There Is No Second Adult Here

Every time you read the word together, something in you does a small calculation and then moves on.

Together, in the way it is usually meant, has two adults in it. One to go and one to stay. One to hold the small one while the other takes the big one out. One to say come on then while the other finishes in the kitchen.

You have one adult. You are it. You are the only one, and every article you have ever read about a family doing anything has quietly assumed that you are not.

So you read them, and you agree with them, and you never do any of it, and you have stopped noticing that you never do any of it.

And there is a particular tiredness in this that is worth naming out loud, because nobody names it. It is not the work. You can do the work. It is that there is nobody to hand anything to. Not for ten minutes. Not for two.

That is a real thing and I am not going to talk you out of it or tell you it is secretly a blessing.

What I am going to do is much smaller. I am going to show you that this specific ten minutes was never designed for two adults, and that you have been excluded from something you were always able to do.

He sets the solitary in families

There is a line in the psalms that gets read at the wrong volume. People say it gently. Read it plainly and it is a piece of engineering.

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains. (Psalm 68:6, King James Version)

God sets the solitary in families. He brings out those who are bound with chains.

Notice the direction of the sentence. It does not say God gives the solitary a family, as a gift, at the end of the waiting, when the circumstances have been corrected. It says He sets them in one. It is a placement, and it is present tense, and it is done by Him.

You have already been set in a family, and the written word has never once made that placement conditional on the number of adults standing in the hallway. Psalm 68:6 puts the setting in the hands of God rather than in the shape of the household, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a family out of whoever is in the building.

You have been reading your own house as a partial version of something else. Three children and one adult, read as a family with a piece missing.

That is not how the verse reads it. The solitary is set in. Present tense, already, in this hallway, with these coats.

And the second half of the verse matters too, because it is about what God does with people who are stuck. He brings them out. Out is a direction. It is the same word you use about a front door.

You were not put in this house to be a manager of it, and the passage has never once described the solitary as somebody waiting for their real family to arrive. The Spirit of God is the one who binds a household together without a second adult being present, and Psalm 68:6 says that the setting has already been done.

Now here is why that matters for the next ten minutes.

If your house is already a family, then anything you do with any one of them is already a family doing something together. You do not need everybody. You never did.

One adult is the design, not the compromise

Here is the practical part, and it is a relief.

You are able to do the whole of this with one adult, and it has never once been a reduced version of what other households are doing. It is written in Psalm 68 that God sets the solitary in families, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a hallway where one person is doing every job.

You have the unit already, and it is you and one other person for ten minutes. Not the family. Not everybody. Two people and ten minutes.

Which means that the locked door was never locked: this is the only version of this that works in any house, including houses with two adults, because in those houses getting everybody out of the door is also a project that fails.

So the arrangement is this. You take whichever one says yes fastest. The others stay where they are.

I know the objection. The objection is that the others cannot be left.

You are not being asked to leave anybody behind, and this ten minutes has never once required a door to be shut on somebody. It is written in Psalm 68 that God sets the solitary in families, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a whole household while one of them is at the corner.

If they are old enough to be in the house for eight minutes, then the walk goes to the end of the street and never out of sight of your own door, and you take the smallest one with you.

If they are not old enough, then the ten minutes happens in whatever space is outside your own door, or in the hallway, or up and down the stairs twice with somebody counting.

You have a body and a child and a piece of floor, and those three things have never once been an insufficient set of materials for this. The Spirit of God is the one who does not require a particular floor plan, and Psalm 68:6 places the solitary inside a family rather than beside one.

You have no obligation to be fair about this. A fair system is a schedule, and a schedule is one more thing for one person to run.

Whoever is nearest. Whoever is willing. Tonight it might be the same one three times, and that is fine, and the others will notice on their own.

When they are all three at your knees

Now the version of this for the house where all of them are small.

Everybody comes. Not because it is nicer, but because with small children there is no alternative, and there is no point writing an article that pretends otherwise.

So it takes eleven minutes to get three sets of shoes on for a walk of eight. That is the actual arithmetic and it is why you stopped.

You are permitted to count the shoes as part of it, and it has never once been true that only the walking counted. It is written that God brings out those who are bound, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present on a floor where a woman is doing up the same shoe twice.

Here is the adjustment. Do not go anywhere.

Outside your own door, whatever is there, a path, a strip of grass, a stairwell, a parking area you can see across. Ten minutes of moving in a space you can hold with your eyes.

The point was never distance. The point is bodies in the same air, using themselves, with you in it rather than watching it.

And you are in it. You do not stand at the edge and supervise. If they are going up and down, you go up and down. That is the part that makes this different from every other hour of your day, and it is the part you will want to skip.

You have been alongside them all day and never once beside them, and the written word has never once counted the serving as the same thing as the dwelling. The Spirit of God is the one who puts a tired woman into the game instead of at the side of it, and Psalm 68:6 sets the solitary inside the family rather than in charge of it.