Balance requires sacrifice

This post was originally published on February 26, 2008, a few weeks into my experiment of structuring my days around set prayer times. You can read all the posts on that subject here. Lately I’ve been thinking about how smoothly everything goes when I structure my days around prayer, and how I’d like to recommit to that habit soon.

Last night my husband and I were sitting in the living room after the kids went to bed, chatting about our days over little bowls of chocolate ice cream, and I caught a glimpse of the half-folded basket of laundry I’d set aside in the laundry room. Then I thought of those last three bills I needed to pay, and remembered that I never did get around to replying to that one email. My instinct was to get up and meander over to my desk or to the laundry basket, but I sunk back into the couch and kept chatting with my husband instead. And I thought, “So this is what balance is like.”

When I used to make my semi-monthly proclamations that I desperately needed balance in my life, what I was really saying was, “I want to do all the same stuff I’m doing now, but just not be stressed about it!” Yet another huge lesson I’ve learned from this experiment of scheduling life around prayer (instead of vice versa) is this:

Balance requires sacrifice.

I know, to a lot of people that’s as insightful as saying breathing requires inhaling, but it was actually a revelation to me. Before my commitment to make the workday end with Vespers, I would have spent that time after the kids went to bed shuffling around to try to finish the laundry, pay those last few bills, reply to that email, and undoubtedly get sidetracked with all sorts of other things along the way. It would have felt too indulgent or wasteful to just put my feet up and spend a whole hour chatting with my husband! Especially because of my tendency to procrastinate, I would have felt like I “had to” forgo relaxation time in the evening to make up for not getting enough done during the day.

The realization that a natural life is a life with hard stops — that it is only in recent years through modern technology that we have even been able to throw our lives so far out of balance by extending our working hours at will — changed everything. These days, leisurely breakfast time ends and high-energy activity time begins with Lauds (Morning Prayer) at 9:30; high-energy activity time ends and naptime/desk work begins with the Office of Readings at 2:00; and I do one final sweep to get any lingering projects to a stopping point before the whole workday comes to a close with Vespers (Evening Prayer) at 6:00. Do I always have everything done by the time prayer time rolls around? Nope. Am I often tempted to keep working into the evening to make up for not getting enough done during the day? Absolutely. But, I have realized, such is a life of balance.

Back in that post where I talked about my “hard stops” epiphany, I speculated that the reason that pre-electricity generations spoke of a life of peaceful rhythm and natural balance is because, for example, a housewife living in 1890 couldn’t do laundry at 10:00 at night if she didn’t get to it during the day; by virtue of having built-in hard stops like sunset and community-centered activities, they were forced to sacrifice a lot of the things they wanted to get done and simply rest. Mimicking this life as best I can, by allowing my day to be broken into times of work and times of rest by forces larger than myself, has indeed forced me to sacrifice a lot of the things I’d like to get done. And it has given me a life of balance.

I suppose it might technically be possible to achieve such a nice rhythm by using something other than prayer to provide hard stops; but, for me, I doubt that anything else would work. Here in our 24/7 world, there’s so much pressure let your life slide out of balance, to sign up for “just one more” activity, to get “just one more” thing done each day, that with my notorious lack of willpower I’m sure I would have backslid into my old ways long before now with any other type of routine. But by anchoring my days around God by joining in with the universal prayer of the Church, by letting the rhythm of the Liturgy of the Hours be the guiding rhythm of my life, three times a day I am reminded that I only have one real to-do list, and it is short; that the little sacrifices I make to achieve balance are minuscule in the grand scheme of things; that my time is not my own anyway.

I don’t mean to imply that my life is now stress-free or that I don’t ever struggle with challenging days anymore (anyone who read this post or this post knows that that’s certainly not the case). But I will say that it all feels more “natural” than before. Letting go of the temptation to make every hour a working hour, structuring my days around prayer instead of around the frantic pace of the world, might not have made all the stress in my life go away, but it has brought me times of guilt-free rest to act as a counterweight to the challenging times. Life has a gentle rhythm that wasn’t there before. Even though there are days when it’s painful to sacrifice a couple items from my to-do list that I wanted to get done, even though I have more responsibilities now than ever before in my life, I feel that after all these years, I have finally found balance.

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Tips for surviving (and thriving!) in the baby/toddler phase

Or, A Few Things I’ve Learned from Having Four Kids in Five Years

I started this post as an answer to the most frequently asked question I get, “How do you find time to write?”, but realized that the answer stems from my overall approach to life with little ones. As I’ve said before, since we’re bad at NFP open to the possibility of more children, my husband and I don’t see the baby/toddler years as a brief phase, but rather we’ve come to see having little ones around as just part of life for the long-term. This has prompted us to spend a lot of time thinking and praying about how to not only survive but thrive in a house with multiple children in diapers.

I thought I’d share some of the general “life management” tips we’ve come up with. I don’t offer this as expert advice, and I assure you that I do not walk around feeling like I have it all figured out. These are just some ideas that my husband and I have found helpful that I thought I’d post in case they give anyone else food for thought.

1. It’s all about optimizing

• Accept that you can’t do it all: My husband is fond of saying that optimizing isn’t about having it all, it’s about being good at not having it all. In a busy phase of life such as this there’s no way that you’re going to be able to scrapbook and garden and can vegetables and blog and try new recipes and maintain lots of close friendships and reply to all your email and learn to sew and watch TV and so on. You will only be able to do a few of the all those things you’d like to do, so it’s important to make conscious decisions about how you spend each hour of the day.

• Know the goal: In order to make tough choices about what to fit into your life vs. what to leave out, it’s important to clarify what your primary goals for yourself and your family are. For example, our first goal as individuals is to be close to God, our second goal is to draw each other and our family to God. Below that might be other things like accomplishments I’d like to have with my writing or successes my husband would like to see in his career, but they are all secondary to that primary goal. It’s helpful when tough tradeoffs arise to have that clearly defined.
• Value flexibility: The only thing that’s predictable with a house full of little ones is that it’s unpredictable: kids get sick, babies wake up at night, toddlers have temper tantrums, etc. I’ve found it critical to make sure that all of the activities I’m involved in allow for flexibility. For example, I’m not involved in any ministries that have regularly-recurring meetings, and I recently turned down some interesting writing work because it involved deadlines. In order to be able to make daily choices that put my highest goal first, I need wiggle room to be able to spend more time with my family as the need arises.

2. Housework: Prioritize and seek inspiration

No matter what your goal is for your family, it’s hard to achieve it — or do anything at all — if your house is total chaos.

• Prioritize: Decide with your family what level of order and cleanliness would be the right balance of bringing everyone peace without making you too overworked. Again, I think it’s really important to make this a conscious decision that you make with your husband rather than (as I tend to do) just doing things done haphazardly as you get to them. For example, my husband and I have decided together that it’s okay with both of us if it takes a few days to get clean laundry put away; however, we’ve decided that dirty dishes in the sink really bother us, so we make sure that at least that is taken care of each day. Spelling this out with my husband has resolved a lot of nagging guilt I used to have about what was and wasn’t getting done each day.

• Seek inspiration: There are a lot of great books out there with ideas about how to stay on top of all the little daily tasks involved with running a house, such as FlyLady, A Mother’s Rule of Life, Sidetracked Home Executives, etc. It’s unlikely that any one system would be a perfect fit for your family, but many of these books can offer great food for thought if you’re having trouble getting it all done.

3. Know thyself

• Introvert or extrovert?: It’s been my experience that one of the most important things to know about yourself, especially in a busy time of life, is whether you’re an introvert or extrovert. The most helpful way I’ve heard these concepts defined is in terms of how you recharge your batteries. Which soothes you more when you’re feeling run down: having quiet time to yourself or being around people? If it’s the former you’re more introverted, if it’s the latter you’re more extroverted. When you’re running at 100% each day it’s very important to understand the best way to recharge your batteries…

• Think about which activities wear you down and which give you energy: This sounds obvious, but I’ve found it surprising how often I assume that something will be no big deal for me just because it’s no big deal for most people. For example, when I was a new mom I went to weekly playdates because it seemed like that’s what all moms enjoyed. I eventually realized that while I also enjoy playdates, as an introvert, they’re much more exhausting for me. Whereas something like writing, which might be hard work for someone else, actually leaves me feeling relaxed and energized. This understanding helped me choose which activities to be involved in and how frequently to be involved in them so that I didn’t end up frazzled.
• Explain it to your spouse: It’s helped my husband and I support one another to realize what the basic things are that each of us need to stay sane. For example, it’s important that my husband understand that, as an introvert, it is a very high priority that I get regular quiet time to recharge my batteries; whereas the spouse of an extrovert would need to understand how important it is for that person to get regular social interaction.

4. Remember that serving others does not mean running yourself ragged

I’ve mentioned before in posts like this one and this one and this one just what an important realization this has been for me. As a Christian I am called to live a life of selflessness…yet I cannot do truly serve others if I’m not meeting my own needs first.

• Prayer: This subject has been covered better by other people, but the importance of making time for daily prayer can’t be overstated. You can’t give what you don’t have, and you can’t show Christ to others if you’re not developing a deep relationship with him yourself. Though I struggle with making prayer a priority in my own life, I’ve found that there are incredible fruits when I do. (All my posts on the topic of making time for daily prayer are here.)

• Food: I used to get through the newborn period by constantly eating foods that would give me a quick “high” like chips, sodas and snack foods. After I cut those out as part of my “Saint Diet,” I found that I not only lost weight but had so much more energy to get through my busy days.
• Exercise: I will readily admit that this is an area of my life that could use a lot of improvement, but I’ve found that even trying to be more active with the kids by going to parks or even just running around the house with them helps keep me from getting run down physically.
• Sleep: With my first child I was devoted to the concept of co-sleeping, but after 18 months of trying various ways to make it work I found myself so severely sleep deprived that I was depressed and even becoming a dangerous driver. After I switched to a more scheduled approach with babies sleeping in their cribs, such as the one laid out in Kim West’s book Good Night, Sleep Tight, I saw a 180-degree difference in my happiness, my energy level and my ability to serve my family. However, what works for one person isn’t what will work for everyone. Here’s a great post by a mom of ten talking about how going from strict scheduling to co-sleeping worked wonders for her family. Either way, I think it’s important to make it a priority to get good sleep whenever possible.
• Fun: I’ve found having a hobby that challenges and excites me is a great source of inspiration that helps get me through those tough times when I feel really overwhelmed. Back to the “Know Thyself” idea, though, I think it’s important to carefully choose activities that give you energy rather than take it. For example, formal photography, scrapbooking and sewing are all hobbies I’d really enjoy, but they would use up a lot of energy. Given my very limited free time I’ve chosen to only have one hobby right now — writing — which is something that is a source of energy for me rather than a drain.

“But how do I know how much time to take for things like rest and prayer and hobbies? How do I know if I’m getting what I legitimately need or just being lazy?” are questions that immediately popped into my mind when I was first introduced to this concept. Which brings us to…

5. Be careful about how you evaluate yourself

• Schedule “mini New Years” for reflection: It’s sometimes hard to know where to draw the line between giving yourself a needed break and just being lazy. “Do I let the kids watch too much TV?” “Could I read to them more?” The answers to questions like that aren’t always clear, and it’s surprisingly easy (at least for me) to succumb to unnecessary guilt when you can’t do as much because it’s truly a bad week or, on the other hand, to tell yourself that you’re doing fine when you’re actually slacking. It’s hard to discern these things in the heat of the moment, so I’ve found it incredibly helpful to reserve judgment on my overall success in my vocation to three “mini New Years” spread throughout the year (which I talked about more in #3 here). I set aside these days for serious high-level reflection on where I am in my life vs. where I should be, and knowing that I have that helps ward off mommy guilt on a day-to-day basis.

• Don’t compare yourself to other moms: As Sarah pointed out in this great post, things are totally different for moms with children of different ages, and as Molly Miller pointed out in this inspiring article, we all have a completely unique set of gifts that will make some things harder or easier for us than they are for other women.
• Consider getting a spiritual director: As I said here, I have found it immensely helpful to have a trained, orthodox spiritual director to help me honestly evaluate how well I am doing as a wife, mother and Christian.

6. Be proactive about creating a support network

As I’ve we talked about last year, I’m a big believer that we weren’t meant to raise kids in isolation. I’ve found it to be critically important to seek out a support network so that our family has extra help if we need it, and so that I can get little breaks here and there when other people are around.

• If possible, put down roots: People often remark that my husband and I are so lucky that my mom lives nearby and we seem to be surrounded by people able to babysit or lend and extra hand here and there. A large part of that stems from the decision we made to put down roots in this area. It’s meant sacrificing potential money and career advancement for my husband, but the payoff has been huge in terms of building a community and support network for ourselves.

• Learn to accept imperfect help: I once wrote about the ah-hah moment I had when I realized that it wasn’t so much that I didn’t have any help as much as it was that I didn’t have help that was on my terms. Once I went through the painful process of learning to accept “imperfect” help, even when it meant dishwasher chaos, it opened doors for me to receive so much support that my perfectionism had prevented me from receiving before.
• Remember that getting help isn’t an all-or-nothing thing: This might not be an option for everyone (as it hasn’t been for us for plenty of periods), but during rough patches it’s worth seeing if a small amount of temporary help might be able to be squeezed into the budget. For example, a couple years ago I was lamenting that I had my hands really full yet couldn’t afford help. My husband pointed out that, while it was true that a full-time nanny wasn’t in the budget, we could set aside a certain amount of money to use to hire someone to come in a few hours a week for a couple of months, just to help me get through this rough phase. We ended up finding a nice lady to come over for part of the morning two days a week for a few weeks, and it was a tremendous help.

7. Partner with your spouse

This is another one that’s probably obvious, but one thing that has been very helpful for our marriage and our family is that my husband and I share with one another in everything we do. For example, we see his career as something we’re both involved in, and we see the writing I do as something we do together: he gets my input on dilemmas at work, I tell him about interesting blog comments and get his feedback on what I’m writing about, etc. As busy as we are, it’s especially helpful not to have a lot of boundaries about “his stuff” and “my stuff,” otherwise it would be hard to do it all and still find time for our marriage.

8. Put God first

All of the above are some practical tips my husband and I have come up with for managing life in a house full of little ones. All of them are ultimately meaningless, though, if the final aim isn’t deeper union with God. We’ve found that it’s so important to remind ourselves that everything we do, down to the smallest action, should somehow, some way, be aimed at bringing us closer to God. Not that we’re living that out perfectly, of course, but knowing that that’s the goal helps us make good choices about what to do with our very limited time, and it helps us support one another to know that we’re both working toward the same thing.

If that makes it sound like we’re ultra-holy people, I assure you we’re not. We have committed to put God first in our lives not only because it’s what we “should” do, but because, after putting everything else first for so many years, we have found it to be true that God is the only source of lasting happiness. Even in our crazy busy lives with four kids under age five, we have found that, compared to our old lives, his yoke is easy, and his burden is light.

8 Things I Learned in 2008

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been reflecting on what I learned in 2008, and considering how I can continue to grow from these lessons in the New Year. I thought I’d share my list in case anyone’s interested.

1. If my goal is to have a God-centered, peaceful life, I cannot do nearly as much as I thought I could.

This was my first lesson of 2008, and one that I’ve realized I’ll have to remind myself of over and over again as I battle my lifelong tendency to put too much on my plate. As I detailed in the posts below, it all started with looking at Mother Teresa’s religious order’s daily schedule; I was struck by its simplicity and focus, and the way it revolved around prayer and allowed ample time for rest…yet they are still able to have a huge impact on the world.

Posts on this subject:

• Admitting I can’t do it all (or even half of it)
• Schedules and hard stops
  

2. Life is easier when my days revolve around prayer.

In January of 2008 I decided to do a “reckless experiment with prayer”: despite all the good, logical reasons I had not to spend too much time in prayer (namely the fact that I was unbelievably busy with a three-year-old, one-year-old and newborn, all in diapers), I decided to try an entire week of putting prayer first. For one week, observing the prayer times of the Liturgy of the Hours would be the first and most important thing on every day’s to-do list, and everything else would come second. I’d try it just to see what happened.

I half expected that my house would degenerate into chaos and my little prayer experiment would somehow end with the Health Department’s involvement, but just the opposite happened: I actually got more done despite the fact that I was spending much more time in prayer than I had been, and a peace and serenity entered my house that were not there before. I’ve kept up with this practice ever since. (Though it did suffer a bit during my recent spiritual dry spell, it’s something I plan to recommit to in 2009.)

Posts on this subject:

• A reckless experiment with prayer
• A reckless experiment with prayer: The Plan
• Focus and procrastination
• I wrote a lot on this topic throughout the year — click here to see a list of all posts in the series

3. It’s harder for me to trust God with small stuff than with big stuff.

In 2007 I learned a lot about trusting God with my life, and when 2008 rolled around I felt like I was actually pretty good about turning my anxieties over to God…and then I started having computer problems. In the desk-pounding, near-computer-throwing, profanity-muttering series of hissy fits that ensued, I realized that while I might have reached a fair level of spiritual maturity about trusting God with things like our long-term finances, I had basically zero trust in the Lord when it came to little details like getting stuck in traffic or having technical problems with a website. It’s still something I’m working on, and I find it to be one of my greatest spiritual challenges.

Posts on this subject:

• God and computer problems (Part I)
• God and computer problems (Part II)

4. Fear is the absence of love.

When my spiritual director first counseled me that “fear is the absence of love,” I wasn’t sure what she meant. I’d been talking about my worries about the new pregnancy, medical issues, finances, education choices for the kids, etc. — what on earth did that have to do with love? She simply suggested that I meditate on that thought and, every time I experienced fear, ask myself how I could pour love into the situation (or, if I couldn’t see a way, do some act of love unrelated to the situation). At the time I had no idea what a huge lesson this would be for me. Hardly a day has gone by that I have not thought of this lesson, and I have yet to find a problem that, after praying about it, I don’t see a clear way that I can pour love into the situation — and, sure enough, it helps every time.

Post on this subject:

• Fear is the absence of love

5. Answered prayers are easier to see when looking at the world through a lens of love and humility.

When I first started praying, I expected my prayers to be answered in a vacuum; in other words, I expected the help or information that I needed to just fall out of the sky and into my lap. What I’ve found over and over again, however, is that God often answers prayers in a way that draws us closer to one another, and if I’m looking at the world from a self-centered, controlling, isolationist point of view, I might miss the fact that God has actually answered my prayer through the imperfect efforts of another human being.

Posts on this subject:

• The story of a friendship
• Looking at the world through a lens of love
• Do I let others help me?
• A lesson about accepting (imperfect) help

6. I did not lose my own life when I embraced the idea that my primary vocation is to be a wife and a mother; in fact, I found it.

Coming from a completely secular background, I found this to be one of the more counterintuitive, profound bits of wisdom in Christianity.

Posts on this subject:

• Putting our lives on hold
• Getting my life back
• Dying to self
• “It’s not what you do, it’s whom you serve“

7. Christianity is the fulfillment of the atheistic beliefs I was raised with.

As I’ve grown in my newfound faith I continue to be surprised that it feels oddly comfortable in many ways. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my new belief system is not a complete departure from my old one; rather, it’s the fulfillment of it.

Posts on this subject:

• Love and atheism
• Reason, wonder and Pope Benedict XVI

8. There are ways you can structure your lifestyle to make it more conducive to holiness.

I’ve written about this recently and I’m sure I’ll continue to write about it a lot in 2009. My spiritual director’s gentle admonishment to work on getting my exhaustion under control before I attempt my specifically spiritual goals (detailed in the first post below) was a real eye-opening moment that has had a far-reaching impact on the way I approach growing in holiness.

Posts on this subject:

• The Saint Diet
• Some thoughts on food and sin

It’s been fun to look back at all these great lessons from 2008 and think about them as a new year begins. What did you learn in 2008?

AREWP Week 34: Prayer and spiritual dry spells

[AREWP stands for A Reckless Experiment With Prayer.]

Back in the first few months of 2008, a theme that I wrote about frequently was my “Reckless Experiment With Prayer,” which I originally talked about in this post. The idea was that I’d structure my daily activities around prayer times instead of vice versa. I called it “reckless” because I was supposedly soooooo busy with three children in diapers that I didn’t have a single extra minute to spare for prayer, and the “experiment” was that I would take a risk and just see what happened if I put prayer first above everything else.

As I mentioned in my many posts on the subject (you can find them here — scroll down to see them all), it turned out to be one of the most life-changing things I’ve ever done. It gave my days some desperately needed structure, and brought a tidal wave of grace into my life and my family’s lives. I haven’t mentioned it in a few months, so I occasionally get asked: do you still pray the Liturgy of the Hours?

Here’s the short answer: yes.

Here’s the long answer…

Yes, although I can’t say that I never skip an office out of forgetfulness or laziness; nor can I say that there haven’t been entire days that I didn’t pray a single office. To be honest, it is not nearly as easy as or fun as it used to be back when it was something new and different and I felt on fire for my faith. There are days that I feel so distant from God and am so immersed in selfishness that it’s downright painful to open up that prayer book and take 10 minutes for Lauds. And that is one of the reasons that I think it’s beyond coincidence that I felt called to start doing this just before I ended up in the spiritual doldrums.

One of the first lessons I learned in this experiment was that there’s only one way to pray the Liturgy of the Hours: to think of prayer as the only thing you’re definitely going to get done that day, to mentally prioritize everything else as a distant second. On a practical level, I found it interesting that 10 out of 10 times that I approached my days this way, I was far more organized and productive than on the days that I let prayer slide to put more “important” things first (I talked about that major lesson more here). However, I found that the discipline of putting prayer in the #1 priority slot had an even bigger effect on a spiritual level.

Especially during these days of spiritual dryness, there’s been something powerful about putting prayer first even when I get nothing out of it in terms of feelings or emotions, even when I’m so immersed in worldly concerns that I feel like anything and everything is more important than sitting in front of a book and reading Psalms and other prayers. Something about giving God one of my most precious assets — my time — has kept me close to him in a different, deeper way.

I remember how painful prayer used to be when I wasn’t sure if I believed in God. Other little sacrifices I made for this unseen deity at least had some worldly payoff if he didn’t exist: donating money to Christian charities helped people do good works in the world, reading the Bible was educational as an important book in Western history, and we did meet some great new people at Mass. I was making some sacrifices for God, but my bets were hedged…just in case.

But prayer was different.

The first few times I tried make room in my day to talk in God’s general direction, I feared that I was wasting the ultimate nonrenewable resource: time. If God didn’t exist, or if he was some distant deity who had no connection to the day-to-day affairs of humans, then prayer was a waste of precious time that I could never get back. There’s no worldly payoff to talking to yourself with your eyes closed and your hands folded (not for me, anyway — if you say there’s some benefit to the meditative aspects of it because you find deep insights within yourself, you haven’t heard my prayers). Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I believe now that my (albeit grudging) willingness to give God some of my time, even though I wasn’t sure he existed, was a critical step that softened my heart and cracked open a channel of grace that would help me get to the next level in the conversion process.

Though I never have doubts about God’s existence anymore, I’ve found a similar lesson applies in this time of fear and worry.

I haven’t been great about bringing glory to God in my daily life lately. For a while there it came naturally to me to meditate on Christ’s sufferings any time I felt sorry for myself, or to give thanks to God for my many blessings when I was tempted to complain about some inconvenience. Now I pretty much just feel sorry for myself and complain about inconveniences. (I’m working on that.) But one thing I can do, perhaps one of the biggest sacrifices I can make for Christ in my daily life, is to give him some of my time.

I might not be overflowing with zeal and pleasant emotions like I was a few months ago. I might not feel enveloped in God’s love like I sometimes did earlier this year. Yet every time I choose pray Lauds instead of getting a head start on the breakfast dishes, or pick up my prayer book for Vespers instead of checking email one extra time, I am aware that I am intimately close to God in an important way, even if I don’t feel it.

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