To Do List for the Day, Every Day
My “To Do” list never quite gets done and I’m okay with this. When we stop to get the research books, we are promoting becoming more learned –it is important enough that I will make a trip just for you. When we cheer at a game, the kid notices…that’s my Dad. When we fix them dinner, we have fed the hungry. When we dress them, we have clothed the naked. These are the little things we are called to do with great love and they reflect our souls’ states, whether they are moving towards or away from God.
Such movement is measured in scraped knees that have been kissed and folded socks and diapers changed and dishes washed, not by numbers but by attitude. The world likes to emphasize how much work it is to do these things. The world tries desperately to crowd out all sense of these small acts being anything but constant wearying duty.
When we went shopping for a car, nearly every new model had a TV screen or DVD player available. When I asked if they had any without this option, the salesman expressed shock. “You don’t want to distract your kids? To entertain them? To keep them quiet?”
The truth of the matter was “No.” I viewed the TV’s as excess, as unnecessary, as a means of trading family peace for family silence. He saw the kids and thought, “Work.” Kids zoned into their own worlds may make for a quiet car or a quiet home, but they also mean no actual interaction or connection is being made. Relationships between siblings then become a matter of proximity and not emotional connectedness. I wanted my kids to remember talking to me and each other each day riding home from school. I wanted them to be present to me and to each other in the car. I didn’t want the first words of my son or daughter when piling in the car to be, “Put the movie on.” And then silence until appetites stirs someone to ask, “When’s snack?
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I am not anti-television or technology. I merely didn’t want to make a purchase for the purposes of sticking a mental pacifier in my children’s mouths the instant they got in the vehicle. So we will put up with the squabbles over seats and the occasional clamor that comes from three or four people trying to tell about their day at the same time, rather than the silence brought forth by screen inducing stupors. For these stories and sharings and fights and memories, reflect the Divine and the human life in all its color. We can grasp moments of this inbetween errands to pick up new shoes and hair cuts and homework stops at the library if only for a few moments, when we remember why we do these things which take time, effort, money and energy.
In the introduction to C.S. Lewis’ “The Four Loves,” there is a passage I have underlined and reread over and over, as I think it correctly defines the nature of parenting as a vocation. “Our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the rods, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely unlike anything we can attribute to the Divine life itself, is apparently not only like, but is, the Divine life operating under human conditions.” This is our real “To Do” list that we should always be in the process of doing. Sure it is work, but it's the only work that matters.
Spiritual Hot Cocoa
Sherry Antonetti is a mother of eight children and a freelance writer of humor and family life columns with prior publications in Absolutewrite, the Catholic Standard, Beaumont Enterprise and the Washington Post. She can be reached at 
