My Mother And My Children Both

There are two lists and you are one person.

Your mother needs things. Not enormous things, mostly, but regular things, and there is a shape to the week that has her in it now in a way it did not two years ago.

Your children need things, and they are small enough that the needing is constant.

And every hour you give to one of those is an hour visibly not given to the other, and you have been keeping score in a way you would deny if anybody asked you, and you have been losing on both sides of it for about eighteen months.

I am not going to solve this. Nobody can. What I want to do is take one specific thing off you, and it is the scoring.

Let them learn first to show piety at home

There is a line in Timothy about exactly this arrangement, and it takes it entirely for granted.

But if any widow have children or nephews, let them learn first to shew piety at home, and to requite their parents: for that is good and acceptable before God. (1 Timothy 5:4, King James Version)

Let them learn first to shew piety at home, and to requite their parents.

Notice the shape of the household being described. There are children in it, and there is a parent in it, and there is somebody in the middle carrying both. The letter does not treat that as an unusual crisis. It treats it as an ordinary arrangement that needs naming so that everybody knows whose job it is.

You are in an arrangement the letters already knew about, and it was never an unforeseen emergency that you are living in. 1 Timothy 5:4 assumes a household with a parent and children in it at once, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as recognition rather than as another demand.

And notice the phrase good and acceptable. It is said about the whole of it. Not about doing it well, not about managing it without dropping anything. About the doing of it.

You have been called good and acceptable for the doing rather than the succeeding, and it was never the standard of the performance that was being assessed. The written word puts the approval on the arrangement itself, and the Spirit of God is what takes a scoreboard off a man carrying two households.

The scoring is the extra load

Now let me name the thing I actually want to remove, because I cannot remove the other two.

There is the caring for your mother. There is the caring for your children. And there is a third thing, which is the continuous internal accounting of which one is currently being underserved.

That third one is not care. It is not attention to either of them. It produces nothing for anybody, and it runs all day, and it is the reason you finish a day exhausted in a way the actual work does not explain.

Two duties that cannot both be met in full is a description of a life and not a failure of one, and staying in is not a smaller answer than going out.

You are not failing anybody, and it was never possible for one person to meet two full sets of needs at once. 1 Timothy 5 names the arrangement as ordinary and calls the doing of it acceptable, which is exactly why the Spirit of God addresses the accounting and not the arithmetic.

And here is why it matters for going outside. Every time you consider taking one of your children out for twenty minutes, the accounting starts, because those twenty minutes have a name on them. So the twenty minutes never happens, and neither does anything else, and the outcome of the scoring is that both sides get less.

Take one out, and take her out, and do not compare

So the practical part, and it is two separate small things and one prohibition.

Take one of your children out for ten minutes. And on a different day, take your mother out to the step, or to the end of the road if that is available.

You are able to do two small things without ranking them, and it has never once been required that they be equal to both be real. The passage names a household with both in it and calls the doing acceptable, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man doing ten minutes with one and ten minutes with the other.

And the prohibition, which is the part that does the work: do not compare them. Not while they happen, not afterward, not at eleven at night.

When the accounting starts, and it will start, say to yourself: both of these happened. That is the whole answer, and it is accurate, and it does not require you to work out which one needed it more.

And on the days when neither happens, and there will be days, let that stand and add nothing to it.

You are permitted a day where neither one gets anything, and it has never once been a verdict on a man carrying two households. 1 Timothy 5:4 puts the good and acceptable on the doing itself, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present on the days when nothing got done at all.