Cindy and her husband Bruce Lingelbach run Pierce’s Inn in Etna, New Hampshire, where they do most of the housekeeping, maintenance, and cooking. Their children are 9, 11, and 13. Cindy also speaks on college campuses about healthy attitudes toward sex, and does one-woman shows in New England about parenting, sex, and keeping it all balanced. She is the co-author of Finding the Doorbell: Sexual Satisfaction for the Long Haul.
Cindy Pierce, speaks about accepting messiness, parental guilt, the value of family meetings, and the joys of being a “righteous imperfectionist”
Q: You’re juggling a lot.
A: I go from making beds to skiing with kids to jumping on a plane or scrubbing pots and cooking to reading with kids to stepping on stage. It can be tough when I can see a pot boiling over a few yards behind one of my kid’s crying and needing to process an emotional moment. Or I can feel the dirty toilets calling us when we are out throwing the football. It can get sloppy, but we are able to let a lot go to survive.
Q: What do you let go of?
A: One thing we loosened up on was our own housecleaning. As innkeepers who clean toilets, we weren’t too interested in scrubbing our own after doing ten at the Inn. So the kids have taken on that chore. Other overwhelmed guilty moms used to admire how I juggled it all so gracefully: “How do you do it? You own an inn, you are a mom of three, you speak, you wrote a book and you keep it all together.” Hah! I used to give a tour of our less than tidy family bathroom, our cluttered office/mudroom, and our bedroom (living out of laundry baskets). The Martha Stewart wanna-be’s would almost weep with gratitude. I could have charged Continue reading
