A Parable of the Working Mother

Just finished reconciling my bank statements, which I had not done since December. And yet, miraculously, my husband still wants to be married to me.

Even with the help of Quicken and online banking which downloads transactions automatically, it was tedious. How did people even balance their checkbooks before Quicken? I remember learning how to do it in some high school life skills class, and the process seems so adorably quaint now, kinda like the big typesetting machine we used for the high school newspaper, before we got the spankin’ new Mac Plusses. Then we were really kicking some PageMakin’ butt, let me tell you.

Anyway, the first step in reconciling all that mess is to enter in the checks. It was sobering to go through check after check after check made out to the Childcare Provider. They just kept coming, one after the other, like an avalanche. There’s no denying the impact of seeing those slips of paper in a small stack, pulled out for the manila folder marked IRS, and realizing that if I did not work, or if my husband did not work, that stack of paper would not exist. (Perhaps the same could be said of my checks to the pastoral counselor!)

I think the problem is that these checks are all the same, indistinguishable from one another, except for the date. But life has not been like that. When I look at a nondescript check from late March, I am looking at the remnant of a transaction that allowed me to envision, write and deliver a sermon that a visiting minister told me later described his life so perfectly that he was moved to tears. A check to our childcare provider in April allowed me to visit with a man who shared with me the happy news that he is enrolling in seminary courses this fall. A check from May enabled me to have lunch with a parishioner whose 21-year-old friend is dying from a brain tumor; she wants me to do the funeral. If there had been no check in June, I would not have received the letter from the young person working at the youth conference I led, who shared that as a result of the conference he has felt the presence of God for the first time in his life.

I’m really getting sick of a certain credit card commercial. You know the one. So I simply want to ask, Can I put a price on any of that?