The 24/7 Job

I talk about my mission a lot on this blog but I truly believed that it prepared me for my future. One thing that I learn a lot about is parenting. I learned this by training a new missionary. She had no idea what she was doing when she first got out there. It was a whole new world and I was in charge of teaching her all she needed to know to be successful. It was amazing to see her growth in the three months I was with her as she began to understand and accomplish what I was teaching her. This prepared me for later events.
When I got home my parents and aunt and uncle all planned to go on a cruise two months later. My uncle invited my oldest brother, but made it very clear that no children would be allowed on this trip. Because I wasn’t married, I was still considered a child and so I was left at home, along with my brother’s three children. I had babysat these kids before. This wasn’t my first rodeo, but it was my first time being in charge of kids for such a long time.
My sister-in-law gave me two big packets of papers giving me information for what was going to happen in the next ten days. I sat there and learned the different schedules for each child and referred back to these packets often. They also gave me different passwords and phone numbers for emergencies. It was a lot of information I had to soak into my brain, stuff which my sister-in-law didn’t even have to think about to remember, she just knew.
Reading all that information just stressed me out even more. This experience taught me that I am a worrier, and when I am really worried I have nightmares about everything I am worried about not working out the way that it should. Usually I am a deep sleeper. It is not a big problem to be such a heavy sleeper as a college student, or at that point in my life I just had a job at my mother’s daycare so it wasn’t a problem then either. But I was so afraid that I wouldn’t wake up in time to get myself ready and three kids ready for school. I woke up many times throughout the night from dreams of it being later in the day and my nieces and nephews trying to wake me up. Needless to say I was awake plenty of time to get myself ready and get them ready, I was just very tired the whole day.
This gave me an appreciation for my own mother. She never failed at helping all seven of her children look prim and proper. She always looked put together herself. And she was always fifteen minutes to everything. I became very impressed with my mother, and I hadn’t even been doing the mom thing for a full day yet.
The beginning of all of this was easier than end. The excitement of Aunt Dixie watching them made them in a way behave what I asked them to do, but as time wore on they saw me more as a motherly figure and that is when the complaining and the frustration came through. I realized then that I never wanted to be a single mother. Taking care of these kids for eleven days was only a taste of my future life. It wasn’t easy, especially because I was alone. I also had no say in the way that these three kids would be raised. Of course I made my own spin on what was happening those eleven days, but they had spent the entire life being raised by their parents. I couldn’t change these kids but it showed me a little of what I want to do with my own children.
This experience taught me that being a mom is probably the hardest one out there, and millions of women do it without thinking. This helped me set goals for my future family and one of those is to find a husband that will work with me in raising our children. It is a 24/7 job and no one is ever ready for the task, but I learned also from this experience that it is one of the most rewarding things I can do with my life.