i am not a science person, and i never took physics. perhaps this is why i have managed to reach the age of 34 without fully grasping the simple concept that i cannot be two places at once. but andy’s three-day out-of-town conference last week was just the crash course i needed to fulfill my “knowing one’s limitations” requirement.

lesson one occured at memphis botanic gardens’ big back yard, where i encountered another mom, who was expertly holding her ten-week-old while her three-year-old was tentatively exploring.  

i, on the other hand, darted frantically from one child-in-constant-motion to the other. the bird fell, the monkey was hogging the slide, the bird nibbled on someone else’s lunch, the monkey needed help finding the mallets for the “house of rock,” the bird was dangerously close to the creek, the monkey…

wait! where was the monkey? hiding in the worm hole. cool.

only this wasn’t so cool with the aforementioned mother, because while my attention was on the monkey, the bird was playing with the enticing gadgets on her ten-week-old’s empty stroller.

i scooped up the bird in a flurry of apologies. she said nothing but went to work on the stroller with wet wipes.

the big back yard is just that — big. but no matter how far we strayed from the perturbed mother and her statuesque children, the bird always managed to find his way back to her alluring collection of stroller toys. when she started scolding the bird and yanking him away from the empty stroller, i knew it was time to go. i also knew that in about a year, when her baby is walking, this mother would be joining me in the impossible attempt to be in two places at once.

lesson two occurred at the end of my solo-parenting duty, just as i was congratulating myself for maintaining patience, relative calm, and a sense of adventure while andy was away. the phone rang, and a kind and gentle church parishioner on the other end of the line expressed legitimate disappointment that i had not visited his family during a very critical time they had experienced in the previous few days, the same few days i spent playing the roles of mom, dad, and cruise director for my kids.

i was, and still am, riddled with guilt.

i’m also frustrated that in many cases for me, quality ministry and quality parenting are mutually exclusive. but no matter how hard i try, i cannot be in two places at once. sometimes being fully present to one child means being only marginally present to the other. sometimes providing stability during a critical time for my children means not providing empathy during a critical time for parishioners.

this is the reality of my life right now, one that i am having a hard time embracing. even i were a science person, i cannot change the laws of physics.

it finally happened. all of the deadlines that i set for myself to protect me from THE DEADLINE came and went. i left the house sunday morning with barely enough time to get to the church. a trail of index cards and commentaries followed. i would have to finish the sermon (sure to be my all time worst) in the car.

andy drove while i scribbled illegible notes and envisioned myself lost in translation as i cowered behind the pulpit. concentration was elusive as i began to remember, in great detail, the host of things i had forgotten: the scripture reading, shoes, my robe… PANTS! 

andy was on the cell phone attempting to borrow a robe from a colleague when he made the snap decision to take an off-road shortcut. a rocky embankment prohibited us from driving the rest of the way, so the two of us scaled the jagged surface (leaving yet another trail of index cards and commentaries). i had picked the wrong day to go barefoot but if we hurried, there would still time be to make it for my part.

a scary yard dawg and a nagging home owner with a “no tresspassing policy” sent the two of us and my dwindling preaching paraphanalia back to the car, where we peeled out, backtracked, drove slowly through traffic toward the church, and tuned in to the service broadcast on AM radio station 600.

who knew that unspoken anxiety and anger could be transmitted over radio waves? andy and i listened as the congregation organized an impromptu hymn sing while they waited for me. we were stopped at a broken red light. i realized i still had on my pajama top. i had forgotten to brush my teeth.

and then i did what i should have done in the very beginning. i forced myself to wake up. i told the whole dream that it could take its flying index cards and commentaries and board a plane to timbuktu. i packaged up my anxieties over the forgotten robe, shoes, and scripture reading, along with that nagging neighbor and her yard dawg, and i shoved them all off of the rocky embankment.

but as i lay awake in bed, i could not seem to tune out the sounds of AM radio station 600, which was taking a break from regularly scheduled nightmares for a little public service announcement:

the “transportation parade” at the monkey’s school would be taking place in less than five hours. “have you decorated your son’s big wheel?” the announcer chided.

no. clearly i hadn’t decorated the damn big wheel. many thanks to my subconscious for pointing out the error of my ways. and what does it say about me that i just had a full-blown anxiety nightmare over a four-year-old’s school transportation parade?   

now… does anybody know where i can get balloons and streamers at 6:12 in the morning?

lately, i’ve been reading geneen roth’s women, food, and god, a book i passed over the first four times it called out to me from the best-seller rack at target. the book is a spiritual approach to disordered relationships with food, exercise, and the body, disordered relationships that used to be landmarks in my own internal terrain. in light of new found and much appreciated health in these areas, i was hesitant to read about what women do to mask, override, indulge, project, and protect our hungers. it’s better just to celebrate that the real struggle is behind me, i thought. it’s better not ask too many questions.

roth describes addictions to food, thinness, exercise, et cetera as coping mechanisms for more existential struggles and longings. in order to avoid “trusting our less tangible hungers (for rest, contact, meaning),” which are often surprising “doorways into a blazing inner universe,” women often use food, rigid discipline, dieting, and the like to transform our existential angst into something more manageable (14, 15). and there are secondary gains that come when we buy into the widespread weight loss industry. this industry has given women a language to speak about our shortcomings. it has given us the illusion that we can control our fates. it has given us company in our loneliness. but as roth points out, it also traps us in the cycle of losing and gaining the same 18 pounds, 30 different times, over a lifespan of about 80 years.

in my reading of women, food, and god, i have recognized myself in what roth describes as “creating a secondary problem when the original problem becomes too uncomfortable” (52). it has occurred to me that a good bit of the energy i used to exert over body image issues is currently channelled into another common secondary problem: finding that ever-elusive balance between love and work. perhaps the real struggle is not behind me after all. perhaps it has merely changed forms.

though i swore off dieting many years ago, i am enjoying similar secondary gains in the quest for balance. once again, i have a language for articulating my grief, a notion that i can control my fate by making the right choices, and a community of other women who are trying along with me to restore equilibrium to our lives. and it strikes me that this quest might also trap me in a similar cycle of losing and gaining my balance 30 plus times for a lifespan of about 80 years (or at least until my children are launched).

i’m now asking myself what deeper hungers are masked by the ever-popular quest for balance. have i internalized systemic ills and personalized the great imbalances around me? are my feverish engagements with the working world merely escape attempts from a basic loneliness that could be a “doorway to a blazing universe?” is my decision to spend most of my time at home a way of taking myself out of a game i fear i’d lose?

i don’t know the answers to these questions but i think they are worth pondering. it seems entirely possible that fullness is achieved by embracing our hungers.

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

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!

this is my “to-do box.”

this is what the bird thinks of my “to-do box,” and all of the various lists, reminders, work obligations and home-related chores that reside on note cards therein:

what a perfect metaphor for what it’s like to try to be a “work-at-home-mom!”

i catch myself envying moms who work full-time outside of the home and those who leave their jobs completely to become stay-at-home-moms. surely life in these neatly defined categories is, well…neater.

but then i remember these wise words from lisa belkin’s life’s work: confessions of an unbalanced mom:

“i have yet to hear from anyone who feels they are doing everything right. so it’s not just me who can’t do this — and it’s not just you, either. not a one of us seems to be able to give 100 percent of themselves to their job and 100 percent of themselves to their family and 100 percent of themselves to taking care of themselves. small wonder. yet we all seem to think someone (else) out there is getting it right; people who work full-time think people who work  part-time are doing it, and people who work part-time think people who don’t work at all are doing it, and those who left the office to tend to home think that if only they could escape back to an office, they might find sanity. but all of this misses the point. no one can do it, because it cannot be done…. this emotional and economic tug-of-war is the central story of our generation” (14 , 16).

belkin is no longer in search of balance. now she’s just after “a close approximation of sanity.”

i think she might be on to something.

[bibliography is located on the sidebar to the right.]

when i was in divinity school, i was surrounded by people who had very specific callings. some knew they would be working as chaplains in prisons. others  were going on to work in public policy. one of my favorite colleagues was dead set (pun intended) on entering the field of thanatology.

because my husband’s job ties us to memphis, my vocational narrative has always been a bit different. out of necessity, my calling has always been to find meaningful work in ways that  fit well within the parameters of meaningful family life. luckily, i don’t have the slightest predisposition toward teaching snow skiing in colorado or studying the chestnut blight in appalachia. the field of ministry is, itself, a vast city with major thoroughfares and meandering back roads. somehow, i have always known that the backroads are my place.

after the monkey was born, i gave up the traveling supply preaching gigs and the late-night college chaplaincy commitments. i traded these things for a regular preaching gig in a nearby church and the chance to lead several weekday morning study groups. when the bird was born, i cut back on the preaching even more but started this blog and increased the number of other commitments such as weddings, funerals and baptisms. all the while, i have been thankful for a vocation that can take on so many forms.

but somewhere along the way, in trading the risky thrill of writing on a sunday morning deadline for the even pace of study-group-prep, i have sacrificed some things that i am good at. and, in so doing, i have sacrificed some of the meaning. but i don’t know how to restore meaning to my vocation without taking away from the meaning of family life.

so i’m trying something new. i have removed myself from some major, long-standing work commitments, AND i am not going to fill this time immediately with other work commitments.  i am uncomfortable with empty space, and saying no, and the long rambling answer i give people when they ask if i work outside of the home. but for the first time in a long time, i’m beginning to get that old divinity school feeling back — that blind sort of trust that meaningful work will present itself if i am open and patient.

i guess, in a sense, i am returning to my place in the world: the indirect but infinitely interesting back roads.

back in my pre-kid days, i remember feeling completely baffled by some of the time-saving measures taken by a friend, who was working outside of the home, parenting, and pursuing her masters degree. every sunday, for example, she would pour her preschool son’s milk into 14 little containers so as to shave milliseconds from her weekday lunch and dinner prep time. this struck me as the same mentality employed by olympic swimmers, who shave their whole bodies for a swifter glide through the water. i wondered why my friend was making parenting into an olympic sport.

but now that i am a parent, i have a new perspective. i find myself strategizing about how to cut corners. i have yet to fill my fridge with tiny little milk containers but i no longer question my friend’s time-saving practices. as a mom, an employee, and a student, she was triathlete. her life was necessarily one of high stakes and high structure, and if i saw her again, i’d give her a gold medal.

i have been training for my own event over here, and the good news is that my personal record times will not be adversely affected by my ambivalence toward shaving. i’ve been trying to streamline the meal planning and grocery shopping processes that have historically usurped much of my valuable weekend family time.

my friend sarah mentioned in passing several years ago that she has a weekly grocery list on her computer with all of the staples her family needs for a week. i have recently borrowed this idea, and now i simply print up my own such list (diapers, applesauce, milk, detergent, et cetera) before heading to the grocery.

i am also now following my friend tiffany’s lead, and i have compiled several weekly meal plans that work well for our family. so, for example, if sunday morning rolls around and i would rather watch paint dry than spend time planing our meals for the week (which is often the case), i can simply pull out a previously compiled list of tried-and-true dinners complete with its corresponding pre-compiled list of needed grocery items, and i’m good to go. tiffany’s weekly meal plans are seasonal and make use of many fresh ingredients. i guess this is what makes her an olympian and myself just an olympic hopeful.

i would love to hear about the tactics you use to simplify your life. if you are interested in my weekly meal plans, i’ll be posting them soon. just click on the “weekly meal plans” heading located on the sidebar to your right.

[thanks to http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/35584821/ns/today-today_in_vancouver/ for the olympic curling image.]

a mailman nearing retirement laments that he will miss reading the series anonymous love letters that have made their way to his “dead letter file” over the years.

a frazzled therapist leaves her abusive husband to start a new small town life.

an infamous, preppy, womanizing, frat boy-bigot-turned-radio-personality goes missing, and nobody seems to mind.

a beloved former school teacher with a mysterious past opens up an unconventional smoking cessation clinic.

these are a few of the eccentric characters in jill mccorkle‘s carolina moon, a 1996 national bestseller that made its perfectly-timed entrance into my world just a few weeks ago.

i enjoyed the book, which is no surprise given that mccorkle considers lee smith to be her mentor and harper lee’s to kill a mockingbird to be the supreme example of literary genius. but the real gift to me was the interview with the author included in the back of the book. about the structure of carolina moon, an interwoven collection of narratives and letters voiced and penned by a handful of bizarre characters, the interviewer asks,

“the structure of this novel is perhaps its most striking aspect; reviewers seem to either applaud its ingenuity or criticize it as confusing. if you could do it over again, would you have changed the way you handled the plot structure?”

to this question, mccorkle replies,

“no. it really is the novel I wanted to write. if I had had the luxury of an everyday writing schedule it might have turned out differently, but this novel was written during a very busy time and there was no way for me to shape the story as if it was one big lump of clay. i was making tiny little pictures and hoping that eventually they would all connect.”

as someone who writes sermons during a “very busy time,” and as someone who dreams of publishing a book someday, i was simultaneously inspired by mccorkle’s answer and curious as to what she was doing in the years preceding the 1996 publication. could she have perhaps been the mother of small children?

i found my answer on the writers write internet writing journal, where in a 2000 interview mccorkle explained,

“before my children were born, i had the luxury of–if not a daily schedule–at least a more structured schedule. now i just write whenever i can get the time. i’m constantly taking notes and writing smidgets of things, because, in desperation, that’s the only way i can get there.”

well jill, (can I call you jill?), thank you for this bit of honesty. clearly you “got there,” and so then just maybe i can get there too.

maybe we can all get there, whether we have writing aspirations or not. after all, aren’t we all, as mothers, simply making tiny little pictures and hoping that eventually they will all connect?

[for publication information about carolina moon, see the bibliography page located on the sidebar to your right.] 

there are many common narratives in the collective story bank of motherhood, each with its own familiar plot and phrases. who hasn’t told or heard a “stuck child” story, complete with words such as

“…and then i realized that [fill in name of small child] had accidentally locked himself/herself in the bathroom.”?

and now, in an age when  modern mothers are increasingly appreciated and accomplished in the workplace, the “vocational turning point” story is becoming a collective throng. it often goes something like this:

“that day, when [insert chaotic clash of work and home life] happened, i knew i needed to change the way i was working.”

as it happens, these two prototypes converged for me last friday night. the bird was singing his own familiar tearful chorus as i showered and got ready to be the liturgist at the final montreat women’s connection worship service. after learning that it is virtually impossible to simultaneously hold a child and don a dress, i allowed him to use my leg as a teething biscuit as i hurriedly applied my makeup.

just as i was feeling smug about the fact that i would have a whole fifteen minutes to go over my part in the service after i dropped the kids off at my mom’s house, the monkey declared that he needed to tee tee. he did his business, and then, so as not to be outdone by his brother, he instantly deteriorated into a fitful rage that reportedly rendered him completely incapable of pulling up his own pants. i calmly closed the bathroom door and told them that he was welcome to come out once his pants were no longer around his ankles.

in his tornadic attempt to liberate himself from captivity, the monkey accidentally turned the tarnished brass lever above the knob on the old mountain house bathroom door. he was locked inside, and getting more panicky by the second.

my friends and temporary roommates calmed the (now hysterical) bird and hovered outside the locked bathroom door with these  necessary tools:

• a knife
• a spatula
• a phillips head screwdriver

meanwhile, i finished buttoning my dress as i walked outside and scaled a bear-proof garbage bin to get a look inside of the window. a neighbor strolled by and inquired as to why i was five feet above the ground, wearing a towel on my head, leaning at a 45 degree angle, peering into a window, and scaling the house’s exterior wall. he reported that in all of his 30 years of living across the street, he has never seen a person exhibit such behavior.

five minutes later, the monkey, who is apparently remarkably stellar at following my directions (when he feels like it), unlocked the door and waltzed out of the bathroom *with* his pants pulled up. i hopped down from my perch, shuttled the kids to my mom’s house, proceeded to the service, did my part without any major incedents, and moved on.

except that i haven’t really moved on. though i am new at telling the “stuck child” story, there are a zillion other stories that coincide with my attempts to maintain my identity as a person who works, albeit part-time, outside of the home. i’ll spare you the details of the “calling poison control” story, the “writing on the walls” story, and the “submerging daddy’s shoes in the bathtub” story. just know that all three of these plots unfolded while i was trying to fulfill obligations pertaining to my job as a minister.

i don’t know what sorts of shifts i will make in the way i structure my work life, but there will be some. and to the neighbor, who marveled at the site of a young mother living out the particulars of her own “stuck child” story, i have this to say:

if you look closely, you will find that mothers all around you are desperately trying to climb “the wall”. they can be heard pumping during conference calls. they can be found supervising third grade math homework while working on their own coursework. many are simply trying to shower for work in relative peace. women’s roles have changed during the last 30 years, but “the wall” is still there. when old challenges crumble away, they are quickly replaced by new ones.

i might be the first person you have seen shouting instructions to a three-year-old from a lofty perch. but i am by no means the first woman to employ flexibility, strength, and a sense of humor while creatively solving a problem and wearing a cute dress!

as a minister and a child of a dynamic presbyterian church, i have been a part of my fair share of foot washings. in fact, very few maundy thursdays or youth retreats have passed without the uneasy descent into vulnerability that occurs when one clumsily liberates the feet from their hiding places of leather, canvas, buckles, and laces, and offers them, in all of their clammy smelliness, to a fellow community member possessed of a rag and water bowl.

it’s too much raw humanity, yet we do it anyway. except for those times when, in the interest of time and the preservation of dignity, we wash hands instead. i have always chuckled at this modification of ritual and this attempt to clean up something that is intentionally messy. until i encountered these:

until i had boys, i did not know it was possible for the putrid smell of a post-game NFL locker room to be contained so neatly in a children’s size nine keen sandal. and i never dreamed that the still-sweet-smelling curly head of an 18-month-old could be part of the same body held upright by tar-bottomed peds. i wash two sets of powerfully smelly feet (almost) every night now. and i am here to tell you: it is not an exercise for the faint of heart.

the level of fith and sacremental beauty present during my kids’ bathtimes far outweighs anything i have ever experienced in all of my 33 years of church membership and six years of ordained ministry.  some rituals happen in gothic stone churches, and others happen in standard issue tubs. but both are grand entrances into deep spiritual intimacy — chances to make and mark meaning as we put one foot in front of the other.