Saturdays are our busiest day on the farm for a variety of reasons. It’s the busiest day for tours, baby goat experiences, visitors on the farm – and we have to do it all without the help from our employees.

But it’s October, and that throws in another complication – Cross Country season. During Cross Country season, the boys have races on Saturday mornings. So that means we also have to do Saturdays without the majority of the children.

Fortunately Emery can drive the boys to the race. Which basically leaves Jim, Brett, Mason, Colter and I (and sometimes Jade and Indigo) running the entire farm!! To say it’s crazy and that we don’t sit down or eat or anything til the rest of the children return is an understatement.

This Saturday we were fortunate in that neither Indigo nor Jade were running, so we still had them for help. Their favorite jobs are running the farm store (Jade) and the Sweet Shop (Indigo).

So that left me to… clean.

Yep, I spent Saturday morning washing windows and mopping floors. Is that the best use of my time?

Nope.

But sometimes a Mom’s gotta do what a Mom’s gotta do. And this Saturday it meant cleaning.

While I was mopping I got to thinking about how much of the work a typical Mom does is not all that important. Let’s taking mopping floors for example. It’s not all that important in the scheme of things. You mop and then the floors get dirty again (and pretty quickly around here).

So yes, a single mopping doesn’t really matter. But if mopping NEVER got done, it would certainly matter.

Same thing for cleaning toilets. If you don’t clean them one day (or one week) it won’t matter that much. But skip it for an entire month and it’s going to be pretty unsanitary.

And I think that’s the beauty of motherhood – part of what we do is to just keep things going.

Have you heard the story of the man who came home to find his house a disaster? Toys and food and junk littering the floor and every surface, children dirty in their pajamas running amok, basic chaos everywhere. He runs upstairs thinking he will find his wife dead and discovers her in bed reading a book. He says, “What happened?” His wife looks at him and says, “Remember yesterday when you asked me what I do all day? I decided not to do any of it today.”

I guess mopping the floor was a good reminder to me that while I didn’t really feel like mopping, I did it anyway. And the reason I did it anyway was because it’s my role to keep everything moving steadily along in the right direction.

That doesn’t mean it moves along perfectly. But it moves along. There is a direction I know I want my family (and Goat Milk Stuff) to head and I have to keep my fingers on the pulse of everyone and everything to make sure it is heading in that direction. And sometimes I need to give it a gentle nudge. That nudge could be a conversation. That nudge could be a new system. And sometimes that nudge is picking up a mop handle and showing everyone that cleanliness is important.

When I was done mopping, I sent Emery (whose job it is clean the candy kitchen) a text. It said this: “Because I love you, I mopped the candy kitchen floor for you. Thanks for keeping all the tables in there clean like I asked.”

Did I need to mop the floor for Emery? Nope, he was back around 2:00 and could have done it then. But sometimes your children need some extra loving and a surprise reward. After all, a Mom’s gotta do what a Mom’s gotta do.

So what are you doing that a Mom’s gotta do?