Lisa Rose Bauer

A new broom sweeps clean, but the old broom knows the corners. Proverb

The summer camp where my daughter went as a child was hiring counselors the summer before her 10th grade year. She was 15-years-old. The summer before a driver’s license is an in-between and antsy one for many teens. She wanted to be busy and enjoy that summer. I drove her to the camp for a visit and an interview. They were happy to hire a veteran camper. The next Monday she started at the long established Catholic camp on the Bay. Like so many other pivotal times in her life, somehow I just knew this was a crossroad. Another chance at growing and moving forward.

While picking her up in the first week, along with her two friends, also counselors that summer, I got out of the car to enjoy the salty air. When Sister, the director of the camp, spotted me as she hailed pick up traffic, she shouted across the parking lot in her loving, gruff way – she’s never used a broom. I had to teach her to sweep. With a twinkle in her eye, she waved on the next car. She was right. My daughter had actually never swept the floor. 

She had never swept a floor simply because we didn’t have a broom for the inside of the house. There was the industrial broom for the garage. And one for the basement. But not a basic, straw broom for the inside of the house. The simple tool had long been replaced by a little electric broom ever-charging in the corner of the laundry room. Our house broom. This dedicated tool served its purpose very well. Nightly, as guided by one of us, the electric broom gulped up dust and dog hair and crumbs from the main floor of the Cape house our children lived in, where they grew up for 20 years. Still today, I hear the voice of Sister when I list the wish I did’s of my parenting years. A simple broom.

That once high school girl is now a momma herself and she celebrates her first Mother’s Day tomorrow. The time between that camp summer and this summer spans 15 years. A watershed time for sure, where nothing was ever the same year after year.  High school to college, to a first professional job and then another. Apartments in Boston, meeting her guy, more apartments, and travel and more travel to friends’ weddings. And then a wedding of their own and a first house. And a first baby son last July. She is a mother in an ever-changing, lightning speed time. Where things are so much easier and yet so much harder than when she was her own son’s age of 9 months.  

The other night after helping with my grandson’s first bitty pasta meal, acini di pepe, and then breakfast, lunch and dinner dishes, and loads of laundry and folding, we lightly debated. From our own experiences, is today or was back then easier as a parent raising a child, a family? A nearly impossible question because we weren’t in each other’s shoes at the same time, but we respected what the other was trying to say.

Daycare planning and the cost for her son vs. no daycare for her (I was a stay-at-home for 6 years). Formula today is on demand by the ounce dispensed from a Kerig-like machine. Bottles with plastic liners containing formula were slightly warmed in a measuring cup filled with hot water three decades ago. Today, groceries and house necessities are tapped for on an app and arrive on the doorstep an hour or two later. Back then groceries, house supplies and CVS items required optimal timing and a blueprinted travel plan in between naps and feedings and yard work and all.

Information was still in the form of a book and only just being introduced on vintage websites via a dial up internet connection in 1994.  Socially it was an isolating time for new parents, especially mothers who did not immediately return to the workforce. Today, mothers are able to connect more readily about baby news and information. There truly is an app for everything!  But apps have downsides. No doubt the 24/7 streaming of pictures, the loop of events and news on Instagram, is daunting to a mom who feels overwhelmed and left out while viewing airbrushed “perfect” existences.  

The similarities and differences of now vs. then reveal much about the times socially, psychologically and economically. Which time was harder? Which time presented the most challenges? And what, if anything, was a common denominator of both times?

So simply and often articulated by my own momma, Gracie said that being a mother is the hardest job in the world, Lee. Yes, of this most common denominator she was, and still is, right. She often reassured me, that the days will get easier as she watched me traverse the universe of tasks and expectations in raising a young daughter and son. She recognized that most, maybe all, of the thinking, planning, doing, initiating, completing, continuing, worrying and so many more ings fall squarely on the momma’s shoulders, in her heart, on her mind.

On Mother’s Day I will gift a simple corn stalk broom to my daughter. Not to remind her that a women’s work is never done, but to remind her to engage in a quiet, singular task each day. A flow task. Like sweeping. When the baby is sleeping, just drag that broom and swish, swish across the floor. And breathe. I will tell her it’s not even important to get into every corner or under the table.  Just breathe. Allow the time to be yours. No problem solving. No planning.  No thinking.  Just simple. Just be.  

To my daughter, Kendall Rose, on her first Mother’s Day, May, 2025.  The light and love from your heart to your son’s is a blessing to see every day!