07/24/2026
"The laundry, the shoe pile, and the audacity to be grateful"
This morning, I caught myself staring at an overflowing laundry basket sitting directly beneath a wall of carefully framed family photographs. In the pictures, everyone is clean, coordinated, and looking in roughly the same direction. Beneath them is the actual operational reality of raising a family: towels, sweatshirts, socks, and an entire basket that has apparently rejected the physical limits assigned to it.
The contrast made me laugh because it is probably one of the most accurate family portraits I have ever taken. There is the version of us that gets printed and hung on the wall, and then there is the life happening directly underneath it.
For a long time, I believed the second version meant I was failing.
I grew up watching my mother constantly measure her life against what other women had. Their houses were nicer. Their cars were newer. Their vacations were better. She would often express that jealousy through criticism, as though pointing out everything wrong with another woman’s house might make it less painful that she did not have one like it.
Over the years, that dissatisfaction turned into resentment. She resented my father, resented our circumstances, and often seemed to resent motherhood itself. My father existed at the opposite end of the spectrum. He was consumed by the family business he had taken over from his parents and did not seem to have much emotional energy left for anything outside of it. One parent was focused on the life everyone else had, while the other disappeared into work. The rest of us became very good at reading the room.
I learned that a home was something you achieved once your life finally looked correct. It had enough bedrooms, matching furniture, a clean kitchen, and enough storage that nobody’s shoes had to be stacked on top of anyone else’s shoes. Home belonged to people who had made better decisions, earned more money, or figured out some fundamental rule of adulthood that had apparently not been shared with us.
I also learned that you could become so focused on the house you did not have that you stopped appreciating the people living inside the one you did.
That is the part I am trying hardest not to repeat.
The last decade of my life has been interesting, which is a polite way to describe it. I finished a serious college athletic career and launched into adulthood with discipline, a bachelor’s degree, and very little understanding of how to create stability outside of a training schedule.
There were failed marriages. There were two children I now share with a man who later moved to another state. There were years when I could not understand why I kept finding myself surrounded by different versions of the same toxic dynamics I had worked so hard to escape.
Some of that was my own doing. I jumped at the first opportunity to get the f**k out of my parents’ house when I was young, then spent years moving at full speed without ever stopping to ask whether I was actually headed somewhere I wanted to go. I became very good at surviving and equally good at disguising survival as competence.
From the outside, I looked productive. I worked, parented, handled responsibilities, and kept moving. Privately, I had no idea what I was doing. I was trying to build a life while still operating from the belief that admitting I needed help was more dangerous than whatever situation I was trying to handle alone.
I met Travis in 2021 when I was deep in the trenches of rock bottom. I was a newly single mom with a degree I was not using, very little relevant career experience, and no realistic way to afford the childcare I would need in order to work enough to pay for childcare.
On paper, I was employable. In reality, the math was not mathing.
I did not know how to navigate the assistance systems that supposedly existed for people in exactly my situation. I genuinely needed help, but I had inherited a deeply ingrained belief that needing anything was shameful. Instead of admitting how unstable everything felt, I spent an exhausting amount of energy trying to make it look like I had everything under control.
Fun fact: I did not.
Travis loved me slowly and gently. He did it so gently that I spent a while wondering whether he even liked me. I had been conditioned to associate intensity with connection, so consistency initially seemed suspicious. There was no immediate emotional explosion, no rush to force our lives together, and no demand that I prove what I could offer him.
We spent the next several years building something while both carrying the remains of the relationships and experiences that came before us. His relationship history prior to me was, well, woof. Mine was not exactly suitable for an instructional pamphlet either.
Something shifted for us in April 2025. We stopped standing near the edge of the relationship, waiting to see who would retreat first. We dove into it, committed to believing in each other, and started building a life as though we trusted the other person to stay.
Years later and we finally got married.
In November 2025, I left my parents’ house after living there since March. I left during a desperate, angry night that eventually became part of a much larger series of events. By the end of it, I had made the decision to go no contact with my parents, although if I am being honest, that decision had been forming for a very long time.
Travis and I moved into his parents’ basement while we adjusted to his new career, the long hours that came with it, and the practical work of figuring out what came next. Downstairs, we have one bedroom, a living room area, and a separate corner with bunk beds for the kids. We do not have a kitchen of our own, so we created a morning station out of a microwave, a coffee pot, a giant canister of aggressively average coffee, and whatever flat surface was available.
It is not the type of kitchenette anyone is saving to Pinterest, but every morning starts there.
Our Skylight calendar hangs above it, cycling through pictures of the kids while also functioning as air-traffic control for our family. It tracks appointments, school events, practices, work schedules, custody exchanges, and the movements of five children who are rarely supposed to be in the same place at the same time. Travis and my best friend chose it together as my Christmas present because they understood what I actually needed. They did not buy me something pretty for a hypothetical future home. They bought me something that helps carry the life already happening in this one.
That is a particular kind of love: being known well enough that someone sees what is taking up space in your brain and gives you something that makes it a little easier to hold.
Living with family is hard. Privacy becomes more of a scheduling concept than an architectural feature. Your belongings gather in borrowed corners. Multiple households operate within the same structure, and you are constantly aware that the space you occupy technically belongs to someone else.
I understand why that can feel difficult because I am living it now. The difference is that I am deeply grateful for this place.
This basement has given us stability while Travis establishes himself in a demanding career. It has allowed us to plan carefully instead of rushing into another bad decision because I am embarrassed by where we are. It has given our children somewhere safe to sleep and has given us the chance to work toward buying a home of our own.
Of course I want our own house. I want a kitchen with actual counters. I want rooms for the children. I want storage that does not require an advanced degree in spatial geometry. I would love to open a closet without first preparing for impact.
But I no longer believe I have to hate what I have in order to work toward something more.
That is a distinction I did not understand growing up. I thought ambition required dissatisfaction, and I thought gratitude meant you were no longer allowed to want anything different. I am learning that you can recognize the limitations of your current situation without treating it like a personal humiliation.
You can say, “This is hard,” and still be grateful.
You can want a bigger home without blaming your children for the fact that the current one feels crowded.
You can acknowledge that motherhood is exhausting without making your children feel like their existence is the source of your unhappiness.
My two youngest children are currently with their father for his half of the summer. The house is noticeably quieter. There are fewer arguments, fewer urgent reports concerning what someone else has done, and significantly fewer requests for snacks from people who insisted ten minutes earlier that they were not hungry.
The extra quiet has given my brain room to wander through the archives, which is not always a supervised activity.
This morning, I looked around at the clutter that normally overwhelms me. With the children gone, I could see it without watching them actively create more of it. Everywhere I looked, the room was telling me that my children live here.
They do not simply visit a tidy adult home and return all evidence of themselves to a designated basket before leaving. They occupy it. Their shoes are mixed with ours. Their bikes fill the garage. Their books are under the table. Their artwork appears in random corners. Their schedules govern the digital command center mounted above our coffee pot.
For years, I would have looked at the overflowing shoe shelf and thought I needed a better system. To be fair, we do need a better system. That shelf is currently operating well outside its intended design specifications.
But I also see movement.
Those shoes go to school, work, practices, wrestling tournaments, family trips, grocery stores, and ordinary afternoons outside. They are what gets left at the door when a family has places to go and eventually comes home again.
The shoes will not always be there.
The bikes will become too small. The books will be outgrown. The children will stop covering every available surface with papers, toys, half-finished projects, and objects they swear are extremely important despite not having touched them in six months.
The child who cannot find the shoe sitting directly in front of him will eventually become a person who leaves the house in shoes he bought without consulting me.
That is the rude thing about childhood. The phases that seem to consume your entire home eventually disappear.
Even our bedroom tells the story of this season. The bed is rarely made. Clothing sometimes occupies a portion of it. The dogs position themselves according to a system that prioritizes their comfort and completely disregards ours. One sleeps across the blankets as though she just finished a physically demanding double shift, while the other lies on the floor looking personally devastated by circumstances nobody can identify.
There was a time when I would have believed peace required a prettier room. I would have wanted matching furniture, more space, better storage, and a bedspread that did not contain both dog hair and yesterday’s clean laundry.
I still want the storage. Growth has not made me opposed to closets.
What has changed is my belief that the beautiful part of life has to wait until the room becomes more beautiful. We sleep there after long days. We talk, laugh, make plans, argue, apologize, and occasionally attempt to hide from the children there, although closing the door has never prevented anyone from asking questions through it.
The room is crowded because the life inside it is full.
My relationship with motherhood has been complicated because I grew up watching motherhood performed publicly and resented privately. There was church, homeschooling, 4-H, and all of the visible machinery of a wholesome family. Beneath it, I heard how miserable my mother was. I heard about the houses other women were buying and the life she believed she should have had.
Children notice when they are treated as part of the burden.
They notice when their noise is experienced as a personal offense. They notice when their belongings are treated like evidence of failure. They learn whether home is a place where they are allowed to take up space or a place where they should apologize for having needs.
I am not interested in romanticizing motherhood. Children are loud. They are expensive. They create laundry with the efficiency of a textile mill and can turn a clean room into an active investigation within minutes. I become overstimulated. I lose my patience. I forget forms. I have absolutely considered throwing every unmatched sock directly into the garbage.
My children still deserve to know that I am grateful they are here.
I do not want them growing up believing they stood between me and a better life. I want them to understand that they are part of the life I fought to build.
Breaking family patterns sounds dramatic when we talk about it in broad terms, but most of it happens in very ordinary moments. It happens when I stop myself from turning stress into shame. It happens when I apologize after losing my patience instead of insisting that being the parent makes me automatically right. It happens when I acknowledge that our circumstances are hard without assigning that hardship to the children.
It happens when I look at the laundry, the dogs, the shoes, the crowded rooms, and the evidence of a family taking up space, and refuse to resent them for existing inside the life I have now.
This basement is temporary. The way my children feel inside it may not be.
They may not remember the square footage. They may not remember that our coffee pot sat on top of a microwave or that their shoes were stacked in a manner that openly defied several laws of physics. They may not remember the dog hair on the blankets or the laundry basket overflowing beneath the framed family portraits.
They will remember whether home felt tense because they took up too much room. They will remember whether their needs were treated like interruptions. They will carry some understanding of whether their mother looked at her life with constant resentment or recognized that, even in an unfinished season, there was something worth being grateful for.
I cannot give them a perfect childhood, and I am never going to be a perfect mother. What I can give them is a mother willing to examine what she inherited and decide that it ends with her.
I can refuse to pass resentment down as though it were a family heirloom. I can teach them that an imperfect home can still be safe, that temporary circumstances are not failed circumstances, and that love does not require hiding every sign that people live together.
The family photographs can remain neatly arranged on the wall. The laundry will continue spilling out beneath them. The shoes will continue exceeding the shelf’s legal capacity, and the dogs will continue acting as though our bed was purchased solely for their use.
I am refusing to embody resentment I felt growing up and I am learning to be grateful for the whole picture of what life actually is
