every year on new year’s eve, andy and i (and some of our dear friends) set personal intentions for the year ahead by giving it a name.  perhaps the most significant year-naming for me was “the year of rearranging,” which resulted in this proud post.

but the year of rearranging is over. i am now 19 days into “the year of gratitude.”

if you are rolling your eyes with associations of new-agey, blissed-out, shallow pronouncements of happiness, designed to mask all that is wrong with this world, STOP RIGHT NOW. if you were thinking more along the lines of  the dalai lama, you can stop that too. sadly, he and i have little in common.

i simply found myself, during those last few days of 2011, on my knees (not praying but scraping already-chewed-gum off of the kitchen floor); having a mountain top experience (wherein i observed my children happily eating greasy goldfish crackers, on the couch, in my bedroom, under a two-weeks-high mountain of clean laundry); in the wake of a come-to-jesus-talk with my husband (that didn’t involve jesus at all but rather another baby, the third one that we won’t be attempting to have due to our divergent viewpoints about how many people we want in this household); and i realized that much of what enrages me about my life has to do with the way that i form, internalize, solidify, and live by GREAT EXPECTATIONS. and by “great” i mean sometimes soul-killing.

my friend, erika, gave me a little ledger for christmas where there is a space to name what i am grateful for each day. i confess that i have no idea where i put that thing. but it (and she) inspired me to spend the year taking an honest look at the beauty and bounty that is instead of the beauty and bounty that is not.

the best thing about the year of gratitude is that it does not come with any presumptions of forward progress. all i have to do each day is name one moment in which i witness a spark of the divine outside of myself and one moment in which i witness a spark of the divine inside of myself (the latter is the more difficult). i send these brief musings to myself in daily emails, which, unlike all of the other emails in my inbox, i do not expect myself to read unless i want to.

so far i have been grateful for things as shallow and profound as yoga, the bird’s third birthday, trader joe’s dark-chocolate-pistachio-covered toffee, our new montreat house, and this song. andy’s year-naming has given me much to celebrate as well, but more on that later.

this is less about an attitude change (though one might say that i need one!) than it is about clarity. both of my vocations, motherhood and ministry, take place where great expectations meet mixed messages about the value of tradition and the right way to do things. i cannot distill any of that into something that makes sense, but i can intentionally notice the good in my life.

it’s about doing something daily that is positive, not overwhelming, and just for me.

people are poor predictors of what will make us happy.

 it’s like that time when i was in middle school and i begged my parents for a liz claiborne purse. my new bag did not transport me into a world devoid ofangst, pimples, failed flirtations, and latin tutors. i would need something else to make me happy: a spot on the basketball team, acceptance to the college of my choice, an adventurous summer trip, a boyfriend, a husband, a house, a meaningful vocation, children, children who take long afternoon naps, decent savings, balance, and the list goes on. according to a host of articles and popular books  written by daniel gilbert and his posse of fellow harvard researchers , i am not alone in my often misguided planning for a happy future.

“we treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our paychecks each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, jogging and flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, enduring dirty diapers and mind-numbing repetitions of the cat in the hat so that someday theywill have fatcheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps” (from dan gilbert’s stumbling upon happiness).

of course, we cannot simply forget about the future. i’m going to keep brushing my teeth twice a day to ward off future root canals. but gilbert’s findings could bring about a paradigm shift for people of every age and stage. perhaps the empty-nester who is plotting out a happy retirement, the young mother who is pining for the day all of her children are out of diapers, and the upstart professional who revels in visions of a corner office would live differently if they believed that,

“bad things don’t affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. that’s true of good things, too. we adapt very quickly to either” (from a new york times interview of dan gilbert).

last week, i started making a list of things that make me happy. these are not things that i imagine will evoke happiness in the future. rather, when i am in the middle of my every day life, and when i have a sudden flash of awareness that i am, in that very moment, experiencing happiness, i write down what i’m doing. so far, it appears that i will not have to finagle an extraordinary future to enjoy my life. as it turns out, i am happy when i am folding clothes on the bed while my children are snuggling together watching word world. i am happy reading outside in the sun during my children’s nap times. i am happy when i am doing things that are athletic. i am happy when i’m sharing a bag of kettle corn with a good friend. i am happy when i am pondering a new idea.

this is helpful information, since the enterprise of parenting is so future-oriented. i will always probably be a poor predictor of what makes me happy. but, perhaps, with a little more awareness, i will begin to recognize happiness when i stumble upon it, not in far off dreams of  diaper- free days, not in fleeting visions of a more career-focused life, but in the present moment, as messy and harried and beautiful as it is.

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.]

today is the first in a month of mornings that i’ll be waking up in the mountains of western north carolina. i’ll post more soon about our trip and the requisite en route adventure. but for now, let’s catch up on another amusing little episode, shall we?

a couple of weeks ago, andy and i, along with our raucous progeny, were speed-eating our way through dinner at el porton mexican restaurant. then, just as i was taking my first sip of my second margarita, a couple of high school girls, who were participating in some sort of a scavenger hunt, approached us with sombreros and a camera and explained that they needed a picture of a “normal american family.”

as you can see, not even the prospect of high school scavenger hunt fame can distract me from the lure of tequila. the next day, the picture appeared on facebook, and because the world is small, a mutual friend recognized us and tagged me.

but the point is, god help us all if our family is the picture of normalcy!

the monkey has a semi permanent “ear plug dread lock” in his hair thanks to his waxy blue plugs and embarrassingly infrequent showers (hello… doesn’t swimming count?). i still cut my hamburgers into quarters because my mom used to do this for me when i was little. in preparation for our current vacation, i couldn’t find one single toy to bring that was still in tact and had all of its pieces. for distraction purposes, i have given my infants tampons to play with at restaurants and my toddlers duct tape to play with on airplanes. my husband prefers to jog during the hottest part of the day, in what is arguably one of the hottest cities on the planet. our children were conceived through the miracles of science and are raised on a hodge-podge of common sense, superstition, tradition, book knowledge, and exhaustion-induced parenting moves.

but it is not just that our nuclear family is abnormal. we are the apples that have not fallen far from our eccentric family trees. my aunt, for example, is convinced that my deceased grandparents send us messages through blinking lights and other electrical anomalies. i wholeheartedly agree with her. andy’s dad has been known to buy enough plastic wrap at once to last for decades. we are aware of the longevity of such products because he proudly writes the purchase date on them with a sharpie and revels in this sacred “history” every time he is called to cover something up and put it in the fridge.

i would venture to say that i don’t even really LIKE people who seem to be living out the imaginary standard of “normal” living. i am much more drawn to the bizarre particulars that make people who they are.

i hope those high school girls won their scavenger hunt. but mostly, i hope that someday (and the sooner the better), they come to know that “normal” doesn’t really exist. there are many other standards one can employ to measure the quality of one’s life. take the amount of years that one uses the same roll of plastic wrap, for example!

i think it is very telling that the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM), the giant tome published by the american psychiatric association to aid mental health professionals in diagnoses and treatments, is revised regularly, in part, to reflect changes in our culture.

in other words, there is an evolving cultural consciousness that helps determine what sorts of behaviors are disordered and what sorts are not. and perhaps, more importantly, sometimes societal norms change to CREATE new disorders.

without further explanation, here is my letter to the american psychiatric association, suggesting that they consider adding a new disorder to the upcoming DSM-V:

dear american psychiatric association,

my name is mary allison, and in many ways, my life is a reflection of today’s motherhood and vocational trends for young(ish) women. i have a hard-earned master’s degree and two long-awaited small children, a part-time job in the world, and a full time job in the home. these conditions have led me to the following pattern of disordered behaviors, called  maternal part-time hybrid disorder (M-phD) from here on out. please consider adding M-phD to the DSM-V.

overcommitment: as one who suffers from M-phd, i commit myself to too many work-related projects in order to compensate for my fear that my four-year masters degree and growing passion about my work will forever lie dormant.

vanderbilt divinity school graduation with my friend maria

self-applied pressure: because my full-time work in the home means that my presence in the working world is abbreviated, i feel that my vocational output must be of exaggerated quality to make up for its lack of quantity.

failure to live in the moment: i have come to measure the worth of my days by the amount of work i have accomplished, which is silly when my days are full of soft, curly, wiggly embraces.

the above behaviours produce an array of symptoms ranging from feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and the permanent “storage” of junk under the couch.

i would greatly appreciate any strides your esteemed association could take in the diagnosis and treatment of M-PhD.

sincerely,

mary allison

my days are marked by endless shortcuts, tricks and concessions that are driven by creativity, necessity, and most of all, convenience.

for example, the monkey and bird receive morning doses of PBS and afternoon boosters of dora. they also take baths in the middle of the day, not because i am following the advice of the latest parenting guru but because i simply want to contain the kids while i fold laundry.

there are countless parenting philosophies calling out to us from every corner of pop culture, and many of them are wildly attractive. this is why, as a popular book title states it, “i was a really good mom before i had kids.” but things are different now that my life includes internet searches such as, “are holly berries poisonous?” it is not that i am parenting without convictions. i would describe my particular version of motherhood as a tapestry that includes the latest wisdom delivered by scientific and personal research. but this tapestry really is held together by what blogger Julie of a little pregnant calls “a series of reflexes, instincts, and minute-by-minute adjustments.”

my natural tendency is to apologize for the huge gap between today’s tidy expert parenting schemes and my own comedy of errors, which is often held together by love and duct tape. but the people i’ve encountered through this blog are proof that women’s greatest triumphs are rarely the result of textbook decisions made according to published plans.

mothers of invention from the blog's first month

the mothers who dazzle me with their love of life are always those who raise their children with a sort of makeshift flexibility, and who reinvent themselves in each season using this same, treasured skill.

first name: Beth

age: 31

occupation: By vocation I am a mom and outdoor educator. These days I am a mom (full-time at home) and the youth program director for an Episcopal Diocese (part-time at home). I just finished my first book, and I’ll be teaching my first college class in the fall. (These last 2 things I do because I love them, not because I have the time.)

how do you structure your time and space? In regards to space, thankfully our new-to-us home has an extra bedroom that serves as the office/craft/library “quick – close the door, company is here!” space. This room has revolutionized my work life because I can start something and finish it later without needing to pick it up. I keep quiet toys in Eliot’s room and the louder ones in the living room. As is true with many toddlers, no matter how many toys we have (too many, thanks to the generosity of all sorts of people), his favorites will always be the broom, mop, my knitting tape measure and the blower-upper thing that came with my (underutilized) exercise ball.

As for the way I structure my time, a couple months ago, Eliot started sleeping past 6:00 a.m. on a regular-ish basis. Since this sleep change, I’ve been setting my alarm in a (not always realized) attempt to wake before him for a little yoga, e-mail check-in, to-do list overview, and, when I’m lucky, reading or knitting. Otherwise, my day revolves around his schedule which is dictated by me but must not push past his need to sleep or be crazy. I try not to work when Eliot’s awake but he loves “helping” with housework and cooking. I believe in adventures to pass the time (the park, walks, zoo outings, grocery shopping, working in the garden).

Most of my work gets done while Eliot sleeps in the afternoon.  Thursday mornings he goes to a Mother’s Morning Out program (which is almost done for the summer – yikes!), and Tuesday mornings my husband takes him to the park or somewhere just as fun. It’s impressive how much work I can get done in an uninterrupted three hour period. Since Mitch’s schedule is flexible (he’s a priest at a small church), when I need a day to finish a project he usually can accommodate this need.

I have always been a morning person and I envy all those who can work late into the night. My evenings are usually reserved for a sit-down family dinner, Eliot’s bedtime routine (Mitch and I swap dinner clean-up for bath/play/bed) and knitting or sewing. Most nights my day ends with The Daily Show.

using the metaphor of seasons to describe the phases of women’s lives,

-what are the particular challenges and highlights of your current season? It’s almost time for summer camp. Directing the camp is the most consuming part of my youth program director job. I have to work more and be more creative and disciplined with my time. One blessing of my job is that Eliot is always welcome – to meetings, events and the office (when I go). Naturally then, he is at camp with me, which makes life both easier and harder. Of course it’s also late spring and I can still tolerate the heat (you can take the girl out of the northeast …) so Eliot and I go on lots of adventures whenever we can!

Mitch and I moved to our current town only a couple months ago. This move has been wonderful and rewarding on so many levels. Our new space and community bring so many highlights to an otherwise challenging season. It’s hard to get overwhelmed when good distractions abound.

-What season(s) preceded this one? The season preceding this one was easily the most challenging of my life. We left a wonderful, loving seminary community when I was eight months pregnant. Our new home came with a new baby, new jobs (for me, motherhood), new culture and no grandparents. Needless to say, we have learned a lot!

One of the things I’ve learned (and continue to work on) is that I often (always) set the bar way higher than is possible for me to reach and therefore am regularly disappointed. I’ve been working on replacing “should” (I should do x, y and z … all perfectly) with “need to” or “want to” – this is part of why my current season is so comfortable.

-What season(s) might your future hold? I’m not sure what’s coming next. We like where we live (the town and our home). We’re managing our money better than ever before, paying off debt, and can finally start to see the end of that tunnel. We’d like more kids one day. I want to teach more and write more and craft more. Way down the road we hope to move back to the northeast but we aren’t feeling particularly antsy about anything these days (a delightful feeling, for sure).

favorite family activity/activities: going to the park, the zoo, our community garden, or anywhere else we can think of that gets us outside; playing ball of all varieties; disc golf; cooking/baking; reading

 favorite solo activities: knitting, sewing, reading, yoga, hiking/backpacking

sources of inspiration: My mom has always worked from a home office (she’s an accountant), and when I get really frazzled, she is always there. She’s there when I’m not frazzled, too! We talk usually once a day via phone, IM, or Skype, which allows her to see Eliot’s current state of crazy. My friends all provide inspiration in their own way: friends who have clergy spouses, multiple kids, creative output, or a love of the outdoors.

best MakeShift moment: Ever since Eliot was tiny, my shower time has been the easiest part of the day (and he was a hard baby). At each new stage I come up with creative things for him to play with in the bathroom – the bouncy chair when he was tiny and a blanket and some books to chew on when he was little. A Mr. Potato Head version of Elmo currently resides in one of the vanity drawers. He’s always loved books so that’ll get me a little time but lately he’s at the water stage: filling, pouring, washing. For the most part the water even stays in the sink! Like most mothers, I can tell what is happening most anywhere in the house just by listening. When all I need to listen for is on the other side of a curtain, I can be pretty sure what he’s doing and when.

find beth on the web:

• blog: http://weteyelashes.wordpress.com
• book/curriculum: To Serve and Guard the Earth: God’s Creation Story and Our Environmental Concern http://www.churchpublishing.org/products/index.cfm?fuseaction=productDetail&productID=8465#

i am a mother and a minister, and it struck me yesterday that these are two vocations in which one is often expected to be superhuman. and by “superhuman,” i mean not human at all; above being human; perfect. an interesting facet of this expectation of superhuman-ness is that in both cases, it includes a sort of disembodied existance. the body will get you every time, with its animal ways and love of gravity! my world is marked by clerical robes and nursing covers, both of which i am usually happy to hide behind out of fear that my body might be objectified or labeled as shameful and inappropriate.

meanwhile, young mothers in every profession are experiencing their bodies as the main event. it is difficult to ignore the body when it expands to carry another life, acts as a one-woman-catering-service for a little one, and contracts (usually in all the wrong areas) before it’s time to start the cycle again. perhaps this is why i love the kind of honesty about the body found in ayelet waldman’s bad mother:

“how well i remember [my] rack! those perky breasts that hovered just below my chin. those pert nipples. that swelling cleavage. after four children and a full seventy-two months of breast-feeding, the last six of which were spent with my nipples clamped in the death vise of a breast pump, it is only by dint of foundation garments designed by teams of MIT professors who otherwise spend their days drawing up plans for the world’s longest suspension bridges that my breasts achieve a shape even approximating round. when i undo the clasps, buckles, straps, and hoists of these miraculous feats of engineering, my boobs tumble to the ground like boulders falling off a cliff. i could polish my shoes with my nipples” (28). 

it is my job, as a minister, to talk about miracles. turning water into wine, walking on water, and raising people from the dead are common topics of conversation for me. so why, for the love of god, should i refrain from talking about the miracle-working powers of a good bra?

on the list of things that have transformed my life are things like martin buber’s i and thou, viktor frankl’s man’s search for meaning, marcus borg’s concept of jesus, and now this:

this is the SPANX bra-llelujah full-coverage, front-closureunderwire bra. yes, it is expensive, but is it really possible to put a price on comfort and this carefully-engineered, non-surgical restoration of one’s pre-kid shape?

friends, hear the good news! we do not have to super-human. we simply have to invest in super-human undergarments.

brallelujah!

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

in her 2009 book, bad mother, ayelet waldman opens with this line: “we are always watching: the bad mother police force, in a perpetual state of alert-level orange” (5).

how true this is. i flashed my bad mother police badge long before i even had kids, as i scoffed at those parents who were so driven by their children’s schedules that they forgot about their own lives. since then, i’ve eaten those words and MANY others uttered in expert tones. what is it about parenthood that invites such judgment?

i’ve examined this judgment in other posts , and i’ve read the accounts of many women who have reluctantly added “other mothers” to the long list of challenging people in their lives. i’ve also addressed the widespread and ridiculous standards that serve as the backdrop for our parenting. i am just one person in a progressively expanding army of unsatisfied mothers who are joining forces to institute a healthier culture.

but the complaints about judgement and the frustration with standards seem to exist in these discussions as two parallel but unrelated realities. waldman begins the important work of connecting the dots between them. basically, she says, when we judge ourselves against the impossible standard of “the good mother,” we feel so deficient that we are compelled to console ourselves by comparing our own ways with those of “the heinous bad mother” (15). we judge others in order to recover from judging ourselves.

i love this bit of insight! quashing the “bad mother police” just feels like an impossibly overwhelming task. but adjusting my self-standards actually feels do-able. it’s exciting to think that by doing some good internal work, we can each help to create an environment that is supportive, and not “alert-level orange”.

[the source for this post can be found on the bibliography page located in the sidebar. the photo in this post is from http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3575/3464797518_c40f36fd3a.jpg.]

i read karen horney’s book, our inner conflicts, when i was a 25 year old hospital chaplain and divinity school student. i had the painful and liberating experience then of seeing my personality spelled out in its pages. now, as a 33 year old mother of two, i see myself again in horney’s theories.

essentially, she explains that part of being human (or say… being a mother) is having to manage conflicting ideas and difficult choices. these things produce a natural anxiety which can be addressed in healthy ways or in a number of unhealthy patterns or neuroses. one such neurosis is “the formation of the idealized image.”

this way of dealing with life’s complexity and the darkness within ourselves involves “creat[ing] an image of what, at the time, [we] feel like [we] ought to be. conscious or unconscious, the image is always in large degree removed from reality, though the influence it exerts on [a] person’s life is very real indeed…. if the focus is upon the discrepancy between the idealized image and the actual self, then all [we] are aware of are [our] incessant attempts to bridge the gap and whip [ourselves] into perfection. in this event [we] keep reiterating the word ‘should’ with amazing frequency” (96,98).

i believe monday’s mother of invention, jessa, captured this notion more succinctly with her proposed motherhood book title, get a grip: stop shoulding all over yourself!

as a young adult, my ridiculous standards had to do with academics, body image, and being admired and adored by all. thankfully, i don’t feel so tied to these notions anymore. but motherhood comes with its own set of ridiculous standards that we often simultaneously despise and reinforce, both consciously and unconsciously.

i must confess that a couple of days before last christmas, i decided that i SHOULD sew each of my children the perfect pair of christmas pajamas. i did this partly because i love to sew but mostly because i had this picture in my head of my children opening their designated christmas eve packages, gleefully donning their new jammies, waking up in style on christmas morning, and beaming from head-to flannel-clad-toe as they posed for photos in nests of gifts and wrapping paper.

as you can see, the SHOULDS won, as they often still do.

but karen horney gave me the invaluable gift of being able to at least recognize (and sometimes even in the present moment) whether i’m being driven by my true self or some neurotic, culturally-informed idea of who i SHOULD be.

maybe there is hope for me yet. maybe there will come a glorious day when mothers everywhere stop shoulding all over ourselves. this is an idealized image i’m going to hold on to.

[it’s not too late to enter the “billboard bag” giveaway. also, the source for this post can be found in the bibliography page located on the sidebar to your right.]