It wasn’t that long ago that life in our family was tremendously hard. No one single thing came easy. Housing? Precarious. Employment? Teetering on the brink. Education? A constant rolling boulder of agony. Housekeeping? OH YOU HOLY SAINTS AND ANGELS WHAT DID I JUST STEP IN. And so on. This is what happens when you’re extremely poor and never sleep and have a ton of kids and no idea what the hell you’re doing.
Things are so much easier now. We’re more secure in almost every way, and the daily rhythm of our lives may be up tempo, but it’s not a frantic tarantella. In many ways, our life is almost like a fairy tale, and not in the “here, put on these red hot iron shoes and dance until you die” way, either. Yes, things are stable, predictable, peaceful, and calm.
And that’s intolerable, apparently. We just don’t know how to function when everything is going smoothly and there’s no crisis. So every time things start to feel manageable, we introduce some kind of ridiculous and unnecessary complication into our lives, just so we know what’s going on.
The dog and cat situation, for instance. We’ve always had a lot of pets; fine. Pets are good for kids. They teach them about responsibility and stewardship, and also death, and sex, and cannibalism, and coprophagia, and incest, and other wholesome lessons. Fine. So we have birds, we have a lizard, sometimes we have gerbils and hamsters, sometimes we have fish, fine, normal. Turtle, frog, temporary rat, sure. And sometimes we have a cat; and sometimes we have a dog. This is manageable.
But in the year 2020, things got too quiet, and so we decided we needed to have both a cat and a dog. And lo, our house has been transformed into an absolute cartoon madhouse. Read the rest of my latest at The Catholic Weekly.