I want to be a mom — not a maid

I left my career to be a stay-at-home mother, not a stay-at-home maid.

But some days I feel like a small portion of my day is actually spent on mothering. Instead, the housekeeping, laundry-sorting, dinner-planning side of my motherly duties is in competition with the mother I want to be. I want to be a mom who teaches, loves and has fun with her children.

So when I'm staring at the ridiculous pile of laundry that I'm pretty sure has been washed but not 100 percent sure so I'm going to have to wash it again, I wonder if I'm spending my days in drudgery rather than mothering.

And while people always say, "Those dishes and that dirty laundry will be there tomorrow. Enjoy your children today," it's not that easy. It won't just be that laundry tomorrow, but another day's worth of laundry on top of it, and you can only ignore the dishes so long without ending up using plastic spoons every night and drinking out of sippy cups at dinner. Yesterday I used a Gerber baby spoon to eat breakfast.

What's a mom to do? I want to be a mom, not a maid. I don't want my kids to look back one day and say, "Wait, that woman always sorting whites and colors was my mother? Who knew?"

So in the last few weeks I've been thinking of ways to be the mother I want to be instead of this fractured person morphing between boring housekeeper mommy and fun mommy.

Well, I only needed to look to my own mother and my own childhood to find the answer. There were fun vacations and excursions growing up, but the real fabric of my childhood is made up of everyday moments with my mom. Those are the moments that have stuck with me throughout my life, and as I reflected on them, I was surprised to find that most of them happened in moments of what I now call "drudgery."

There were moments like every Tuesday after piano lessons when we would go grocery shopping and all share a warm loaf of French bread on the way home.

There were moments in the kitchen when I would be sitting at the bar snapping green beans while my mom made dinner. Those unplanned bar-side chats were always easy and revealing as we cooked side by side.

In the spring, my mom would get out big buckets of soapy water so we could wash down the patio furniture. It always unraveled into an all-out water war, but those chairs sure got clean.

Somehow she even managed to turn laundry into a treasured childhood memory because I equated laundry day with the chance to go for a swing in the king-size sheets.