It has been a week since I had unexpected surgery. My suburban housewife glees and woes were interrupted. My fear of not being available for those I care about came true. I received an untimely, yet pertinent reminder that life cannot revolve around creating a perfectly manicured world of highs for my family and friends. Life is not always pristine and managed by an Erin Condren planner. Dirty life happens and will happen again.
I don’t mean dirty as in “disgusting and deplorable.” I just mean the “unkempt, the unknown, and the unexpected.” As I type, my small home is a modest mess. My dear husband and boys have done well maintaining the work I put in pre-op, but I see things unraveling. As I gain strength, I make my way into the living room where remnants of blanket forts have laid for days. I walk into the kitchen, welcomed by open cabinets and drawers. Laundry, including baseball and school uniforms and work shirts, are piling up. I am simply not ready to visit my boys’ bathroom right now. On a typical day, this disarray would be viewed as unacceptable chaos. Everything in its place, people!
Ah, but today. Today, as I am recovering, happy to be alive, home is a haven. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and like my husband says all the time, “it is what it is.”
This is the dirty life of the mom mafia, moms with complex and occasionally stoic behavior codes relating to all things children, family, and female. Something about the mom mafia trains mothers to robotically maximize resources, days, efforts, and relationships inadvertently focused on self-benefit and self-satisfaction. Did I get everything I wanted accomplished? Did I give my children everything I wanted them to have? How satisfied am I with my valiantly creative efforts? There is no chapter in the mom mafia manual for dirty life. “Everything is beautiful” or the mom mafia will move mountains for it to be so or cover it up. The obsessions with the next mom meeting, sale, vacation, recipe, war against teachers and bleachers, witty social media post, and date night selfie don’t mean a thing when a doctor says you have a potentially cancerous, cantaloupe-sized mass growing in your reproductive system. No, my friends, this isn’t my first dirty life rodeo, which is why I can unapologetically say, the truth is sometimes moms just make life much ado about nothing.
During surgery recovery, there’s not much to do but rest and reflect on days past and days ahead. (Ok, and get on Pinterest again.) As I reflect, I get energized thinking about moms who are writing their own dirty life chapters for the mom mafia manual. Chapters full of authenticity and substance, sharing stories of navigating through and overcoming the likes of illness, disease, infertility, divorce, death, and distress. Stories of courage and vulnerability. Stories of miracles. The mom mafia life is good until it is not. A dirty life mom has scars of depth and evidence of the imperfect. A dirty life mom knows life isn’t always beautiful, but how we press onward together is.
The sting of dirty life descends through the gift of sacrificial friendship. Graciousness extended in hard times will forever be more meaningful than the futility in finding the right tablecloth for the next Christmas party or boasting of the latest outings and acquisitions. As my friends and I walk through moments of dirty life together, greater purpose is etched in our hearts through our vulnerability. We join forces not over where we stand on class, wealth, or the politics of motherhood, but on our motivation to do more for others. The dirty life of the mom mafia is happening, and we are mobilized.
