Pants-Free Parenting: Grocery delivery helps keep the balance

The No. 1 thing that has helped me as a parent this past year hasn't been the free advice offered to me by well-meaning people watching me break up shoving matches between my kids. The No. 1 most helpful thing is online grocery shopping.

That sentence should be self-explanatory and I should just end the column here with a period. But in the event that you don't understand what I mean, let me explain.

Our American model of family is rigid and unrealistic. The idea of a breadwinning man married to a dependent woman who raises the children is largely a myth. But it's a myth that won't die. Our tax policies, social institutions and even literature is all built around it. Recently, the Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage has gone a long way to changing the dominant narrative, but the myth still persists.

As a result, the idea of family is in flux and increasingly fragmented. Women reach toward new models of whom they are supposed to be while still trying to drag along the expectations of the past. I do this. I want my job. I want my identity in my work. But every Sunday, I clean the whole house, I take responsibility for all the meals, I coordinate schedules, make playdates, set up doctor's appointments, oversee activities, and, until recently, did all the grocery shopping. I take full responsibility for this.

When my husband and I got married, we wanted to be equals in all things. But at some point, with work and children, things broke down and we reverted to the norms we knew, not the things we aspired to. And we are tired. It's hard to be a revolutionary about your ideals and deconstruct myths of gender and family, when your 4-year-old still insists on sleeping in your bed every night and your 2-year-old is awake at 5 in the morning demanding 'Smoothies, mom! Smoothies, right now!”

We live far away from family and help is expensive. My husband also works hard and when he comes home he has chores and somewhere in between there wants to actually hang out with his children. But a few months ago, Hy-Vee launched its grocery delivery and changed our lives.

I am normally a bargain shopper. I prefer the cheap, rush of Aldi, to the more pricey convenience of Hy-Vee. But grocery shopping for my family of four can also take up to three hours every Sunday, three hours I could use to clean the spiderwebs out from under my hutch, read a book, or take a nap.

So, I signed up.

And it feels revolutionary. It feels decadent. It feels like freedom.

So many answers to problems with modern womanhood can be summed up as 'lean in.” Women should try harder. Stop apologizing. Step up. Do more. Be more. Be happier. Try harder to be content. I think those messages are the problem. There comes a time in every person's life when they need to not lean in but just lean out. Take a break. Let someone else step up. That it's OK to not do everything and to outsource. So, right now, I am outsourcing my grocery shopping. Every week a delivery comes to my door and I'm so happy, because each delivery represents three hours of my life I did not grocery shop. Hy-Vee is helping me lean out. And for that, I am so grateful.

l Lyz Lenz is a writer, mother of two and hater of pants. Email her at eclenz@gmail.com or find her writing at LyzLenz.com.