Image Description: A person wearing a yellow and black glove is pulling weeds.
This week, I fixed the clogged sink and worked with a wonky furnace (a clogged condensate pump to be exact).
I call this sadisfaction: Sadness that something stops operating the way it should combined with deep satisfaction at having fixed it. Heck yes!
This week, I also clipped a whole bunch of weeds (those have been waiting for me for a long time) and I got my heart pumping with the exertion of a hand push lawn mower.
AND!
I reached a brand new threshold of adulthood.
Moving back in time more than a decade ago, let me first say that I remember the exact moment I felt like I was a full blown adult. No more stages of emerging adulthood, mind you, but full adulthood. It was the moment I went to buy a mattress. I remember going to a legitimate mattress store. And in a moment of arrival, I remember lying on a bunch of them to try them out. “I”m an adult!” I felt with glee.
Well, this week, I reached a whole new moment of adulthood.
“I am a mid-life adult!” I felt with glee.
Here is the milestone marker: I paid a young adult to do yard work I didn’t want to do.
(And thankfully, a young adult who loves yard work).
“Let me provide for you. To do yard work at my house. That I don’t want to do.” Every part of that feels like mid-life adulthood.
GET ON MY LAWN!
I have arrived.
In the sadisfaction, the chores, and the delegation of mid-life adulthood, I need to give a nod to Rachel Held Evans and say, I am WOMAN OF VALOR.* I am getting it done, and it deserves praise.
*I am linking above to Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber’s gorgeous and powerful eulogy for Rachel Held Evans. I listened to this recently, and her sermon brought me to tears. I recommend reading it, or even more, listening to it, if you can. She says, “As you will discover when you read A Year of Biblical Womanhood, the best translation of eshet chayil is not ‘woman of virtue’ but actually “woman of valor,” and as Rachel teaches us, the most faithful use of Proverbs 31 is not as an unattainable standard women must reach in order to be worthy of praise, but as an example of how much in women’s lives and work is already worthy of praise.”
Smuggling Grace 