roller coaster parenting: hold on to your hats

Recently, at the Terrible, Horrible End of a No-Good, Very Bad Week, I happened upon a reflection which described the tunnel of parenthood: the first five years of raising young children.

Tears sprung to my tired eyes as I read while baby nursed. We are in the tunnel, I realized. The long, dark, will-it-ever-end tunnel.

Finding myself in that mother’s description of these difficult days brought me both hope (only a few more years till we get to age five and know what we’re doing!) and despair (WE STILL HAVE YEARS UNTIL WE GET TO AGE FIVE AND KNOW WHAT WE’RE DOING). A deep breath and another pot of tea calmed me down, reminding me there is nothing magical about age five.

Yet the core truth is this: right now is really hard. But it will get better. My own sheer, stumbling faith tells me it will get better.

(That, and our toddler does now sleep a blissful 12+ hours a night, so I know theoretically that his little brother will someday, too.)

Now, I’m not naive enough to think this is as hard as it gets. I know we have plenty of rough days, sleepless months, and trying seasons of parenting ahead of us. That’s the life we signed up for when these babies came on board.

But the more I thought about the tunnel of new parenthood, the more I realized this was not just any tunnel.

This is a pitch-black, terrifying twists and turns, hold-on-for-your-life roller coaster tunnel. The Space Mountain of early parenting.

We waited a long time to get on this ride. When we decided we wanted to go, we checked that we met the requirements: age, height, medical conditions. But then it took much longer than we expected for the line to snake its way to the start.

So when we finally stepped into the long-awaited car, we were giddy with excitement. We strapped ourselves in, grinned at each other, and slapped our hands down on the bar. We were ready to go.

As the car slowly clicked up the first hill, we marvelled at the view. Look at us! Here we are! I can’t believe we’re about to do this!

Then the slow crest at the top, the instant suspended in mid-air….

And suddenly we’re free falling, wind and ground rushing at us so fast we can barely breathe, let alone scream. We’re whipped around to the right, banking the curve at insane speed, then slamming to the other side, spinning upside down and praying that we won’t plummet to sudden death below.

Hurtling up, down, back, forward; lurching in every direction; careening from one side to the other. Stomach spinning, head pounding, fists clenched to the bar, eyes squeezed shut. We thought it would never end.

But we held on, and we screamed when we could manage to gulp down a breath, and we even whooped for joy when we raced from one tunnel to the next and saw the blue sky shoot through overhead. We remembered that we wanted to be on the ride in the first place.

That’s where we are right now, my partner in parenting and I. Right in the middle of a wild ride that we jumped at the chance to take. Sometimes the loops make us laugh, sometimes the lurches make us queasy. We wonder some days if we were crazy to get on board, and we shake our heads other days that we can’t imagine not taking the plunge.

Living day to day in the coaster’s vertigo leaves me spinning. I lose my perspective as quickly as I lost control over the direction of the ride. I wonder who and where I will be when light finally bursts forth at tunnel’s end.

But I do know that one day – maybe at that magical age five, maybe years later – we’ll suddenly snap to the finish, just as sharp as the beginning. Bars will raise up, belts unclick all around us. We’ll look at each other, wild-eyed and grinning, and realize we made it. We never have to go back and be new parents all over again. We survived.

But oh, the darkness of the tunnel.

When the ride’s just beginning and you have no idea where it will end…

why i hate to leave my babies (and why i do it anyway)

I love my boys. And I love my job.

And I hate the tension between them.

While my commute being only a walk downstairs can seem enviable, working from home brings its own struggles. Boundaries are blurred. Child care or housework can encroach on my work time if I’m not careful. Or work can seep into every hour of the day and corner of the house if I don’t make myself fully present to my children when work is done.

Yes, working from home means I’m closer to my kids when they need me. Yes, working part-time means I’m able to be with them for much of the day-to-day of their early years. But it also means that when they are wailing upstairs, I can’t run to them – there is work to be done. Likewise, when they burst out in peals of laughter with the babysitter, I miss out on their joy. And that kills me, too.

Both sounds – the cries and the delights – tear at me when I can’t be right there. The flip side of being only a door away is that I am only a door away. And no white noise or background music can mask a mother’s most immediate and instinctive desire to run to her child.

There are other frustrations, of course. Trying to explain to a toddler why he can’t barge in on his mama whenever he wants a read or a cuddle. Pumping milk for a baby in the room right above my head. Navigating the tricky balance between letting a responsible sitter take charge of their care and feeling tempted to micro-manage since I’m within earshot.

And I’ve learned that living in-between worlds – that of the working mother and the stay-at-home mother – means I’m not good at doing either 100%.

Not being a full-time stay-at-home mom means that on the days when I’m with both boys from dawn till dusk with no break for my work, we are all on each other’s nerves by bedtime. I struggle when I’m home with them full-time.

Not being a full-time working mother means that on the days when I have to leave all day (or week) for meetings or conferences, the whole household is turned upside down to prepare for my extended absence. I struggle to get everything organized – for me and for them – to be gone full-time. To say nothing of hating how it feels to slip out of the house before they wake and return late after they’re back in bed.

So my work and my mothering are decidedly a muddle in the middle. Both/and; neither/nor.

And yet somehow I make it work and find the back-and-forth to be life-giving, if exhausting. I make it work because I love my kids and I love my job. I love using my skills and my gifts and my education to help make a small difference in my corner of the world. I feel called to this work and want to give myself to it.

But even knowing that I am blessed to have choices, and choices between good things, I still feel deeply torn on some days. The tensions I feel between my work and my family will never be fully resolved. I simply have to learn to live as best I can within them and rejoice in the fullness of my life writ large, pulled back from the daily effort required to keep juggling all these balls in the air.

One truth I did not know when I started on this mothering journey was how deeply compromised I would sometimes feel about the choices I would make. How much I would envy moms on one side of the fence or the other. But it turns out that parenting is a much more complicated picture than the pretty pastels I painted it to be in my youth.

Motherhood is also about compromise. And ambivalence. And guilt. And fear that if you choose poorly, you may somehow fail the most precious people in your life.

And when we don’t talk about the shadow side of mothering – when we insist upon the illusions of loving-every-second and complete-and-utter bliss – we sell ourselves short. All of us.

Including the God who mothers. The God who works. And the God who calls all of us to become the people we were created to be: people who give ourselves to work and relationships and service and others.

So I share my struggles here, in this space, with you, because I think it is only in the honest claiming and sharing of our stories that we create a community where diverse decisions and situations can be understood. I stake none of my choices as normative: this is simply the path I carved for myself. But showing the truth of it – the good and the bad – and inviting you to share your own story in turn reveals the many ways in which we are called and create our life out of our many calls.

One wish I have is for better language to share our stories. No “stay-at-home mom” lounges in the comfort of her couch all day, and all moms are “working mothers.” Women are called and gifted to serve the world in a myriad of vocations and professions. And it is the goodness of the work we are each called to do that makes our sacrifices “worth it” in the broadest sense.

So how could we more truthfully and creatively share the stories of the work we do as parents: inside and outside the home, paid and unpaid, for our children and for others? And how might this help us to tell God’s story better, too?

Where do you live in this tension?

How is your parenting shaped by compromise or conflict?

How do you embrace the choices you’ve made?

easter: perspective and retrospective

Yesterday morning as we stepped out of Easter Mass into glorious sunshine, my father noted that the weather all weekend had perfectly matched the Triduum.

We arrived to the cabin on Good Friday afternoon amidst grey clouds and light rain:

Holy Saturday gradually transformed from morning showers to afternoon sun peeking through the clouds:

And Easter Sunday morning was clear as a bell, bright with sun, warm as spring all day long:

Today, as I wake with a head full of thoughts of the Triduum, of moving liturgies and moments of prayer, of a weekend rich with good company and good food, I’m reminded of the ways the world outside often matches our inside journey – if we only open our eyes to see.

I think back to an Easter Monday six years ago, when F asked me to marry him. It had been another beautiful day, unseasonably warm, and I had the day off (a lovely perk of working for a French company). So after a happy, relaxing day of a long run, a short nap, a spring cleaning of my apartment, I spent the first twenty minutes of F’s arrival to my place after work babbling to him about what a great day I’d had, how beautiful the weather had been. He practically had to interrupt me to make his sly transition to propose before the ring burned a hole in his pocket.

And as the day transformed into one we would never forget, I remember (amidst my total joy and crazy adrenaline) that the weather had matched my mood all day long – an unexpected explosion of warm and sunshine into that perfect March day.

Today, the morning is bright and fresh with dew, ready to greet the unfolding of the Easter season. The grass is greener than when we left three days ago, and the garden is full of blue jays pecking at the tilled soil. Though today brings a return to work and the quietness of just me and S at home all day, it feels like a day rich with possibility.

And I wonder if it is simply because I took the time to notice before launching into the day’s work. How often do I fail to see what God has quietly, lovingly placed before me? Or is the clarity only apparent in retrospect? Perhaps only when we rejoice in the Easter sunshine do we realize how dark the tomb really was.

I don’t know about you, but I need Easter this year. I need sunshine and daffodils. I need hope and renewed joy. I need fresh air and feasting on the first yields of the garden.

It’s been a long, hard winter. That tomb was dark and deep. I am ready for Easter’s spring.

a muddy truth

Fifty degrees in February. We rarely see days like this in the frozen north, so S and I and the beagle had to seize the day and venture out for a long afternoon walk. The fresh air and stretched limbs did us all good.

For some people, walking can be a spiritual practice. I remember reading Carol Howard Merritt describe this beautifully in her book Tribal Church, where she wrote about how long walks on a beach near her home helped her to heal after a miscarriage.

But walking hasn’t usually produced any kind of spiritual epiphany for me. Daily jaunts with a stroller and a dog in tow usually produce this kind of litany instead: H., heel. HEEL! Yes, S., that’s the doggie. Doggie. Yes, that’s the sound the doggie makes. No, we didn’t bring any snacks; you can wait till we get home. Oops, watch out for the puddle! Let’s steer around…Ok, car’s coming - heel, H. COME HERE, shh S., you’re fine, it’s just a car. Let’s go. No, no, H. – you cannot pee there. NO. STOP. STOP. No, S., you’re fine. Come, H., COME.

I enjoy our walks, but they’re hardly spiritual.

Today was a little different, however. As we looped through our neighborhood, listening to water drip off eaves and melting snow trickle down hills into the gutters, I started to notice the ground around us. Muddy, slushy, gooey muck. Browned snow mixed with dirt and sticks where the plow pushed it to the curb. Bits of trash now unearthed in the unseasonal thaw. A lone smashed pumpkin from Halloween, rotting at the road’s bend.

Most late winters, I turn up my nose at the detrius that spring’s melt brings. All the dog droppings that people forgot to pick up during winter’s chill, litter blown from garbage cans in the howling freeze, crumpled newspapers, piles of unraked leaves. It’s embarassing to see what lies hidden underneath snow’s pristine white.

But this day, my heart was comforted by the mess and the muck. I feel like that right now, at this moment in this season of parenting. Like my rawest and ugliest bits are being uncovered by forces beyond my control, laid bare for any passer-by to see.

Overwhelmed by pregnancy exhaustion and nausea, tired of solo parenting a tiring toddler while F works overseas, stressed by work and home and everything in between. My patience is short, my to-do list is long, and my prayer life is nowhere. If I ever wondered what it physically felt like to be at your wit’s end, I am living there every day now.

So I saw the mess and mud on the road’s shoulder as we walked today, and I felt comforted. I needed to see all that muck – the soggy newspaper and the dog droppings and the pop bottles and the rotting leaves – to remind myself that underneath, green grass pushes through undaunted. Somewhere deep down in my heart, it is there, too, though I can’t feel or see it now. There is happiness and laughter and peace and calm to be found. There is God.

We all have the same junk lining our lawns when the snow melts; we can’t hide it under the snow once the sun spins close enough to thaw. I know my life is like that, too. The path I’m struggling down is not uncharted territory, even though it’s daunting for me. There is solidarity to be found here somewhere.

But we’re each embarassed by the truth of our shadow sides, secretly shamed by the flaws and the faults and the sins. We’d rather keep certain parts of ourselves hidden under a thick, safe blanket of snow. Winter is comforting like that. Spring, on the other hand, brings the truth to light – the earthy, muddy muck we cannot hide. We have to acknowledge it, claim the mess as our own, do what we can to clean it up.

Muddying through these days is all I can do. I don’t have the strength or energy for anything else. I do not exaggerate when I state I am barely keeping it together. But maybe the truth of mud is exactly what I needed to realize in this moment: that through the mucky mess of right now, my green grass will eventually, inevitably push through towards the sun.

Spring will come. Winter does not last forever. And hope does not disappoint.

resolving (sort of)

I’m so lousy at keeping New Year’s resolutions that I don’t even bother to make them anymore.

But all the buzz about diets and new workout routines in every headline these days has made me at least stop to consider what I’d like to change for this year. January seems as good a moment as any other to take stock of where I’ve been and where I’d like to be. (And since I missed 1-1-11, why not jump on 1-11-11 as an equally cool day for resolving?)

Suffice it to say, I think my “mothering spirit” has way more room for improvement than could ever be chronicled here. And while I don’t like the internet-era tendency to air every personal flaw and foible as if they’re interesting to anyone but me, I do think a certain measure of honesty is to be valued.

I don’t think we make enough space for honesty in conversations about parenting. Raising children – while doing all the other work we’re called to do – is really challenging. We do no one, including ourselves, any favors when we pretend it’s all sunny days and smiles.

So in the spirit of honesty (and in the hopes that writing it down may make me stick to my goals), here’s a few ways I hope to challenge my mothering spirit this year:

My temper. I have a lousy temper. Which I have completely lost by yelling at my sweet little toddler more times than I would care to admit. I feel rotten awful every time I do, and I swear up and down that I’m going to work on becoming more patient. So if I could make any baby steps towards this goal in 2011, I would consider it a rousing success. My current strategies include trying to avert stressful situations before they erupt and visualizing how I could act differently. For example: imagine gentler responses to the throwing of food on the floor than “WHY WON’T YOU JUST EAT YOUR #$@*%# PEAS??!?!?” Also deep breaths. Any other suggestions are more than welcomed.

My time-wasting habits. Face.book has been renamed “the suck” in this house, an abbreviation for “the timesuck” but a nickname that seems ever more fitting for the way it slurps up my free time and often leaves me feeling, well, suckier about myself. I’m sure we all have the “friends” (such a strange, redefined term these days) who seem to post nothing but variations on this theme: “I have the best husband/kids/job/house/life in the WORLD and I could NOT BE HAPPIER! Everything is PERFECT!” Thrilled as I am for their happiness, it often leaves me feeling inadequate. Yes, I love my spouse and my child and my work, but I have a lot of tough days, too. I second-guess myself a lot and I compare myself too often to those around me. So I wonder sometimes if I would be a less anxious person with more quiet and free time if I could just give up the timesuck? Again, anyone with advice on how to severe the ties, or perhaps just wean back a bit: bring it on.

There are lots of other things I’d like to change about myself, certainly. But these are a few of the struggles I have that most challenge my mothering spirit – the energy, joy and hope I bring to parenting. I’m not putting any hard-and-fast resolutions around them, because I’m trying to decrease – not increase – the amount of stress and pressure in my life. But writing about parts of myself that I’d like to change is empowering in a way: I feel freed from some of guilt’s weight when I name my challenges and my hopes to change them.

I don’t know any good prayers for New Year’s resolutions (or even belated 1-11-11 resolutions, which should reveal that punctuality is something I could stand to make a resolution or two about as well). But I love the hilarious Anne Lamott’s saying that the two best prayers she knows are:

Help me. Help me. Help me.

and

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Seems like a pretty good way to start resolving.

an angel’s words

be. not. afraid.

This week I’m helping to host a meeting on integration in theological education. A fascinating and important topic for today’s theological schools. But that’s beside my point.

Tonight at dinner I sat next to a professor from a Lutheran seminary. We got into an interesting discussion about conflicting understandings of the Gospel message. Earlier in the day’s meetings, someone commented that Catholic seminaries often struggle with different interpretations of the Vatican II documents: whether they call for the church to be engaged with the world, in the world, or whether they demand a more wary stance, that the church must be protected from the world. He wondered whether I, as a Catholic, thought that was a fair assessement – that groups interpreted the same document so differently?

“Oh yes,” I said. I have seen that tension manifest itself quite clearly in the big tent that is the Catholic Church.

He went on to tell me that when he was a new faculty member, he learned about his institution’s culture by meeting with the elders of the community: older faculty members who knew the politics and power plays that made the seminary what it was. The wise ones all told him a very similar story: that there were two camps in the school – one that wanted the seminary to be engaged in the world and one that wanted the seminary to be protected from the world. Their warring back-and-forth was what made the school the contentious place it was when he joined the faculty.

I offered that perhaps these opposing strains of Christianity were present from the beginning, that there have always been Christians reading the Gospel in different ways and fighting over their interpretations.

“Maybe,” he sighed. “But don’t you just want to take people by the hand, and lead them back to the words of the Gospel, and say, ‘Be not afraid! I am bringing you good news of great joy!’”

I had to smile at the Advent angel’s echoes. But his words gave me pause.

Fear does drive us – our decisions as individuals and as institutions. We want to be in control, we want to know. And when we cannot fully control or know, our fear tears us apart inside and outside.

We cannot function in healthy, loving ways as individuals or as the Body of Christ when we are driven by fear instead of trust in the boundless goodness of God. If the angel’s call is to be not afraid, then fear is incompatible with the Christian life.

Be not afraid. Angels speak these same words over and over again throughout our Advent Scriptures. To Zechariah. To Mary. To Joseph. Ordinary people who struggle to seize the impossible, who wonder how to trust God. But each one comes to accept God’s call and God’s gift with courage and faith, not fear.

There are plenty of things I fear. Things I seek to control and know. Places I fail to trust to God. Letting the angel’s words echo in my mind after dinner tonight led me to see this as my Advent challenge for the days that remain. To be not-afraid. To believe. To hope. To let go.

For nothing will be impossible for God.

a season of hope

Each week I write a reflection for my parish bulletin on the Sunday Scriptures and Catholic social teaching. On the good weeks, it provides a disciplined way for me to reflect on the readings before we get to Mass. On the bad weeks, I think grouchy, uncharitable thoughts about How I Don’t Have For This With Work And Child And Everything Else. But I still try to persevere, for myself if nothing else. I need to encounter God in Scripture more than I often do.

This week was a Good Week. True, I had no time to write it (again). And with F out of town (again) and a snow storm swirling round the house (again), I had a driveway to shovel as well. But I forced myself to read the Scripture for Sunday before I went out and tackled the shoveling.

I adore the first reading from Isaiah (the Peaceable Kingdom!), and the Gospel about wild and wooly John the Baptist preaching repentance is a “gimme” for reflecting on social justice. But instead it was this one line from Paul’s letter to the Romans that gave me pause (enough to chew on while I shoveled, anyway):

Brothers and sisters:
Whatever was written previously was written for our instruction,
that by endurance and by the encouragement of the Scriptures
we might have hope.

Hope. In Advent, in all time. In Paul’s day, in our own. Hope can become so cliched as to wither into meaninglessness. Until we enflesh it with the power of Spirit and the truth of Scripture, which remind us that hope is not easy but is what/how/who we are called to be each day as Christians.

In my research on vocation, I recently came across a wonderful article by Walter Brueggeman called “Covenanting as Human Vocation.” In his exploration of the relationship between God and Israel, Brueggeman brings his characteristic wisdom and poetic writing to bear on the subject of hope. At one point, his words stopped me in my tracks:

“In response to the One who makes all things new, a faithful human action is hope, to live in sure and certain confidence of promises, to function each day trusting that God’s promises and purposes will not fail. Hope is not something one does at the margins of life when our resources fail, but it is definitional for persons in covenant with this God.”

When I am at my worst – as Brueggeman says, “at the margins of life” – is when I am consumed with thoughts of hope. I hunger after it; I find it nowhere and yet I long for it everywhere.

As I often do during this season of Advent, I think back to our journey through infertility, when hope wore thin and my prayers were pleading, plodding petitions. Hope seemed so far-off, certainly not a daily companion or a faithful friend.

But Brueggeman challenges me – and all of us – to consider hope as the central mark by which we define our relationship with God. We are called to trust that God’s promises will not fail. We are covenanted to believe that goodness, love, and forgiveness will triumph. We are made to hope, and when we do otherwise, we live counter to the very nature by which God created us.

To hope is to be faithful. It is not naive or immature; it is not fool-hearty or simplistic. Hope is the real stuff of relationship with God and with each other. Scripture was passed down through the centuries, spoken from generation to generation, written down for future believers – so that “we might have hope.” What a powerful witness.

Advent is a season of hope. A promised savior for an enslaved people. An in-breaking of the divine into the very essence of humanity. The fulfillment of the prophets’ visions.

We await the birth of Jesus with the same faithful anticipation, the same hopeful trust in God’s good promises as centuries of followers before us. Hope is not marginal for Christians, but definitional. It makes us who we are – resurrection people (even at the nativity). Advent invites us to remember who we are.

what to expect when you’re adventing

Advent came alive for me two years ago.

In the span of one season, one calendar month, my world was transformed from infertility to fertility.

The first Sunday of Advent had brought with it deep breaths and a resolution to Just Forget How Awful Advent Felt Last Year And Make It Through Mass Today Without Crying. The second Sunday slumped forward into a familiar place of pessimism: It Is Never Going To Happen For Us And I Wish I Could Stop Wanting It To Happen.

But then.

There was this miraculous Wednesday in the middle of a cold December week. That brought with it one faint pink line – the first that dared seem real and not mere hope. And with it (and the second, and third tests that followed, just to be sure) came amazement.

What seemed so easy and natural – and often unwanted – for so many women was for us the culmination of months and months and months of charts, drugs, hormones, doctors and tests. To say nothing of prayer, tears, anger and more prayer. Frustrated, fitful prayer. We had to work at this, and it was painful, all-consuming work at times.

But then the sorrow was transformed. The tears turned into dancing.

My astonishment was palpable. I remember sitting at church during the third week of Advent, giddy from the Knowledge and barely off Cloud Nine. I realized that I would no longer have to grit my teeth through another Christmas chorus of “For unto us a child is born!” Instead, I was entering into expectancy just as the Church sang its praises – as the symbol of our openness and readiness towards the in-breaking of God in our lives.

I can mark my journey that Advent through Scripture. I went from wallowing in the psalmist’s pit of despair to marveling at an angel’s startling announcement of conception. Could it really be?

The season’s symbols and stories shone in a new light. The tale of long-barren Elizabeth and Zechariah was no longer dry history. The leaping and blessing of John and Jesus in the womb no longer echoed like well-worn lines of rote prayer. The fear, surprise, and delight of these men and women was real and enfleshed. Their stories were our own.

This Advent I am profoundly grateful, from the depths of my core where that still-surprising and long-awaited life sprung, for the life of S. As we soon celebrate the anniversary of The Day We Found Out, I give thanks as well for living Advent: leaning into the unknowing and discovering God’s abundant goodness that is waiting therein.

Mystery, not magic; hoping, not having – these are the marks of the season. Of the graces to be dug from the thorny brambles of barrenness, spiritual renewal is thankfully a fruitful gift. But for me, the unexpected seasonal rebirth proved to be just as surprising: a welcome Advent guest.