Getting my life back

[This is a Part II to the post Putting Our Lives on Hold.]

This weekend will mark my fourth Mother's Day as a mom. It's stunning to think of how much things have changed since that first Mother's Day not that long ago. Three years and two more babies later, I see now that it was the crucible of motherhood that shattered the fragile life philosophy that I learned from the secular world, made me fearlessly seek truth and, ultimately, taught me the true meaning of life. Here are my reflections.


Back when my first child was born, I had a certain amount of angst about being the mother of a baby. It was odd. I loved my son dearly and saw the great importance of shaping another person's life...and yet, there was always this voice in the back of my mind that murmured, "What about my life?" Despite my tremendous love for my child, there was a part of me that felt like I'd hit the pause button on my life the day he was born. The full-time care that babies and toddlers require was so wearying, and I frequently commented to my husband that I couldn't wait until our youngest child went off to elementary school so that I could finally "get my life back!" I felt like there was always a carrot stick hanging in front of my nose, distracting me, promising the glory days to come when I would no longer have little ones around and I could finally get back to really living.

In my mind, the phase of life with babies and toddlers underfoot was drastically different than other phases of life. As I mentioned in my first post on the subject, I assumed that the only way to find fulfillment and meaning in life was to be self-focused. This was the default, the only way to live life to the fullest. Being the mother of little ones was a rare situation in which you were thrust into being temporarily other-focused, and was therefore something to just grit your teeth and endure until it was over and you could get back to the default.

After my second child was born in the midst of painful medical complications, life with little ones got even harder. You'd think that I would have found myself more desperate than ever to move on from this grueling time in my life, and yet, that didn't happen. This was around the time I had started to take a serious look at Christianity, and in the process of reading up on God and what he's revealed to us through his Word and his Church, I started to notice something interesting:

My life as a mother started to make a lot more sense when seen through the teachings of Christianity.

I've said many times before that reading the Christian explanation of why we are here, what we are to do and how we are to live was like reading an articulation of words that had been written on my heart all long -- and this was especially true when it came to motherhood. I increasingly found that my secular, godless worldview offered me no lexicon for describing what was so beautiful about motherhood, and why it was worth it; yet Christianity described it perfectly. I started to find some very interesting answers to that nagging question, "What about my life?"

Christianity was telling me that all those things I yearned for that fueled my self-focused pursuits -- happiness, excitement, security, youthfulness, joy, importance -- were actually yearnings for God, and that I'd never find peace until I sought him. At first that claim sounded crazy, even after I thought it was possible that God might exist. But when I took a hard look at my worldly pre-motherhood life and recalled the travel, the parties, the socializing, the trendy size 8 clothes -- all those things that were supposedly my "real life" that I was so anxious to get back to -- I started to realize something: none of those pursuits ever brought me lasting happiness. In my self-focused life without God there was certainly happiness and joy, yet it was fragile. There was always a feeling of restlessness, a never-ending search for the next big thing. I felt like I couldn't stay still too long, or the happiness might go away.

"OK, I'll bite," I thought after contemplating this for a while. "If I've somehow been groping around for God this whole time and won't be able to truly rest until I find him, how do I go about doing that?"

It was when I got the answer to that question that my entire life -- in particular my life as a mother -- finally made sense.

I discovered that the path to God is the path of agape, of self-giving love. When John wrote in Chapter 4 of his first Epistle, "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love," he wasn't talking about just any kind of love. I "loved" traveling and sleeping in on weekends and pretty much anything that involved me doing things for me without having to make sacrifices. But that's not the kind of love John was talking about. The kind of love that leads to God, that God is, is agape: self-emptying, other-focused, inconvenient, sometimes-painful love.

When I started to seek God by seeking agape, everything changed. For one thing, the carrot stick disappeared; that siren song of the self-focused glory days to come when I no longer had children in diapers was silenced, the tension gone. My life as a mom of little ones was no longer in such sharp contrast to my future life without young children: either way, I'd be serving others. I found that this was the meaning of life, the secret to lasting happiness, the hidden key that unlocked the mysteries of the spiritual realm that I'd spent my whole life trying to find.

And, ironically, after I came to embrace the idea of a life dedicated to agape, I actually ended up with more time for myself. Because in my secular mindset the other-focusedness of the childbearing years was a temporary situation that you would extricate yourself from as soon as possible, my mentality was to just hold my nose and plow through it. I would have thought that to further embrace selflessness would lead to mental and physical collapse! But what I realized, through Christianity, was that a life of agape is not a life of running yourself ragged. To truly serve God and others to the best of your ability is to humbly accept that you are only human, and that there are limits to what you can do. Using the Rules of Life of religious orders as examples (I once posted the daily schedule of the Missionaries of Charity here), I began to see that it was simply not optional that I regularly find time for rest and prayer. I saw that the other-focused life doesn't mean that you can never take a time for recreation and relaxation -- quite the opposite, in fact. It means that you must regularly take time for recreation and relaxation, but that you put these activities in their proper place, realizing that they're not the meaning of life.

After doing it backwards for so many years, it fit like a glove to live a life that was other-focused for the long term and self-focused in the short term.


As this fourth Mother's Day rolls around and I look at my life with three children in diapers, I find that it's a perfect encapsulation of the mystery of human existence, a testament to that most counterintuitive, most important of all truths: that it is only by going through the discomfort of becoming other-focused that we will find what we're really looking for. To paraphrase the Evangelist John, it is only by knowing agape that we will know God.

I've mentioned before that I'm particularly ill-suited for this job: I'm easily irritated, disorganized, sensitive to noise, introverted, and come from a background of being a spoiled only child where I never had to lift a finger around the house. My daily life is not usually what you would call "pleasurable," at least not in the same way as my pre-kid days. I would almost certainly have reported more days as being overall "fun" or "easy" back when I had a cool career than now. From a secular, self-focused worldview, my life should be worse now than it was before. But it's not. I wouldn't say that "my life is better now," as much as I would say that "my life has started now."

Through Christianity, I understand that that the tension I used to feel about my life as a mother was the tension of resisting God, of fearing that if I emptied myself of ego and selfishness that there'd be nothing there to fill me back up. I finally understand that the life of a mom of little ones is in such sharp contrast to the typical life in our godless, secular culture because it is inherently a life of self-giving love, of being close to God.

The lessons I've learned are objective truths about the human experience, applicable to everyone in every state of life, whether or not they have children. Yet, for me, it took motherhood to teach me these lessons. I am so hard-headed and was so entrenched in my old ways that it took the tidal wave of agape that could only come with a house full of babies to break down layer upon layer of selfishness encrusted with fear, and free me to seek the truth.

Through the beauty of motherhood, I think I now understand what it's all about. And I finally got my life back.

AREWP Week 12: Refocusing

[AREWP stands for "A Reckless Experiment With Prayer." This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]


I'll just come out and say it: last week was a disaster.

Between a teething seven-month-old, a teething 20-month-old, and disastrous setbacks with potty trainwreck training my three-year-old, it was a really rough week. I had not only fallen behind on laundry and other housework, but the stack of unopened mail on my desk seemed to be somehow breeding and growing larger by the hour, and every time I tried to catch up on email I just felt like crying and legally changing my name to Sisyphus. My husband was helping as much as he could, but it didn't seem to even make a dent in all that had to be done. I was so overwhelmed that I kept forgetting to observe my prayer times. I felt like I was drowning.

One of the emotions I felt most strongly throughout the flameout of last week was simply surprise. "How has this happened?" I kept wondering. Things had been going to amazingly well ever since I started praying the Liturgy of the Hours. I'd had other tough weeks since then where I didn't fall off track with prayer and maintained a sense of peace even throughout tough days. I kept wondering what had changed, what it was that derailed not only my prayer life but the wonderful sense of peace I'd found in daily life. After about the third or fourth time I forgot to pray one of the major hours because I was distracted by something else, I finally realized:

My mentality had totally, fundamentally changed.

For the first couple of months that I structured my days around the Liturgy of the Hours I never forgot to pray, because that was the purpose, the very center of my days. To give you some specific examples, here is a glimpse into my mentality throughout the past few months when thinking about what I needed to do the next day. Let's use examples from Thursday evenings, when, say, vacuuming the living room and mopping the kitchen floor were on my to-do list for the next day:

WEEK 1: "Tomorrow my goal is to serve God first and foremost. I will observe the universal prayer times of the Liturgy of the Hours -- even when it's not convenient for me or what I want to do -- and thus anchor my days with prayer. No matter what else happens, these prayers will get said. Hopefully the structure of having my days guided by set times of turning to God will help me accomplish the other things I'd like to get done, like vacuuming the living room and mopping the kitchen floor."

WEEK 8: "Tomorrow my goal is to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, but I really need to make sure I vacuum the living room and mop the kitchen floor too."

WEEK 10: "Tomorrow my goal is to vacuum the living room and mop the kitchen floor. Oh, yeah, and I need to remember to pray too."

WEEK 11: "Tomorrow my goal is to vacuum the living room and mop the kitchen floor."

I was so amazed at the practical benefits of having my days revolve around prayer that I slipped into the mentality of seeing those practical things as the end I was trying to achieve -- and it all fell apart.

The reason my house was so much more clean and orderly after I started praying the Liturgy of the Hours was not because I'd found a great organizational routine. It was because the way I approached daily life had fundamentally changed. Praying Lauds, Matins and Vespers at their scheduled times was a great exercise in obedience to God: it was never convenient to stop what I was doing and get out the prayer book. It always involved setting aside something else I felt like I should be doing. But in making these little sacrifices I was reminded, three times a day, that life is not about what I feel like doing, that I need to let go of what I want to get done and foster only a calm trust in God.

The grace and peace that entered my life after I started living this way set off a domino effect where everything else fell into place. The order that these prayer times brought to my days meant that housework fell into a gentle rhythm, and it was easy to fall into a routine without even having to think much about it. As I mentioned here, since my working hours were cut down to make more time for prayer, I had more energy to pick up the pace in the times that I did work. To my great delight, the result was a cleaner, more orderly house.

But then the temptation arose to take a shortcut: I loved having my household running so smoothly, so I began to elbow God aside and focus on that alone. As I showed in the example above, the thought process of "Tomorrow I will pray; and vacuum and sweep if it's God's will" drifted into "tomorrow I will vacuum and sweep; and pray if it's Jen's will."

This weekend I was reminded of a quote from Pope Benedict that I excerpted in greater detail in my first post about scheduling my days around prayer:

When God is regarded as a secondary matter that can be set aside temporarily or permanently on account of more important things, it is precisely these supposedly more important things that come to nothing.

[Excuse me for a moment while I go tattoo that on my forehead...OK, I'm back.]

At the end of last week I felt like everything was in shambles. I felt like there was no way I could ever catch up on all that I had to do and regain a sense of peace in my daily life. With a laser-like focus on all those important practical matters I needed to take care of, I sat on the couch with my head in my hands, feeling crushed under the weight of it all. I looked at all the notes scribbled on my to-do list, on the disaster area that was my living room, and thought, "I can't do this." And in that moment I realized: it's true. I can't. I can't do it all. I need to let go.

And when I did just that, when I set aside my to-do list and stopped asking myself "How can I get X, Y and Z tasks done tomorrow?" and started asking myself only, "How can I pray tomorrow?" I felt a weight lift from my shoulders, and knew that I was back on the path to peace.

Motherhood, work and socializing

In my post from earlier this week, I compared the internet to a tribal village water well: a gathering place where women can have quick, casual conversations in the course of their daily lives. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot as I read through all the fascinating comments is the ways in which the internet is not perfect replacement for a real village well. I think one of the biggest things missing, as a many commenters have pointed out, is that our children are not involved in our online interactions. If we had a real well to go visit, our children would be running around and playing as we chatted -- filling our need for casual interaction with other adults would be something we did with our kids.

Yet the modern alternative, going to playgroups or other get-togethers involving moms and children, is missing something as well: it doesn't involve any aspect of our daily household duties. Again, if we had a real well to gather around, we wouldn't just be there for the chatting: we'd be accomplishing a vital household task (gathering water) in addition to meeting those needs #2-4 that I talked about in that last post. From what I remember from those anthropology classes, the daily gathering places that women have always had were places where they also washed clothes, collected water, prepared food, etc. (I recall a commenter offering a lovely glimpse into this sort of life in the first comment to this post over at Mothers of Many Saints.)

Personally, as my family has grown, I've found it harder and harder to put all daily work on hold to pack everyone up and go socialize. Though it's well worth the effort to occasionally go to good friends' houses for meaningful conversations and quality visits, it's increasingly difficult to make it to playgroups or other sources of casual get-togethers. It takes a large amount of time and effort to get everyone packed in the car and out of the house, and doing that too often leaves me exhausted and puts me behind on all that I have to do to just keep the house at a "probably not going to be condemned by the health department" level. The beauty of having a real community water well area would be that life would be decompartmentalized: I'd have an opportunity to chat with other adults, my children would be part of these interactions, and it would all be part of my daily work. "Time with my children" and "work time" and "socializing time" would all blend together as one (to borrow from Steve G.'s term) community liturgy.

So here's what I've been pondering this week: is there any way to recreate this in modern life?

I would love to draw on the brainpower of my brilliant commenters and see if you have any ideas here: can you think of any solutions, either short-term or long-term, that would help us combine our daily work with gathering with others?

To give you some examples, my husband and I were thinking that some short-term solutions could be to, say, meet other moms at a laundromat once a week and do our laundry together, or perhaps start a garden with another family, or join a mothers prayer group. A long-term solution could be to have opportunities for socializing heavily influence our housing choices, i.e. either living in an urban, walkable area or intentionally living on the same street as friends or family members. We even threw out the crazy idea of getting together with other families and buying a bunch of land outside the city limits and all building houses there. (Some of those are more feasible than others, and I'm not saying that any one of these would definitely work or is a perfect solution -- just some quick examples from our brainstorming session.)

So...I turn the question over to all of you: What do you think about this? Can you think of some ways we could combine our daily work with community interaction? Have you found something that's worked for you?

Mommyblogging and the water well

As I mentioned back in February, closing comments for Lent gave me a lot of insight into the role that the internet plays in my life. I didn't want to get into too many details in that post since I knew it would lend itself to discussion, so here is the promised Part II.


Back in college I spent a couple of semesters as an anthropology major. I found the study of different peoples and cultures fascinating, and drank up all the material in the courses. One thing that always jumped out to me was that in almost every group of people we studied across time and place, one thing they all had in common were clear, cohesive communities: whether we were studying the ancient peoples of the Fertile Crescent or villages of medieval Europe or modern-day tribes in the jungles of South America or even early 20th century American neighborhoods, one thing almost all these peoples had in common was that they lived around people they knew -- the same people, including all their family members -- for their whole lives.

I think often about how different modern American life is, particularly for those of us outside of the workforce. Many of us experience the historically new phenomenon of living around strangers: we don't know many of our neighbors, don't run into people we know at the grocery store or the post office, don't live close to immediate (or even extended) family members, etc. If we feel part of any kind of close community at all (e.g. a church group), it is often not people who live close to us, whom we run into casually. As I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, other than planned, scheduled meetups, I could probably go a couple of weeks (or maybe months) without running into anyone I know in the course of daily life.

I've talked a lot about this phenomenon with friends who are immigrants from places where cohesive communities still exist (e.g. rural France, Mexico, India) and have come up with a lot of thoughts on the subject. And, hey, why have a blog if you can't write up this sort of stuff and tell the internet about it? So, for your reading pleasure, here is my little theory about social interaction and modern life, based on extensive studies and research (read: I thought about it while washing dishes):


I feel like I need four different types of social interaction (broadly defined) on a regular basis. In order of importance, they are:

1. Quality interaction with others -- forming new friendships and strengthening existing relationships with friends and family members
   
   
2. Casual interactions with people I know where my expected participation level is flexible
   
   
3. An awareness of the events and concerns of my community as a whole
   
   
4. Simply running into people I know in the course of daily activity, even if we don't have much direct interaction
   

I feel like regularly having opportunities for each of these types of social activity is ideal for my psychological wellbeing; and, looking at human history, it would seem that we're designed to have these things as natural parts of our lives. Yet here in my part of suburbia, I only have #1 (and even that is with great effort). So what am I to do about #2-4?

I remember back in those anthropology classes, I noticed that a common community setup was that there would be a central area where people, especially women, would gather as part of their daily work, e.g. a tribe might have one community fire pit for cooking, or there would be one spot on the river where the women would all gather to do the washing. In particular, one visual that stuck with me was that of the village water well: in some long-forgotten textbook I read the description of a tribal village that had one central well where the women would go to get the family's water. There was some sort of central oven nearby, and this area, of course, became a bustling hub of social activity.

By virtue of having the community water well area, women didn't have to separate their lives into "work time" and "socializing time" in order to get needs #2-4 met. Socializing would be interwoven into their daily tasks, rather than something that had to be sought as an entirely separate endeavor. I've often imagined how helpful this must have been: when you arrived at the well, you could listen to the conversations and jump in if you were feeling talkative, or hang back and mostly listen if you were feeling tired or reserved. Unlike the carefully-orchestrated playdates of today, casual interaction could be just that: casual. You had an opportunity for social interaction, to hear what others in your community were talking about, without an obligation to be "on" if you weren't feeling up to it. Ever since I read about that village well I've often wished that we had something similar today, a community gathering place that would meet our desire for casual interactions, to fill needs #2-4 in my list above.

This, I believe, is where the internet can be a great thing.

In the past few years since the explosion of blogs, I've come to feel like my laptop is my village well. In between loading the dishwasher and vacuuming the living room, I can stop by the well and see what folks are buzzing about. Simcha's children are seeing if they can sustain life on Easter candy alone, Ann is finding beauty and deep symbolism in an ordinary task, BooMama is having technical problems like mine, Abigail shares a lesson she learned about parenting, Danielle Bean reflects on being a mom and an introvert, Veronica Mitchell is undoubtedly vowing to never mention Esperanto again (ever), and Maggie's son still won't take naps.

In a five-minute scan of some of the blogs I read, I can get a quick pulse for what's going on with women who have similar values and lives to mine. It's wonderfully unpredictable: sometimes I might be challenged intellectually, other times I might be moved to tears, and other times I might laugh out loud. I see the familiar names in the comments at other blogs, often people whose blogs I follow as well. I can join in the conversation by leaving a comment, or just sit back and listen. In addition to following others' stories, I can start a conversation of my own by writing a post for my own blog and inviting comments, or I could just check email to see what friends and family have to say today.

This is, ultimately, what I was getting at in my last post on the subject: for a lot of us, I think the internet is the closest thing we have to the community water well. It's not necessarily a good place to try to form deep friendships, but it is a place where we can quickly, casually throw out the question "You ever have days like this?" in the midst of our daily work; a place where we can just listen to what's going on with other people we "know" when we're feeling too tired to make conversation ourselves; a way we can feel like we have a pulse on what's going on in a larger community throughout each day.

To be sure, I don't think it's a replacement for real-life friendships, and I don't think that virtual communication can or should ever replace fostering quality friendships with people whom you see in person. It's not even a perfect replacement for a thriving community center. But, when you have three kids in diapers and you're the only person on your suburban street who's home during the day and you never see anyone you know at the grocery store, there are some days when it's all you've got in terms of opportunities for casual chitchat with other adults. And on those days you feel really, really blessed to have your own little water well sitting on your kitchen counter.


So those are my little musings on the subject...what do you think?


UPDATE: A part II to this post is here.

Daylight Savings Time

Since it is Lent, I will not indulge in musings about what kind of twisted mind would come up with a plan to make tired parents lose an hour of sleep once a year. I will guard against letting profanity slip when having mind-bending household schedule adjustment conversations with my husband. I will forgo my semi-annual custom of spending two weeks saying something bad about Daylight Savings Time every time I look at a clock. Alas, I will not even write a 2,000-word rant on the subject for my blog, no matter how satisfying that would be. I will simply direct you to my post from the last time we changed the clocks, which was not during Lent.

Cat vomit, temper tantrums, and dying to self

What does it mean to "die to self"? I used to ask that question a lot when I was first exploring Christianity. I had no idea what that odd phrase was supposed to mean. Frankly, it sounded kind of morbid and depressing. So I set aside the question and decided to revisit it once I had more pressing questions answered.

These days, as I come to feel like I finally have a grasp on the basics of Christian teaching and try to grow in my newfound faith, this whole "die to self" concept keeps coming up again. And I think I finally understand what it means.

It really, really clicked for me earlier this week. I had a "perfect storm" moment where it was as if every frustrating thing that could possibly occur in a day all happened within about a 30 second time period. I'd only had four hours of sleep the night before. I'd been working hard to accomplish just one little thing that morning -- cleaning off our bathroom counter -- and while I was doing so the 18-month old cleared off my nightstand and threw my books everywhere (losing my bookmarks in the process); the three-year-old launched into a major temper tantrum and broke something in the process; his tantrum woke up the peacefully sleeping baby and she started fussing; and when I walked over to go get the baby I saw an outdoor cat who hangs around our house (who is not supposed to be inside) sitting next to my bed. As I paused for a moment, the counter only half cleaned, trying to figure out which fire to put out first...the cat threw up on the floor in front of me. Then the phone rang. I saw on caller ID that it was my husband. He was going to ask how my day was going.

In that moment, I understood what it meant to die to self.

To "die" to myself would be to not let love be smothered by my selfish, sinful tendencies that had been stirred up by the challenge of this situation; to make the painful decision to let go of my heated feelings of frustration and anger and let God work through me in all my actions; to let go of the way I felt like handling the situation to instead act in a purposeful but calm and loving manner, never losing sight of the needs of the other people in this situation. It was clear that I had two choices:


1. What I knew to be the right thing to do:

• First of all, pray. Ask God to be with me in this moment.
• Then go get the baby, temporarily sequester the 18-month-old in the playpen so that she'd stop destroying my nightstand and wouldn't get into the cat's mess, and firmly but lovingly explain to my three-year-old what he did wrong as I put him in time-out.
• "Offer up" the yuckiness of cleaning up cat throw-up. Consciously choose not to dwell on the inconvenience of it.
• Answer the phone when my husband calls with gratitude for having the kind of loving spouse who calls regularly to see how I'm doing. Tell him what he may be able to do to help me get through this challenging day in a constructive way, without "dumping" on him.
• Most of all, just think of it as attending the "University of the Moment" and remember that all I need to do is turn to God in complete trust, and that what is meant to get done will get done -- nothing more, nothing less.
  

2. What I felt like doing:

• First of all, spend a few solid moments dwelling on how awful the situation is. Point fingers, trying to figure out who let the cat in.
• Yell in the general direction of the three-year-old and 18-month old as I grudgingly pick up the baby. Instead of loving guidance, just keep raising my voice until they stop misbehaving.
  
• Let out a bunch of loud sighs as I clean up the cat vomit. Dwell on it to the point that I start to feel sick myself, and then feel sorry for myself because I feel sick. Get exasperated when the two toddlers get too close and try to touch it, as if there's no way I could have seen that coming.
• When my husband calls, try to see just how much frustration I can pack into the one word "Hello?!" when I answer the phone, and when he asks how my day is going, respond with something utterly unhelpful but satisfyingly self-indulgent like, "My day is terrible! TERRIBLE!" Then proceed to rattle off a long list of every annoying thing that has happened in recent memory, culminating with a grand proclamation about the tragedy of my inability to complete a simple task like cleaning the bathroom counter.
• Sulk.

I went with an only slightly improved version of choice #2. But why? That's the interesting part: it wasn't because I felt like it would be mentally healthy to "let it all out" by releasing my negative emotions in other people's directions. It wasn't because I felt like choice #2 was the better option. It wasn't even that I felt like I couldn't have chosen option #1 -- even in the heat of the moment I knew that God would give me the grace to take the high road. So why go with the lesser option, then?

Because I didn't want the pain.

The option of choice #1, I realized, would have meant "dying to self" -- and I didn't want to experience pain of the mini-crucifixion that that would have involved. Like an addict craves the empty high that drugs can give, I craved the empty high that self-pity and anger can give. I knew it wasn't good for me. I knew it wasn't good for anyone in that situation. But I didn't want the pain of nailing the self-pitying and angry sides of my personality to the Cross, the pain of humbling myself to let go of my plans and trust in God's plans instead.

And the result? If you had some kind of meter that showed a real-time readout of the total amount of love in the world at any given moment, you would have seen a little dip that afternoon. In choosing to seek the path that involved the least immediate pain for me, in choosing to let sin control the situation, I slammed the door to allowing God to work through me. I took a little bit of love out of the world -- and a whole lot of love out of our household.

I don't know what I used to imagine "dying to self" would feel like, but I didn't anticipate that there would be real pain involved. (I can just picture lifelong Christians smiling knowingly at that one.) The more I live as a Christian, the more I am struck by how difficult it is. To borrow a phrase from fellow former atheist John C. Wright, I find that Christianity is a very inconvenient religion. To die to yourself as we're called to do -- to live in the moment with calm trust, to let go of your own ego and selfishness, to reject the empty high of sin -- is hard, hard work.

And yet, despite the difficulty and the pain, it's the only thing worth doing at all. Because it is only through the painful process of dying to self that we can let God -- who is Love itself -- work through us; we can have the pure, selfless, agape love of Christ will flow through our every action. Though it's much harder than I thought it would be, the payoff is much greater than I could have ever imagined. I hope that I can remember that the next time I am tempted to run away from the pain of dying to self.

Comments closed for Lent

The domestic monastery

A kind reader just sent me this article, saying that it might have some food for thought for my ongoing quest to bring peace to my daily life. It was so good I had to share it. An excerpt:

What is a monastery? A monastery is not so much a place set apart for monks and nuns as it is a place set apart (period). It is also a place to learn the value of powerlessness and a place to learn that time is not ours, but God's...Certain vocations offer the same kind of opportunity for contemplation. They too provide a desert for reflection.

For example, the mother who stays home with small children experiences a very real withdrawal from the world. Her existence is definitely monastic. Her tasks and preoccupations remove her from the centres of power and social importance. And she feels it. Moreover her sustained contact with young children (the mildest of the mild) gives her a privileged opportunity to be in harmony with the mild, that is, to attune herself to the powerlessness rather than to the powerful.

Read the whole thing.

Comments closed for Lent | Cross-posted to my links blog

A day in the life of a "mommyblogger"

Closing comments and turning off visitor stats on my blog has had a surprisingly significant impact on my daily life. Writing into a vacuum, hearing the proverbial crickets chirping after I publish each post, has crystallized a lot of things I've noticed about blogging, modern motherhood, and "mommyblogging" (a term I'm using loosely to encapsulate the phenomenon of so many moms reading and writing blogs).

I have a lot of thoughts to share on the matter, but since they lend themselves to discussion I'll save most of them until after I've re-opened comments at Easter. In the meantime, here's some food for thought: below is a description of an average day for me from before I turned off blog comments. I will note that parts in which I have social interaction with other adults in blue (those of you on feed readers may need to click through to see the color). See if anything jumps out at you:

A Day in the Life of a Mommyblogger

MORNING
I wake up early, get dressed, and go downstairs for some quiet time before the kids get up. I smile to see an email from a good friend with new pictures of her family, and reply to ask how the new baby is doing. I reply to a few more emails from friends, family and blog readers.

I then check in on my favorite blogs to see what other people I "know" (from following their blogs) are up to this week: one mom tells us that she's struggling to incorporate prayer into her busy life, another writes of feeling glad for having such a great husband, and another writes of her tendency to feel like she's not as good of a mother as everyone else is -- what a relief to hear other who feel the same way I do! I eagerly leave sympathetic comments. One of these posts makes me think of something interesting that I'd like to share, so I write up my thoughts and post them on my blog.

The kids are now awake, so I go upstairs and get them ready for the day. It takes almost two hours to dress them, feed them and then clean up the kitchen. We say morning prayers and start our day. My husband calls to say hi. I eagerly start telling him about something that's on my mind, but the baby starts crying so I have to abruptly end the call. Today is grocery store day, so I start making the store list. I'm interrupted multiple times by needing to help one of the kids with something, but I eventually get the list completed and am finally ready to go to the store.

I give the kids a five-minute warning that it's time to stop playing and get ready to go, and take the opportunity to glance at my computer. I see that I have two new comments to that post I wrote. How interesting! One person says he can really relate to what I talked about; another writes to say she disagreed with parts of it. I leave a reply to the woman who disagreed. That little burst of intellectual stimulation gives me renewed energy as I go back to get everyone ready for the store trip.

AFTERNOON
I go through the 40-minute process of changing diapers, filling sippy cups, putting on socks, shoes and jackets and getting everyone strapped into their car seats, and we head off to the store. I have been going to this store the same day of the week at the same time of day for two years, and I never run in to anyone I know. I am surrounded by strangers. I make polite chit-chat with the checker about the weather.

On cue, all three kids are fussing by the time we get back with the groceries. A friend calls but we can only talk for a moment because I can't hear her over the noise in the background. We agree to try to get together sometime and abruptly end our conversation. I scramble to feed the baby and make lunch for the toddlers since they're all overtired and hungry. A couple of difficult situations arise and I feel so frustrated I could scream. I wonder if I'm overreacting, if other moms have days like this, if my kids' behavior is normal. I am dying to tell someone about the way I feel, and maybe get some encouragement or reassurance.

Things eventually settle down and I clean up the kitchen, do afternoon prayers, read children's books, and put the toddlers in bed for their naps. The baby and I head downstairs for some much-needed relaxation time.

I go to my desk and pay a few bills while the baby bounces on my lap. I check blog comments to see that that woman who disagreed with my post has left a new comment to our discussion, and it's really interesting! Articulating my reply in defense of my position is a refreshing mental exercise. There are also two new comments that offer perspectives that I'd never considered before. I am not familiar with the name of one of these new commenters, so I click through the link to her blog. As it turns out, she's a mom of five children, and she just wrote a post about potty training. I'm so relived to find this, because I have a specific question I've been dying to ask someone who knows about this stuff! So I leave a comment on her site with my question.

Then I go to see what's going on with some of the other bloggers whose sites I regularly follow. One of my favorite bloggers writes of how she's having a tough day and wonders if other moms have days like this. I am so relieved to read her post, I could cry! I leave a long, enthusiastic comment in response, and see that twenty other women have done the same. Some of the other commenters and I begin addressing one another's points, and a lively conversation gets started. I click through the links to some of their sites and spend some time reading their musings about life -- I can relate to so much of it. Meanwhile, the mom of five whom I asked about potty training has replied, and her answer is just what I needed to hear!

After spending a bit more time reading through my list of favorite blogs, I feel like I have a pulse on what my "community" is buzzing about today. I feel connected to the world.

EVENING
After reading the interesting comments to my post and interacting with other likeminded people through their blogs, I feel reinvigorated to tackle the rest of the day. I get the kids up from nap and, once again, go through the 40-minute process of getting them ready to go somewhere in the car (actually, an unexpected poopy diaper makes it 45 minutes). We head out to my mother's house to drop off some paperwork. To get there we drive two miles, all through neighborhood streets, and I see only one other human being. It's as if there's been a bomb scare. The one person out is a mom pushing a stroller alone. She must live near me, but I've never seen her before. I feel like stopping the car and rolling down the window to say, "Hey, I have a baby too! You should come over for tea sometime!" But that would be weird. So I offer a little wave instead. She doesn't wave back.

When we get back to the house I take the kids to check the mail at the central mailbox station on our street. Now that it's into early evening, a few people on my street are actually home. The lady who lives three doors down whom I've never met is there getting her mail. We exchange polite hello's. She never makes eye contact and quickly turns to go back inside her house.

Back at home we do a brief evening prayer and the kids play as I start dinner. I am so relieved to see my husband when he walks through the door! We chat a bit, but it's hard to have a conversation with all the chaos of tired and hungry children. He plays with the kids while I finish cooking. We sit down for a nice family dinner. I finally get to talk to my husband, although we have to monitor what we say since little ears are listening.

After dinner the circus of bath and bedtime begins, and we rush around to clean the kitchen, give all three kids baths, put on their jammies, read books, and get everyone in bed. It takes about an hour and a half. At the end of that time we finally have a little while for adult conversation. We barely get into our conversation before we both agree that we're so tired we should just go to bed. I prep bottles and sippy cups and coffee for the next day, and get ready to do it all again!

Sorry for the long story, but I share that level of detail to illustrate a point: notice what percentage of social interaction I have in a day comes from the internet. I have plenty of friends, but to get all the kids ready to leave the house (while working around the all-important nap schedule) makes going anywhere in the car only slightly less difficult than a moon landing. Hardly anyone in my neighborhood is home during the day, and the transient nature of suburbia means that the people I do see are strangers. I am almost completely isolated.

I share this not to complain, but because I find it interesting. Closing comments for Lent has brought into relief the non-trivial role that writing and reading blogs plays in my life. I would dare to say that it goes beyond a form of mindless entertainment and into the area of a real psychological need.

...But I will save the details of those thoughts until after Lent, when I can open comments again and hear what you guys have to say. Stay tuned for Part II.


UPDATE: Click here for Part II

Comments closed for Lent

How I became pro-life

I've been wanting to put this together ever since I read Abigail's touching post with the same title. I've been dabbling at this post for a few months, and finally feel ready to share it. I apologize that it is so long, I just couldn't figure out how to condense it without leaving out important details. I hope that you will find that it's worth your time to read the whole thing.


Who is human?

Back in college I remember reading about how in certain societies throughout history, I believe in this case it was the Greeks, it was common for parents to abandon unwanted newborns, leaving them somewhere to die. It was so deeply troubling to me, and I could never figure out what was going on there: how on earth could this have happened?! I mean, I knew lots of people, and nobody I knew would do that! In fact, in our society you only hear about it in rare cases of people who are obviously mentally disturbed. How could something so obviously evil, so unthinkably horrific be common among entire societies?

Because of my deep distress at hearing of things like this, I found it really irritating when pro-lifers would refer to abortion as "killing babies." Obviously, nobody around here is in favor of killing babies -- and to imply that those of us who were pro-choice would advocate for that was an insult to the babies throughout history who actually were killed by their insane societies. We weren't in favor of killing anything. We simply felt like women had the right to stop the growth process of a fetus if she faced an unwanted pregnancy. It was unfortunate, yes, because fetuses had potential to be babies one day. But that was a sacrifice that had to be made in the name of not making women slaves to the trauma of unwanted pregnancies.

I continued to be vehemently pro-choice after college, and though my views became more moderate once I had a child of my own, I was still pro-choice. But as my husband and I were in the process of exploring Christianity, we couldn't help but be exposed to pro-life thought more often than we used to be, and we were put on the defensive about our views. I remember one day when my husband was in the middle of reconsidering his own pro-choice ideas, he made a passing remark that stuck with me ever since:

"It just occurred to me that being pro-life is being pro-other people's-life," he quipped. "Everyone is pro-their own-life."

It made me realize that my pro-choice viewpoints were putting me in the position of deciding who was and was not human, and whose lives were worth living. I (along with doctors, the government, or other abortion advocates) decided where to draw this very important line. When I would come across Catholic blogs or books where they said something like "life begins at conception," I would scoff at the silliness of that notion as was my habit...yet I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with my defense:

"A few cells is obviously not a baby or even a human life!" I would say to myself. "Fetuses eventually become full-fledged humans, but not until, umm, like six months gestation or something. Or maybe five months? When is it that they can kick their legs and stuff?...Eight weeks? No, they're not human then, those must be involuntary spasms..."

I was putting the burden of proof on the fetuses to demonstrate to me that they were human. And I was a tough judge. I found myself looking the other way when I heard that 3D ultrasounds showed "fetuses" touching their faces, smiling and opening their eyes at ages at which I still considered abortion OK. I didn't have any interest in reading the headlines at Lifesite. Babies -- I mean, fetuses -- seen yawning at 12 weeks gestation? Involuntary spasm. As modern technology helped fetuses offer me more and more evidence that they were humans too, I would simply move the bar of what I considered human.

I realized that my definition of how and when a fetus became a "baby" or a "person," when he or she began to have rights, also depended on his or her level of health: the length of time in which I considered it OK to terminate a pregnancy lengthened as the severity of disability increased. Under the premise of wanting to spare the potential child from suffering, I was basically saying that disabled fetuses were less human, had fewer rights, than able-bodied ones. It didn't sit well.

The whole thing started to really get under my skin. At some point I started to feel like I was more determined to be pro-choice than I was to honestly analyze who was and was not human. I started to see it in others in the pro-choice community as well. On more than one occasion I was stunned to the point of feeling physically ill upon reading of what otherwise nice, reasonable people in the pro-abortion camp would advocate for.

In reading through the Supreme Court case of Stenberg v. Carhart, I read that Dr. Leroy Carhart, an abortion advocate who actually performs the procedures, described some second-trimester abortions by saying, "[W]hen you pull out a piece of the fetus, let's say, an arm or a leg and remove that, at the time just prior to removal of the portion of the fetus...the fetus [is] alive." He said that he has observed fetal heartbeat via ultrasound with "extensive parts of the fetus removed." The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which presumably consists of well-educated, reasonable, intelligent men and women, opposed this procedure. Not for the reasons I thought -- because it was plainly obvious that this was infanticide in its most grisly form -- but because dismembered babies inconvenienced their mothers, and it was better to kill them outside the womb in a procedure they refer to as "D&X". In the College's words in its amici brief:

D&X presents a variety of potential safety advantages over other abortion procedures used during the same gestational period. Compared to D&E's involving dismemberment, D&X involves less risk of uterine perforation or cervical laceration because it requires the physician to make fewer passes into the uterus with sharp instruments and reduces the presence of sharp fetal bone fragments that can injure the uterus and cervix.

There is also considerable evidence that D&X reduces the risk of retained fetal tissue, a serious abortion complication that can cause maternal death, and that D&X reduces the incidence of a 'free floating' fetal head that can be difficult for a physician to grasp and remove and can thus cause maternal injury.

I read the Court documents from Stenberg v. Carhart in a state of shock. A few years ago a friend of mine had her baby very prematurely, and I had visited him in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. He was so beautiful, just like the full-term newborns I'd seen, only a little smaller. Seeing him and the other babies lying there so peacefully in their incubators (some of them with cute little notes written on their incubator tags like "Aiden -- mommy's big boy!"), I was overwhelmed with feelings of wanting to protect these precious, innocent little babies. I was thrilled to hear the my friend's son and all the other preemies who were in the NICU at that time did survive and go home with their parents. So I found myself in a state of cold shock and disbelief that I was reading of people -- not just fringe crazies, but the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and some Supreme Court Justices -- casually speak about the inconvenience of the skulls and bone fragments of dismembered babies ("fetuses") the same age as those babies in the NICU. The horrors continued when I read Gonzales v. Carhart [some excerpts here...warning: no photos, but the descriptions are extremely disturbing].

It took my breath away to witness the level of evil that normal people can fall into supporting. They were talking about infanticide, but completely refused to label it as such. It was when I considered that these were educated, reasonable professionals who were probably not bad people that I realized that evil always works through lies. I also took a mental step back from the entire pro-choice movement. If this is what it meant to be "pro-choice," I was not pro-choice.

Yet I still couldn't quite bring myself to label myself pro-life.

I started to recognize that I was no better than Dr. Carhart or the concurring Justices or the author of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' brief, that I too had probably told myself lies in order to maintain my support for abortion. Yet there was something deep down inside, some tremendous pressure that kept me from truly, objectively looking at what was going on here. There was something within me that screamed that to not allow women to have abortions at least in the first trimester would be unfair in the most dire sense of the word. Even as I became more religious, I mentally pushed aside thoughts that all humans might have God-given eternal souls worthy of dignity and respect, because it got too tricky to figure out when we receive those souls, the most obvious answer being "at conception" as opposed to at some arbitrary point during gestation.

It wasn't until I re-evaluated the societal views of sex that had permeated the consciousness of my peer group, took a new look at the modern assumptions about the act that creates those fetuses in the first place, that I was able to let go of that internal pressure I felt, and to take an unflinching look at my views on abortion.


The contraceptive mentality

Here are four key memories that give a glimpse into how my understanding of sex was formed:

• When I was a kid, I didn't have any friends who had baby brothers or sisters in their households. One friend's mom was pregnant when we were twelve, but I moved before the baby was born. To the extent that I ever heard any of our parents talk about pregnancy and babies, it was to say that they were happy that they were "done," the impression being that they could finally start living now that that pregnancy/baby unpleasantness was over.
  
  
• In sex ed class we learned not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. After we were done putting condoms on bananas, our teacher counseled us that we should carefully decide when we might be ready to have sex based on important concerns like whether or not we were in committed relationships, whether or not we had access to contraception, how our girlfriends or boyfriends treated us, whether we wanted to wait until marriage, etc. I do not recall hearing readiness to have a baby being part of a single discussion about deciding when to have sex, whether it was from teachers or parents or society in general. Not once.
  
  
• On multiple occasions when I was a young teen I recall hearing girls make the comment that they would readily risk dangerous back-alley abortions or even consider suicide if they were to face unplanned pregnancies and abortion wasn't legal. Though I was not sexually active, it sounded perfectly reasonable to me -- that is how much we desired not to have babies before we were ready. Yet the concept of just not having sex if we weren't ready to have babies was never discussed. It's not that we had considered the idea and rejected it; it simply never occurred to us.
  
  
• Even recently, before our marriage was validated in the Catholic Church my husband and I had to take a course about building good marriages. It was a video series by a nondenominational Christian group, and in the segment called "Good Sex" they did not mention children or babies once. In all the talk about bonding and back rubs and intimacy and staying in shape, the closest they came to connecting sex to the creation of life was to briefly say that couples should discuss the topic of contraception.
  

Sex could not have been more disconnected from the concept of creating life.

The message I'd heard loud and clear was that the purpose of sex was for pleasure and bonding, that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point of being forgotten about altogether. This mindset laid the foundation of my views on abortion. Because I saw sex as being closed to the possibility to life by default, I thought of pregnancies that weren't planned as akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street -- something totally unpredictable, undeserved, that happened to people living normal lives.

Being pro-choice for me (and I'd imagine with many others) was actually motivated out of love and caring: I just didn't want women to have to suffer, to have to devalue themselves by dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Because it was an inherent part of my worldview that everyone except people with "hang-ups" eventually has sex and sex is, under normal circumstances, only about the relationship between the two people involved, I got lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: to dehumanize the enemy. Babies had become the enemy because of their tendencies to pop up and ruin everything; and just as societies are tempted to dehumanize the fellow human beings who are on the other side of the lines in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized the enemy of sex.

It was when I was reading up on the Catholic Church's view of sex, marriage and contraception that everything changed.

I'd always thought that those archaic teachings about not using contraception were because the Church wanted to oppress people by telling them to have as many kids as possible, or something like that. What I found, however, was that their views expressed a fundamentally different understanding of what sex is, and once I heard it I never saw the world the same way again. The way I'd always seen it, the standard position was that babies were a horrible burden, except for a couple times in life when everything is perfect enough that a couple might temporarily see new life as a good thing; the Catholic view is that the standard position is that babies are a blessing and a good thing, and while it's fine to attempt to avoid pregnancy for serious reasons, if we go so far as to adopt a "contraceptive mentality," feeling entitled to the pleasure of sex while loathing (and perhaps trying to forget all about) its life-giving properties, we not only disrespect this most sacred of acts, but we begin to see new life as the enemy.

To use a rough analogy, the Catholic Church was saying that loaded guns are not toys, that while they can perhaps be used for certain recreational activities, they are always to be handled with grave respect; my viewpoint, coming from contraceptive culture, was that it's fine to use loaded guns as toys as long as you put blanks in the chamber. Thinking of that analogy, expecting to be able to use something with incredible power nonchalantly, as a toy, I could see how that worldview had set us up for disaster.

I came to see that our culture's widespread use and acceptance of contraception had led to the "contraceptive mentality" toward sex being the default position. As a society, we'd come to take it for granted that we're entitled to the pleasurable and bonding aspects of sex even when we're in a state of being vehemently opposed to the new life it might produce. The option of abstaining from the act that creates babies if we're in a state of seeing babies as a huge burden had been removed from our cultural lexicon: even if it would be a huge crisis to get pregnant, we have a right to go ahead and have sex anyway. If this were true, if it was indeed a fact that it was morally OK for people to have sex even when they believed that a new baby could ruin their lives, in my mind, then, abortion had to be OK.

I realize that ideally I would have taken an objective look at when human life begins and based my views on that alone...but the lie was just too tempting. I didn't want to hear too much about heartbeats or souls or brain activity...terminating pregnancies just had to be OK, because carrying a baby to term and becoming a parent is a huge deal...and society had made it very clear that sex is not a huge deal. As long as I accepted that for people to engage in sex in a contraceptive mentality was morally OK, I could not bring myself to even consider that abortion might not be OK. It just seemed too inhumane to make women deal with life-altering consequences for an act that was not supposed to have life-altering consequences.

So this idea that we are always to treat the sexual act with awe and respect, so much so that we should simply abstain if we're vehemently opposed to its life-giving potential, was a totally new and different message. For me, being able to honestly consider when life begins, opening my heart and my mind to the wonder and dignity of even the tiniest of my fellow human beings, was not fully possible until I understood the nature of the act that creates these little lives in the first place.


The great temptation

All of these thoughts had been percolating in my brain for a while, and I found myself increasingly in agreement with pro-life positions. Then one night I was reading something, and a thought occurred to me, and from that moment on I was officially, unapologetically PRO-LIFE. I was reading yet another account of the Greek societies in which newborn babies were abandoned to die, wondering to myself how normal people could possibly do something like that. I felt a chill rush through my body as I thought:

I know how they did it.

I realized in that moment that perfectly good, well-meaning people -- people like me -- can support very evil things through the power of lies. From my own experience, I knew how the Greeks, the Romans, and people in every other society could put themselves into a mental state that they could leave a newborn child to die: the very real pressures of life -- "we can't afford another baby," "we can't have any more girls," "he wouldn't have had a good life" -- left them susceptible to that oldest of temptations: to dehumanize other human beings. Though the circumstances were different, it was the same process that had happened with me, that happened with the concurring Supreme Court Justices in Stenberg v. Carhart, with the abortion doctors, the entire pro-choice movement, and anyone else who's ever been tempted to dehumanize inconvenient people.

I bet that as those Greek parents handed over their infants for someone to take away, they remarked on how very unlike their other children these little creatures were: they can't talk, the can't sit up, and surely those little yawns and smiles are just involuntary reactions. I bet you anything they referred to these babies with different words than they used to refer to the children they kept. Maybe they called them "fetuses."

AREWP Day 5: Permanence

[AREWP stands for "A Reckless Experiment With Prayer." This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]


Whenever I've tried to implement a new routine, a better system for control and organization of my household, it seems that invariably I have to go out of town or have some other life-altering event come up immediately afterwards. And woe be to the people who are anywhere near me at those times, because I always get ridiculously stressed and whine endlessly about how these events are going to derail my plans. I'll snap at my mother-in-law for getting the kids down for nap a half hour late because she spent too long at the park, or moan the entire trip to Houston about how this out-of-town visit is going to just demolish the new routine that I worked so hard to create. Looking back, I had a surprising amount of angst about things as minor as bedtime getting pushed back or breakfast being at a different time than usual.

In this past week of creating yet another attempt at a routine, I think I finally understand why I felt so unsettled by such little schedule deviations: because they were my anchors.

I think the goal with every routine is to create structure, to get as close as possible to the way humans have always lived, with hard stops around which we can structure our days. Naptime being at 2:15 wasn't just important because that's when the kids needed sleep, but because naptime was my hard stop, it was my anchor. Along with breakfast time and dinner time, I used the beginning of naptime to provide structure to my days, to cue me to begin a different phase of the day, a different set of tasks, a different mindset. And when naptime (or breakfast or dinner time) got off track, I was adrift. That structure that I so desperately craved could be demolished with something as simple as eating brunch instead of breakfast one day.

As I've gone through my week, thrilled that this crazy experiment with prayer has been working so well, I realized at some point that I'm not on edge about these things anymore, about some event coming along to derail it all. If I found out we had to go out of town tomorrow I would honestly be fine with it, I wouldn't freak out about it messing up my precious routine. What's different?

In every other attempt to get organized and establish a routine, I've used fleeting worldly things as my anchors, my cues to transition from one part of the day to the next. It's no wonder then that something as simple as a cold virus or an overnight trip could leave me without anchors, without a routine, picking up the pieces of all my big plans.

But prayer is something I can always do.

My prayer book fits in my purse, so whether I'm here at home, on a plane, in the hospital, visiting family out of town, in a hotel, out running errands, on a bus -- wherever I am -- I can always say Lauds, Matins and Vespers at roughly the same times, every day. Unlike all my other routines that revolved around fleeting events specific to this phase of life, there is no foreseeable reason why I couldn't keep this same basic routine, praying the Liturgy of the Hours, every single day for the rest of my life.

That's one of the reasons I have a really good feeling about my odds of keeping up with this: it's not only about praying or organizing or establishing a routine. It's all of that, and more. It's a radical re-thinking of the way I approach life. It's about finally admitting after all these years that my way isn't working, that if I had it all figured out I wouldn't spend so much time feeling behind and overwhelmed; it's about trying to get as close as possible to living as we're designed to live, with daily and seasonal cycles directing how much I attempt to get done; it's about living on God's time, sacrificing large portions of my to-do list in order to balance periods of work with periods of rest; it's about trusting that God will give me the grace to make up for time "lost" in prayer and rest, that if I just trust in him it will all get done (though God's definition of what "it all" involves may be different from mine); and it's about forcing myself to turn to God often, to pause to ask for his help before embarking on each new phase of the day.


This week has been a tough week: I've been up with the baby multiple times each night, unable to nap during the day, and my two toddlers seem to have been replaced by half-human, half-robot superbeings who can demolish the house in the time it takes me to blink. And yet here it is, Friday afternoon, and I actually feel pretty calm. I'm annoyed about the cereal being dumped out on the newly vacuumed carpet and the bowl full of macaroni and cheese landing face-down on the kitchen floor, but I don't feel overwhelmed. For the first time in a long time, I don't feel behind on anything. My to-do list was smaller this week to make sure I left plenty of time for prayer, but what was there did get done. (And, honestly, I probably didn't accomplish any less than I used to, it's just that I accomplished 100% of a smaller list instead of 60% of a larger one.)

The reason I originally called this a "reckless" experiment was because I supposedly did not have one more minute in my day to devote to prayer. I could have proven to you on paper that my life (as well as my family's lives) would be thrown into chaos if I set aside even a few extra minutes to devote to God. Needless to say, I'm thrilled that so far I've been proven wrong -- very wrong. Everything that needed to get done got done. We could all feel God's grace working. Our house was a peaceful place to be (well, as peaceful as it gets with three little kids). As it turns out, putting a reckless amount of trust in God was exactly what I needed to do.

Britney Spears syndrome

I was in line at a convenience store yesterday and the employees had their radio blasting, playing one of those overproduced, hypersexualized songs (you know, the ones with the heavy techno beats and women gasping and singing in a high-pitched, coquettish voices). It was pretty grating, so in an attempt to drown it out I started flipping through one of the celebrity magazines. I hadn't heard the latest about Britney Spears, that she evidently had a complete nervous breakdown a couple weeks ago and was taken to the hospital. As I flipped through the pitiful pictures of her strapped down to a stretcher, looking at the camera with a dazed, tear-streaked face, I realized that the song playing on the radio was hers.

I felt guilty by association, listening to her voice coo lyrics like "Everytime they turn the lights down / Just wanna go that extra mile for you" and "You got me in a crazy position (Yeah) / If you're on a mission (Uh-uh) / You got my permission (Oh)." As an artist, you would expect her latest album to be more of a reflection of her life; you would expect a more mournful tone to the songs, more tales of disappointment and love lost. The one song that does speak to the trauma she's been through in the past year, Piece of Me, is still a hypersexualized track filled with gaspy "aaah"s and "ooooh"s. (I know, I'm disturbingly familiar with her music. Let's never speak of it again.) The theme of her current album foregoes any honest reflection of what's in her heart in favor of tracks with her gasping and panting about how much she supposedly desires to have no-strings-attached sex all the time...because that's what the world wants to hear.


Personally, I've never had a nervous breakdown. I think I came close, though, back in 2000. I vividly remember sitting on a friend's couch one night, I think it was a Tuesday, and feeling like something within me was going to explode. I felt like I just wanted to scream -- and then I wanted to scream again because I didn't even know why I wanted to scream in the first place! I was supposed to be happy -- I had it all! Every area of my life was on track. I had a promising career, I'd recently purchased an adorable condo in an up-and-coming area of town, I had great friends...yet I felt completely lost. I could not figure out why I would feel such angst, so painfully adrift, when I had every important area of life nailed down.

I'd come over to seek my friend's counsel on a variety of matters, but for some reason the topic of dating triggered what I think was a near panic attack. I was single at the time (I met my husband a few months later), and couldn't figure out if I should enter the dating scene or not. For some reason I just could not get comfortable with the idea of living the Sex in the City lifestyle that was so popular among my friends and coworkers. According to my moral code and worldview at the time, not only was there nothing dangerous about women treating sex lightly and "dating" lots of different men, but it was in fact healthy! Yet something within me recoiled at the concept. My theory at the time was that I was still feeling the residual effects of the bondage that women endured for so long before feminism liberated us, that I had yet to throw off the chains of the oppressive patriarchal mentality that still lingered in American culture...yet the more I considered this line of thinking, the closer I felt to nervous breakdown.

Now I understand why.

At the time, I was part of the segment of society where traditional feminine qualities are disdained. As a woman you could express any desire, show any side of your personality, so long as it didn't involve behaviors that humans have always associated with women, like maternal instincts, the longing to nurture others, feeling sentimental, having fluctuating emotions based on your body's rhythms, wanting to be cherished by men, etc. Probably due to a lot of the recent changes in modern society -- high on the list being the constant touting of contraception as a good thing, making us start to feel that what it's "curing" must be a bad thing -- all the nurturing, life-giving aspects of being a woman were scorned. This left a huge elephant in the room around which we had to maneuver, and the result was that the two main options for acceptable behavior from women were either to act like a sex object or a man (or both, a la Sex in the City).

I know that's an extreme statement, and there were some gray areas that varied by socioeconomic group, but it's not too far