The Sinking Pumpkin

Once I had a neighbor who was a single mom. She had two kids. Both her kids have a rare and very serious metabolic disorder that required unbelievable amounts of time in the kitchen preparing food for them. This neighbor also had an ex-husband who should have been kept away by a restraining order...maybe he was eventually.
I very much enjoyed this neighbor. She was comfortable to spend time with, generous and funny, and an easy person to talk to. She had given up money and prestige and a very good zip code to be more in the lives of her young kids.
One Halloween there was a pumpkin on her porch. As is the case in the NW, once Halloween is over and it starts to rain more frequently, the pumpkins on the porches start to mold and rot. Her pumpkin began to sink into the patio. It started out friendly-looking, but soon it's twisted face was distorted and spooky. She said many times that she needed to throw it away, but I saw how she walked back and forth from the car in the driveway--never was there a time when her arms weren't loaded with a toddler or groceries or someone's school backpack. So the pumpkin kept leaning and disappearing into it's chin (if pumpkins had chins). The mold started growing out through the eyes and the gaps between the teeth and it started to look like less of a job for two empty arms and more of a job for a shovel and a trash bag.
I never made a note of when the pumpkin finally disappeared, leaving behind a stained splotch on the concrete. But it was well into another holiday season.
For some reason I think of that pumpkin often. It is like an emblem of motherhood. Something you walk by every day that needs to be done, but you can't get to it. There just isn't that free two minutes that couldn't be more wisely spent on something else. The pumpkin is not critical path. You start to despise the pumpkin--there for all the world to see that you don't have your act together enough to throw something in the garbage. You know in your heart that the rotting pumpkin is of no consequence, but it bugs you anyways. You don't identify with people who don't throw away their rotten pumpkins. Then again, you do, and that is so strange. You used to be the person who would put out their clothes the night before and spend a free hour organizing the closet (sometimes by color, sometimes by size, sometimes by style).
But now, your body shelters other little people--it is their safe space, the place where they are validated and nurtured and it is from here that they are launched forth into the world. You would let all the pumpkins rot if it meant that your little people were thriving. Thrive they do, even if it is amongst the dog hair on the carpet that should have been vacuumed yesterday and the piles of dishes that weren't exactly finished before bedtime. The unfinished projects for yourself that are compartmentalized behind closed doors until further notice.
Wherever you are now, long lost neighbor...I wish you well. Order, peace and thriving kids--and the occasional glass of wine and time to yourself.