On being a mother

Oprah featured moms on her show a couple weeks ago. The two "experts" who "wrote the book" were bubbly, sharp, blond business-type women who wore chic outfits that had never seen spit up or spaghetti sauce stains. They rallied the audience into a frenzy of confessions about motherhood which variously decried the hardships of this "first order of creation" occupations.

"I hate the fluids of babies: pee, spit up, spilt milk, snot."

"I cried the day I drove to the car dealership to buy a mini-van."

"There were days I wanted to 'send them back to the hell from whence they came'."

On and on the tales of woe pored from the mouths of devoted parents. Video clips of small kids on bikes, disastrous laundry rooms, "stuffed to the gills" cars with seats and sippy cups floated by, making one wonder why anyone would sign up for the task of mothering, let alone sustain it for decades. Moms confessed things, too, like the one who said she didn't want to wake the sleeping baby by stopping the car for a potty break, but she needed to pee so badly, she took a Pampers diaper, stuck it between her legs and let it "go" as she drove. Yeah, I thought that was way more information than I needed to know about her, too.

There was a surprising lack of joy represented in the discussion of mothering. Mostly being a mom was held up as the hardest job on earth, the most demanding, the most self-sacrificing, the most misunderstood and overlooked work on the planet. A kind of shared martyrdom, underdog status united everyone and Oprah, never having mothered anyone, had to declare that indeed, they were right. Mothering equalled sainthood (which we all know implies burning at the stake and smiling through it!).

With my kids in the room, listening to the pain of childbirth and engorged breasts, the relentlessness of little voices, the demandingness of the small child's need for food, sleep and comfort, the annihilation of a woman's identity and sense of self, I couldn't take it any more. After all, far from being the hardest job in the world, mothering has been the happiest, most satisfying, life-giving, joyful, rewarding, fulfilling and (dare I admit it?) easiest job I've ever had. Oh sure, the hours suck, there are anguishes deeper than the ocean, there are seasons (years!) of such utter exhaustion you can't imagine ever being rested again... but all those discomforts are easily and unequivocally overturned by my children, themselves.

I punched pause on the DVR to set the record straight:

"Being your mother has been the single greatest joy and privilege of my life: not a burden, not a perennial unrelenting source of emotional and physical agony, not the 'hardest job in the world', not the knee-capping blow to my 'adult individuality' nor has it been the thankless, under-appreciated, most overlooked profession these mothers would have you believe. In fact, my sense of personhood, identity and self-knowledge have grown more through mothering than any business I've started, any degree I've earned, any relationship I've pursued. I thank YOU for being the best people to ever happen to me."

Then I spewed in bullet style the privileges and unique joys that came with mothering them (all five of them, each one popping into my life like a fresh daisy, every two years for 10 years).

Cuddling: Being your mom means I got to have someone to cuddle non-stop for 12 years while sleeping with at least one of you at a time, nursing you, carrying you, holding you, helping you in and out of car seats, backpacking you.

Sleeping together: There is nothing more divine than a baby who falls asleep on your chest while you fall asleep and the whole world stops while mother and tiny child become fused as one content, quiet, shared being. No meditation, yoga, prayer circle, private retreat has ever come close to providing me with the depth of peace, pleasure and abiding hope that sleeping with a baby has given me.

Playing: Board games and hopscotch, dress-ups, face paint, finger paint, walks in the woods, trips to the zoo, picking up bugs, rolling down hills, blowing bubbles, eating too many cookies, watching Arthur on PBS, rewatching Disney movies, cards, chasing a dog in the backyard, trampoline jumping, creek splashing, snowman building, skiing, middle of the night slumber parties, bike rides, soccer in the backyard, soccer on the official fields, ultimate frisbee... What adult gets to do any of this on his or her 9-5 job? Talk about luxury!

Conversation: Oh it starts off good - why do bubbles float? How did I get red hair? Why doesn't Santa Claus visit Moroccans, too? But boy does it keep getting better! I've learned about human rights, veganism, Role Playing Games, Shakespeare, Klingon, fashion, exercise, lacrosse, birds, fantasy novels, conspiracy theories, atheism, feminism, linguistics, alternative monetary systems for world peace (serious!) and more by talking to my kids.

Mothering is the job that means taking the dog and kids for a walk in the woods is on task. It's the one where teatimes and picnics are considered achievements worth trumpeting to friends and family. It's the job where even on bad days, someone tells you "Hey, I love you Mom" and then hugs you so tightly, you believe it.

There is no comparison to the jobs I've had in business and writing. Sure, affirmation and personal achievement are nice... but they are nothing like the bond that comes from the devotion of loving people who live every day looking for you to see them for who they are. I've found that the easiest thing in the world is to love my kids. All it takes is entering into their lives on their terms and giving all I've got. I get it all back and more.

Yes, there have been nights where I cried myself to sleep over a non-stop crying toddler or a teenager's emotional pain. There are times when I feel out of control and invisible and fearful for my child's future or welfare. But the rewards of mothering so far outweigh any of its challenges, I can't relate to the repeated refrains of "how hard I have it" simply because I chose to have five kids. Instead, I just feel perennially lucky that my lifestyle has included such richness, tenderness and connection to immortality through my children.

I think it's time we blew the whistle. Mothering isn't a job. It's a privilege.

Wikiklesia: Volume Two

Taking Flight: Reclaiming the Female Half of God’s Image. A Journey of Freedom and Reconciliation

The Wikiklesia Project: Volume Two

I'm one of the editors on this project and would love for any of you who feel qualified and interested, to submit articles. All details are on the website.

"It's Good to Be Free"

About a year ago, I went to California to begin my midlife crisis. I didn't consciously plan that activity, but it appeared on the itinerary anyway. I felt an inner "snap." The band holding my life together burst.

I turned the "purse of my life" upside down, gave it a good shake, and all the jumbled contents scattered across the floor in every direction: lipsticks, loose change, market receipts, old "to do" lists, paper clips, keys, sticks of gum, reading glasses... No way to squeeze it all back in and I didn't want to. The purse had become cluttered, crowded and unmanageable. High time to clean it out.

So I've spent a lot of this year sorting. The sorting process is tricky. I'm used to saving stuff, pushing it down, cramming it in to be looked at later. But later had arrived. I took it an item at a time: "Does this go back in?" Sometimes, even if I wanted to keep a thing, it had spoiled and I had to simply toss it and face the truth: it was not what I wanted after all.

It takes radical self-trust to believe in your own perceptions. For years, I've been trained not to do that. Someone outside of me can and should tell me what is good for me, what I ought to tolerate, what I must be willing to live with—as though someone else knows, someone who isn't inside me. But a year ago, on a beach, alone with my sacred cigarette, I knew I couldn't live like that any more. I had to take the first awkward steps toward reclaiming my voice, toward sorting my life.

I remember last April walking the streets of San Francisco while the Final Four were playing, hurrying back to a hotel room to catch the second half where my team, the mighty UCLA, went down. A bit metaphorical, after all. That school bound to make it with Kevin Love at the helm, fell apart. Expectations weren't enough to carry them. I knew I couldn't make it on reputation and habit alone.

Still, it had been such an incredible ten days in California: soaring with emotion, relief, freedom, and peace - an awakening to how life could be, yet with a dawning awareness of the cost to get it to be that way all the time.

A couple weekends ago, while little Villanova stunned the nation beating Pitt, I had a similar, and yet new, feeling. I was also out of town, watching a game on a screen in a sports bar at a hotel. This time, the team I rooted for won. The evening felt unburdened by my past year. It strangely liberated me. A flood of feelings followed: relief, escape, confidence, optimism, and admittedly, fatigue, too. In that space, I felt free to let down, to recuperate. I had spent myself, but I also liked what was emerging from the depths: my own, original (though still small) voice, undiluted by what others tell me to think or be. I let it all go - the bad, the good, the confusion. I embraced myself and knew I'd be okay.

"But the little things they make me so happy
All I want to do is live by the sea
Little things they make me so happy
But it's good it's good it's good to be free..." (Oasis)

Twitter: I type, therefore I am

I took a hand count in my homeschool sessions (APACHE conference over the weekend) to see who had heard of Twitter. Many homeschoolers still (how to put this delicately) tend to be Luddites. Still, the techno-ones who were Twitter fans jiggled their hands in the air with the enthusiasm of anyone who has joined a craze. I felt a kinship with them. I get the same way... that is, happy to be in the know when the know is in! We bonded. We knew we weren't wasting time, doing nothing, all day, for no good reason.

The next morning, I ate my stale English muffin in front of the hotel TV and listened to a commentator condescend to the "crazed" as she raised her eyebrows mouthing the word "tweet" like it was a juvenile playground term six floors beneath her, that had somehow wormed its way onto her teleprompter, forcing her to say it Against. Her. Will. She derided the "updating" process, making the tweet all about stale English muffins at breakfast.

Yet just the day before, one of my homeschool moms had told me about a Twitter identity that tweets a different opening hook from a novel every day. I had just taught the "opening hook" in that session and she was positively gleeful to tell me about this resource that would add such value to the ideas I was suggesting. Of course! That's the point right there. Someone else is compiling opening hooks from children's novels, publishing them every day, and all any of us has to do is read them. Genius!

I got to talking to a man later in the day who had heard of Twitter but had yet to succumb. He wanted to understand how on earth I had time for all this social media (blogging, facebook, twitter, forums). Of course, I spend more time on the computer than should be humanly permissible so that makes it easy for me. But I went on, in my Brave Writerly way.

We're living in an epoch when more writing is being created and disseminated than in the history of the world. Really. I'm not overstating it. Kids especially (our reluctant writers, our kids who say they hate writing) are writing constantly (won't even use the phone as it's impolite so they text instead). Yes, much of what is written may as well be speech (they're not writing for pay, after all). Still, the craving to be known, to record what and who I am through the written word is taking over; putting myself in print or pixels has become one of the ways I know I exist. Writing is competing with speech for the first time in history.

And I'm one of those people who thinks that's incredibly good! For one, we take more responsibility for what we think when we commit it to writing (ask anyone who has made the mistake of pontificating on a forum without nuance). We express a point of view (even in 140 characters) and are accountable to those who read it (was it good to read? did it inform? did it inspire? did we connect?). Writers online share a passion, looking for that corresponding "yes" and experience the community creating happiness that comes from knowing that what I love, others love too.

Twitter, FB status updates, blogs: they let us play with words. God! Why is word play so undervalued? The heart of a vibrant community is its vocabulary. Truly. The more ways you can express your devotion to your passion, the more trivia you accumulate, the more insider-lingo you master, the greater your pleasure. It doesn't matter if you're a NASCAR fan or are all about container gardening. Pleasure multiplies when you talk about it in depth, using all your words (technical, slang, jokes and trivia), with other people equally zany for your chosen enthusiasm.

Twitter is genius since our attention spans have been shortened by the media saturation we live with every day. So now, in 140 characters, we must become good writers. Can you get it done and hold the reader's attention? For people like me, that's the game. It's the sudoku of language (and let's just ask: why does sudoku get to be famous and people admire those who do the silly puzzles daily, but twitter is seen as a waste of time?) We wordy people must rise up in protest. No more "math" beats "language arts" - the injustice!

So yeah, I love Twitter and Facebook and blogs and forums and texting on the phone. Finally - we can all be published. And read.

I write, therefore I am. Or... I type, therefore I am.

Virtual Lives

In cleaning out some old files on my computer, I ran across this journal entry from five years ago (Feb. 2004). It stunned me. I remember very clearly what prompted the insights and thoughts at the time. Yet it spoke to me on another level now. See what you think:

Dr. Dewey [professor of New Testament] commented: “God is not in any book but in the Reality of our lives. Trouble is we tend to lead virtual lives. Wouldn't know Reality if it knocked... yet when it does, well, it does. When the baby decides to come, when the water breaks, when the contractions start, you have to face Reality and go with the waves... The stories [in the Bible] are told to help people identify the waves in their lives... the beauty and the horror...”

Last night I had such an "Aha" about what it means to lead a virtual life. I kept playing over and over again in my head: what does he mean we wouldn’t know Reality if it knocked? And then the realizations of my own virtual existence poured in.

How many times have I felt someone else’s feelings instead of my own when relating to that person? I find myself out of touch with what I want, need or think and totally adjust who I am to what that person says, does or is. How often have I pretended that a viewpoint made sense when underneath was a horror or shock that I knew wouldn’t be acceptable?

I’ve lived in a world of faith that put more emphasis on the invisible that I can’t know or touch or see than on what I can know, touch and see. I’ve invalidated what I know to fit with what I’m told I ought to think.

I’ve not trusted my experiences – I’ve allowed other people to tell me what is right or wrong. I let people tell me what was right in my sex life. I let people tell me that my reasons for a move [to Ohio from CA] wouldn’t be good enough – I must let God have his way. I was told that my ideas about a career were inferior to God’s ideas of a career for me. And ironically, those who play the virtual reality game well figure out ways to get both – getting what they want in the guise of God’s giving it to them. This is my particular world of the virtual. There must be others that aren’t bound in religion. [And yes, those are the ones I'm getting know now.]

Am I saying that I am the final word on my life, my authority comes from within? Scary thought! A hundred voices immediately jump in front of me to warn me of the danger of being autonomous.

Yet I might be. And it is such a deeply ingrained wrong way to think (being responsible for self) that I'm almost nervous to write it out. But the truth is that we all submit to authority – only most of the time we pick an illusion – as though we can submit to something outside of self – something we deem bigger and more real than our own authority, even though our personal sense of right and wrong guides even that choice. To own our responsibility, as Bonhoeffer suggests, is too big for most of us. We have been trained not to trust self and we willingly turn over our consciences, our guilt, our aspirations to the stewardship of others pretending that we are not choosing, are not in control, are not risking being bad or making bad decisions.

Who gets control?

Religion
Government
Family
Culture
Pop stars
Fear of Rejection
Psychology
Fame

Reality: what is it? It’s the bottom rung on the ladder of experience and thought. What is the stuff that gets in the way? What do we heap up on top of it (like drugs to dull the pain of the contractions) to avoid living it and being responsible to it?

I love the idea of birth: the water breaking, the baby coming and going with the waves. Oh my God! I know that feeling totally. The baby is coming – I can’t stop it. I’ve lived this experience five times without drugs, without intervention. It was the most miraculous experience I’ve ever had. To let go of control and to completely yield to the process, to recognize that I could only cooperate or inhibit but that it would happen no matter what. My births were the most “in the moment” experiences of my life and the result was sheer exhilaration, power and joy!

What baby is on its way in my life right now? The profound disillusionment with literal faith is what is at work in me [Feb. 2004]. It’s shattering the old attachments and interpretations and ways of thinking… about everything.

Biblical literalism is such a scary place. The worldview that literalism represents has invaded every aspect of how I live and think. It has a strong hold on my thinking. I have a fog settle in any time I move out of it too far. And it is subtle. I thought I had let it go by letting the Bible be fallible and errant. But no! I then want to literally affirm the metaphorical truths in the same way I held to the literal history or geography.

I work hard to do things “right” so that I can control the outcomes. If I parent correctly, if I homeschool conscientiously, my children will not do drugs, they will love me, they will have friends and go on to college. I expect my obedience to the demands of these “promises” to pay off literally. No mystery. No chance to fail.

But what if Reality woke me up? What if there is more there than what I do? How will I respond? Will I suddenly wake up from my virtual existence and realize that there is something else more real?

And isn’t that what happens so often? My parents are “happily married” for 17 years and then Wham! Reality intrudes and my mom discovers my father in bed with another woman. What illusion were they living before? What virtual life had they tricked themselves into believing?

We pile up debt and believe we own things. We promise ourselves that next year will be better and then miss what’s happening today. What is today teaching me?

I find myself consulting experts and trusting someone else’s word over my own. I don’t want to follow my thoughts - I want someone to tell me how it is. But the baby is coming. I will be born. The “I” I’m supposed to fear, call sinful, distrust… that me is the baby this time. Can I trust that Reality is my greatest teacher, that I can find my way through life with as much honesty as I can muster? Direct access to reality! What a concept.

Dorothy Sayers says:

“And to every man and woman to whom integrity of mind meant more than material gain, defenders in the central keep of man’s soul, personal differences forgotten in the face of a common foe, to be true to one’s calling whatever follies one might commit in one’s emotional life, that was the way to spiritual peace.”

“There are a number of people who are disconnnected between what you do feel and what you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.

“Yes, said Harriet. “And I am one of them. I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feel.”

“Oh I don’t think that matters, providing one doesn’t try to persuade oneself into appropriate feelings.”

Virtual living: persuading oneself into appropriate feelings.

And isn’t that the nature of not knowing Reality?

We have to learn the language game of the group we join and then reinterpret our experience of life in light of the new “proffered” reality. We aren’t free, we can’t speak, we don’t share. We conform, adhere, play by the new rules and find safety and protection from a direct experience of Reality.

This must be what E. M. Forster is about. He constantly challenges people to have their own opinions, to face their hypocrisy in the face of truth and beauty. Is it better to love a painting because someone famous paints it or because it speaks to you – you, the one for whom it was painted – the viewer, not the student or priest or tourist.

Oh my! It’s coming to me now. I know I may have a piece of it.

The truly free thinker, or free mind is the one that can stay open to self and not give in to the pressures of the group. On the other hand, we need each other to help us see reality. We need others to help us not be bound by our group think tendencies. But what are friends for? They aren’t supposed to exclaim loudly “How can you think that?” They are supposed to be the midwives of a birth. They don’t know ahead of time what the baby will be. If they do, they aren’t midwives any more. They are the ones who will rob you of the truth once it’s born. They will tell you what baby you should have had.

But real friends will marvel with you and help you see Reality as it unfolds in your life.

That’s it.

Hmmm. So many thoughts. I'll leave those for another day. What is your version of virtual living? How has Reality awakened you?

Is it ironic....

that during the Bush years, the Republicans oversaw the multiple fronts of the so-called "War on Terror" (the one thing I would never want to trust a Republican to oversee given their myopia, inability to see "the other" and their "bomb first, ask later" style of international diplomacy), while we are now in the Obama years, and suddenly the Democrats are in charge of the largest money crisis since the Great Depression (honestly, my conservative roots still make me a bit queasy turning over that power to the gov't, despite wanting to trust the president on this one)?

Seriously.

It's like a big cosmic joke.

Emotional Safety

I read this quote yesterday and thought it perfectly described the heart of a good relationship:

Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.
~Dinah Craik, A Life for a Life, 1859

Quiet and silence

So the kids survived their media fast. In fact, they happily reported that it wasn't "so bad" and that, in fact, they might do it again some time. I wondered what they liked about it. They read, the house was quiet, they didn't feel pressure to check up on friends, they were proud of themselves for sticking to it. All good stuff. At the meeting where they gathered with their other media fasting friends, the pastor asked if the kids had spent more time in prayer or reading the Bible. My kids told me, "I wished he'd have mentioned that we could be doing THAT while fasting. He never told us that BEFOREhand." Ah well. I majored on what they did experience and told them their pastor is still growing in his leading skills too.

This morning, a friend sent me a couple of quotes that I had supposedly sent her years ago. I mean, I'm sure I did. It's just that I don't remember either of them and clearly didn't learn a thing from them on the first pass. Let me post them first:

Unfortunately, in seeing ourselves as we truly are, not all that we see is beautiful and attractive. This is undoubtedly part of the reason we flee silence. We do not want to be confronted with our hypocrisy, our phoniness. We see how false and fragile is the false self we project. We have to go through this painful experience to come to our true self. It is a harrowing journey, a death to self—the false self—and no one wants to die. But it is the only path to life, to freedom, to peace, to true love. And it begins with silence. We cannot give ourselves in love if we do not know and possess ourselves. This is the great value of silence. It is the pathway to all we truly want.

--M. Basil Pennington

Silence is the measure of the power to act; that is, a person never has more power to act than he has silence. Anyone can understand that to do something is far greater than to talk about doing it. If, therefore, a person has a plan or idea and is fully resolved to carry it out, he does not need to talk about it. What he talks about in connection with the proposed action is what he is most unsure of and most unwilling to do.

--Soren Kierkegaard

I've spent time being quiet. My kids were quiet last week. I know how to turn down the sound. In fact, for years I called my Bible reading and prayer hour, a "quiet time."

I remember naps with little kids. My whole "ragged, on-the-edge" goal by 2 p.m. - get kids into beds and knocked out. I'd be unraveling so fast by that hour, that all I could do was hurl myself onto the floor of the bedroom that had three, four, and finally five kids stuffed into it, letting the current baby nurse while a soft lullaby tape played, hoping the bouncing, questions, tossing and turning would finally collapse into gentle little one snores. I'd extricate myself from the suctioned baby, careful not to disturb a single muscle, and walk into the other room, sighing deeply. Quiet had descended on the apartment. I could draw breath. For a moment.

Silence, though, seems to be another whole level. Silence is not just being quiet, but being with self, alone. Being confronted with hypocrisy? Oh sign me up! Really much easier to be busy and noisy than that. I love that nearly last line of the Basil quote though: "We cannot give ourselves in love if we do not know and possess ourselves." That seems to be the key to living a rich life, doesn't it?

I'm realizing quiet is not silence. Silence is shutting down communication that distracts me from being with mySelf. I want to cultivate a little silence in my life (probably have to start in small doses - I'm pretty addicted to "noise"). What do you do? Anyone practice silence as a discipline?

Irish rambles

I don't wear green on St. Patrick's day. I figure being Irish is enough. I remember clearly in 5th grade that I very much wanted to wear a little pin my mother kept in her jewelry box. The pin was a circle of white with the word "Sweeney's" stamped across it. The apostrophe, naturally, was a shamrock; Sweeney, my last name. This little pin had been a gift from my dad to my mom when they were dating, picked up at an Irish pub and brought home as a gift to let her know "she was his."

So I loved the idea of wearing the token on St. Patrick's Day and begged my mother to let me wear it to school. Being one of those moms who likes to make her kids happy, she acquiesced but not without a little pressure: "Please don't lose it. It means a lot to me." I assured her that I would not and pinned it to my blouse.

During the day, I'd check my lapel to see that the pin was still there. It was. It drew attention and I got to repeat the little romance story of my parents' love to anyone who asked. By the afternoon, I felt so good. I'd kept it securely fastened in spite of morning recess and lunch. Now it was time for kickball and then a run around the field at Round Meadow (the name of my elementary school - I've always loved it). I'm competitive when I play so I never paid a single bit of attention to my blouse and instead, dove at the ball with all the power a 4' body could muster. Sweaty and happy, we finished the game.

As I walked back to class, I glanced down at my lapel. You already know what's coming. The pin had vanished: somewhere in that round meadow called the back field, my little pin lay lonely under a sea of green grass. Panic swept over me. I got permission to comb the field. I scoured it the way a 5th grader does - not really seeing, not really knowing where to look. Mostly I cried.

Eventually, I got on the bus to head home, scared that my mother would be heart-broken. When I walked into the kichen, she had little green shamrock cookies at our table (she's like that, so thoughtful). I couldn't hold back the tears. And she knew, right then, the whole story. Yet she hardly said a word about it. Not a bit of scolding. She was glad I had gotten the chance to wear the pin to school. She reminded me that she hadn't looked at it in years and at least on its last day, it got some happy use.

I hadn't thought about that story until today when Jon and I were talking about the fact that I never wear green on St. Patrick's day. Made me think of the pin that I did wear. Then I gently chuckled realizing that my parents are divorced and the pin would mean next to nothing now, anyway. I really did enjoy it at the height of its meaningfulness to me. In a strange way it reminded me of how temporary everything is: declarations of love, souvenirs, tokens, seasons of life, irresponsibility, childishness, celebrations, even parents who love each other. Enjoy them while you can, when you have them, then... let them go.

Erin-go-braugh!

P.S. We used to always say to my little sister, named Erin, "Erin-go-braless" on St. Paddy's. ;-)

TED Talk: Unveiling the Sixth Sense

Coolest, crazy thing ever. Clearly this is the future (as radical as the Internet for the next generation... or sooner!).