million other things that had to be done that day that I don’t care for. I could’ve been dressed in my hottest dress with heels and I would’ve looked my worst.
I need to remember when I am checking out the shirt that I probably wore yesterday that no matter what I dress myself in to face the tasks of the day, the thing that dresses me is my mood. This is what my children and others are seeing. This is what a picture shows. I don’t want them to think I scowl at the calling to be a mother and run the house. Although many of the chores don’t make me happy, I need to find the joy in everything I do and show it.
When I am serving my family through the chores, I want them to see a service of love and happiness. It’s hard, but not impossible to serve with joy when the days get blurred together by methodical repeats. It is within me to serve a meal, clean up the meal and go right into cooking the next without being ugly and complaining.
…and frankly that attitude of joyful serving on my face will outclass my fanciest dress.
Categories: January Diary Entry
Dear Kitty, 
Alycia Neighbours 
Hard lesson to learn but such an important one. I remember one time, years ago, when Josiah asked me if I didn’t like it when Bert called home because I always sounded frustrated when it was him but for anyone else I managed to sound cheerful. I suspect that the cheerfulness was a mask and the frustration was me uncloaked. But whatever it was … it was … IS wrong!
Do everything, including cleaning up dog poop, as unto the Lord. Not easy … but a command … not a suggestion!