Things I Would Write About If I Made Time For It

I know that some people always make time for writing and blogging. I could do it, I know. But instead, in my few moments of rest, I choose sleep, watching House, looking at facebook, uploading pictures of my little one to Shutterfly, petting my kitties, hanging out with my partner and having a bloody mary. I hope someday I will return to blogging more regularly. If I did, here is what I would write about:

How important Buddhist ideas have become to me and what this means for my religious identity. (Raises issues of cultural appropriation and puts a different spin on my approach to life which has always been about trying harder, working harder… this is hard to do with meditation.)

How hard it is to make the life we want and how it takes (for me) constant returning, breathing, refocusing, and a very difficult balance of trying harder while letting go.

How different the skill sets are for running a successful campaign where people feel engaged in politics and running a successful government where people feel engaged in politics. This also reminds me of how ministers (like presidents) need several very different skill sets: 1) preaching well week in and week out; 2) keeping a church healthy – people getting along, a sense of community, social justice work, spiritual growth, people growth, etc.; and 3) pastoral care.

How much harder it is to have a multi-cat household with some foster cats and some permanent ones when you have a baby.

On having a child: the joy, the difficulties of needing daycare, the desire to do well without obsessing over doing it “right”, work life balance, the role of women in running a household when both partners are trying to do it equally…

My increased insanity about keeping our house clean – it is as if when the house is in order, my soul feels more in order. I know there is a blog post here.

There will be time for this writing someday. Until then, peace be with you all…

Life With Baby

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

I am trying not to be worried that my house will never be as clean as I want it. Crumbs are not poisonous. They are not specks of doubt flung around announcing my inability to manage my life.

I was telling my partner – I need to think in terms of sanitation..the house must not pose a health hazard – rather than trying to actually keep it clean. I can understand a bit more now where good old Betty Friedan was coming from.

My sweet angel wants to be held. Always. I am not of the cry it out school of parenting. Or the school that thinks you can spoil your baby. He needs what he needs. He need reassurance. He needs my arms and my breast and my heartbeat. Still adjusting to his life that is his own and not 100% woven together with mine. As I said in an earlier post: It is flattering, but exhausting.

Yet. I want to life a life that is about love and peace and gentleness and kindness. Maybe I am some sort of cliche, but these things actually have meaning for me – they are not words – but a life that I long for and believe in. And it cannot be lived if I am running around like a mad woman muttering about papers that are not written or sleep that is not had or crumbs that have not been dust-busted.

So, I try to lose myself in my mesmerization. Let myself feel it. The soft skin. The wonder of our boy. The way his eyebrows are just little fuzzes that I can rub against my cheek while he is sleeping on my shoulder. Just let him sleep on my shoulder rather than try to put him down in order to do something else.

The way his breath smells sweet. The magic of watching him learn how to giggle.

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

So I will do what I need to do – the work, the school, the cleaning, the errands – as I can. But when I cannot, I will smell his sweet baby breath. Sit and wait for the wild turkeys to come and get the corn we have put out for them.

Pray.

Breathe.

Cuddle.

And try to let go.

On Being a Mama

Well, it is gonna be a while before I get this blog back into the swing of things. I hate only posting every so often – I would love to be a once-a-week blogger. But that is just going to have to wait until I have time to do things like clean or work or breath. Currently, I’m having a hard time with any of those three while I care for our little one.

I promise this is not going to become a Motherhood Blog where I reflect all the time on my ever-so-unique situation of motherhood and the wonder of my Amazing Child. Heaven knows there are plenty of those blogs out there and don’t we all just love to read them? Actually there are some great and interesting ones out there, including some UU blogs that deal with motherhood/parenthood which I love. But I do get a kick out of some of the blogs I see that are not just for friends or family, but apparently for the world to see the Wonder of Child X and deal, in great detail, with the daily minutiae of parenthood. Fitting for children of babyboomers whom (who?) often forget that the world does not revolve around them and their WonderBabies.

But I digress. I just wanted to briefly point out two cool blogs on motherhood:

Raising My Boy Chick – written by a feminist, queer-identified, male-partnered mama raising a boy. Sounds familiar to me.

And Mothers for Women’s Lib which is a blog out of the UK that I just saw this morning with this post On Raising Male Children. Exciting, I think. And then I read, “I’ve read a lot in the radical feminist blogosphere about how radical feminist women ought to refuse to care for male children.” Are. You. Kidding. Me? What a great way to give feminism a good and reasonable name. I mean, where are these bloggers that refuse to raise male children and what, might I ask, do they DO with them? As a feminist mama four weeks into raising a precious little boy, and as a feminist scholar-wanna-be, this seems like both a bad idea in practical and moral terms (you know, giving away your child), but also pretty unhelpful in terms of feminism. How are we to reshape our world if we only raise feminist daughters? The blog Mothers for Women’s Lib makes a very similar point, btw.

This raises an important question as to how we might raise feminist sons. Or, if you are not happy with the f-word, I mean sons that are responsible, loving, kind, into equality, justice, race/gender/class awareness and analysis, and that sort of thing. It is hard to undo how our world makes far too many men. I hope we can do better in raising our little one. I, of course, welcome comments about how you do this. So much learning to do. Such high stakes.

But for now, he is asleep on my chest in his little carrier, precious, lovely, perfect, and innocent. A pretty special time. Even if I am delirious with sleep deprevation and my poor cats are traumatized by having thier position as my babies usurped.

Time to nurse.

Peace.

E

New Year New Year: a bit of rambling/visioning/thinking and an annoucement of sorts

Hello 2009. We are 9 days into you. I wonder how this will go?

I tend not to be a big new year resolution person because I am not really good at keeping big promises and because I am always trying to improve things (um, maybe too much) and I guess adding to that isn’t really so helpful. Really, I don’t know. I just don’t do them much. (As I write this, I realize I did it two years ago right here on this blog where I vowed not to buy new clothes for a year and I stuck with it very well for five months. But usually I don’t do resolutions, and maybe my failure five months into my 2007 resolution helped to solidify this.)

Anyway, so I guess I want to reflect a bit on the upcoming year and how I would hope that it might go for me and my family.

Um, so I guess I am sort of private and this blog isn’t really a personal journal, but it I suppose I will want to write about this more at some point so:

drum roll

is about a month and a half until we welcome a little baby into our family. So that makes for a very different year. I have been reading about pregnancy since I was 15, and excited about having a baby since I was old enough to hold my baby cousins. I’ve always wanted a family and it has always been a big part of how I envision my life.

I would read about or talk to women who would say that they didn’t like being pregnant, and I would think, “They must not love it enough. They must not have read enough about all the natural remedies that can make it better. They must not have a midwife and a doula and a support system.”

Until I got pregnant and have been very very very sick ever since. I do not believe in a God that teaches us lessons, but if I did, I am sure this would be one of God’s humbling lessons to Elizabeth about how you can’t control everything in your life and you shouldn’t judge other people so harshly, especially until you have walked a mile or seven and half months in their shoes.

I should probably clarify that there are women who have been more miserable than me in pregnancy and, as far as we know, nothing is really really wrong. I have not been hospitalized. Baby seems healthy. I seem healthy (enough). But every day is a day to get through. Which does not facilitate the pregnancy pre-baby, round belly, pregnancy joy that I had been envisioning.

Soooo, my point here is that in the New Year, I am going to try to let go a bit more and realize that I cannot read and plan my way out of the struggles and road bumps in life, and that sitting counting the hours and the days until something is over or better does not make for mindful, joyful living. In high school, it was “Oh, how I can’t wait until college.” In college, “Oh how I can’t wait to settle down with a partner and be done with college.” In my Masters studies, “Oh, how lovely that will be if I can get into a Ph.D. program.” Each semester: “Oh, how nice it will be to be done with papers.” And, as much as I have tried to not think it, it has often been, “Oh, how wonderful it will be for the baby to be born and not be pregnant anymore.”

And so goes our life.

My life has, far too often, been about achievement. I wanted to be the line leader in Kindergarten. The best reader. The best community service do-er. Get more scholarships. Seem more special. Write better papers. Be the best future minister.

In one way, of course, this is good. It is good to work hard, right? To do good. But, of course, we can do it too much.

And, at the end of the day month year, our wall is covered with diplomas and our drawers are stuffed with A+ papers and the congregation loves the sermon and we have missed What We Are Here For. Which, for me, is to love others. To be loved. To drink hot chocolate and hear others’ stories and be present to people and be present to myself. To cuddle the cats. To love the colors of the trees. To ease the suffering of others.

I have seen this so much in the last months as I tried to not collapse finishing my classes, waddling around like a sick hippopotamus on speed trying to read enough, write enough, do enough, and watch myself be perky and cheerful to others, as if I was watching some other person who could not turn off her fake cheer and show how tired she was.

I do not want to show this sort of life to our baby. I do not want to miss first coos, and the magic of a baby growing up while I scramble to Do It All. And I do not want him or her to learn that to live is to Do Good and Do Right and Achieve. I have not spent enough time playing. Or laughing. Or drinking hot chocolate. And I want my little one to do this more.

I know this is cliched and I almost don’t want to post it because it seems to me like it could be some sort of email spam story about treasuring our friends and our life and our children. All that is missing is a note at the end that if you don’t pass this on to 10 people you will be cursed.

It reminds me of a thousand sermons about being in the moment. A thousand books about Women Who Do Too Much and our rushed 21st Century World and how we need to Slow Down.

Perhaps there is a reason that there are so many damn books and sermons on this – because it is hard.

So, as we prepare to welcome a new little person into our lives, I have given myself a little new year nudge, realizing that it will never be a goal I will Achieve, but that it is an important path to be on and remind myself of.

Be present. Be gentle. Love. Let myself be loved. Slow down. Remember what will be important as I look back on my life.

Mess up.

Try again.

Be thankful.

Amen.

And when they scrape their knee, you can also hire someone to comfort them.

The NYTimes is running an article about people who hire a nanny to comfort their baby at night. One woman says

“[The nanny] swaddles the baby and sings to him and that’s the whole point for us — she has a lot more energy and patience at that point in the day than my husband or I do. We are wiped out.”

And, hey, I understand being wiped out and having a high pressure job and all but, um, why did you have kids? It isn’t like it is going to get easier. Are you going to hire someone to potty train them? Learn to ride a bike? Go to parent teacher conferences? To me, comforting your baby and attending to his or her needs is an essential part of being a parent. I am not against having a nanny or help for some tasks. I am not for this parents-have-to-be-heroes and be perfect and all-attentive. But it seems like six nights a week of someone caring for your baby is sort of like having a baby and then hiring someone to parent him or her, especially if you work during the day so you aren’t home with the baby then either. You can’t parent only on Sundays.

I just think it is part of this on-going thing where people think they can still be good parents without making any changes to their lives. (See article that Ms. T pointed out a few months ago about how children are not decor (shock!), including this weirdo family that refused to put up stair railings because it just looked so bad. Do seat belts also wrinkle their clothes, too?)