Drama as spiritual attack
I was going to write about something else today, but I keep laughing about something I read recently, and I just had to share.
I recently finished the fascinating book The War of Art by bestselling author Steven Pressfield, which is a sort of field guide to spiritual warfare. He goes through practical tactics for defeating what he calls “Resistance,” i.e. the malevolent force that works to prevent anything good from happening in the world (what a Christian might call “the devil” or “the enemy.”) In the section called Resistance and Self-Dramatization, Pressfield writes:
Creating soap opera in our lives is a symptom of Resistance…Sometimes entire families participate unconsciously in a culture of self-dramatization. The kids fuel the tanks, the grown-ups arm the phasers, the whole starship lurches from one spine-tingling episode to another. And the crew knows how to keep it going. If the level of drama drops below a certain threshold, someone jumps in to amp it up…It’s more fun than a movie. And it works: Nobody gets a damn thing done.
I laughed out loud when I read that, mainly because I realized that I’ve had my own Starship Resistance miniseries playing over here.
“I don’t even know why I bother to write at all!” I’d announce at the start of the day’s writing time when I was working on the book. “I just can’t get the words out! It’s all a waste! THIS ENTIRE PROJECT IS DOOMED!” And, with that opener, I’d drag my friend/husband/babysitter/UPS delivery man into a tedious, belabored conversation about my life as a tortured writer (hoping that nobody notices my liberal use of the label “writer”) while my cursor sat motionless on the screen, not one new word appearing on the page.
I seem to be most prone to this kind of silliness when I’m doing anything that could remotely be considered “art,” but no area of life is immune: whether it’s planning homeschool curricula or organizing the house or writing thank-you notes, I’ve realized that getting swept up in theatrics over minutia is one of the main ways I let Resistance keep me from getting anything done. (The internet is a particularly rich source of drama-based Resistance for me — anyone else think of the blogosphere in that Pressfield quote above?)
Not all “drama” is bad, of course. I love how the Christian life makes everything so exciting; how every day is a great battle, and the truths of the faith are better than the best fairy tale. It’s also normal and healthy to have strong reactions to intense events (in other words, don’t expect me to lay off the caps lock key next time I see a scorpion). And then there are things like clinical depression, where you may have stronger reactions to situations due to serious medical issues.
But there’s also just drama: baseless, time-wasting, Resistance-fueled caterwauling that you need to learn to shut down in order to live a full life. So how do you recognize it when you’ve fallen into it? I’ve been pondering that for the past couple of weeks, and what I’ve come up with is this:
I think the primary difference is that Resistance drama is ego-focused, whereas the healthy ups and downs of the spiritual life are God-focused. When I get mired in bad drama I withdraw into a tiny solar system with my blazing ego at the center, where I fixate on who said what that offended me, whether people will think what I’m doing is great or terrible, whether what I do is good or bad in comparison to other people’s work…and I give nothing back to the world. I’m a black hole. Paralyzed by Resistance. Whereas on the occasions that I’m swept up in positive drama, I’m more focused on God than myself, more concerned with helping people than comparing myself to them, and, most tellingly, I’m still creating. I’m still giving something back to the world.
Now that I’ve recognized this tendency, I’ve been getting a lot more done, especially in writing/creative type endeavors. I’m learning to identify those moments when I’ve brought my life to a screeching standstill by turning it into another thrilling episode of Starship Resistance; to know when I’m faced with legitimate issues that I need to address, and when it’s time to stop the theatrics and get to work.
CAVEAT 1: I know there’s recently been a lot of discussion in the blog world about depression and the spiritual life, so I want to emphasize again that I’m not talking about that or other serious mental health issues here. I’m talking about good old-fashioned melodrama.
CAVEAT 2: Even though Pressfield is not a Christian, as a Catholic I found 90% of The War of Art to be dead-on accurate and life-changingly, put-down-the-book-in-mid-sentence-and-go-tell-everyone-you-know-to-buy-a-copy good. Since it deals with spiritual matters it’s one you’ll want to read “with discernment,” as they say, but I do strongly recommend it.
7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 69)
Discussions about the weather with friends up north this week have led me to see that there is a need for a Cold Unfairness Index. Whenever I grouse about having to go out in rainy, 33-degree weather, they throw down with stories of blizzards, ice-covered sidewalks and highs in the 20′s. It always seems like they handily win the woe-is-me weather contest, but I keep sensing that there is something unjust about the scale.
It finally occurred to me: there needs to be some sort of winter weather index that takes into account the number of stinging bugs one has to deal with in the summer. For example, you get to drop five degrees for every scorpion sighting in your house, two degrees for every scorpion encountered outside your house, one degree for every wasp’s nest by your front door, etc. (And it automatically goes to zero Kelvin if you were actually stung by a scorpion. You just win. Nobody should have to deal with scorpion stings and weather below 40 degrees.)
A couple weeks ago my husband and I went to the coolest restaurant:
It’s called Ronnie’s Real Food, and eating there is a cross between dining in a restaurant and a cozy living room. The owner was an accountant who wanted to open a restaurant but didn’t want all the hassle, so he bought a house, set out some tables and started taking reservations. Each night he only offers a couple choices for entrees, you bring your own beer or wine, and it’s a fixed price: $25 per person including tax and tip.
The homey atmosphere, fresh, local food and personal touch made the dining experience one of my favorites ever. If you’re in Austin you have to check it out!
Speaking of food, here’s a tip for getting kids to get more variety in their diets: incorporate new or non-favorite foods into a “taco night.” For example, when I make beef stew my kids balk at the onions and mushrooms, and they don’t like the soupy texture. So I put drained meat and carrots on their plates, then set out little cups of sour cream and shredded cheese. I give them each a tortilla to combine it all into a taco, and they eat it like crazy. This works for all sorts of different food. You’d be amazed at the different kinds of “tacos” we make around here.
From the “I can’t believe this works” files, another tip: I’ve had great success in getting my three oldest children (ages five, three and two) to help me clean up at the end of each day by playing special music. Instead of setting a timer, I put on our two clean-up songs. It took a couple weeks to enforce the concept that they need to be cleaning while those songs are on (they get some treat afterwards in proportion to how hard they worked), but I’m telling you, it’s like they’re robots now. They’ll be standing around, whining, saying they don’t want to help straighten the living room, then I put on the music, and it’s as if their bodies start moving in cleaning motions without them willing it. It’s amazing.
(If anyone’s interested, our clean-up songs are 2-Minute Clean Up by Andy Dodge and Clean My Room by the Imagination Movers. Someone without young kids might find these songs grating, but they’re like freaking Tchaikovsky to my ears because I associate them with having my living room cleaned for free and not by me.)
Has anyone tried one of these Presto things? I love the idea: it’s a printer that prints emails for people who don’t own computers (a more thorough explanation here). We’re thinking about getting one for my 95-year-old grandfather. Anyone have any good/bad experiences with it?
I just remembered that this weekend is Valentine’s Day. That holiday never makes it on my radar. It’s not that I dislike it; I think my subconscious just has this tendency to block out non-essential holidays that require planning, creativity or domestic adeptness as a way to avoid epic failures on my part. My husband and I have half-jokingly talked about setting St. Claude la Colombiere day as our romantic holiday — there’d be less pressure to do anything elaborate, and since it’s the day after Valentine’s Day it’d be easy to get cards and flowers on discount. (This is why nobody asks me to write homemaking advice columns.)
Anyway, I like to live vicariously through people who do cool stuff for Valentine’s Day, though. Anyone have any cool plans?
Tomorrow I’m excited to be going to the Darwins‘ annual blogging meetup, where we’ll be joined by Melanie Bettinelli, Dom Bettinelli, Literacy-Chic, Christopher of Sanctus Christopher and a few other friends who don’t currently have blogs. (I apologize if I’m forgetting anyone!) Should be a great time, as always.
I look forward to reading your posts!
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7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 55)
A little public service announcement for fellow procrastinators: Christmas Day is only nine weeks away!
A while back I mentioned that I was musing about what the difference is between an essay and a book. “Why is a book not just a long essay?” I wondered. Thanks to that awesome Breakout Novel book, I think I finally found the answer: An essay has only one layer; a book has many layers.
To use my conversion story as an example, I’ve written quite a few articles on that subject, and each one comes at it from a different perspective: One talked about how, surprisingly, Christianity ended up being more of a fulfillment of (rather than a departure from) what I’d always believed as an atheist; one talked about I came to believe that Christianity simply presented a more reasonable worldview; another talked about how my daily life has changed; etc. Each one of those is a layer on a larger story. When you write a book, what you’re doing is taking all the layers of a story and weaving them together to form one multi-layered story. Just a thought for fellow book nerds.
I just got finished doing one of my least favorite things: Shoe shopping. “But I love shoe shopping!” you say. Yeah, well, you don’t wear size 12 and have to buy glorified clown shoes from special Sasquatch stores. There is never anything cute in size 12. Ever. On the rare occasions that you actually come across a shoe that looks just darling on the size 5 sample and find out to your short-lived delight that they actually have a size 12 in some dusty corner of the store, when you see it in your size it looks like some sort of conceptual art project gone wrong. Allow me to illustrate:
To put it in perspective:
Add to the fact that I’m six feet tall and therefore heels are out lest I seriously start to look like a hairless Sasquatch, and you see that my choices are limited to about five shoes in the entire world. Anyway, yeah. I really don’t like shoe shopping.
If you didn’t get a chance to read the comments to my post about what to do when you screwed up and went against God’s will, I highly recommend taking a moment to scan them. There were some great thoughts there. Thank you to all who commented!
Tonight (I’m writing this on Thursday) I’ll be heading out to the Texas Alliance for Life dinner to see Gianna Jessen speak. It should be a great evening, and I look forward to hearing her presentation. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Gianna’s story of surviving an attempted abortion — the abortion doctor, ironically, having to sign her birth certificate — you can read the BBC coverage of it here.
Speaking of which, my husband did a little unexpected pro-life advocacy this morning. He somewhat spontaneously decided to stop by one of the local 40 Days for Life continuous prayer vigils to say hello to and see if anyone needed coffee or snacks or anything. There was only one guy there, and as soon as my husband arrived he said, “Thank God you’re here! The next person wasn’t able to make it and I’m late opening my business!” Since the goal is to have at least one person praying at all times, the guy couldn’t leave unless my husband agreed to stay. After a little hesitation he agreed to take over. And then it started raining.
His conversion on pro-life issues was about as dramatic as mine, but I don’t think he’d planned to do sidewalk prayer vigils just yet. But, nevertheless, there he was, standing under an umbrella in his suit and tie in front of an abortion clinic on a major road during rush hour. I have to wonder if anyone drove by and thought, “Look, some weirdo out in the rain…wait…wait a sec…that’s my lawyer!”
Yaya just rolled into town. Those of you who don’t know what that means can find out here. It just occurred to me that if God ever wanted to send me THE ULTIMATE BLOG POST, he could hook up it up where I’m driving with Yaya and we find a scorpion in the car while getting stuck behind someone with Trucknutz. Dude. I think that would be guaranteed to pretty much triple my blog traffic.
Anyway, have a great weekend, everyone!
I look forward to reading your posts!
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7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 43)
We went to the San Antonio zoo yesterday. In 101-degree heat. With a four-hour round trip drive. Does that sound challenging? It was. However, it was all worth it to meet up with the other Kidsave families — who are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met — and to see how excited all the girls were to be there. My kids liked it as well, although as it got closer to naptime and they began to look more and more like angry tomatoes, the excitement of the exotic animals began to wear off for them.
Also, in the “scary things that bite” sections, I was trying to get the kids excited as we walked past rattlesnakes, poisonous spiders and scorpions but it kind of fell flat when I announced, “Look, kids! It’s…a bunch of stuff that you can find in the back yard.”
I have a new job description for myself: wife, mother, writer and Hannah Montana English-to-Spanish translator. Rita is absolutely enchanted with this show but doesn’t know a word of English, so I narrate each episode in bad Spanish.
It’s a good thing she has the peppy visuals, because my descriptions alone make the show sound Kafkaesque. “Hannah without the hair is Miley…the friend does not know that Miley is famous because is secret that she is Hannah…and the father of Miley is mad…because she wants to sing and not go to dance with the nice boy…” I can only imagine the plot summaries she’s going to recount to her friends when she returns to Colombia.
“You’re letting her watch Hannah Montana?” you say? I know. Early on I tried to avoid it, but 12-year-old girls have Hannah Montana radar, and when I was flipping through the TV menu she spotted it immediately. Trying to steer her to something more enriching, I suggested that we watch EWTN in Spanish instead. “Look!” I announced, “A movie about Maria Goretti! How lovely to watch a film about a saint.” About thirty minutes into the movie I learned that I should do a little research to make sure I know about a saint’s life before encouraging children to watch movies about them. Just before the assault scene I switched it over to Hannah Montana in a desperate attempt to put on something a little more light. We’ve watched it daily ever since then.
Earlier this week we toured some amazing caves in our area. The tour was fascinating. It was so weird to look up at the top of the cavern and realize that we were standing right under the highway. The craziest part was when they turned out the lights to let us see the total darkness of the cave. The guide told us to close our eyes while he turned off the lights; when we opened our eyes again, there was no difference. None. Just complete darkness. I waved my hand an inch in front of my face and couldn’t see any trace of it. So creepy.
That experience made me realize that it takes a special type of person to be a cave explorer, that type being “not me.” I have a newfound fascination with people who are able to do that. Anyone know of any good books about cave exploration?
What are we going to do about the lack of a gender-neutral singular personal pronoun in the English language? Saying “he or she” all the time is way too clunky, but just using “he” or “she” often comes across like you’re trying to make some kind of political statement. Is there someone we can petition about this? Maybe we should just riot? Maybe we could all just agree to use “them” in the singular sense and fie on anyone who says we’re using it incorrectly. Who’s with me?
A huge “THANK YOU!!!!!!” to those who recommended duct tape in response to my feces apocalypse post. Putting a couple layers of duct tape across the flaps on my daughter’s diaper is a new part of our naptime and bedtime routines, and it’s had a 9 out of 10 success rate. Granted, 1/10th of the time it’s still pretty grim, but it’s a huge improvement.
A few people have mentioned that I seem stressed lately. My friend Elizabeth said in an email the othe day, “You sound SO incredibly tense and stressy-filled lately on your blog.” I found that interesting since I have been especially, ah, “challenged” lately but I didn’t realize it was so obvious.
I’ve been thinking a lot about why I’ve been having a tough time, and I think that 95% of it simply comes down to not having much “introvert time,” i.e. time when I don’t have to be “on” at all. I haven’t felt comfortable enforcing that with a guest in the house, worrying that it would be rude to essentially say, “Now that the kids are down for naps and it’s just you and I…I’m going to sit alone in my office. See you later!”
Though I technically knew that that was how I recharge my batteries and de-stress (I talked about that some here), I had no idea just how much it impacts me when I don’t have time like that. Even the slightest things leave me feeling like I CAN’T. DEAL. Nothing about having Rita here has been unmanagable in and of itself, but all the activity and responsibility + almost zero alone time has left me running in the red zone lately.
What I’ve realized is that when you have a guest staying with you for five weeks, you can’t be in “guest mode” all the time — you have to relax around them the way you would around family. Starting today I’m going to make it a high priority to get back to having daily introvert time. I’ll be interested to see how much it helps. I’ll report back in next week’s 7 Quick Takes.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
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7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 39)
I cannot believe that our Kidsave child “Rita” arrives Thursday! I also found out that the children’s chaperone from Colombia will rotate houses while she’s here, and she’ll be staying with us first, so she’ll be coming home with us from the airport on Thursday as well. (For those of you doing the math, that will make eight people in a three-bedroom house.)
I need tips from those of you who are domestically skilled: What is a nice welcome gift I could get for both Rita and the chaperone? I’d like to get a little special something to start out their trip on a nice note — preferably not too expensive and easy to pack for their return trip. Any ideas?
Baby Joy is finally getting baptized tomorrow! I’m so excited. Hopefully it will not be the flaming disaster that my son’s baptism was a couple years ago. One the plus side, I’m still holding out hope of America’s Funniest Home Videos riches.
This Tuesday is the last day to vote in the Catholic New Media Awards. If you’d like to vote, click here to create an account (it takes about two seconds — they only ask for a valid email account). Then you can click here to vote. I always discover a bunch of great new blogs every time I look through the nominees list.
Last week I told you guys that this picture was taken on my favorite vacation ever, and asked you to guess where it is, promising I’d give the answer this week. Nobody got the right answer! And now, the moment of truth…
Texas! A lot of people don’t realize that the Rocky Mountains extend down into Texas, Guadalupe Peak reaching 8,750 feet (2,667 meters). This picture was taken somewhere near Big Bend National Park.
We actually took this vacation to west Texas for our honeymoon. It was the best trip I could have imagined. It was a nine-hour drive (on open roads at high speeds) to get out there from the central part of the state, and is literally the middle of nowhere. All the towns had that eerie end-of-the-earth vibe where you feel instant camaraderie with anyone you encounter, and mixed in with the locals you’d meet people from places like Phoenix and San Francisco, passing through on cross-country trips.
Some of the towns really live up to the name “ghost towns,” the “ghost” part coming not only from the vanished people but from that keen awareness of your own vulnerability to larger forces that you feel when you’re hours and hours away from the nearest Wal-Mart, and the only light at night comes from the stars. If anyone’s looking for a really unique trip, I highly recommend taking the same route we did, spending a couple weeks visiting places like Marfa, Lajitas the McDonald Observatory and Terlinguas. It’s an ethereal, beautiful part of the world.
So I found out as part of my guest post for Rachelle Gardner that it’s OK if I say who my agent is. For some reason I thought that my literary agent and I had an unspoken understanding that it would be best if I denied all association with him, hopefully saving him from comments from respected colleagues like, “That woman you represent wrote about scorpions on her blog again today. She’s quite adept with the caps lock key. You must be very proud.”
Anyway, in case anyone’s interested, I’m represented by Ted Weinstein Literary Management.
Speaking of my tendency to write about stinging insects, here’s a Yaya story from this weekend: Shortly after we arrived, I was on her back porch with the kids and looked up to see a thriving wasps’ nest right above my head. Under normal circumstances I would tell you that it’s important to control your phobias so as not to impart your own irrational fears to your kids. However, when I looked up to see 100 (OK, maybe eight) wasps buzzing around their nest about a foot away from my head, my reaction was something along the lines of “RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! NOW! NOW! BEFORE THE WASPS ATTACK US! THEY’RE GOING TO STING US!!! AAAAH!!! IT’S SO TERRIBLE!!!!!”
I had just dragged all the kids to safety out in the yard when Yaya walked outside, holding some scissors she’d gone inside to get. I shrieked a warning at her just as she walked under the nest. She looked up, shrugged, and knocked the wasps’ nest down with the handle of the scissors. The nest fell right next to her feet, angry wasps darting all around her, and she took a moment to wipe off the scissors with her shirt before strolling off.
And you guys thought I was kidding when I said that she’s nonchalant about being stung by scorpions in bed!
This morning I’m excited to be grabbing coffee with “momtrepreneur,” podcaster and Faith and Family blogger Lisa Hendey while she’s in the area for the new media celebration.
(FYI: Unless I bring my laptop and occasionally interrupt our conversation with “You mind if I blog a little bit?”, I probably won’t approve comments until I’m back at the house. And trust me, based on a couple of monitor-meltingly appalling remarks people have tried to slip in lately, y’all do NOT want me to turn off comment moderation.)
Have a great weekend, everyone!
I look forward to reading your posts!
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7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 25)
So I did not realize that I am surrounded by a bunch of gourmet chefs. Friends have been bringing us dinners almost every night since the baby was born (thanks again to Care Calendar), and every single one of them has been a 10 on a scale of 1-10. I need to find some way to convince them to keep doing this indefinitely, because it’s going to be a major hardship to go back to eating my own cooking.
To my great distress, we saw a scorpion a few weeks ago (“a few weeks ago” as in “IN FREAKING FEBRUARY DON’T THESE THINGS EVER HIBERNATE!!!!!”). It is somehow not surprising that Yaya was involved (longtime readers may remember this classic Yaya + scorpion story). I heard her urgently calling the kids to come out on the back porch and ran out myself to see what all the commotion was about.
When we all got outside she was forlorn, explaining that she’d found a scorpion under the kids’ toy box and tried to catch it for them to play with but, alas, it was gone now. Having long since given up on trying to have the age-old “Are scorpions appropriate playthings for young toddlers?” debate with her, I feigned disappointed and turned to go back inside.
Just as I was about to close the door, on a hunch I asked, “Where did the scorpion go?”
“Oh, it ran in the house,” she said casually.
Scorpion season has begun.
(New readers who aren’t familiar with my stinging arachnid saga can read the whole story here.)
After I published my 7 Quick Takes post from last week some of the comments made me realize that I might have made myself sound a little too pious with #7.
You see, the original version of take #7 was quite a bit longer, including a lengthy rumination on how I wish sushi restaurants would take a page from gaudy Texas steakhouses and have a deal where if you eat some unbelievably grotesque quantity of food you can get your meal free. I imagined myself signing up for some “Eat Everything on Our 10-pound Nigiri Sake Plate and Get Your Meal Free!” special, perhaps even wearing a sweatband like those people who enter eating contests professionally, a crowd of awed onlookers standing around and cheering me on loudly on as I stuff sushi into my mouth with reckless abandon.
It was then that I added the note about this perhaps not being the most appropriate musing for Lent.
I ended up cutting the eating contest part for brevity, leaving only the much more mild comment about my plan to eat a lot of sushi on a date night with my husband. So I don’t think there’s any worry of me being too strict with my Lenten observances. I’m still planning to do a great sushi dinner (hopefully on a Sunday and without being too gluttonous), I’ll just try to refrain from entering any eating contests.
I’ve been hearing all sorts of great buzz about Meetup.com. I know quite a few people who have found everything from playdates to exercise groups to book clubs through that site, and they’ve all had great experiences with the people they met there.
I thought I’d give it a plug since I occasionally get emails from readers asking for tips about meeting likeminded people in their area. From what I’ve heard, Meetup.com seems like a good way to meet nice, normal people who share your interests.
Our TV broke the week before the baby was born. In a different phase of life I might have considered taking this as an opportunity to just live without a television, but I knew that there are going to be some occasions over the next couple of months were I desperately need to break out a Veggie Tales DVD to keep my children from getting mutinous. At the same time my husband received some extra money for some work he was doing on the side, so we decided to use it to get a new television.
We decided to go ahead and get a flatscreen TV. We’d priced them a few years ago and knew that there were some tiny ones (the size that people sometimes put in kitchens) within our budget.
So I sent my husband and four-year-old son off to Wal-Mart with the famous last words, “Just get the biggest one you can in our price range.”
A few hours later I came downstairs from a nap to see my husband and son beholding a great monolith that had appeared in our living room. It was our new, huge flatscreen TV. I SEE FLATSCREEN TV PRICES HAVE DROPPED A BIT IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, I thought as I watched them “oooh” and “aaaah” at the vivid soccer game on the monstrous screen.
I gently tried to broach the subject of perhaps exchanging it for a smaller model, but they got all Gollum on me, all but clinging to it and hissing “My preciousssss!” when I tried to step near it.
I’m kind of used to it now, though I am occasionally struck by the irony of watching Sunday Night Live episodes about holy detachment or somber Lenten Masses on a huge flatscreen television that we purchased during Lent.
A breastfeeding update: the Medela skin shields are saving my life. They’re a tremendous help with the pain, especially on that one side that was really bad. Interestingly, I tried them with previous babies and they hardly helped with the pain at all because there was still an issue of excruciating pain from the underlying tissue feeling bruised. This time there is none of that underlying tissue pain (likely because of the diet), and only surface skin pain. So I am thrilled that I gave the shields another shot — it’s made the baby’s first few days much more pleasant than usual!
Speaking of the baby, everything is going well. Unfortunately she sleeps a lot during the day and is up a lot at night, though that will probably change on its own as she gets older and more alert.
I’ve been reading Seven Storey Mountain during our late-night feedings. I think I’ll look back on this time in my life with warm memories, recalling these nights of cuddling with the baby as she nurses, sitting in my silent house at three o’clock in the morning, reading Thomas Merton’s poetic story of leaving the world for the silence of a Trappist monastery. There’s something ethereal about it*.
* I realize that I will probably be using words far different than “ethereal” to describe middle-of-the-night feedings when I no longer have family around to let me sleep in and get naps throughout the day.
I look forward to reading your posts!
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7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 21)
I’m sitting here, looking from the box of clutter in the corner of our living room that’s been there for weeks to the myriad stains on the carpet, waiting for the nesting instinct to kick in. Waiting…waiting…
Speaking of which, my doctor mentioned in passing today that we’ll probably schedule labor to be induced two weeks from Monday. ONLY TWO WEEKS?! It seems like it was just yesterday that I was writing this post talking about my nervousness about a brand new pregnancy. Even though I still have tinges of apprehension about handling four kids under age five, I’m excited to meet the new little one!
One of the interesting things about blogging is when you come across off-site discussions about your blog where the participants talk amongst themselves about your posts. It’s always an educational experience to see completely uncensored feedback about what you write — all the more so, I’ve found, on the not infrequent occasions when atheist forums link to something I’ve written. It’s no surprise that the consensus is typically that my writing not only drivel but indicative of amoeba-level intelligence, but what is rather fascinating is the sheer energy level that tends to be behind their opinions of my little site. Here’s a typical example, a recent discussion of one of my posts from last week (scroll down to see the comments, though be warned that there’s some profanity).
Anyway, I find that links like this from atheist forums always bless me with excellent opportunities to practice humility. 
Every time I watch Top Chef I feel the uncontrollable urge to pick up the phone and call Bravo and pitch them the concept of a Top Housewife competition. I’m telling you, it would be HUGE (meaning: I would like it). I have this all figured out. Here’s how the first episode would go:
WARM-UP CONTEST (winner receives immunity for elimination challenge)
A series of timed skills tests where the last person to finish is eliminated:
- Fold 10 king-sized fitted bed sheets into perfect squares with smooth edges.
- Match up pairs of socks from a bucket of 500 mismatched socks that are all the same color but different sizes.
- Craft a Faberge egg to specification while holding an angry octopus in one hand and reciting the Gettysburg Address while someone screams in your ear. (This one inspired by how I feel about fives times a day.)
ELIMINATION CHALLENGE
Since it might violate various laws to include real children in this series, the conditions of having multiple young children will be approximated with various similar stimuli:
Contestants have 60 minutes to get a living room and kitchen completely ready for formal company. Prior to the episode, 12 drunk interns will have been turned loose to have a kegger and a massive food fight on the site. During the challenge, trained monkeys will be sent in to cling to contestants’ legs; a door leading to a room full of angry bees will automatically open at frequent intervals and need to be shut; the phone will ring constantly and contestants will have to answer and respond to trivia questions; and at random intervals a box full of toys will be dumped in the middle of the living room floor. Oh, and because it’s my concept, there will be scorpions involved too.
OK, so now that I’ve typed it all out I see that it might not be the biggest ratings draw in the history of television or anything…but, hey, I would watch it!
There seems to be a small but vocal contingent of people on the internet who have strong feelings about the words healthy and healthful. I’ve received more than one note on the topic, I saw that someone left a similar comment for Kelly the Kitchen Kop, and I’ve seen it other places as well. These folks claim that it’s incorrect to say, for example, “I ate a healthy meal,” saying that it should be “I ate a healthful meal” instead.
Now I’m all confused because, according to Merriam-Webster, healthy can mean “conducive to health.” If that’s the case, then wouldn’t it be a correct use of the word to say, “I ate a healthy meal”? If there are any language experts out there, please weigh in! I’ve been using the term a lot lately with my diet talk so I’m very curious.
An email from my dad from this week:
I know you lie in bed at night and wonder how center lines and other road stripes and signs reflect the headlights. Here’s a shot of a gate sign being created:
They put down a heavy coat of yellow paint and immediately the guy in the blue jacket spreads ground up glass on the paint. The glass is about like beach sand. They said that for long stripes, the paint truck spays the line then there’s a glass sprayer right behind the paint sprayer.
Proving that we are not only cheap but unromantic, my husband and I have actually considered making our official St. Valentine’s Day celebration a few days after the 14th so that it’d be easier to get restaurant reservations and we could get cards and gifts on clearance.
I could just see us gushing about our romantic St. Gilbert of Sempringham dinner or the lovely card (marred just slightly by the big 80% OFF CLEARANCE sticker) that I got my husband for Conrad of Piacenza’s Day.
I look forward to reading your posts!
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Answering your questions!
Since all of you asked some great questions in response to the Great Delete of 2009, I thought I’d take the opportunity to answer some of them. Sorry I couldn’t get to them all, I just chose the ones that I could answer quickly since I’m short on time.
1. “Write about scorpions.” (The Sojourner)
I know, I know. Sometimes I suspect that half my readers are only lurking around for the next scorpion sighting (all the posts on that here — scroll down to see them all). Also, you know you might enjoy blogging a little too much when you occasionally have fleeting thoughts that you wish you’d see a scorpion around since it’s such great fodder for posts. Alas, I haven’t seen one since this infamous day in June.
2. “How do you apply your Christian principles in the moments of utter kid-mischief?” (Jane @ What About Mom?)
I say a prayer after I’m done screaming at them.
Kidding. This is an area where I’ve found that preemptive action is critical. For example, on days when I’ve slacked off on prayer and have eaten foods that leave me feeling sluggish, I’m much more tempted to let my Christian principles go flying out the window. Whereas when I’ve started my day by asking for God’s assistance and I’m structuring my days around prayer, getting as much sleep as possible, and eating foods that nourish me physically and spiritually, I am far more likely to respond calmly and prayerfully to kid-related chaos.
For another angle on this, I once shared some amazing advice I heard on this subject here.
3. “I would love to hear a story about your kids…If you choose not to write about them on purpose, I’d love to know why.” (Christine)
I do choose not to go into much detail about my kids here on this blog. One of the reasons is just because I try to keep it pretty focused on the topic of faith and daily life (which of course involves them, but doesn’t usually warrant specific details). The other reason just boils down to “it doesn’t feel right for this space.”
Maybe it’s because there are occasionally some extremely heated combox discussions in which personal insults start to fly and I wouldn’t want discussion of my kids dragged into it, or maybe it’s because I’ve had various websites for almost eight years now and have seen my fair share of seriously disturbing comments and emails, but I just never feel moved to write about my children in specific detail. (That said, I’m not opposed to it in theory and am not suggesting that other bloggers shouldn’t do so.)
4. “Write about how you met your husband.” (TL)
We met at work, at a high tech company where I was an online media developer and he was VP of one of the departments. This was back in the dot-com boom, and I could write an entire book of all the crazy things we witnessed there. We sort of bonded over the insanity of it all. (Think: a lead developer calling me one night before a critical deadline to ask me if I could take him to the hospital because he’d smoked too much crack; $20,000 open-bar company parties to celebrate vague milestones that wrapped up with police involvement at 5:00am; husband and wife coworkers soliciting people at work to join in their open marriage, etc.)
Oddly, the first time I saw him — he was walking in late to a department meeting — I “heard” the thought, “We’re going to get married.” It was so strange. I really didn’t have an impression of him either way yet — he was just some new coworker coming to a meeting — and the thought really didn’t seem to come from me. I was an atheist at the time, but of course now I wonder if there was something else at work there.
I wrote about our wedding and how our marriage has changed here.
5. “I would like to hear how you trusted God with the possibility of miscarriages or other things going wrong!” (Faith)
This was something I had to tackle early on. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the story, about two weeks after my husband and I shocked ourselves by realizing that our extensive research and prayer led us to find that the Catholic position on contraception was reasonable and correct and that we (gasp!) agreed with it, I was diagnosed with a life-threatening blood clot (a deep vein thrombosis, or DVT) at 36 weeks pregnant. I found out that it was caused by a clotting disorder that makes pregnancy complicated and somewhat dangerous — in other words, according to my doctors, future pregnancies were out for me. In a flurry of activity I had to leave the midwives I was seeing, get under the care of a high-risk OB and a hematologist, give myself shots in the stomach every day, have an induced hospital birth instead of a midwives-staffed birthing center birth, get on FDA Category X medication postpartum while trying to learn Natural Family Planning, etc.
We did not have insurance that covered pregnancy. The medicine I needed during pregnancy was $2,000 a month out of pocket (my insurance would pay part for this pregnancy only, but my portion was still $850 a month). Our medical debt went through the roof, and we were in tough financial times to begin with. Everyone pressured us to abandon this Catholic stuff and use contraception so that we wouldn’t have to go through this again. And, just when the dust finally started to settle, we found out we were unexpectedly pregnant again, still with no pregnancy insurance (as well as other concerns that I listed in that post).
In other words…I got a crash course in trusting God. For the first time in my life, I had to pray, I had to combine the medical research I was doing with a trust that if this were indeed the path that God wanted me on that he would work some kind of miracle to get us out of the mess we were in. And he did.
As I write this I’m realizing it probably warrants a post of its own. I’ll share more details in a separate post if anyone’s interested.
6. “I would love to read about your daily life in prayer and in relation to God. Do you go to church every day, or is it just bedtime prayer?” (Mrs. KAOS)
I still pray the Liturgy of the Hours (an FAQ about that here), though I admit that sometimes I fall out of the habit and need to recommit. I also try to go to daily Mass with the kids when possible, which lately has been about once every couple of weeks (in addition to Sundays). (And, yes, it is EPIC to take three kids under four when 33 weeks pregnant.) Other than that I just try to turn to God as much as possible throughout the day, asking for guidance here and there, trying to see him in all things. Some days I’m better at that than others.
7. “I’d love to read more about vocations — discerning our vocations, and what if we still don’t know our vocations, or what if the vocation we thought we were called to just didn’t pan out?” (Kim P.)
I’m no expert on that subject, but I did some Googling and came across this great PDF about discerning your vocation. I also highly recommend the books Finding God’s Will for You and Introduction to the Devout Life — two of the most life-changing books I’ve ever read.
8. “How do you stay spiritually awake, when your days must be very busy? How do you manage to keep God a priority?” (Tess)
One way would be simply praying every day. The Liturgy of the Hours has really helped in that department. Another little thing that has been surprisingly impactful is to always have a good spiritual book going (in addition to Bible reading, although that’s mainly what’s involved with praying the Hours). I’ve noticed that whenever I’m reading some interesting book about faith, I walk around thinking about whatever it is I’m reading and it helps keep my thoughts on what really matters throughout each day.
I’ve also found that the more frequently I receive the sacraments (the Eucharist and Confession), the more I feel close to the Lord at all times.
9. “You know what I’d like to hear? How you manage to write…with three young kids in the house. What happens when nap time goes awry? Do you have back-up plans?” (Kelly @ Love Well)
OK, I get asked this enough that I’m going to do a separate post about it.
10. “How do you view death now as opposed to when you were atheistic? Did you think about death then? Were you afraid? How has that changed.” (Jane)
Great question. I actually have a post in the works about that as well. The short answer is: though I mostly managed to push the reality of death far from my conscious mind when I was an atheist, it was always there, like when you can hear someone’s footsteps behind you. Occasionally the wall would come down and I’d internalize what it really meant to be nothing more than a bunch of chemical reactions. The level of visceral terror and despair that would ensue is nothing I could ever put into words. Needless to say, to be freed from that darkness has been a profound change.
But, like I said, I’ll cover that more in an upcoming post.
11. “What was or is the most difficult thing to get used being a Catholic?” (Jane)
At first it was just going to church every Sunday. Especially before I could receive the Eucharist, it was incredibly difficult to make myself go every Sunday. That’s terrible, I know, but I had only been to church a few times in my life (and even that was just tagging along with friends) and had it firmly entrenched in my mind that Sundays were for total free time.
Overall, though, what I have found to be the most difficult change has also been one of the very best changes: my husband and I practicing NFP and going from viewing our marriage with a “contraceptive mentality” to an “open to life” mentality. (Since there’s a lot of confusion about that term, here’s a good summary of what “open to life” means in the sense I’m using it.) It changed every single aspect of our lives — I mean, everything: the way we think about my husband’s career, the way we socialize, my body image, our relationships with God and one another, our plans for retirement and the future, our view of what a marriage is, our level of trust in God on both a long-term and short-term basis, etc. — nothing was the same after our conversion on that issue.
One difficult part of that has been letting go of the iron-fisted control I once had (or, thought I had) over my life (ahem). But I think the most difficult thing about it has been the reaction of others. Many people in our lives are baffled by the changes they’ve seen with us, and aren’t always understanding about why we appear to be making things harder for ourselves by not using more “reliable” methods of birth control than NFP. We have not always gotten positive reactions to new pregnancies, especially given the medical issues I mentioned in #5, and that has been a recurring source of stress and tension.
12. “Please write about how your conversion has inspired others to…at least question their unbelief.” (Jane)
I do regularly hear from atheists and agnostics who are searching and said that something I wrote resonated with them. As you can imagine, that just makes my day!
13. “I would like to hear about that in relation to having to let go of the ‘ideas’ about ourselves that we had when we were younger…I think that as we get older, the selfishness of our plans and dreams in those areas become clearer and yet the process of giving up those dreams is a very painful sacrifice.” (Hope T.)
I once wrote about this here. Basically, I have found that in letting go of my plans and letting God guide me, I have found more peace than I could have ever imagined. Even though my plans before were rather glamorous and the plans God has led me to now are much more simple, I shudder to think of how empty my old route was.
That said, there have been periods when I temporarily felt a lot of angst about giving up something that I was really set on. I’ve found that, if I can be patient, God will either show me a way to make it happen or give me peace about it not happening. If I feel sorrow or discomfort about letting something go that I just can’t seem to shake, that usually seems to be a sign that I need to pray about it more and see if there’s something else God has to tell me about it.
14. “I’d like to know if you get tired of talking about ‘atheism’ and all that’s included in that topic? Do you feel like that part of your identity clouds over what your are now?” (Rachel)
The short answer: no.
First of all, since I was raised as an atheist and didn’t even believe in God as a child, faith is still something very new and different to me. It’s like a new pair of shoes that I have yet to wear in; I still remember the old pair that, even though they were falling apart, were comfortable.
But the main reason is this: I remember how lost and lonely I felt when I was first exploring religion; it seemed like lifelong believers and I were simply speaking a different language. They would try to explain faith and religion to me and it just didn’t compute. I eventually found that it was former atheists who knew how to explain faith in a way that made sense to me, and I desperately sought to find more people like that. Reading the writing of former atheists — authors and blog commeters alike — was absolutely critical in my coming to belief in God.
I promised myself that if I ever got a handle on any of this stuff I would make myself findable, on Google and otherwise, as a former atheist; that even if I became some super-devout church lady I would always let people know that I used to be an atheist, so that if anyone else was ever coming out of atheism and feeling lost and lonely and hopeless, they would be able to find at least one person to talk to.
That’s it for today! Thank you for all the great questions. I really think I have the best group of commenters on the internet.
