how we spend our time: paying attention

Today I’m delighted to welcome Ginny Kubitz Moyer to kick off this series with her new book Random MOMents of Grace. I love Ginny’s writing for the glimpses of God she notices in daily life. She is a perfect author to start us thinking about one important way we choose to spend our time as parents: paying attention.

Ginny’s book is all about paying attention to the grace-filled moments that spring up unexpectedly among parenting’s challenges. I love her elegant and wise writing, the everyday subjects she tackles in search of motherhood’s spiritual side, and her chapters that are short enough to read in one sitting when my kids are quiet for five whole minutes. Here are more words of wisdom from Ginny on how she spends her time:

1) What is one truth about time you have learned since becoming a parent?

They say that when you are the mother of small kids, the days crawl by, but the months pass like a shot. I couldn’t agree more. Sometimes it is so isolating to be at home all day with your kids, especially because there are periods of your life as a parent when it is simply too much of a production to get into the car and go anywhere. Those days can feel endless (except for naptime, of course, which moves at twice the speed of light.)

But now that my boys are six and four, I look at baby pictures of them, and I have to catch my breath because I realize how quickly the time has passed. We forget that when we see our kids every day. And the fact is that every phase of parenting has its challenges and its blessings. I’m not changing diapers anymore (thank you God!) but oh, I do miss that adorable baby-hair that Luke had, which stuck straight up as if he’d been playing with electricity.

So, as I write in the book, I’ve learned that I shouldn’t will the time to pass too quickly. When things are frustrating now, it helps to look at my kids and realize what I have now that I will miss in a year, or five, or ten. That’s a reminder to savor it.

2) What is one practice of using time well that you have developed as a mother-writer?

I love this quotation from the writer James Thurber: “I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, ‘Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.’ She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.” I’m not quite that extreme, but I can relate.

Writers usually want large blocks of quiet time in which to sit down and write, and the reality is that when you’re a mom, you almost never have that. So a lot of what I do, writing-wise, involves letting things simmer in my mind or mentally trying out various adjectives or squirreling away bits of information to use later. This means I can write in the car on my commute to and from work, or while making dinner. If you think about writing as being more than just putting pen to paper or sitting in front of a laptop, you realize there is actually a lot of writing time during the day. Then the only challenge is to remember it all for later ….

3) What new insight about faith did you gain from writing this book?

All writers are people of faith, I think, because it takes faith to face an empty page. You need to have faith that you will be able to put your feelings or your experiences into words that other people will enjoy. I think it also takes faith to slog on through the writer’s block, those times when you feel like everything you are writing is about as exciting as a tax return, and why would anyone ever want to read it?

It was so thrilling to get the contract for this book, but at the same time, it’s a different experience to write when there is a firm deadline. Luckily, I’d been writing the book in bits and pieces for about two years prior to finding a publisher, so nearly all of it was already done. But there was still some work to do on it, and I found myself going on faith that the ideas would come.

I distinctly remember starting one chapter and writing a ways into it and thinking, “Oof. This chapter is not going anywhere. I should just abandon ship right now.” And then, about a week later, I revisited it, and guess what? I found that it was better than I’d thought, and I had some ideas about where to take it. It’s now one of my very favorite chapters in the book.  Sometimes, you just need a little distance … and faith.

4) What is your favorite way to spend time with your family?

Oh, so hard to choose!  I love the quiet weekend mornings when we’re all just hanging out in our pj’s.  I love going on trips where we are out of our normal element and we get to discover a new place or a new experience together.  It is so fun to play soccer outside, all four of us, on the front lawn (I am the least athletic woman I’ve ever met, and now I’m playing soccer?!?  Motherhood is so broadening.)

Most of all, I love hugging my boys.  There’s nothing sweeter.

Thank you, Ginny! Please visit Random Acts of Momness for the rest of Ginny’s Blog Tour over the next two weeks. And be sure to check out Random MOMents of Grace from Loyola Press, who has generously offered FIVE copies of Ginny’s book to readers of Mothering Spirit! (Full disclosure: they gave me a copy, too – but I was waiting to buy one anyway, so their generosity in no way influenced my opinion.)

To enter the giveaway for your own copy, leave a comment below. And if you’re inspired, share one way you try to practice “paying attention” in your daily life!

how we spend our time: a new series

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” –  Annie Dillard

From the second we wake up, we make choices about how to spend our time.

Shower or not? Black pants or grey? Cereal or eggs? Music or news? Work out or email? Highway or back roads? Speed or slow down?

Our days are shaped by decisions. How we spend our time is the defining choice we make with every moment. It becomes who we are and what we value.

As a mom with two young kids, a career to pursue, a house to keep, and all the key relationships of my life to nurture (you know, small things like God-spouse-family-friends), I get overwhelmed by all the demands on my time. But I also get tired of the same old “so busy” conversation. I have the same hours as everyone else. I make time for what’s important. I let other things slide. We all do.

But I’m fascinated by the implications of our choices, how the little and big decisions of our lives become our story and shape the stories of those around us.

My kids are no exception. They already notice how I spend my time. They whine when I check email over lunch; they grin when I sit down to read with them. They ask what we’re going to do today, this week, this month, and they sort through their reactions to the choices their parents have made. Even as young as they are, they understand how time matters.

In an ongoing effort to fight the “too busy, no time” cycle, I’m constantly wondering how to spend my time in more life-giving ways. How to enjoy each hour rather than exhaust myself. How to stretch out the margins of our family schedule so we all have more room to breathe.

Lots of ink gets spilled on the big choices that I make as a mother: for example, whether to stay home with my kids or work outside the home. But within these larger vocational decisions are a thousand other important decisions about how to spend my time. How do I structure my days according to what I value? How do I stay present to the task at hand? How do I prioritize people first and foremost?

This week I’m launching a new series about how we spend our time as parents. How do we use our hours meaningfully in the busy years of raising kids? What practices can help us to become more mindful about the way we spend our time? How have other parents learned to live into the choices they make about time?

In this series I’ll be asking four questions about time to a group of mother-writers whose work has inspired my own thinking on the subject. Each of them offers a unique perspective on the activities and attitudes we bring to our use of time. I hope they will inspire and invigorate you (and there might be a few giveaways of their wonderful work, too, so stay turned!).

Till then, have a wonderful day – all 24 hours of it.

how i nurture my mothering spirit – laura

The overdue last in the series. But hey, when it’s your own blog, you can make and miss your own deadlines. Hope you’ve enjoyed the series as much as I have. Thank you again to all the wonderful writers who shared their stories with us!

Another cold Minnesota night as the lavender shadows of sundown stretching across the glowing white of snow fade fast to sinking black. This time of year I hate to leave the house after dark; winter turns me into a hermit if I’m not careful.

But every Monday evening finds my car winding through the dark along the river road, slipping from small town to small town across rolling fields.

The weekly pilgrimage to yoga.

Yoga is not prayer for me. But my practice makes space for prayer, clears the chaos from my mind, shoves the clutter aside so God can sneak in again.

When I roll out my well-worn mat and begin to breathe deeply, I start to feel the stress of the day slip away. Cranky toddlers who wouldn’t nap. Chores left undone in our messy house. Clutter piled up so high on my desk I feel my blood pressure soar when I open the office door.

I set it all aside, and I sit and stretch. 

The peace of the present moment rises once again to my consciousness. I remember the wisdom of all those saints and sages who discovered that God is never more present to us than right now, that every moment offers the possibility of connecting with the Spirit if we only slow our own scattered minds to turn and remember.

Guided by a gentle teacher, I move and hold and push while others around me do the same. We breathe together, lunge, reach and rest. I love the mix of solitude and community that yoga offers: the reminder that my single life is part of something bigger and beyond.

Yoga stretches my limbs and my limits. How much tension can I hold? What would happen if I let go and sunk into the pose a little deeper, released the fears and hesitations holding me back?

I learn about myself – my physical body, my mental flow, my spiritual needs – every time I push back into downward dog. My view of the world is turned upside down, staring underneath my legs at a room of yogis hanging from the floor-as-ceiling. Especially in these early mothering days, so focused on home and our chosen few, I crave this change of perspective, this flip-side reminder, this fresher view.

Perhaps because yoga draws together body, mind and spirit, it sprang immediately to mind when I started this series. I’m grateful to yoga – and to the wonderful studio community I’ve found – for nurturing me as a parent and as a person.

I have little time for working out in ways I used to pre-kids: early morning sessions at the Y before work or daily cardio classes at the gym. Frankly I’d rather write in my wee free time than work out. But I can’t quit yoga. Yoga is sanity, space, silence and stretch. It is the centering practice of my parenting days.

The metaphors come almost too easy. Balance. Strength. Flexibility.

If only I could stay on the mat, I could stay Zen.

Of course that’s not the calling; we all have to come down from the mountaintop and back into the plains. Every Monday night I drive back across the same winding roads, back home to the people to whom I’ve promised my life.

But I’m better for them, and for me, when yoga nights stay sacred. I’m at peace with the contours of my life, with the God that shapes my being.

what’s the soul of a parent?

When I was a child, I got obsessed with figuring out what we all had in common.

Call it the curse of Catholic school. All those lessons on how we’re all made in God’s image. I remember riding home on the bus, swinging my skinny legs off the sticky vinyl seat, trying to figure out exactly what that meant – what magical thing we all had in common that made us reflect God.

First I decided it must be eyes. Everyone had eyes, I figured. And you learned a lot from someone by looking at their eyes. So maybe that’s what we all had, that made us in the image of God.

But then my grade school self remembered pictures from National Geographic of people with disfigured faces, people who might be born without eyes, or might have eyes that didn’t work. That didn’t seem very image-of-God-like. I scratched eyes from my list.

Next was arms. I was pretty sure everyone had – nope, then I remembered that man on TV with no arms, playing his guitar for the pope. He had to be made in God’s image. Arms were out.

Ditto legs, hands, hair, teeth, feet, ears. Any physical attribute I could think of was crossed off the list. Even as a first-grader I got frustrated: how could there not be a single thing that every human being shared? How were we all supposed to be made in God’s image if we had nothing in common?

This was my first inkling of soul. Of the spark of Spirit within each of us.

Because, I studied seriously, chewing on the end of my pigtails, if there had to be something of God about us and it wasn’t outside us, then it had to be inside us.

God had to be within.

. . .

When I became a mother, I became obsessed with figuring out what parents had in common.

One late night when my first son was a few weeks old, I stared out his bedroom window, trying to stay awake while he nursed. As became my practice, I thought of all the other parents awake at that hour – across the street, across town, across the globe – doing all the things parents do that keep them awake at wee hours: rocking babies, soothing sick kids, keeping vigil for curfew-breaking teenagers.

I remember rocking in the nursery, swinging my feet off the glider, trying to figure out exactly what made us parents.

Was it birthing a biological baby? Definitely not. Plenty of people I knew became parents through adoption.

Was it caring for a child full-time? Not necessarily. Grandparents and babysitters and daycare providers often watched a child for more daylight hours than their parents ever saw them. But that didn’t make them parents.

What was the core of parenthood exactly? I knew it but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought about legal definitions and cultural redefinitions and variations on a theme. And that’s when it hit me:

It was the same dilemma I puzzled over on the school bus that day, wanting to define the essence of a thing.

It was the same searching that led me back to the idea of soul.

. . .

What is a parent? Does what we do make us who we are? If we are so wildly diverse, how can we all be the same thing? What is common to this complex calling?

When Sarah at Fumbling Toward Grace first blogged about her frustrations with breastfeeding and how harshly she felt judged as a mother for feeding her baby with formula, her honesty struck a chord with many of us. So when she invited me to participate in the “No More Mommy Wars” series that sprung out of the deep resonance of her post, I started mulling over this question.

What makes us the same as mothers, even though we make such different choices for ourselves and our children? Where can we meet in the soul of parenting?

Today I’m posting at Fumbling Toward Grace about my experience of extended nursing. If you had told me a year ago I’d be writing on such a subject, I would have laughed in your face. But the winding road of this parenting journey twists in ways I never expect.

This story is one of them.

Please click over to read the rest. And check out the rest of Sarah’s wonderful blog while you’re there!

for the mornings we yell

For the mornings we wake up determined to make it a better day, and then we don’t -

For the times we promise to soak up the sweetness of these fleeting years, and then we wish them away -

For the days we want to fill with laughter and song, and then they’re darkened by bad moods and cross words -

For the meals we make with love and hope that they’ll be enjoyed, and then we grit our teeth as they’re gagged while chewed -

For the playdates we plan to share the long days with good friends, and then we’re annoyed that a sick child screws up our schedule -

For the glossy parenting magazines whose advice we dog-ear with good intention, and then we shove the stack in the recycling bin instead -

For the calm, cool, collected moms we envy when we wrangle our whiny bunch into the grocery cart, and then we glower over how we’re doing worse at this job than everyone else we know -

For the naptimes when we catch up on the world’s news and resolve again to treasure the rare gift of healthy, safe, sheltered children, and then we’re screaming at them by suppertime -

For the eyes that want to look with love and capture how quickly our kids will be grown and gone, and then they narrow with frustration at messes and mistakes and missing shoes -

For the hands that hope to hold and hug and help, and then they clench into angry balls that bang on the kitchen counter when no one listens to us -

For the boiling-over moments when we try to breathe and breathe and not lose it completely, and then we do -

For the nights we try to treasure bedtime instead of tick off the minutes till we’re done, and then we’re flooded with guilt when closing the bedroom door behind us feels like the best part of the day.

For remembering we’re humans raising humans,

for knowing if we teach our children nothing else, we’ll teach them how to bend down and open arms and say I’m sorry because we have to do it daily ourselves,

for the chance to keep screwing up because it means we keep going,

for forgiving ourselves,

and learning slowly how forgiveness takes the shape of a cross – pulled down in love, stretched out in embrace.

For trying again.

For today. For you.

. . .

Today was supposed to be the last in the series, my part to add to the wise women who shared their stories of how they nurture their mothering spirits, how they find peace in the midst of parenting.

But inspired by this dad’s truth spoken here, and a morning that called for this instead of that, I’m waiting till tomorrow to write about calm. Because today I needed to write about chaos.

Because I thought I might not be the only one who needs to hear it.

And maybe you can share it with another mom who needs it, too.

how to nurture your mothering spirit – check out the series!

What a lovely way this has been to kick off 2013, with weekly reflections from wise women on how they nurture their mothering spirits in busy seasons of parenting.

The last installment in the series will be coming this Wednesday – from yours truly – so in the meantime, check out any posts you may have missed.

Here’s a look back through the past few months…

Nell shared a story of discovering sewing as a way to connect with God in the midst of parenting little ones.

Maureen invited us to join her in a hot cup of chai and a quiet moment of simple pleasures.

Melissa wove her story of learning to embrace centering prayer as a connection with the Divine within.

Lydia considered hands-on crafts like knitting, sewing and baking as ways to enjoy the quiet process of creating alone.

Kate offered a number of simple and creative ideas for nurturing her spirit as a pregnant mama.

Peg evoked the practice of greeting the morning darkness as spiritual self-care while parenting teenagers.

Mihee reflected on life as one big inconvenience and how we encounter God in the unexpected moments.

Leanne wrote about her love of writing and the catharsis of processing motherhood’s challenges through her words.

Roxane evoked the healing powers of pot roast and how we need to nourish ourselves in order to care for others.

Ginny described her writing desk and the need for a private space at home to call her own.

I’m deeply grateful to each of these kindred spirits for sharing their wisdom and words with us here! Please be sure to visit their blogs in turn, where you’ll find even more nourishment for your spirit and soul…

Tune in Wednesday for the culmination of the series. And if you’ve caught up on all these wise and wonderful reflections, take a minute to explore the latest redesign of Mothering Spirit and let me know what you think!

the perspective of puke and the tales we tell

I could tell the story of my week like this:

For the first time since I became a parent, I spent the morning cleaning vomit out of the crib.

(At which point I would pause while the Interwebs finished laughing at me. “Seriously?”)

And that would be true.

Because in some strange stroke of luck, we’ve never had a stomach bug tear through this house in the almost-four years since we’ve had kids.

Sure, we’ve had common colds and croup and thrush and other typical childhood ailments. And we’ve got at least one boy who’s prone to car-sickness, so we’ve wiped up car seats and coats aplenty. But never before had our doorstep been darkened by the Evil 24-Hour Stomach Virus, as sponsored by Lysol and the sanitizing cycle on the washing machine.

I know this sounds naive. And trust me, ever since I became a mother I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, the quintessential moment when I would wind up catching some kid’s puke in my cupped hands and realize, while choking back my own gag reflex, “So this is motherhood. Huh.”

And yes, that happened. Exactly as you’d expect, exactly as I’d always expected. One frantic knock on the office door from the nanny while I was working mid-Monday, one boy throwing up in the bathroom, one brother felled by the same bug the next day, more vomit on my sweatshirts than I care to remember, more hot water loads in the washer than I care to count.

You know the story.

Or do you?

As I pondered the wretched (wretching?) events of the past few week, I realized that I could spin the story any number of ways.

It could start like I did above, that I’d never been puked on before, so four years after first giving birth, I felt like a newbie parent all over again. And behold: a tale of maternal rite of passage.

Or it could take another twist: after my youngest had his 18 month check-up on Monday, and his doctor was closing the door to say goodbye, she called out, “Great to see you! It’s been so long – I can’t believe you’ve never had this kid in for anything but well-baby visits since he was born!” And behold: a story of sour irony.

Or it could travel down this road: at the beginning of birthday week, all I dreamed of was a weekend away with the beloved spouse who stole shares my natal day, but by week’s end I was reduced to begging divine intervention to please just keep my kids from puking today so that we can salvage some shred of the celebration slipping away before my eyes. And behold: a reminder of reversed expectations.

All of these tales are true. What matters is which one I pick.

The more I ponder the intersections between parenting and spirituality, between mothering and writing, the more I realize how the lens through which see the world matters. And how the tales we choose to tell matter, too.

Whether or not we recognize it in the moment, we choose to narrate every experience according to certain scripts or slants. Here’s my Tale of A Terrible Day; here’s my Glowing Reminder of Life’s Beauty; here’s my Gut-Punch Reminder of Fleeting Mortality. The same day spun six different ways.

In her book Composing A Life, Mary Catherine Bateson explores the various versions of our life that we create – when we introduce ourselves to a group of people at a meeting or make a new acquaintance at a party, for example. She claims that our self-introductions, our autobiographies, even the everyday stories we tell each other all have multiple versions – and this is not only good, but necessary:

What I want to say is that you can play with, compose, multiple versions of a life.

There are advantages in having access to multiple versions of your life story. I am not referring to a true version versus a false version, or to one that works in a given therapeutic context as opposed to others, or to one that will sell to People magazine as opposed to ones that won’t. I am referring to the freedom that comes not only from owning your memory and your life story but also from knowing that you make creative choices in how you look at your life….

The choice you make affects what you can do next. Often people use the choice of emphasizing either continuity or discontinuity as a way of preparing for the next step. They interpret the present in a way that helps them construct a particular future.

The art of composition and improvisation has the power to reshape our world as we reshape our point of view.

Pondering this truth mid-sick-week helped me to remember that I still held a teeny bit of control over all the situations slipping out of my hands. My perspective on the pukefest mattered, and the lens I chose to view the vomit could color the way things turned out in my mind and in my memory.

Because I could have spun this week as woe-is-me, worst-possible-timing, what-could-be-crappier. Or I could choose to see it as minor-inconvenience, mostly-manageable, much-lighter-than-burdens-others-bear.

Or maybe, just maybe, I could focus all my energy and hope and even prayers that the story of this week might end up being the one I wanted all along: the perfect prelude to a weekend without kids.

The story of the stomach bug that almost stole our birthdays.

how i nurture my mothering spirit – ginny

In the classic girls’ book Betsy-Tacy Go Downtown by Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy’s mother understands the creative process. She gives her daughter an old trunk to use as a writing desk, a special place where Betsy can sit and be alone and pen stories to her heart’s content.

“Betsy’s mother was a great believer in people having private places,” says the narrator.

Betsy’s mother gets it.

I, too, have a private desk of my own. It’s a brown desk in the bedroom, pushed up against the corner where two windows meet. Ever since my second child was born, it has been the place where I go to pray, to read, to write.

It’s a place that is mine and mine alone: the only place in the house where this is so.

Motherhood is all about sharing: sharing one’s time, one’s energy, one’s body, one’s last Kleenex. I would not have it any other way, because all that sharing has stretched me in ways that nothing else could have done. My two young boys are worth every bit of it, and more.

But, like many of us, I still need a small piece of physical space to call my own.

On the writing desk, I’ve put all kinds of special items and trinkets. There are family photos, a small statue of Mary that I bought in Lourdes, a Valentine card sent to us by a dear friend the year that she died. There is a quotation from Hemingway that always jumpstarts my writing process. There are candles to light and books for inspiration. In the desk drawer is a rosary – two, actually – for times when I need the soothing repetition of prayers I know by heart.

The desk is like a little shrine of all the things that sustain me: family, friends, faith, reading, writing.

It’s my own space, and it is capable of working wonders. A few candlelit minutes there in the evening are enough to slow my breathing and help me pick off the burrs of stress that routinely attach themselves to my day.

Whether I pray, or read, or write, or just stare off into space, that desk reminds me that I have an inner life worth cultivating and tending. It’s a reminder that although I am a wife and a mother and a teacher and a writer, underneath it all, I’m always me.

And I’m a more peaceful me when I let myself be nourished in – and nourished by – this special private place.

 . . .

Ginny Kubitz Moyer is a writer, teacher, and mother. She is the author of the new book Random MOMents of Grace: Experiencing God in the Adventures of Motherhood. She blogs at RandomActsofMomness.com.

when we all add up

31 + 31 + 3 + 1 

He’s obsessed with numbers now. All he wants to do is stand at his easel and scribble numerals in chalky pastel, then furrow his brow and punch the digits into his cash register.

Adding and subtracting have transformed his small world into an explosion of equations. He begs us to fill up the chalkboard or the paper with long strings of numbers he can add together. Then he greets the familiar ones as old friends.

70…that’s Papa’s age. 22 is my favorite song on the CD. 50 is for 50 states. 28 is the date.

This is how the world makes sense to him right now, at the still-small stage of 3.5. Neatly ordered by numbers, waiting to be added or subtracted at the touch of his fingers pounding the calculator keys.

It’s not my language – I love words and art and music – but I try to meet him there. (And try to remind myself as I struggle to scrape together interesting-enough equations to delight him dawn till dusk, that words and art and music sing with numbers all their own.)

But when he tires of adding up all the units of measurement I know and the phone numbers I can remember and the street numbers of family addresses and the birth dates of old friends, I always default to this one:

31 + 31 + 3 + 1

All the ages under this roof. Two parents, two kids. Added up together.

For a brief moment in time, our ages are caught up in a numerical anagram: they in us and we in them.

Back when my boy started this obsession with numbers, I realized for the first time that our ages would be patterned like this for a few short months. I’m no math whiz myself, so when I tried to calculate if and when this might happen again in our lifetimes, my brain got bored and slipped into pondering the grocery list. Suffice it to say, it seems a rare occurrence. (The left-brained engineer at my elbow agrees.)

But the rarity seems right for now – this slender sliver of a season when our lives are so intimately, bodily, exhaustingly bound up with each other. These months (because we still measure in months) when we’re still a clump of a family unit, not yet stretched by the sprawl of adolescents who strain to pull as far away as they can, or redefined by a Rolodex with separate entries for every adult child’s address.

Right now we’re all bound up together. 31 + 31 + 3 + 1.

Our two boys are their own selves, to be sure. But they are still so wrapped up in us, and we in them. Sometimes when these two squirmy worms are wriggling all over the couch and each other and my lap and the book we’re trying to read, I find myself wondering where each of us starts and the other ends.

Parenting brings about a strange and profound redefinition of self. You are at once the same person you always were and a new creation, birthed by the child before you. Magazines warn you not to lose yourself in the exhaustion of new motherhood, yet you can’t help but stare at the bleary-eyed stranger in the mirror and wonder what happened to the girl you once were.

And yet there is something of you in them, something of your younger self that glimmers back in their eyes or frown or laughter. You see your spouse in their smile, too, and bits of others in the shimmering hologram that is a child: the spitting image of grandma in this light, an uncle’s twin in that photo.

You catch your breath when you see it, and then it’s gone.

31 + 31 + 3 + 1. Scribbled on his dusty chalkboard, these numbers speak truth of this fleeting stage when we are so easily glimpsed in one another. When we are so closely linked to those who surround us.

When we all add up together.

how i nurture my mothering spirit – roxane

The Healing Powers of the Pot Roast

In the early part of November 2012, I experienced a profound moment of healing by spoon.

It functioned like salve on my weary mother’s soul – a bowl of pot roast made by my sweet mother-in-law.

She’d prepared the roast and its accompanying vegetables in her Crockpot the night before, the overnight simmering of soup and juices from the meat producing a scrumptious gravy that would have had world-class chefs swooning.

While the rest of my family was occupied in other spaces – the youngest of them splashing in a nearby hotel pool – I’d found a moment to steal away into the quiet of our dining room to eat what was left of the roast, most of which had been nearly completely devoured earlier by hungry men.

Sitting in the dimly-lit room, breathing deeply, slowly now, I prepared to consume the first homemade meal I’d had in months.

Comfort food, they call it, and this moment made it true for me. With each delectable bite, restoration was beginning.

For nearly a year I’d been trying to do the impossible, working outside the home with five kids still needing so much more of me than I could offer with my attention elsewhere.

But now, after weeks of discernment, I’d made the difficult decision to resign from what had seemed, by all accounts, my dream job. It would mean giving up a paycheck that had lightened our financial load but brought extra responsibilities that weighed down my heart, causing my middle child to utter one day, “You’re not a being a mom anymore.”

I’d done what I could to rearrange the pieces of my life to accommodate all, but came up short. The emotional, spiritual and even physical effects were manifesting themselves, and I had to ask myself whether the job was worth risking an illness that could remove me from life altogether.

Ironically, the kitchen, which I consider the heart of the home, was a room I avoided like the plague during that year. I knew that if I entered, I wouldn’t make it out without depleting the extra energy I needed to push through my busy days.

Fast food had become normal; my oven, a neglected appliance. The dining room was a place to linger only as long as was necessary to gulp down a slice of pizza or a burger.

But sitting before that bowl of real food made with loving hands, placed gently in a warmer and transported 120 miles to our home earlier that day, had reintroduced me to the place where my heart longed most to be.

A few days after leaving the job, I prepared my own slow-cooked meal, and as I scooped out portions to each family member, a surge of love and joy took hold. I was ready now to feed my family, both in food and through my presence in ways that had not been possible for far too long.

And in the midst of it, I became aware that if not for that wonderfully nourishing meal several weeks earlier, the moment would have passed unappreciated. In that gift of warm sustenance, I’d been given a poignant reminder that we cannot offer others something we haven’t first taken in ourselves.

In doing whatever is necessary to create space in our days to ensure we’re nourished, we’ll have something to offer back those we love. And they, in turn, will give to others when it’s time.

A potato, a carrot, a tender chunk of meat – the healing powers of the pot roast.

A bowl full of love that wooed me back to life.

. . .

Roxane Salonen lives in Fargo, N.D., with her husband and five children, ages seven to 17. A church cantor, book reader and coffee drinker, she also works as a faith columnist and features writer for her city’s daily newspaper.

Roxane is the author of two children’s picture books – First Salmon and P is for Peace Garden: A North Dakota Alphabet. Find her pondering on “faith, family and following the muse” at Peace Garden Mama: roxanesalonen.blogspot.com/