Also at Letters from the Nest:
https://open.substack.com/pub/lettersfromthenest/p/crying-over-laundry?r=48qui&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Dear Children,
One evening a few weeks ago, we invited two young women into our home to meet our family. They were full-time missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and had been recently reassigned to be the first female missionaries to serve in our congregation for many years.
I am always impressed with young full-time missionaries. Their goodness and honesty through struggles is inspiring. They are doing difficult work under difficult circumstances.
These two young women were telling us about their awful first Preparation Day (P-Day) in the area. P-Days, for missionaries, are meant to be the one day each week, as a “day off’ from full-time proselyting to buy groceries, wash clothes, participate in wholesome recreational activities, and call their families. P-Days are a break in the daily grind that can sometimes characterize full-time missionary work.
They had high hopes for their day, but things kept going wrong for them. They spent many hours stranded in cold weather at a pickleball tournament, forgot their phone charger, and didn’t get what they needed or wanted at the grocery store. The evening hours found them in a laundromat waiting for clothes to wash and dry while their phones charged enough to call their parents. One missionary moved a load of clean laundry to an open dryer, put in her last quarters, and pressed start only to find that she had transferred her clothes to another washing machine, which was starting a long soak of her clean clothes. This was the last straw. She cried and cried. What a horrible day.
Have you ever cried over laundry? If you haven’t, you will one day.
When I was weeks away from having our first baby, we didn’t have laundry facilities in our apartment, so I had to carry our laundry across the commons of our complex. My pregnancy exhaustion, combined with work and school commitments, caused me to neglect the laundry longer than usual, so I had two overflowing baskets to carry. I carried the tower to the back door of our apartment, then shifted the teetering mass to what was left of my hip, hugging it tight with one arm while I used my freed hand to open the door. The baskets toppled out of my grasp and crashed to the ground, spilling across the kitchen floor. In an awkward bend/crouch, I reloaded the baskets, opened the door, picked up the baskets, and walked through the door, but then I didn’t want to bend to put the baskets down again to close the door behind me. I tried the balancing trick again, and guess what happened? Again. Dad was home, but absorbed in schoolwork. Why didn’t he hear me or help me? You might ask that, but I can counter, why didn’t I ask for help? I cried as I resorted, reloaded, and restacked the baskets. I cried as I approached the laundry room door. Another obstacle. For the rest of the day, any minor inconvenience felt like the end of the world.
You boys might think only girls cry over laundry. If you do, you’re missing the point. It’s not about the laundry, and I guarantee you will cry over something small that breaks your spirit—a forgotten appointment, a misunderstanding, a stubbed toe, a spilled drink, a hole in your favorite pair of pants.
The thing is, we know life is hard. When tragedy strikes, it’s swift and severe. Illness, death, abuse, addiction. These trials and more are horrible evidence of our fallen world. But what about when life is good and it’s still hard? What if your child isn’t mortally ill, but your plants are? Maybe you haven’t lost a loved one, but you lose your car keys every day. Maybe you’re not physically ill, but you’re sick of freezing cold weather and cloudy days. What about the periods of life when these “little” things feel too heavy? You wonder how people are dealing with the big stuff when you are buried in little stuff. Do the same principles of faith apply? What about grace? Forgiveness?
I have been thinking about this since I listened to a BYU devotional by Elder Holland months ago. It’s called A Saint Through the Atonement of the Lord, and he tells of a family who has had more than their fair share of sudden, severe, and seemingly unfair tragedies. As I listened, I felt like I couldn’t relate. Sure, our family has had some challenges, but nothing like that. It was like many years ago when my good friend’s mother died of cancer, and her father asked her to raise her little brother along with her young sons. I remember thinking, exceptionally good people have some exceptionally awful challenges, and I’m not like that. In other words, I thought I wasn’t “good enough” for those kinds of challenges. I wasn’t heroic like that. I wasn’t, as Elder Holland described, saintly. Does that seem like a weird thing to think? I didn’t aspire for their goodness or their challenges. I just didn’t relate.
I still hold some of that dissonance, but I can see some other truths too:
Opportunities for refinement are not always drastic.
Everybody experiences tragedy—not just good people.
People don’t always respond to tragedy with faith and refinement. Just as often, people arrive at the other side of trials bitter and resentful.
So, what am I trying to say with all of this? Well, I guess I don’t really know. This letter is more of an accumulation of some thoughts-in-process. What do you think about big and little challenges and their role in refining us? Are there times when you don’t feel worthy of a particular challenge? Are there times when you think you should be handling “little” problems with more faith and maturity? Let’s talk about these deep thoughts sometime. I bet I can learn a few things from you.
Love,
Mom
Comments