Wednesday Inspirations #8

November and December are busy months for my family.

As always, all our weekends are fully booked and it’s really difficult to squeeze in last-minute activities. This year is particularly busy because of the college entrance exams that my son have been taking one after the other. My husband is also busy with his corporate giveaways business and since he also has his full time job, he can only do the legwork for his business during weekends. One time we went to Divisoria to scout for new items, and after spending the whole Saturday there, we both realized that we can’t do that all the time, we have to split the tasks and one should stay at home to be able to do other errands. This is how it is if you’re both working, all the errands for the family are done during weekends. It doesn’t help at all that we have no househelper. Sometimes it’s really frustrating to see the house in a mess, with all the laundry and ironing that need to be done, and the one that you hired to do it for the day will say that she’s not available and will just do it in the next three days.

Aargh! Sometimes, it takes a toll on the relationship within the family. It happens to us, and I know in most other families also. Sometimes we forget that we are first and foremost a family, and that we have a relationship that we need to nurture no matter what it entails. Like my daughter Faye, every time I tell her during weekends that I need to clean the house, she always say that I shouldn’t do that every weekend, or sometimes she says that she wished that we have a househelper so that we’ll have more bonding time together.

Fortunately, the two older kids, Earvin and Izah, are already helping around the house. They have alternate assignments of dishwashing, as well as other tasks like ironing and washing their school uniforms, mopping and sweeping the floor. Faye also has simple tasks that she needs to accomplish like fixing her bed, and sometimes she also voluntarily sweeps and mops the floor. For this, I’m grateful to their Dad, because it was him who taught them these things.

But sometimes, although the kids are helping, there are still a lot of things that are left for us to do. But then, I realized, we can only do so much. We cannot have a perfect home — and who does, anyway? All we have to do is to lower our expectations. Our expectations on how the house should look like; our expectations on what food is on the table — c’mon we cannot have well-prepared meals all the time!; our expectations on our kids — this is where we need to adjust the most.

What’s important is we are slowly instilling in the minds of our kids the importance of knowing the responsibilities that they have at home.

I think, as parents, this is what we need to instill in our minds also, that good relationships within the family is far more important than having a very clean house, an empty laundry basket, and organized closets and kitchen, because this is what our kids will remember as they too start to build their own families.