Jennifer Groft

I participate in the RCIA at my parish, and there are a few lovely ladies who are in charge of hospitality.  It is their job to make sure there is a snack available at the classes and retreats, and they even go so far as to pretty the place up a bit with candles and flowers.  I am always at a loss for how to help them and wind up standing around watching them buzz like bees over a beautiful spread of food.  I feel so lazy and useless.

Being the overwhelmed, time crunched mother that I am, I tend not to fuss as much over hospitality kind of things.  I keep things extraordinarily simple.  In my view, I’d rather be spending time with people than with setting things up in such a way that makes things extravagant.  And that is how I handle social situations in my home.  But in the RCIA, I have felt a little left out when it comes to understanding the fuss over the hospitality stuff.

I was conveying this frustration to a trusted friend one day and told her, “I guess I am just too lazy to deal with those kind of details.”

She pointed out to me that I am not lazy.  She said that no mom who does what I do in any given day could call herself lazy.  I was just being selective about where my energy went.

Let that sink in for a moment: being selective about where you direct your energy.

For those who might think I discount the value of Hospitality, (particularly in the RCIA classes) I don’t at all.  It certainly makes it a welcoming place and makes the classes more fun to attend.  That is very important.  But in my little world of limited resources of physical and mental energy often hospitality on that scale just doesn’t make the cut.  Thank God for these women with this talent and who can put their focus on it!

I find myself on a daily basis with enough work to do and things to keep track of that could keep about four people busy.  So I have – without even realizing it – learned how to prioritize where my mental and physical energy will be spent and what my time will be spent on.  On some days, that means that the most important thing I can do is sit on the floor and let the baby climb all over me.  Other days it might mean that I really, really need to get the vacuuming or bills done.  What someone else gets done in a day doesn’t mean that *I* am lazy if I am prioritizing differently.

So what is “Lazy” then?

It is defined in the dictionary as “averse or disinclined to work, activity, or exertion; indolent.”

To me, lazy is deciding not to try to do your necessary work when you have the ability to try to do it.

Which brings me to another form of “Lazy” that I accuse myself of:

Do you ever have one of those days when you just can’t seem to move off the couch?  Where forward motion just becomes so hard you start to wonder if you are living in jello?  You know that there is much work to be done but starting or continuing just seems to slip through your fingers.  And so you just sit there, watching TV or perusing the internet, watching minutes tick away and wondering why you’re so darn lazy today.

When this is the case I have lost the ability to do my necessary work except on the most minimal level.  This is where I have to go back and ask myself, “What is going on here?”, “What situations have led up to my feeling stuck?”  Then I can backtrack and usually locate at what point my current unravelling began.  Often it is too much stress or not allowing myself any breaks from my work of caring for my family for too long.  My brain just kind of shuts down and decides to take the break for me.

By working at a slower pace and allowing myself breaks (which are not laziness either!) I find I can prevent or at least minimize these kind of shut downs.

Major crisis will also lead to this kind of shut down, almost a paralysis, and those are on an entirely different level.  Depression, death, a major accident, illness, or shock need to be given far more time and care to deal with and often benefit from some outside help.

So I have stopped calling myself lazy.  Because, in general, I’m not.  I have no problem with getting work done, but there is too much work to not be careful about how I approach it.  There may be go-getters out there who could accomplish a lot more with the time and resources I have.  But they aren’t here. I am.  And I am doing my best to care for my family.  And in spite of occasional appearances, that is not lazy.