Somehow, my reaction was, you can tell the others by their hunted look
As in (Saki, bless) 'she was the kind of woman who lives for others'.
Why I did a good deed every day (and somehow, this reminds of the 'we had sex every day for a year/I spent a year being celibate/etc' trope: and lo and behold, this project has also resulted in a book).
As a working mother, I could barely keep the plates spinning as it was, how could I do anything else for anyone else?
When I announced my resolution to do a good dead [sic] every day for the whole year, my husband groaned - he thinks I complicate our lives. Most men think women complicate their lives, but this time he was probably right.
So do I, because not content with 'slott[ing] good deeds into my ordinary life where I could', she went out of her way to find good deeds she could do. In fact it's clear that she must have decided at some point that just doing one good deed a day was not enough, given the amount of things she describes as piling up on her.
With knock-on effects, not surprisingly, for her family. She doesn't actually make them give their Christmas dinner to the Hummels, but there are a number of things that seem to me to fall into the same class of thing. I am really not at all persuaded that this was a wonderful setting of an example to her offspring, at least, not in any positive sense.
Also, a certain lack of necessary consultation with other people affected:
When I made 128 jam sandwiches for a Jam Jar Army presentation at another school, only to be told by staff moments before I went into the hall, that jam sandwiches weren't a good idea, I had to bring them home and feed them to my children for two days running.
She does realise that
But genuinely good people don't make a fuss about what they do; they often don't talk about it. I had made a resolution and announced it to family and friends. When it got tough, I realised too late that I couldn't stop because of the example it would set the children - that if things got too difficult they could always give up. I was trapped. By the end of April I was so stressed.
Possibly she needs to consider her own needs a bit.
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