a few weeks ago, my friend maryann reminded me of this wonderful quotation about motherhood and ministry, found in the equally wonderful book listening for god by renita weems. i think it can be easily stretched to speak to all mothers who are modifying and trying to integrate their visions of vocation and motherhood. i forgot to breathe while i was reading these words: 

“i will never be the writer i would have been had i not become a mother. nor will i be the minister or professor i could have been if i hadn’t had to suffer the interruptions of a sulking child or the vibes of a brooding husband transmitted under the door of my study. i give up writing the book i might have written or the sermon i might have preached every time i wander out of my study and follow the smell of popcorn wafting in the air, follow it in to the family room, where the rest of the family is watching the lion king for the forty-second time. i’ll never be able to recapture the fine sentences swirling in my head, or the fresh revelations that were about to lay hold of me. but for the joy of getting down on the cold hardwood floor and singing, “hakuna matata,” i’ll settle for bits and pieces of revelation god sends my way, and see what, if anything, i can make of them when i can. because today is today, and that’s all i have.”

and now, in light of a restless night with the bird and the inevitable morning-after fog that now surrounds me, i’m going to “wander out of my study,” as renita writes. happy thursday!

and p.s. renita still managed to be a wonderful professor. i was lucky enough to have her for hebrew bible at vanderbilt.

[the source for this post can be found on the bibliography page located in the sidebar to your right.]

about halfasecond after andy and i got married, people started asking us when we were going to have children. poor little nosy souls… they were forced to wait for six whole years for us to fit quaintly into their definition of family. there was a lightness about those years (probably the sheer absence of diaper bags and clinging children) but people sort of regarded us lightly too. i didn’t notice this, of course, until my life became full of baby love, it’s accompanying luggage, and the sudden respect i received just for having a small human being in my charge. seemingly overnight, members of our community began respecting our decisions to bow out early from a parties, to let the answering machine field our calls, and to decline “invitations” to chaperon church lock-ins. this regard for our boundaries has been a lovely, unexpected parenting perk.

for me, six years was long enough to be married without children; it felt too long, in fact. but what about those who simply choose not to become parents? my friends who have opted out of the parenting thing report that they feel left out, at best, and badgered and disrespected, at worst. 

elizabeth gilbert has recently brought this phenomenon to light in her book committed. she writes of the questions and judgements imposed upon her and others who have chosen not to have children. but she also points out that our society is actually better for having “aunties” and “(s)parents.” she writes,

“Even within my own community, I can see where I have been vital sometimes as a member of the Auntie Brigade. My job is not merely to spoil and indulge my niece and nephew (though I do take that assignment to heart) but also to be a roving auntie to the world — an ambassador auntie —who is on hand wherever help is needed, in anybody’s family whatsoever. There are people I’ve been able to help, sometimes fully supporting them for years, because I am not obliged, as a mother would be obliged, to put all my energies and resources into the full-time rearing of a child. There are a whole bunch of Little League uniforms and orthodontist’s bills and college educations that I will never have to pay for, thereby freeing up resources to spread more widely across the community. In this way, I, too, foster life. There are many, many ways to foster life. And believe me, every single one of them is essential.”

my children have several “aunties” and “(s)parents” in their lives. the glee with which the monkey and bird approach our friends, ruth, martha, hope, sarah, and phil (just to name a few) is second only to the relief i feel when someone with renewed energy and delight in toddler antics enters my front door. i hear these “aunties” and “(s)parents laugh at my kids’ jokes. i watch them join my children for an afternoon of porch swinging and story telling. i see them get down on the floor and immerse themselves in legoland and the enterprise of space-ship-building. and then, when these friends leave, i am able to see my children more for the funny little wonders that they are and less for the little tornadic wind storms that they can be.

so to all of the “aunties” and “(s)parents” of the world, i say THANK YOU. i respect your place in life, and i am thankful for it. there really are “many ways to foster life.” and to those who foster life here at our house, i am so, so grateful.

[the elizabeth gilbert quote is from https://www.babble.com/elizabeth-gilbert-committed-marriage/.]

for the longest time, i resisted getting a tattoo. there was a brief stint in college when i constantly doodled dogwood blossoms and imagined one artfully inked on my ankel or just below the hairline on the back of my neck. but like all symbols that have illumined my path, after its debut as The Center of Unspoken Meaning in my life, the dogwood blossom returned to work at her day job as a bit of earthly matter charged to participate in an ordinary sort of beauty. and i moved on to the sanskrit word for OM, or the mayan cross, or something equally evocative and deep.

image from dianeplus5.blogspot.com

i saw the movie eat, pray, love last week, which reminded me of one of my favorite lines in the book by elizabeth gilbert. in the book, liz is lamenting to her sister that she is feeling reluctant about starting a family. she is trying to discern whether to heed or disregard this ambivalence when her sister says,

“having a baby is like getting a tattoo… ON YOUR FACE. you really need to be certain it’s what you want before you commit.”

it’s true. having a baby is an immediate, noticeable, and permanent identity change. i got my first tattoo in the summer of 2006, at which point i traded things like free time and personal space for an unshakable sense of love and awe and sleep deprivation. my second tattoo came in the winter of 2009, which is when i traded the last vestiges of order in my life for complete chaos, the last shard of my remaining vanity for a brown magic marker and a little road trip entertainment (see above), and my already-full-heart for an impossibly deeper sort of love. inasmuch as there is divinity in everything and everyone (and i believe there is) my children really are the reorienting, Centers of Unspoken Meaning in my life. i don’t want to completely lose my identity in them, and i still treasure the meaning found in all of the world’s symbols. but i have committed myself to shaping and being shaped by these little beings. i might as well ride with them into the depths and usher them into the heights of life. this privelege is what makes such sacrifice worth it.

but taking the parenting plunge yields yet another reward, one that i am just recently beginning to recognize. the indigo girls speak of it in their song, get out the map:

“with every lesson learned a line upon your beautiful face/we’ll amuse ourselves one day with these memories we’ll trace.”

perhaps i am also trading worry and wrinkles for the sweetest of memories… the way the monkey cannot say his R’s, the spring of their curls, the first day the bird said, “hi, mama,” when i went to get him from his crib, our july hikes through the mountains with the monkey at my side and the bird in my pack.

my face is now its own geography of commitment and lessons learned, sleepless nights and smile lines, baby fingernail scratches and sloppy toddler kisses. now i’m not much different than the dogwood blossom, a bit of earthly matter whose day job is to participate in an ordinary sort of beauty. ahh, but what an extraordinary ride this is turning out to be!

the end of august is a perfectly normal time to start discussing halloween costumes in our house. and by “discussing,” i am actually referring to a complex, multi-step process wherein i decide what my children’s costumes are going to be (i am, after all, the decider), and slowly introduce my conclusions in sneaky and subtle ways until the other members of my family are reveling in their own flashes of costume insight (which were, of course, my own flashes of costume insight in the first place).

this system has worked beautifully in the past. every october for four years, i have successfully molded my children into little reflections of my own sense of humor, and in two cases, my own love of all things dr. seuss.

but this year, we have run into a little snafu. it seems that the monkey is now capable of independent thought. and in a giant act of rebellion against his canine-loving parents and select members of his extended family, the four-year-old has been unwavering in his commitment to be a “kitty cat” for halloween. this comes as quite a blow to andy and me, who have been plotting with another family to trick-or-treat as the entire cast of characters from yo gabba gabba.

just as andy and i were arguing over who would make a better DJ lance and pontificating about where we might obtain an orange jump suit, the words “kitty cat” were released into the environs. i must admit that my first inclination was to try to talk the monkey into being brobee or muno. but i did manage to choke out a hollow-sounding, “oooohhh, a kitty cat, huh? what color kitty cat?”

andy assured me that the kitty cat notion would be fleeting. he was wrong. the monkey has dug in his proverbial claws.

i could tell myself that the monkey’s halloween costume isn’t very important in the grand scheme of things. i could probably work my decider magic one more year and resume my ebay search for an orange jumpsuit. but i really think that this halloween costume debacle is one of my first opportunities to demonstrate concretely to my child that his ideas matter. the monkey has given me the perfect reminder that though part of my job is to influence who he becomes, another very important part entails celebrating who he already is.

so, this october 31st, our little monkey will be a kitty cat. what’s more, he will have the best damn kitty cat costume in the history of halloween. i will do anything for this child, including becoming a cat person.

most people mistakenly think that because i am a minister and a mother, i must have some special, handed-down-from-god, ability to explain matters of the ultimate to children. i’ll never forget walking with the monkey into his school last december. the preschool director had proudly installed a life-sized nativity scene:

she greeted us with a smile and a wink and said, “monkey, i know that YOU of all people must know who all of these characters are!”

she quizzed him on everyone from the animals, to mary and joseph, to jesus, himself. i am here to tell you that apart from the slight recognition of a sheep, my little guy had no earthly idea what the director was talking about.

“we’ll work on this,” i said.

yesterday, i had another opportunity to display my deficits in the area of early childhood religious education when i did the children’s sermon at church. i learned later from the monkey that my explanation of the word “perseverance” had not been clear (as found in the hebrews text, “let us run with perseverance the race set before us”). the monkey informed me confidently, as he was attempting to dismount his new trampoline, that i had nothing to worry about. he was “not going to have perseverance.” when i flashed a puzzled look he said, “that means that i am not going to get too tired or fall down.” hmmn…

finally, the monkey and i had the following interaction before bedtime last night. i was singing, and he was to fill in the gaps in the song with rhyming phrases:

mommy: (singing) “the ants go marching 12 by 12 hurrah, hurrah; the ants go marching 12 by 12, the little one stops to…”

monkey: “…go to hell!”

mommy: “what? what is hell?”

monkey: “it’s just a place you go.”

mommy: (dumbfounded) “well, where in the world have you heard of this place?”

monkey: “all the time, mommy. you know… when i go up a hill…”

mommy: “so you are saying HILL?”

monkey: “yes!”

mommy: “oh, thank god.”

so, to all the moms out there who know how to talk to children about divnity and mystery, i have a proposition to make. you give my children a foundation of stories — a framework upon which they might hang their questions later. you give them an overwhelming sense that god is love, and you inspire them to give love in return.

then, when your children get to college, you can send them to me. i will happily return to my old college chaplaincy roots. we’ll talk about our questions, our doubts, and the notion that there’s wisdom in recognizing the vast expanse of what we don’t know. we’ll work on integrating head and heart, thinking and being. 

i hope this plan works for you because if it doesn’t, my children are clearly going to hill in a hand basket.

hello, and welcome to my home tour. i think i’ll start by giving your a glance at my sewing room:

oh yeah, i keep forgetting that you’ve already seen my kitchen and my office. we’ve passed that point in our relationship where i can blithely lie and change the subject to cover up my shortcomings. let’s just say that while i dream of the above displayed organization, my reality looks more like this:

it’s not that i don’t have an organizational system. i do actually have shelves and scrap bins, and i even returned everything to their places right before i left for the mountains. it’s just that everything lives within reach of the monkey and the bird, who love nothing more than to float around in vast seas of fabric. the up side is that this meticulous project of dumping, gathering, and arranging occupies the kids for hours. 

i am still plugging away at the re[frame] productivity system for creative people  . my “to do”  list still resides in a cute little box of note cards, my files are still in order, and my office hasn’t been a disaster area in quite some time. clearly the sewing room project is next. i’m thinking pegboards (out of the children’s reach) securing scissors, rotary cutters, and the like. i’m thinking colorful displays of bobbins and thread, elevated just beyond the monkey’s grasp. i’m thinking off-the-floor shelving for the fabric and scraps. this is going to be huge, people.

if any of you crafty types have any tips, pictures, or inspiration to share, bring it on.

the result is going to be sew fantastic.

the nice orderly fabric picture was borrowed from thread on 6th street in tuscumbia, AL.

four years ago today, all of the mystery in the universe cried and stretched, moved from darkness into light, and conceded the bliss of the world beyond for our clamorous symphony of love. he, our little monkey, was baptized into a community of gracious souls — the bold village entrusted, along with us, to help him become his truest self. we, andy and i, were baptized into a re-orienting sort of love – unconditional, fearful, wonderful.

happy birthday, big boy! you are my wild, empathetic, curly, defiant, inquisitive, exuberent, heart.

photo by carol reach.

i began talking about child number three when i was pregnant with child number two. this was a pretty bold move for someone who spent nearly four years under the impression that she might not be able to have children at all. but two in vitro attempts led to two successful pregnancies, and for the first time i allowed myself to envision myself with a house full of children.

but the second pregnancy was a tropical storm of emotions. for almost six months we reacted to quad-screen test results by preparing ourselves to welcome a special-needs child. we searched (unsuccessfully) at the offices of specialists and in the many alcoves of the internet for definitive predictions regarding our little bird’s number of chromosomes. if we could have checked out for a while, filled our car with plenty of gas and taken an evacuation route to sunnier pastures, we would have.

but this pregnancy was not like that. it was the constant, embodied awareness of darkness and light, fear and joy, reluctance and exuberance. there was no way out but through.

it’s funny how the female memory works. i can recall and describe the experience of my second pregnancy, but i am no longer capable of conjuring up and experiencing its particular level of agony. likewise, the pain of childbirth and the sleeplessness of the newborn phase are wrapped up and obscured in my head by a spectacular sense of wonder and awe.

saved from the monkey's first haircut

apparently, the male memory does not work this way. when the subject of child number three comes up, my husband, who has become the official keeper of the more base realities of pregnancy, childbirth, and newborn parenting, reminds me of the tropical storm we just barely survived in 2009. “why,” he pleads, “why and HOW could we ever survive that again?”

nevertheless, i have baby lust. ayelet waldmen reminds me that i am not alone:

“other women in the park are having these same internal debates, i think. when a newborn shows up, there’s a pause, a hiccup in the general hubbub. we all stare, misty-eyed. we coo; we ooh. and then someone’s kid whacks someone else’s on the head with a shovel, or a toddler gets stuck on the top of the slide and gives a wrenching shriek, and we all briskly shake off that gentle longing” (bad mother, 182). 

maybe baby lust is merely the biological pull that ensures that the human species will persist. it doesn’t feel like this though. it feels more like standing at the edge of the creative center of the universe. staying outside of it takes almost as much of an emotional toll as bravely venturing in.

i was sitting in a marriage and family therapy class a few years ago when my professor handed out a rollins and feldman  graph entitled marriage satisfaction across the family life cycle.

the graph we saw in class, which was a more detailed version of the one above, showed that marital satisfaction is at an impressive high for newlyweds. satisfaction steadily decreases when children hit the scene and begins to rise again at the point when the children launch.

the members of our class were indignant. most of us were parents whose children were still at home. “we’re happy!” we protested defensively. “our marriages are satisfying!” we argued.

yesterday, i read this recent new york magazine article entitled all joy and no fun: why parents hate parenting. sited in it are a number of studies like that of rollins and feldman that examine the stress that children bring to marriages. but the article examines many similar studies that essentially assert that parenting diminishes happiness for individuals too. in other words,

“as a rule, most studies show that mothers are less happy than fathers, that single parents are less happy still, that babies and toddlers are the hardest, and that each successive child produces diminishing returns.”

author jennifer senior proposes a number of potential reasons for the inverse relationship between parenting and happiness. one is that along with children come dramatic and momentary shifts between intense joy and intense frustration. another is that while parents love our children, perhaps we are not so in love with the day-to-day tasks of parenting. another is that our country’s less-than-stellar childcare and family leave provisions contribute to parents’ worry. and finally, perhaps the most comically stated reason is that “[children] are a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.”

i cannot deny that there is spark of truth in the above musings. motherhood is not all snuggles and tender i love you’s. in the time that it has taken me to write this post, for example, my children have:

• argued over a harmonica
• drawn all over themselves with brown marker
• face planted into a cardboard playhouse (the bird)
• systematically spread my fabric collection all over the house (the monkey), and
• taken all of their clothes off.

but still, i really do love my life. i do not think i am in denial. i just think that there is more to life than day-do-day happiness. apparently, i am in good company. daniel gilbert, a harvard psychologist who is also a father and grandfather, asserts that “what children really do is offer moments of transcendence, not an overall improvement in well-being.”

sociologists kei nomaguchi and melissa milkie studied the costs and rewards of parenting and concluded that mothers are often less depressed after having children. like gilbert, nomaguchi and milkie “sought to understand not just the moment-to-moment moods of [their] participants, but more existential matters, like how connected they felt, and how motivated.”

perhaps many studies on the impact of children on marital and personal satisfaction yield such dismal results because the kind of rewards that come with parenting, like most things that are unspeakably beautiful and important, cannot be easily described, categorized, and charted. but i relish the transcendent, existential meaning that my children have helped me to recognize. and to share this experience with my husband is something that i truly cherish.

we may argue over whose turn it is to read llama llama red pajama to the monkey for the five millionth time but even as we do this, we know that we are participating in some sort of divine mystery. we are tapping into something that is bigger than we are. we have lost much of our free time, it’s true. but we have traded it for a fierce and boundless love.