Unwound

This week I had the unique opportunity to live a dream! Or so I thought.
I'm a full time mom to 4 kids ranging in age from 6 years to 20 months. You other moms know how busy and crazy the mom job can be! I read an article this week about moms being wound up tight and I can relate! There are so many bodies, meals, feelings, fights, housekeeping duties, errands and possessions to manage! All the while feeling the pressure of knowing these precious moments will pass all too quickly and I should slow down more to really enjoy them! I have certainly been wound up tight to varying degrees in the last 6+ years of motherhood.
Do we moms dream of cloning ourselves?! Yes! I've often wished there was another copy of myself in the background doing the laundry and mopping the kitchen while I sit on the floor and do puzzles, read books and shower my children with my relaxed and undistracted attention. Other days I've wished for someone else to come occupy my kids so I can find myself again through a solid block of uninterrupted kid-free time.
I lived the dream this week! No, I wasn't cloned but I did have a full time housekeeper/nanny at my disposal 8 hours/day. This was a trial partly because Mitchell had to travel back to the states all week. We also wanted to see if full time domestic help would be something I would want long term.
Surprisingly, this was not as dreamy as I had always imagined! It was actually quite uncomfortable for so many reasons. As a person who values privacy pretty highly, I did not like the feeling of sharing my home and my every move with a near stranger. I hated the internal struggle of devoting my complete attention and time to my kids all while this sweet woman was working up a sweat cleaning MY house and the messes WE had made! As she had been hired as not only a housekeeper but also a helper with the kids, she kindly and with wonderful intentions inserted herself in breaking up arguments, assigning the kids jobs and managing their time. She did these things in *gasp* not the way I would have done! It's so difficult to see a person as an equal and treat them accordingly when you are the boss and have hired them to do all of the undesirable jobs you don't want to do. All of these thoughts and feelings flooding in made for a very uncomfortable few days!
As I've pondered this more I realized that my role as a wife and mother goes deeper than just the activities and work I do all day to fill the time. I am a wife and a mother. That is a lion share of my identity. It's who I am as an individual. I've chosen this life as a full time mom because it's what I want to BE, not just what I need to do. When I hired out the work of my identity I felt a void in myself and an uneasy urgency to fill that void with, what exactly? A new identity? Redraw my whole life trajectory? I wasn't prepared for the deep soul searching and philosophizing I would experience by simply paying another person to scrub my showers and play with my kids!
Needless to say, having a full time domestic employee was not actually a dream come true for me. In fact, after Wednesday I did my best to explain some of my feelings and told her that the trial period was over and it wasn't going to work for me.
The good that came out of all of this is, I feel so unwound! Somehow the perspective gained in taking back my roles (all of them! Even scrubbing the showers!) voluntarily and eagerly has helped me undo years worth of winding up! I am so confident that I have chosen right for me, my family and my children.