An Open Letter to the Woman Walking Past My Driveway

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I see you…glaring at me down the bridge of your nose underneath your designer sunglasses wearing your fancy matching workout outfit with perfectly pedicured red toenails.

I see you…judging me in all my sweat pants, baby pee stained shirt, no makeup, ponytailed hair, peeling toe nail polished because I had my first and last pedicure four months ago toed glory.

I see you…and, I’ve seen you before. Well maybe not you, exactly, but others like you.

I see you…watching all my crazy hooligans running wild and free chasing after some bottle rockets while others hold their sparklers and squeal with delight.

I see you… doing a head count and wondering if all seven of these are mine. Yes they are, and since I know you’re wondering, I’d love to have more, too.

I see you…glaring at my little boy who is running around in his backwards underwear wearing girl tennis shoes that are five sizes too big on the wrong feet. I see you judging him. Judging me because of him.

What I am wondering, however, is if you noticed that every one of these seven hooligans is smiling and laughing.

So while you’re busy making all your judgements about me, let me just tell you a little bit about what you see here.

I’m a busy, stay-at-home, working at home, homeschooling mom who worked for eight hours today, taught school for three hours, made three meals, did four loads of laundry with a broken dryer, hassled with the insurance company on the phone for an hour, and nursed a baby for a total of two hours, too. 

These are my kids. They are well educated, well fed, well schooled (each one scores a minimum of five years ahead of their grade level), and well loved. Some have regular jobs, all have regular chores, love their siblings, listen to their parents most of the time, and respect others more than most kids you will ever meet.

What you see going on, is a mom who doesn’t really care what someone who walks past her driveway might think about her. You see, this mom just finished a work project and came outside to watch her son ride his two wheel bike (which took a matter of 20 minutes and two “run-along sides” with the same mom to learn).

The half naked three year old wandered outside to see what all the clapping and hooting and hollering was about and did the best he could to get on some shoes. And yes, he HATES wearing pants or shorts of any kind so I just don’t fight him on it sometimes.

All those hooligans just finished cheering the bike riding genius on and are now excited to be having some fun together chasing bottle rockets around that are being lit by their dad who is gone more than 130 hours a week between full-time work and full-time school.

While we’re talking about all this, I’ll just tell you straight up that if you were to walk in my house right now you’d hardly see the kitchen countertops since everything from a dinner of nine people still remains, and the house resembles a war zone from yet another busy day of school, work, and everything imaginable with a total of nine people living and working in the same house 24/7, but the five year old riding the bike just happened to be more important than any of that other stuff at this moment.

You see, we live here. We LIVE here. We learn here, we laugh here, and we love here, and we really don’t care what other people think. We have seven kids who live here. Seven kids who are mature, responsible, well adjusted, and well loved kids, and we as parents do the best we can with all of it. All of the juggling since collectively we work and go to school more than 170 hours a week while raising our quiver of children to love God, to love each other, and to love all people, even people like you.

So, if you don’t mind, just keep on walking past while refraining from judging us through your own sense of understanding based on the life that you live because I just bet, that your life is nothing like mine. Not even a little bit like mine.

Even better, why don’t you not judge me, since I don’t have the time to judge you, but even if I did have the time, I wouldn’t. I think judging you just doesn’t appeal to me since I am so often under the microscope of just about everyone I know and see no good come of it.

Next time you walk past my driveway, I hope my family can make a better impression, I really do, because then maybe you’d at least say “hi.”

In fact, I bet that if you and I were just to sit and talk, that we could be friends. And wouldn’t that just be so much nicer than all this judging?

I happen to think that it would.