The Power of Acceptance

This week I found mouse poop in our pantry. Tiny black cylinders in the corner of a shelf, on the lid of the peanut butter jar, behind the empty beer growlers. I pulled the bin where we keep crackers off the shelf and found a packet of saltines with a hole chewed in the back. I pinched it between two fingertips, arm stretched as far away from me as it could go, crinkled my nose, and threw it away. I was disgusted. But also motivated. I went into battle mode. I set two mouse traps last night in the pantry and, to my horror, they both went off before eight pm. 

Life in a rural area means we usually find a mouse (or more) in the pantry when the weather gets cold. Our house is also home to two young children whose sole job it sometimes seems is to manufacture crumbs and deposit them in very specific places: the ledge of a bookshelf, beneath a bed, inside a dollhouse. All of this to say there are many things in life—in my very own house—that are out of my control. And for me, a person with perfectionist tendencies, every day is an exercise in acceptance of that, and it’s not always easy. 

Today I sat at my dining room table and read the news of our nation’s capitol—news of people storming the capitol building, a firsthand account of what it was like to scramble over a railing to evacuate the legislative chamber. I saw images of angry protestors with baseball bats, with horns on their head, people scaling up a stone wall. A mob refusing to accept a transition of power led by a president who refused to accept his loss. In the middle of the afternoon's chaos, the last US senate seat up for grabs in the Georgia runoff election was called for a democrat. It was a wild day for our nation’s politics and our country's collective emotions. We saw an unprecedented display of physical force intended to interrupt democracy in the capitol alongside a successful, socially distant democratic process to elect two senators. 

I took my broom and swept up the mouse poop. I swept it off the pantry floor, off the lid of the peanut butter jar; I found some beside the dollhouse where the girls play, beneath our breakfast table. I am hesitant to even write this because I find it so appalling to admit how much mouse poop there was. I didn’t touch the little turds, but I still washed my hands vigorously after I used the broom, just to maintain some sense of cleanliness. 

Even as I cleaned the house to erase any signs of the mice, I still had to accept the fact that there will likely be a few more this winter, maybe even tonight. I reset the mousetraps. Life in the country means your neighbors might sneak in and eat your saltines in the dark. And life with small children means living with a perpetually unclean house and not enough time to put everything back where it belongs. Every day for me is an effort to accept it. Sometimes that means putting down the broom, leaving the crumbs under the table, taking a break to rest and take care of yourself. Sometimes that means setting mousetraps with a determined sense of taking control over a few square feet of the pantry. However you meet the chaos, I think there’s power in acceptance.