Scott and I went away for a quick couples ski weekend and we left the kids in the care of Scott’s mom. We returned on Monday night to find that all four children remained alive and well. The house was exceptionally clean (thank you, Mawmaw!). The children had been fed and read to and loved all weekend. We started to unpack and rapidly assimilated back into our “parent roles”. We dumped out the kids’ backpacks to make sense of the homework we needed to accomplish in the 27 minutes left before the magical bedtime of 9pm. A few math pages and an early-reader book…about 10 minutes in we had enough done to constitute appropriate effort towards the task. I beckoned Sam back to the kitchen… “Sam, it’s time for a bath!” And he groans, “Uhhh, mom! That’s the exact opposite of what I want to do!”

The. Exact. Opposite. Oh, how many times I have said that. Or thought that. The task at hand is The Exact Opposite of what I want to do. Unload the dishwasher (which is worse than loading); fold the laundry (which is worse than sorting, and I refuse to do the sheets, it’s a physical impossibility to get them square!); clean the toilets, sweep the floor, pick up random dirty socks…from ALL over the house! And it’s not just household chores. It’s at work, too. Address the interpersonal conflicts (I hate tension), sit down and finally write that manuscript (I can’t seem to make it sound interesting), and sign my charts in the electronic medical record (death by a thousand clicks). And it’s in my head. I want the chocolate cake not the carrots, the short run not the long run, the snooze button not the early wake up.

But if I look just beyond The Exact Opposite task that is staring me down and taunting me with being boring, tedious, and even downright painful, I get a little glimpse of the feeling after The Exact Opposite. While I hate matching up socks, and wiping the boys’ toilet “misses” off the floor; and the awkward conversations about adults at work acting like the children at home, and the bruised toes from a long run, I love the neatly folded stack of towels, the clean floor; the handshake (ok, you know me…the hug) after a tough conversation, the published manuscript, and the pride of the long run and the good burn I feel in my calves.

So Sam, you are just gonna have to do The Exact Opposite, because after your bath, well, you won’t stink anymore. And after you do your homework, well, you will pass Kindergarten, and go to the 1st grade and will enjoy the holy grail of elementary school…getting to eat lunch in the cafeteria. We just have to remember that while The Exact Opposite looms over us, if we can break through it, there is glory on the other side.

Disclaimer: My viewpoints are not necessarily reflective of my employer, or any local, regional or national organization that I belong to. As a matter of fact, I pretty much just speak for myself. Please keep that in mind.