before-kids and after-kids: two halves of a marriage

We’re about to tip the balance of our marriage, my husband and I.

This weekend we celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary. We enjoyed an elegant dinner on china and crystal once the babies were asleep upstairs. Watched a whole movie from start to finish without interruption. Indulged in sweet rolls for breakfast and ice cream in the afternoon. Took a long walk downtown and watched our boys play in the sunshine.

Darn near perfect.

And in a few weeks, we’ll celebrate our son’s third birthday. He’s already a-twitter about a cake and a party, so plans are on the horizon. As is preschool, further confirming that our firstborn is no longer a baby, no longer a toddler, but on his way to becoming a Boy.

All of which led me to realize that our marriage now stands evenly balanced, for a blink of an instant, between our years with children and our years without. From this point on, the days when we were partners but not yet parents will start to slip farther away, becoming a distant memory – like sleeping in past nine and spontaneous date nights.

I loved the years of our early marriage. For some they are the hardest, but for us they were full of joy and laughter. We loved getting married, loved being married. No, we weren’t perfect. Far from it. We had to work through plenty of annoyances and adjustments to living with each other, like every couple does. We had to learn how to be in relationship in a whole new way. But for whatever reason – the clicking of our personalities or the constellation of life experiences that led us to each other – we have been blessed with a deep delight as the foundation of our life together. I have thanked God for that gift every day since.

So when parenthood proved to be harder to come by than we expected, in the midst of those lovely early years, it was tough. No, overdone steak is tough; algebraic equations are tough. Infertility simply sucks. It is a profoundly depressing and upheaving and table-turning and gut-wrenching experience. You slam up against your own limits and find yourself powerless. You can do nothing but try and hope and pray and wait and see.

For us, infertility ended. For many, it doesn’t. And that daily reminder, our sheer sense of blessedness at having the chance to have a child, has wrapped our experience of parenting in a sense of wonder and gratitude that has forever deepened our relationship. Watching each other become parents has been touching and tender and terrifying and transformative. Our children have changed us, changed our marriage, in ways we’re only beginning to understand.

Last week we finally started hanging pictures in our new home. One of the first to grace the walls was our wedding portrait. We stood in front of the frame, late afternoon sun reflecting our silhouettes onto our former selves, and laughed that someone must have let sixteen year-olds get married, because how could those fresh-faced kids possibly be us, just a few years back?

I drifted back to that Saturday in July, the same sweet burst of stargazer lillies floating in from the vase in the kitchen, faithfully filled by that same groom. I thought about the two halves of our marriage and the turning point of a baby’s arrival that changes everything.

And I realized that the further we get from our wedding day, the more our marriage becomes more than us, those two grinning goofs in the photo. It’s about our two boys, too.

So while I sometimes long for those early years of our marriage, the spontaneity and simplicity of pre-kid days, I know that where we are now and where we’re going is exactly where I want to be.

And who I want to be with.

where we dreamed our babies

We’ve been tackling lots of house projects lately – windows, floors, closets. So I find myself thinking a lot about this home we’ve created, this place we became a family.

There is a deep joy in making a house a home, a fulfillment I never imagined when I was an energetic twenty-year-old, hauling tattered boxes in and out of different apartments every year. Today I find myself having lived on this street for longer than I’ve lived anywhere except my childhood home. My address hasn’t changed in years, but my perspective has.

Through the seasons I’ve spent gazing out the same windows at the same trees, I’ve learned that settling in isn’t the same as settling. The joy of owning a home is putting down deep roots so beauty can grow. It’s the wisdom grown from tending to one small piece of God’s green earth. It’s the wonder of taking someone else’s place and filling it with your own dreams.

We’ve planted gardens and fruit trees, rose bushes and lilacs. We picked out new appliances when old broke. We hauled furniture upstairs and down when inspiration struck. I’ve watched crews of construction workers tromp in and out of our yard, putting on new roofs or tearing up old floors. My handy husband even built a bedroom and a basement of bookshelves.

In short, we’ve made this place our own.

But when I think back on this house, my strongest memories will be the transformations that took place within us, within its walls.

This house was full of infertility’s charts, tests and meds before it was full of babies’ clothes, books and toys. It was full of couple love before it was full of children. This “starter home” is where we became partners and parents. Where we started writing the story of our life together.

A few days ago I took a break from wrangling the bottomless heap of kids’ clothes in the closet. Sweaty and tired, I laid on the floor and stared up at the spinning fan. The fan that my husband installed, in the room that my mother and mother-in-law painted for our first baby. I thought about the home we have made while I listened to my son pretend to read from one of his favorite books:

We’d dreamed a baby, we’d wanted a baby, we’d planned for a baby, we’d waited and waited and waited for a baby. 

Until finally there was you. 

As he flipped the final pages, I turned my head on the carpet to watch him sing: And oh, how we love you!

Watching my baby-turned-boy, I realized that perhaps this chapter is the most important one we’ve written in the story of this house. Not the herb garden we planted out front or the strawberry patch we dug out back. But the family we became along the way.

When we were giddy newlyweds rushing in the door from our honeymoon, we had no idea how the early years of our marriage would be shaped by the wanting and hoping and praying for children. This was the place we dreamed our babies, wondering how they would look and when they would arrive. This was the place we planned for our babies, worrying as the months stretched into years. This became the place we waited and waited and waited for our babies. Until finally, they were here.

And oh, how we love them.

children, convents, and other commitments

Over the past few weeks, three of my friends from graduate school have announced plans to enter religious life.

None of these announcements were entirely shocking, given what I knew of each person and their journey thus far. But each decision brought its own elements of surprise. And to have three such announcements in such a short span of time was remarkable, to say the least. Few choices are more counter-cultural in our day and age.

One night over dinner, F and I talked about one friend’s decision to enter a religious community. As we marveled at parts of her choice and scratched our heads at others, I set down my fork (ever the signal of a grand proclamation to come) and declared as only a devil’s advocate could, “It’s just so PERMANENT! I mean, how does she know this is the right decision, the place she’s meant to be? How can she make this kind of commitment, for the REST OF HER LIFE?”

F smirked and lowered his gaze to my belly. “So you’re asking how she can make a lifelong commitment, without completely understanding what she’s getting into? Don’t you think it’s a little late for you to be asking that?”

I love when he calls me out.

Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about the commitments we are called to as part of our vocations. Some are permanent; others are for a season. We hope that the Big Ones – marriage, parenting, religious life – last for a lifetime. But we all know the messy reality of human beings proves that not to be true. So knowing that we could fly or fall, how do we take the leap at all?

Hope. Faith. Trust. Guts. Sheer stubbornness and determination.

Ultimately we all have to decide which voices we will listen to. Our own? God’s? The multitude around us? Every decision to make a lifelong commitment – to marry, to raise a child, to enter religious life – is inevitably faced by nay-sayers.

“Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce,” the cynic reminds the young couple eager to walk down the aisle.

“Celibacy is impossible and outdated,” the doubters challenge the seminarian.

“You’ll be responsible for that little brat for 18 years, you know,” the bitter joke to the pregnant. “And you’ll never sleep again.”

And yet no lifelong commitment can be lived out perfectly, since it is lived by imperfect people. The best we can hope to do is live faithfully as the person God created us to be.

Sad, then, that we sometimes tear each other down rather than build each other up. My vocation is strengthened – not diminished – by you living out yours as well. No one’s is holier or worthier; each is simply particular to the gifts we have been given, to the community to which we have been called.

Certainly we all have doubts – about our own vocations as well as others. Few things worse than sitting (or standing up) at a wedding where you’re not convinced the couple will make it. But once all the wise counsel has been given and the decision has been made, we owe it to each other to support each other as best we can, in the ways and the places we have chosen to answer the call.

Every great pastor was once a naive seminarian. Every wise grandmother was once a clueless new mother. Every CEO was once an awkward new hire.

And perhaps there’s something necessary about our naivete at the outset of answering our vocational calls. I may have no clue what I’m getting myself into with baby #2. And my dear friend who’s becoming a sister may have no idea what awaits her in community life.

But we need our hopes (and perhaps our ignorance) in order to take a leap of faith, trusting that a God who is bigger than our doubts and fears will have greater things in store for us than we can imagine on our own. If we knew everything that awaits us down these paths, we’d probably never say yes. But we’d miss the growth and joy and wisdom that far outweigh the struggles we’ll face.

So we say “I do.” We take the job. We take the new baby in our arms. We don the veil. And we hope each morning, even the dark and gloomy ones, that our response to the call can be as faithful as the One who called us.

Crazy? Sure. But hasn’t every decision that turned out to be good – to have another child, to enter religious life, to move halfway across the world to serve those in need – required at least a little bit of crazy?

sacrifices: book shelves over brussel sprouts

“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think interior decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.” – Anna Quindlen

F built this bookshelf. By hand. By himself. Over a matter of mere weeks. In case you can’t tell, I am completely in awe.

The first time the nesting whirlwind hit this house, when S was due to arrive, F built a guest bedroom in our basement. My hormonal self needed to know that there would be space for my mom to stay when she came to help us with baby (and space for future guests to always feel welcome in our home).

So he dreamed it, designed it, and made it a reality. As I joked to friends, you could have put me downstairs with all the necessary lumber and tools, and after seven years I still wouldn’t have anything to show you that vaguely resembled what he constructed. Completely in awe.

This second time around, we needed space for stuff (in order to have more space for people). So F dreamed, designed, and built an entire wall of bookshelves to store the ever-growing stacks of theological tomes and children’s books that creep into our home. There is nothing that warms a book-lover’s heart more than a wall of well-loved books. So every time I walk downstairs and see my grad school favorites mixed with F’s engineering textbooks and S’s board books, I smile to myself: this is the lovely blend that makes this family.

But F’s hours of manual labor inside have come at a cost.

Because not only did he want to finish the bookshelves before baby arrived, but I also wanted him to help me purge and rearrange every.other.room in this house. Project after project filled our weekends as we prepared our home to hold one more.

And outside in the garden, the weeds grew wild.

F is one of those passionate gardeners who dreams of planting in January. While I glower at the howling winter winds, he’s buried in seed catalogs. He plans the garden’s rows before the snow has melted, and for months we have tiny seedlings growing in our basement, stretching towards fluorescent lights in the hopes of someday-sun.

I love our vegetable garden, too; don’t get me wrong. But if it weren’t for F’s passion, dedication, and hard work, we would never have one.

Yet this year, he sacrificed plenty of prime planting days for my projects. And as I slowly noticed that sections of the garden went unseeded or unweeded, a nagging sense of guilt began to grow.

How could I steal this time away from his passion? He waits all year to get out in the garden, and instead I have him crawling around the basement, digging out plastic tubs of baby clothes so I can nest?

I began to voice the guilt. I offered to do S’s bath and bed routine so he could get an extra hour of sunlight outside in the evenings. I came up with creative detours around needing his help for the nesting projects I wanted to get done. I even claimed I could help weed – an offer he quickly shot down.

Instead, he smiled and told me it was fine. While the weeds grew taller and taller.

Now that the corner has turned on garden time and we’re beginning to harvest, I can finally help out more. Blanching beans, freezing zucchini, cooking and baking with the fruits of the garden are easy for me to do as I sit in the kitchen. And even though we still have an ample stream of veggies coming in from the garden, we both know it’s not the wild abundance of harvests past. So the guilt lingered in my growing belly.

Until this morning. I was lying in bed before dawn, thinking of how I should start the day with a pick of beans and cucumbers. And as I clumsily heaved my giant belly out of bed, I suddenly realized that while F didn’t get the broccoli or the cauliflower planted this year, there was plenty I had sacrificed this summer as well.

My favorite parts of my favorite season? Working alongside him in the garden. Bike rides around town. Fishing trips and camping excursions. Sipping white wine on an outdoor veranda. Laying on my back in the sun.

Not one of those delights could happen this summer. And while I was busy lamenting the time he didn’t get out in the garden, he was noticing everything that I was giving up, too.

If there is one small truth I know about parenting, it is that the sacrifices never stop. Next year will bring something new: a passion we don’t get to pursue, a trip we don’t get to take, a comfort we don’t get to continue. But my prayer is that each time I open the freezer this winter and pull out another bag of home-grown peppers, I will remember how much F sacrificed for me this summer. Next year will bring my turn to let him dig in the dirt while I chase around two toddlers in the hot sun.

And I hope I can do that with half the grace with which he let the weeds grow this year. Completely in awe.

on stations, stretchmarks & stories of naming

Stumbled across a few lovely things online in the past few days and thought I’d share.

First is a beautiful reflection on marriage. In the quiet calm between a bachelorette weekend and a best friend’s wedding in June, there’s been lots of talk of weddings lately. And I loved what this deacon had to say about weddings and marriage and how to make a real, earthy, persistent partnership last:

You can never tell, on the day when the vows are said and the petals are strewn and the rice is thrown, whether a marriage, any marriage, will last. Just ask Arnold and Maria—or, for that matter, almost anyone in your own family. I think we all discover, sooner or later, that this marriage thing is a lot harder than it looks. I’ll never forget the story of an older woman who once told a priest, “Father, when you’re walking down that aisle on your wedding day, you don’t see the Stations of the Cross.” …

Beyond the sacramental grace involved—and grace and prayer do play a big part, I think—it’s a lot of talking, and a lot of listening, and a lot of patience, and a lot of persistence. It’s wanting this little partnership to hold together, in spite of all the temptations and opportunities to make it rupture. It’s realizing, day after day and year after year, that the strange and beautiful “something” that drew you to this other person still matters. It’s making the choice to stay married, every day, because you know in your gut and in your head that your life is infinitely better because this other person is a part of it.

That last line is my favorite. Talk about vocation.

Moving on to other callings I like to muse about here, I came across a great reflection from Wendy Wright quoted on the Why Stay Catholic? blog. She writes about the physical acts of carrying and birthing children: how mothers’ bodies are forever changed by this sacrifice and how God’s heart must be equally shaped by the space we each take up within it:

One is never the same. After each birth, the body readjusts. But things are never as they were before. Silver-webbed stretchmarks are only an outward sign. More hidden are the now elastic vessels of the vascular system, the pliancy of the muscle walls, the flat pouch of the once inhabited womb. Each child impresses upon waxen flesh the unique imprints of its life. Inscribes one’s own life with an image all of its own.

Often I have thought how true that is of the heart as well. Each child occupies its own space and in growing presses and pushes out the bounded contours of one’s heart. Each fashions a singular, ample habitation like no other. A habitation crowded with an unrepeatable lifetime of sorrow and joy. A habitation inscribed with a name. How could it be otherwise in the heart of God?

The author of the blog weaves Wright’s reflection into his experience of watching his own child prepare for the birth of twins this summer, a thoughtful ponder on the vocation of grandparenting. Faced with the awesome mystery of bringing new life into this world, he concludes in wonder that we are all ”in the heart of God – a God who has stretchmarks, too.”

And finally, echoing the post I wrote on name stories, America magazine is running a piece this week by the same name (pun intended!) – a great read on the power of naming. The author moves from a delightful description of his children bestowing names on trees and animals on the family farm to a powerful statement of the place of names in the Christian life:

Names make belonging possible because they cut through the abstraction that leads to alienation. Names always embody particular knowledge that comes from being in relationship and from paying serious attention to the named…

Particular names and real relationships do not come without conflict, chaos and heartbreak. And naming can certainly serve darker human impulses toward scorn (“calling someone names”), ego inflation (“making a name” for oneself) and control. But what other way is there than through names to help bring about healing, to move beyond sound bites and shouting matches into authentic belonging?

Affection, tenderness, compassion and care rarely happen in the nameless, faceless abstract; this is the truth of the Incarnation. Christian tradition speaks not of a prime-mover deity far removed from our daily existence but of a living, loving, communal God—a mysterious God beyond all names, who nonetheless chose to take a name, Jesus, and so enter into an intimate relationship with the created order and all of its creatures and places. And this God, whose name we have been given to know, also knows ours: “I have called you by name: you are mine.”

Enjoy…

sabbaths & jubilees

F and I just got back from three blissful days in the sun, sans S. Thanks to the grace of God or the flip side of all the bad karma I’ve been enduring over the past five nauseous months, it was the single most perfect vacation I’ve ever had.

No, it didn’t surpass the honeymoon in terms of joy or the international adventure we took together in terms of excitement. But in terms of sheer Perfection – of everything falling into place, of delightful surprises happening at every step, of ease and beauty and comfort and relaxation – I have never had three days in a row like that in my life.

I knew we needed a vacation, but I didn’t know how much we needed that vacation. We both came back refreshed, renewed, rejuvenated. I feel like I can live off the treasure of that rare time together, just the two of us, for months and months to come.

I wholeheartedly admit that I had very few deep and theological thoughts during those three days. Frankly, once the sun and surf set in, I had very few thoughts, period. But flying home on the plane, my mind started to wander and alighted on the idea of sabbath.

Lately I’ve been trying to live sabbath in a more deliberate way. I decided to go computer-free on Sundays and not even crack the laptop lid to check my home email. I try to leave the “weekend’s end” housework for Monday morning in order to have all day Sunday to relax into another rhythm.

While it’s been a challenging practice in some ways (for instance, the fact that it’s rare a day goes by that I don’t feel the need to Go.ogle something), it has also been freeing and refreshing. Sundays feel suddenly spacious, full of time for family fun and playing outside and cooking something delicious to enjoy. I didn’t realize how much I needed a real sabbath until I started taking baby steps towards it.

So on our long flight home, I mused about whether this vacation had been a sabbath. True, it was a time of rest and renewal, of setting aside work for the pleasure of simply being. But it was more than a weekend’s relaxation; it was a joyful plunge into a time entirely outside our norm, a long luxury of time that flowed to another rhythm.

That’s when it hit me: this vacation was like a jubilee.

Allow the theologian side of the mothering spirit to rear its ugly head for a moment. For the ancient Israelites, the jubilee year came around once every fifty years. It was a sacred time when liberty was proclaimed throughout the land, when lands were restored to their rightful owners, when debts were forgiven, when farms lay fallow to allow creation to rejuvenate.

The jubilee was a whole year that felt entirely Other: it had its own rhythm which pulled people out of The Way Things Are Always Done and into God’s time of The Way Things Should Be. Debts were forgiven, slaves were set free, all who were hungry were fed.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I am not equating our trip to the sunshine state with a biblical mandate for social justice. (It’s ludicrous to even write that sentence.) Instead, the relevance of the jubilee here is that it was intended to be an Ultimate sabbath: not just a day, but a whole year set aside for people to live according to a different rhythm, to rediscover their roots and their relationship with God. We need little sabbaths and we need long jubilees. The God of Israel wisely ordained both.

Likewise, as parents we need regular sabbath time. Maybe it’s a weekly date night. Maybe it’s a quiet cup of morning tea before the rest of the house awakes. However we can carve out the space and time, we need moments that take us away, even briefly, from the work and the worry. We need to reconnect with our center, ourselves, our spouse, our God.

But the gift of this vacation with F made me realize that as parents and as spouses, we need big jubilee moments, too. Not just a nice date night, but a real chunk of time and space – big enough to settle into and breathe deeply – that feels Other enough to remind us of what’s most important: the relationship that started it all, the love that sustains it. A jubilee rhythm that reorients us completely to the way we’re supposed to live, to the plans that God has for us.

I like this idea of jubilee. Granted, F and I haven’t been parents or spouses for anywhere near the fifty years that one traditionally waits to celebrate a jubilee. But I think the concept calls us to consider how we’re living sabbath moments in big and small ways, here and now. We need time for rest and enjoyment every week, every month, every year, in order to stay healthy and happy in our vocations.

I would love take this website‘s advice and make such a solo getaway an annual occurrence, but I know it’s hardly feasible at this stage in our parenting young children. A girl can dare to dream, but I know it’ll be a while till I get to run off with my husband like that again. Yet having dipped my toes into the joy that a jubilee brings, I know I want to make it part of the regular rhythm of our family life.

For now, I’ll settle for living little weekly sabbaths even better than I have been. There’s a lot to be gained by turning off and turning in to the things that matter most.

the footwashing

We are growing everyday in what it means to do the footwashing.

A friend has this quote from Abbot John Klassen on her Fa.ce.book page. If memory serves me, it’s from a homily he gave on Holy Thursday a few years back. Today these words came back to me as I thought about what we celebrate at the start of the Triduum.

All day long the Abbot’s words echoed in my head, as I baked bread (yes! I actually pulled off Holy Week at Home Spiritual Practice #1! Although I will not, ahem, be quitting my day job anytime soon). As I worked. As I cleaned the house for my parents’ arrival. As I played with S, changed his diapers, fed him meals, read him stories. As I prayed at Mass.

We are growing everyday in what it means to do the footwashing.

Tonight I watched our pastor, priest, and deacon bend over bowls. I watched them pour warm water from clay jugs over small feet, old feet, clean feet, bandaged feet. I watched them dry with a fresh white towel, then look up at the face of the person whose foot they just washed. I watched the humble exchange of emotions: gratitude, humility, embarrassment, relief, compassion.

We are growing everyday in what it means to do the footwashing.

I thought about my work as mother, my vocation as spouse. I realized, as the Abbot’s words poured over my thoughts like warm water from those clay jugs, that I, too, am growing everyday in what it means to do the footwashing.

Some days I think I know what it means to serve: to care for my son, to love my husband, to carry this baby. But many days I have no clue. So I try to keep going when I struggle, when I fail. I hope that is what helps me to grow, step by step, day by day, in what it means to do the footwashing.

Sometimes footwashing means letting a feverish, sobbing toddler hiccup himself to sleep in your aching arms. Sometimes footwashing means holding down the fort at home for two weeks while your husband travels for work. Sometimes footwashing means feeling nauseous for the better part of a year while a new life grows within you.

But regardless, footwashing means humility. Self-gift. The messy work of love.

As I leave for the rest of Triduum, I think of all of us who are washing feet. Parents, spouses, caretakers. Friends, sons, daughters. Ministers, teachers, healers. We are growing everyday in what it means to do the footwashing. 

I pray that we find strength in a God of such humility and love that he knelt to wash the dirty feet of a friend who would betray him.

I pray that we help each other through the dark times, the difficult days, the threats of despair.

I pray that the next days’ journey through death to new life reminds all of us what service and sacrifice and salvation look like.

I pray that we keep growing in what it means to do the footwashing.

parenting on the same page

S happily climbed up and down, up and down the stairs of the slide while my growing belly and I sat perched on a too-small toddler chair. We’d managed to overcome the morning’s nausea to make it out of the house and into our neighborhood drop-in play time. Though my energy still lagged, I was happy for the distraction for both of us. New environment, new toys, new parents to chat with.

Little did I know that the conversation I would overhear between two strangers would haunt me for the rest of the week.

It started innocently enough. A father arrived to the classroom with his 3 year-old daughter in tow, a bouncing mop of curls and freckles. She leapt onto the climbing toys while her father made small talk with another pregnant mother watching her son build blocks.

“So I see you’ve got another one on the way – congratulations!”

“Thanks…we’re excited.”

“I bet. I’m jealous, actually.”

“Really? You want more kids?”

“Oh, yeah,” he smiled wistfully. “But it’s not going to happen. You know, ‘snip, snip.’” His fingers scissored in front of his face; his shoulders shrugged.

“Ah,” she said, knowingly.

“Yeah, my wife had a really difficult pregnancy and she doesn’t want any more.”

“But you still do??”

“Oh yeah. I love kids.”

At which point his daughter took a flying leap off the slide into a corner of the wall, and the eruption of tears pulled dad away from the conversation for good. The mother soon packed up her son and headed home, and the two never spoke again.

I felt like an intruder, eavesdropping on a conversation that felt too intimate for two strangers to be sharing in the first place. But I kept glancing sideways at the father for the rest of the playtime. He crawled in tunnels after his daughter, chased her around the building blocks, swung her over his head and tickled her till she squealed. Their delight was contagious.

For the rest of the day, and the week that followed, I found myself returning to that conversation between two parents I didn’t know. To the father’s wistfulness. To the mother’s astonishment at his wanting more children. To the over-sharing between strangers that betrayed his need to tell his side of the story.

My heart felt pulled in different directions: empathy for a miserable mother, sympathy for a longing father, frustration at society’s embrace of so-called “quick fixes.” But what saddened me most was the story of two parents so obviously not on the same page about a huge life decision and the future of their family.

No marriage is perfect; we all have our sore spots and sticking points. Some big decisions come easily; we agree on shared values, goals, approaches. Some are much more challenging; we go round and round for months, even years, trying to find a consensus. The conclusion isn’t reached without anger, frustration, sweat and tears.

But in the best of circumstances, the goal of these go-rounds is to reach a workable solution, to find a liveable agreement. Husband and wife may both have to cave and concede on certain points, but in the end, most of us try to meet each other somewhere in the middle.

So what happens when spouses are stuck on two drastically different pages when it comes to a parenting decision – whether something as huge as how many kids to have or something as small as how to handle the latest discipline crisis? When do we dig in our heels and refuse to budge, and when do we give in and give our spouse the green light to go where we don’t want to go? Can we parent well if we’re not on the same page?

I’m no parenting expert; I’m as full of questions and cluelessness as all the rest. But I think about this father, being forced into a major and permanent decision that went against his heart’s deep desires. And I feel such sadness at the situation; I wonder if and how things could have been different.

Perhaps there’s a call to prayer here. Not only a call to pray for this father and mother, but a call for all of us to keep praying and talking with our spouses about the places where we disagree. A prayer for wisdom and guidance and humility and forgiveness. A prayer to help each other grow into the parents we want to be. A prayer of discernment for knowing when to hold on and when to let go.

domesticity

“Religion never thoroughly penetrates life until it becomes domestic.” ~ Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture (1847)

What parent, faced with washing another sinkful of dirty dishes, or cleaning up after another sick child, or folding another seemingly endless load of laundry, doesn’t wonder – is this what I signed up for? Is this how my talents are best spent? Is this what I got that degree for?

I have plenty of days like this.

But I also have the gift of good work that challenges me to think about such questions from a theological standpoint. I’m in the midst of researching what’s been written on “vocation through the lifespan,” namely, how God’s call to us evolves over our lifetime. Quite often the literature on vocation touches on the vocation to marriage and the vocation to parenting, sometimes romanticizing their merits, sometimes enumerating their challenges.

Both of these vocations – to marriage and to parenting – can change dramatically over one’s lifetime, although the evolutions happen gradually, day by day. What also strikes me about both vocations is that they are largely centered in the home. We certainly remain spouses and parents when we go into the workplace, the school, the church, the community. But we spend much of our time as spouses and parents in the domestic setting.

The home, then, is the primary context for the unfolding, developing, and maturing of vocations to marriage and parenting. We answer a call when we rouse in the dark night to calm a screaming baby, when we sit down to talk with our spouse at the end of the work day, when we spend time on all the chores required to keep our household running. Vocation can be deeply domestic.

I’ve come across this quote from Horace Bushnell several times in my research lately. Each time I read it, it gives me pause. What does it mean for religion to “become domestic”? Does it lose its power and conviction when it comes home? Does it become self-centered when it is less concerned with the needs of world outside? Does it become softer, taken-for-granted, everyday?

Hardly, Bushnell insists. Faith does not become real, raw, relevant until it finds a way into our homes and hearts.

The domesticity of faith is not something to be dismissed. The religious challenges and crises we face in our marriages and families are some of the most real and penetrating questions of faith we will ever encounter. Why did God let my loved one get sick? How can I help my child with her addiction? Can this marriage be saved?

I believe our churches, in turn, need to help couples and families to see the home as the place where we learn to care not only for our own, but for all of God’s people. As the domestic church, the family must be the school where we learn about the needs of the world and ask how God is calling us to respond.

The domesticity of religion, therefore, is not mere navel-gazing. As we encounter love and life in its gritty, day-to-day, up-and-down realities, we learn what it means to be in relationship with others, to forgive and to grow, to recognize Christ in one another.

Religion becoming domestic is a good thing, when it sends us forth with faith into the world in turn.

the graces of flying solo

I’m nearing the end of my longest stretch of “solo parenting” to date, thanks to an international business trip that has taken F away for the past few weeks. As we start to count down the days – and dinners and baths – until F returns to us, I’ve been surprised to find myself reflecting positively on the experience.

Let me preface this by saying that I miss F madly and can’t wait for him to be home. As I told him over Skype a few days ago, in tears over the car that won’t start and the dog that got sick and the mice that appeared in the basement, I’m not my best self when he’s not around. I have even less patience and a shorter temper when the one who knows me best is not here to calm me down.

But this experience of time apart has not been wholly negative, at least for me. (He may have other stories to tell…)

First, we were blessed to have my sainted mother come stay with us for a week: to take care of S, to keep me company, and to help our household humming along nicely. I would have gone batty without her, and we all miss her already. (The beagle, in particular, thinks I am quite boring on my own.)

But during these days where I’ve been the only adult in the house, I’ve had lots of quiet time to reflect on how different it feels to fly solo. Every meal is up to me; the bathtime routine that’s all F is now all mine. The usual suspects – laundry, dishes, cooking – await me, as well as the rest of F’s usual chores – the garbage, the garden, the car. And when S melts down, I can’t hand him off to anyone else.

I crawl into bed exhausted each night, offering up tired prayers for the single parents who do this every day without a relief pitcher walking in the door when the working day ends. I can’t wait to have our bullpen fully stacked again.

But there have been many graces over these past few weeks as well. A kind neighbor who checks up on me every few days and asks if I need any help. Time for evening phone calls to catch up with old friends. A new friend who surprised us with a visit and home-baked muffins.

I’ve had the gift of time to myself, to read and write, to jump into house projects I’ve been meaning to do. I watched a few movies on Netflix that only I wanted to watch. I stopped worrying about cooking dinner and lived off all the meals we froze from the fall harvest.

I surprised myself with what I was able to do. I killed spiders, trapped mice, pulled deer ticks off the dog – all things I happily leave to F. I reorganized our kitchen cupboards and rearranged S’s room – usually tasks his analytical, engineering mind delights to tackle. I paid all the bills, dealt with insurance agents, even answered the roofers’ questions.

But mostly, I grew in confidence, took a few baby steps towards greater patience, learned to roll with more of the punches that unpredictable life always offers. I relearned the surprising truth that I can do this – I can parent S and run the household on my own, when I have to. The anxieties with which I anticipated these weeks with dread have quietly slipped away, and I feel better equipped to handle future solo adventures.

For someone who relies heavily on community and has learned to lean on others, it can seem counterintuitive for solitude to be a Good Thing. But every so often, I need the time and space of aloneness to remind me that I am growing, that God is working within me. That the frustrations and challenges that cloud the day-to-day can part to reveal a step towards wisdom and humility.

I can certainly learn such lessons when F is around. (He’d probably argue I could kill my own spiders more often, too.) But the absence of my partner reminds me who he is helping me to become. Marriage and parenting involve such delicate dances towards maturity, both as individuals and as our team.