Monday through Friday, one of my top three favorite moments of the day is picking up my son from school. The other two spots of those top moments are always up for grabs, but picking up my son is a constant top moment. It’s something about having my son back in my care that just fills me with joy, relief, and excitement.
Having picked him up for a year and some odd months now, I’ve become quite observant of how other families do pick-up. Our school forces parents to stand outside of one door and the kids are released by their teachers after telling the teacher who they see picking them up. I personally love the act of getting out of my car in all weather conditions and giving my son a hug as he walks out. Some parents express the desire to have it be a drive through, but not me. I love watching him walk out to me – sometimes with a big smile and quick steps, sometimes looking like he’s ready for bed and slow steps, but most often, he comes out with a soft little smile and his arms slowly opening for a hug.
On the trek back to the car, I start asking questions and he starts answering them. The typical questions are: “How was your day!” “What color did you get?!” (color meaning where he fell on the behavior chart) “What was your favorite part?” and so on. By the time we are all buckled in, he’s talking my ear off telling me about random things from the day or things that were exciting. I treasure these moments because it’s one of the few where I’m not multitasking. I’m simply being a mom, listening to my son.
So often, I am multitasking. Cleaning AND making sure my 17-month-old isn’t climbing on the dining room chairs. Working AND getting my 4-year-old down some coloring books and crayons. Eating lunch AND making a grocery list. And the list goes on. It’s something I love but also come to loathe sometimes. Is it not enough to just simply do one thing at a time? As a mom, there’s 5,000 things I could be doing. The work is never done. I’ve been trying to force myself to focus on one thing at a time – especially if that one thing is listening to my children tell me a story or show me something they think is cool. It’s easy to only focus on work or my own personal tasks for the day. But for some reason, when it comes to solely focusing on being a mom, I’m always trying to do something else at the same time.
The reality is, our kids know when we aren’t giving them our undivided attention. So when I’m forced to only focus on my kids (like school drop off), I enjoy it! There’s nothing else to draw my attention away and there’s no other thing to tend to, and I can take peace in knowing that I’m being just “mom” in that moment – not the housecleaner, the employee, the friend… just mom. So as I continue to work on creating more moments of “just mom”, I want to encourage you to do the same.
Make time to be “just mom” and maybe daily tasks like picking up your children from school (or something of similar weight) will feel more like a treat, and less like a chore.
