On Just Doing It

Our youngest ate a lot of pickles that summer. The big, refrigerated kind that, when eaten by a toddler her age, take up the whole fist. She was eating one then, sitting in her portable booster seat, strapped to the folding chair inside the screen tent that we never did close the sides on. It was too hot that year, even for the bugs.

Juice dribble down her chin and dropped onto her bare belly. It’s one of the only things I miss about having little ones; the buddha belly. I snapped a picture of her and turned my attention back to my cousin who twirled the eleventy-hundredth strand of her daughter’s tight, ringleted hair around her index finger. She’d been at this task for the better part of an hour.

“I don’t know how you do it.” I commented, shaking my head in awe. Minutes earlier she’d revealed that this was a twice — sometimes thrice — weekly chore. My own daughters hair is stick straight, simple. Wash, towel dry, brush. Toss it in a ponytail if it’s particularly unruly. That’s it.

“You would.” She smiled. “If you had to.” She strung another tiny ringlet around her finger, and then another. “It’s what we do.” She nodded towards me and another of our cousins — another woman — who was at the table, applying her royal we to the gender shared among us. ” We just do it. Because it has to be done.”

I have never forgotten those words; that scene.

While I was in New York City earlier this month I had the pleasure of speaking with the ladies of LoveFeast Table. We talked about — or rather I spouted off about — agriculture big and small, humane treatment of livestock, the evils of supermarket meat, and generally everything I’m passionate about. And the more I talked the more they asked me about, well, me. As I told them more about what I do, my family, my fledgling farm — my life, basically — one of the ladies, I don’t remember which, broke out that all too common question: How do you do it? And for the first time in the conversation I stammered. Ultimately, I shrugged and brushed the question aside with a half-hearted answer, “I don’t know. I just do.” Because that answer, half-hearted as it may be, is the truth.

Sure, I could have told them all the tangible ways in which I do it. I could have told them that we still use Summer Vacation the way it was originally intended, that the kids have their fair share of chores to do “in the fields” when they’re home. I could have told them that I’m obnoxiously dependent on lists, that I have a wonderful and wholly helpful husband, that I have become a master at prioritization and that some things just never do get done if they’re not deemed important enough. I could have told them all that I’ve learned over the years about delegation. I could have revealed in detail the spreadsheets, the systems that make the everyday, the routine run smoothly, like a well-oiled machine. I could have told them exactly, minute by minute, how I do it. Every bit of it. But that would not have been the honest truth; that would have been to mislead them; that, I’m not sure I could have been comfortable with.

The truth isn’t in the tangible logistics of any given task. The truth is, I just do it because it needs to be done. And so do they, so do you. We all just do it for the same reason; because someone has to. Because it needs to be done, because to not do it is to lie down, to accept defeat, to die figuratively, literally. And as much as there are days when that seems preferable, we know it’s not, we carry on. We do it. Because. And the how doesn’t matter, not really.

Tagged as: kids, life, marriage, parenting, Productivity, work