Enough

At nearly the last minute, Xman decided he wanted to go to DOM. He's usually invited by several but has never been sure formals were his thing.

He borrowed a suit. We dragged out his father's "prom" shoes. He just needed a white button up shirt.

We decided a white button up shirt is a useful item and one he'd likely wear again. With the busyness of May, he ran into TJ Maxx on his way to baseball. Grabbed one that fit.

In the busyness of May, I forgot to tell him that he needed to buy a shirt with a BLEND.

He came home with a 100% cotton shirt.

We all know what a 100% cotton dress shirt looks like when you wash and dry it.

The Nana normally fixes these domestic conundrums for us, but she was out of town.

I dragged out our iron.

Our iron has been used MANY times.

For ironing plastic beads.

That's it.

It's not made for ironing clothes, or at least not in this house.

About 22ish years ago, I tried to iron one of SD's shirts for work. He wore a 2XL Tall at the time and let's just say that's a lot of shirt to attempt to wrangle.

I then decided the 99 cent special at the dry cleaners was the way to go. Since then, we've cut the dry cleaning expense by buying him all shirts that are a heavy blend - so they are "wrinkle free."

I was determined on Xman's one (and likely only) formal event - he was not going to be the wrinkled kid.

3 Youtube videos later and I was armed with a plan. I cleaned our iron. I filled it with water (thus youtube says steam is the way to go). I have sprayed this shirt with water, put it in a plastic bag for an hour, and now it's laid out on my dining room table (the ironing board left here in a minimalism kick years ago).

I ran the iron over the towel on the table many times before actually letting it touch the shirt.

After ironing, I hung the shirt up across the room from me.

You know how this goes right?

The more I looked at the shirt, the more I saw new wrinkles.

I decided to give it one more go. Plugged the iron in, and ran it ONE time over the area in question.

At which point my iron betrayed me.

Little brown dots squirted out of the iron ALL over the white dress shirt. Hours before the event.

I hurriedly sent SD to Walmart for a Tide Pen (alas we don't own one of those either). The Princess used the tide pen and a hair dryer. And hours later, as a group effort, the Thrailkills had somehow managed to have one (mostly) ironed dress shirt ready.

As I've been thinking about this domestic snafu this week, I realized that I often have trouble recognizing when "enough" is enough.

Had I left said shirt alone, with the one small wrinkle, it would have been fine.

But I questioned myself.

Had I done "enough?"

Much of my parenting sleepless nights could be attributed to this elusive "enough."

Did I love them enough? Did I teach them enough? Did I enforce boundaries enough? Did I support them enough? Did I hole them accountability enough? Did I offer grace enough?

Mama Warriors, we can always think of the "mores" but are we giving ourselves credit for the plentys?

Are we embracing that (in Jesus) we are ENOUGH.

We don't need to keep ironing over and over.

Our best was enough.