Photo by iloveusb, via Flickr

My life is crazy now. As I try to get back into the swing of regular life, with writing assignments to finish and errands to run, I keep having to adjust my expectations ever lower. Lower, that is, in terms of what I accomplish outside of motherhood. For the first time, I am really not multitasking during nursing times, but simply being quiet, looking out the window, looking at Michael, doing neck stretches (okay, so maybe I’m fooling myself about that whole multitasking thing).

It’s not a bad thing. We had a really nice long weekend, with a visit to family and a visit to the fire station down the street, some outside time and opening the house up (how can you argue with 70 degrees on January 16th?). But it also means that I’m spinning my wheels a lot. This week, I lost one day to a trip to St. Louis for my postpartum visit and another morning to Julianna’s kindergarten IEP meeting…a meeting whose implications I’m still pondering, processing, and, well, generally spending emotional energy.

I don’t want to overstate things, because I’m really okay, it’s just I haven’t figured out how to juggle the extra child yet, and child outranks Everything Else, which means I’m dropping a lot of balls, and every day the list of things left undone gets a little longer. Things that I was able to do without difficulty even during pregnancy suddenly feel like too much, but I don’t know how to jettison them; there isn’t anyone else to do them…or more accurately, there probably is, but it would take so much energy to find that person that it’s probably simpler to try to continue juggling myself.

One of the things I do that I don’t talk about too much is teach natural family planning. For the past year or more, I’ve been working with our diocesan office to promote the visibility and accessibility of NFP in our diocese. It’s working, which is thrilling…but as the ranking teaching couple, it also means a lot of extra work as new couples come on board. And we need to meet with half a dozen engaged couples to plan music for their weddings in the next three weekends, too. And it’s time to be working on preschool for Nicholas in the fall. To say nothing of the scores of pictures piling up, crying out to be archived in scrapbooks. I’ve always, ALWAYS stayed caught up on scrapbooking…but I’m beginning to wonder if I’m reaching the limit.

Anyway, I know I will eventually catch my stride. Frankly, it’ll probably happen when Michael settles into more of a schedule, which means I probably have several months of this unsettled-ness to get through. I have to learn to accept less of myself, and to say no. The first “no” on that list is going to come later today, when I have to respond to a “can you please…?” email that’s been bold-faced glaring out of my email inbox all weekend. But I must confess, I just said “yes” this morning to something else…I promised to drive for a field trip for Alex’s class. But I mean, if I’m going to say yes, it should be to things like that, right? I should be staying hyper-involved in my family, and setting other things at a distance.

When I put a title at the top of this document, it was meant to be about something entirely different, and much more organized. But the introductory paragraph took me spinning off into a stream-of-consciousness reflection, and I decided to go with it. I can return to my original thought tomorrow, after all.

Image via Wikipedia

We sat in the front pew at church yesterday, our first Sunday to attend Mass as a family of six. It had been a long night; Michael decided to nurse every two hours, which meant for every just-over-an-hour I slept, I was up for half an hour. I was kind of a zombie. And in my groggy state, one word jumped out at me.

Stillness.

It’s a word that seems to go with Advent: For you, O Lord, my soul in stillness waits. It’s something that so many of us aspire to, strive for, the chance to be “quiet alert” in the presence of God. To set aside the noisy bombardment that overstimulates our brains and deadens the soul, and simply be: be aware of the connection to an invisible dimension, be open to a voice that speaks in the quiet.

And I realized how rarely I attain stillness.

When it comes, it sneaks up on me, a breathless, fleeting moment that I’m usually ill-equipped to appreciate. Last Saturday night when my parents, Michael and I arrived home from the hospital, the house was quiet, its other occupants off at a concert. I caught my breath. “It’s so quiet,” I said. I’ve never thought of my house as quiet, but after living in the hum of a hospital for ten days–fluorescent buzzing, air systems rumbling, monitors beeping, voices everywhere at all times of the day and night–my living room felt like a tabernacle of restful repose. But I didn’t stop to enjoy it. There was too much clutter to be filed and organized, and a family to prepare for.

This, I suppose, is why I crave the solitude of nature, far from the noise of traffic and the sight of manmade things. Stillness equals rest. It reorganizes the mind, untangles the pathways, allows us to see more clearly and approach life with serenity.

But I don’t think we find stillness very often. And I don’t mean physical stillness, although that’s probably true, too. I mean stillness of the soul. I think we all seek it, but don’t find it very often. We can blame modern life–ipods and a sound byte culture, too many technological toys, too many social networks–but you might as well rail against the sun rising; barring an apocalypse, all that stuff is here to stay.

Life in a religious order often sounds very appealing to me: the rhythm of morning and evening prayer, the focus on contemplation and the search for God, the lack of little commitments yelling “Mommy do this” and “Can I have” that. But I imagine it’s a grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side-of-the-fence kind of thing, and motherhood is my vocation in any case. I’m beginning to see that the divine call for all of us is to seek what we may never, or at least rarely, attain.

And maybe, after all, it’s the seeking that’s most important.

And so I planned our family life around a December 15^th delivery. We had all our big Advent calendar activities planned for the first two weeks; as of December 11^th, all the major commitments were done, and we planned to take it easy the rest of the month, stay close to home, do nothing stressful.

On November 29^th, when I picked Alex up from piano lesson, I said, “Um, honey, we may be having a baby this week.”

Alex threw both fists into the air. “YAY!” he said.

“Well…” I hesitated. “You need to realize something, Alex. If we have a baby this week, we’re not going to be able to do all the Advent calendar activities.”

He paused. “Why not?”

“We just won’t,” I said. “Trust me. We’ll do as much as we can, but if we have to have a baby this week, we aren’t going to be able to do it all.”

He pondered for a minute, then shrugged. “Okay.”

I missed days 1-10 of the Advent calendar altogether, and although Christian tried valiantly to make the activities happen in my absence, the reality is that Advent Reclamation this year is a poor shadow of its real self, and the little ones—pardon, the middle two—have pretty much no idea what’s going on. It’s an Alex show this year, because he’s the only one who’s made that “tradition” connection so far. But I’m not really upset about it. In the grand scheme of things, it’s only one year, and the excitement of a new baby more than makes up for the loss of the daily anticipation. I mean, let’s be honest: how can making St. Lucy buns compare with this?

Or this?

Or this?

Or this?

(I know. I saved the best for last.)

So what does a family that puts such a big focus on Advent do when there’s a four-day hospital disruption in the middle of the season? I decided to share our Advent calendar activities list this year as a guest post for Catholic Mothers Online. I hope it might help others see how to make this daily activity thing work, even in the busiest season.

(Now, whether or not it works…well, I’m sure I’ll be posting on that topic shortly before Christmas!)

Click on through and tell me what you think. Does this look doable to you?

(Mt. 25)

“Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.”

(Lk. 12:48)

Not long ago, I came across a blog post that asked, “How big is your plate?” She was reflecting on busyness and how we prioritize our commitments. How to set limits, to say enough is enough, I can’t do any more. I thought of my mother telling me, “You can do many ministries consecutively, but not necessarily concurrently.”

Among people of faith, there’s a strong predisposition to encourage women to focus on the vocation, or ministry, of motherhood, and to lay the rest of it aside until that commitment is largely fulfilled. But as I was pondering last week, if we’re given gifts—talents (how interesting it is that the word should be translated that way!)—are we not meant to use them all? And if we simply ignore them for a couple of decades, aren’t we, in effect, burying them?

That is the question each one of us faces. Where do we draw the line between giving back/paying forward the gifts we have been given, and thinking the world can’t possibly get by without our particular charism? One is stewardship; the other is pride. And it’s really easy to stray across the line.

A few years ago I probably would have built a big soapbox and tried to tell the world how to tell the difference. But like another blog friend, the more I learn about God, the less certain I am of anything except that absolute certainty is more likely to be a harbinger of pride than stewardship. I can’t claim to know where anyone else’s line is drawn. I can only do my utmost to stay on the right side of it in my own life…and to correct course when it becomes clear I’ve wandered into the path of oncoming traffic.

Dad says he can’t imagine having one of those office jobs where the work is the same every day. What he likes about farming is the constant variety. Building terraces has to get done when you can work in the field, which sometimes is the same time you need to be cultivating or planting. In the hog-farming years, the feed had to be ground, the animals fed, eyeballed for market-readiness, and hauled to the buying station, without neglecting the field work. It’s all on a deadline; miss the window and the yield suffers.

I didn’t really “get” all of this as a child. I just knew he worked all the time, and breakdowns were a source of helpless, choking frustration. Sometimes, my sisters and I wondered why he did it. Mostly, we just took it for granted.

Six years into my writing endeavors, I realize that my life has come to echo his. And I understand the passion that drives him. There’s a truism that says “if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Baloney. Trust me. It’s work. But when what you do wraps around who you are, it reaches into your soul, grabs tight, and puts down roots until the two are one and the same. And then, work feels different. It feels like a privilege.

My dad doesn’t farm for a living; he is a farmer. I juggle kids and writing and household and Down syndrome concerns and multiple volunteer duties at church…and although I can’t boil my self-identity down to a single word, I know that my passions are symbiotic; without any one of them, I would not be me. I thrive on the juggling act, the mental challenge that requires me to

(Yes, it's an unflattering picture. So sue me. Or the 6yo photographer, who didn't warn me he was taking it.)

organize my mind: these two tasks are most important today; must plan everything else to facilitate them. Even today, after a late night, my body wakes itself as usual at 5:30 and says: Time to go downstairs and do some work…while the house is quiet.

“Work.” What a beautiful word. In fact, I have to guard against it becoming an idol. Long blocks of unstructured time terrify me. They sound like a recipe for nonproductivity…and thus, stress.

When I came home last Tuesday afternoon to a virus-paralyzed computer, I had to fight off anxiety. I knew it would be good for me, a chance to reset and break bad habits (can you say “checking email every ten minutes even though it’s unlikely there’s anything there”?). But I have so many projects awaiting completion, and Baby Day looms 6 ½ short weeks away. At some point in every project, I need the computer: to research, to network, to send, to input notes on staves and format scores. Yes, parts of it can be done via NEO or paper and pen(cil). But I can’t finish anything without the computer.

That first night, I went to bed with a dull sense of anxiety pressing me down. Again and again I listed what work I could do without the computer, but it didn’t really help. Wednesday I spent the whole day taking deep breaths and working around the house with my husband…which was nice. I enjoyed hanging around him without distractions. But still, I felt anxious, unsettled.

But at 5:35a.m. on Thursday, I woke with a plan: composing at the piano; short story revision on my NEO. More work than I could realistically do on a day when we needed to clean the house before a lunch date.

Ah…purpose. Direction. Structure. Back in business. Bring it on, baby.

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I know this will come as no surprise to those who know our tendency to plan, plan, plan, but we have already started Christmas shopping. In fact, we’re well into the process.

And you know what? It is awesome.

See, here’s the thing. Every year, Christmas shopping gets more stressful. We can always come up with a long list of things Alex would like, but Julianna’s desires remain very simple: books and music. But we have hundreds of books, and she’s deliriously happy with the music we already have. And Nicholas? Nicholas loves everything, but thanks to Alex we already have everything: Duplos, trains, superhero action figures…

For the last couple of years, we’ve brainstormed, made lists, and hired a babysitter to go shopping. But let me tell you, those shopping trips are anything but fun. We feel under the gun. Nothing ever seems like enough; we feel compelled to have equal amounts of gifts for each child, but the inequality listed above makes it really tough. I spend the whole buying process feeling anxious and under pressure to get it done before the babysitter bill racks up too much. Not enjoyable at all. This is a perfect illustration of why I wrote a book about reclaiming Advent in the first place.

And it was really expensive. (Disclaimer: if you know us at all, you know we are collectively the cheapest people in the universe. I’m sure many people would roll their eyes at me calling it expensive, but as far as I’m concerned, having to pull money from savings instead of covering out of the budget qualifies as EX.PEN.SIVE.)

Plus, there’s this factor. Last year, the kids loved their toys…for a month or two. But they haven’t touched them for the last four months.

It’s time for a change.

So this year, we’re taking a little different tack:

1. Start early. Really early. As in making lists in early September.
2. Spread out the expense. The last couple of years, we’ve panicked at the last minute, realizing we’ve forgotten gifts for teachers and the like. That’s never a recipe for getting something they’ll actually use and appreciate. This year, we’re starting to collect Panera gift cards via the local SCRIP program (one each ordering session), and gift boxes from Penzey’s.
3. Limit the toys. I know we can’t avoid toys altogether, but we’re scaling way back. Why waste money on things they aren’t really all that interested in? My kids are experiential kids, not toy kids. Alex even said a few weeks ago, “I like toys that help me play. Like Wolverine claws.” (If only we could find those.)
4. Think creatively. Guess what? We desperately need pillows and bedsheets. Why not get some fun ones and wrap them up? And the kids, fighting over the Spiderman bath sponge? Sounds like a Christmas gift to me!
5. Check the bargain aisles. So far, bargain shopping has netted a book for each child (a fairy counting book, not Tinker Bell; a photo book of trains; and a car game book, total about $20), and we picked up two containers of sidewalk chalk for $.50 each.
6. Go handmade. I’m planning to make a couple of headbands for Julianna, and enlist Alex’s help. Being my artistic one, I know that will be right up his alley.
7. Go with time-gifts instead of Stuff that’s just going to lie around making more clutter. My work list is getting so long that it’s tempting to try to plow through the mornings and not spend time with the little ones. But they love to help me bake. Why not get some fun cupcake decorations and give them to the kids as Christmas gifts? Use them up, make a memory, and consume it. Sounds like a perfect gift to me.

That’s our plan for this year. But I would love to hear from others. How do you deal with planning Christmas gifts your kids will like without a) stressing out, and b) spending money on things they aren’t going to care about?

I’d go sit for hours in remote woods, finding God in the silence, without worrying about the babysitter’s schedule and whether I’m in a place where cell phone coverage will reach.

I’d write all day…I’d have my novel finished and be tearing through revisions on a glorious wave of momentum, instead of limping along a few hundred words at a time between other commitments. Maybe even be published. I’d practice my flute and write more music…because it wouldn’t get shunted aside in trying to get everything else done. (Practicing my flute and writing music, I have learned, are intimately connected. Weird, I know. But that’s the truth of it.)

I’d weigh a lot less and dress better.

I’d go out on more dates with my husband, and we’d have time to attend to our own pursuits and each other without feeling like we’re fraying at the edges to do it.

I’d scrapbook my wedding photos. It would be a gorgeous album, lovingly, painstakingly crafted, a real work of art.

Then again, maybe that whole list is baloney.

If I wasn’t a mom, I’d find some other excuse not to take the time to quiet my soul. I might go out more, but it wouldn’t necessarily accomplish the goal better.

I’d have so much time that I’d treat it flippantly, getting distracted from writing by Facebook and StumbleUpon and Twitter instead of boo-boos and bickering and meal preparation. And probably I’d still lose momentum and limp along a few hundred words at a time. Besides, I’d still be working. So scratch all that vaunted time to myself.

I’d weigh exactly the same, because I have no natural self-discipline where exercise is concerned; I loathe the stuff. Only having kids could force me to get up at 5:30 every morning.

I’d go out on dates with my husband, but it would be a shallow life, and who’s to say we’d actually connect more deeply? Our children connect us.

And I’d scrapbook, but let’s be honest. When I finished my wedding photos, what would I scrapbook?

I mean, face it. If I wasn’t a parent, I’d be lacking the motivation, the self-discipline, the sheer persistence, to write, to scrapbook, to exercise. Because becoming a parent has changed me. It has taught me those qualities. Without my children, most of those things I do, those many flaming torches I struggle so valiantly to keep in the air, wouldn’t ever have crossed my mind. Writing stories about the real life struggles of married couples to stay connected in a world that pulls them apart? Riiiight. I’d still be writing girlish love stories about fantasy princesses. Talking to medical students? Riiiight. I’d still be tiptoeing around people with disabilities, terrified of being asked to make a connection.

No, I am right where I’m supposed to be. Because without children, I wouldn’t be me.

My kitchen, before we lived in it. Or painted it. Or cluttered it up. I mean, look at that tiny table. Definitely not our table.

I think it happened because my dishwasher broke.

It’s ridiculous, really, that one appliance can become so indispensible that one starts to obsess, not only about clean vs. dirty dishes, but clean vs. dirty (or disorganized) everything else. Especially for me. After all, for the first twenty-one years of my life, I didn’t have a dishwasher. Whenever we griped to our parents, we got that old annoying response: “We do have a dishwasher! We have four of them! One-two-three-four!” (My three sisters didn’t find it any more amusing than I did.)

But here I am. And as I gnash my teeth and wash those plates and bowls and knives and spoons and forks and glasses by hand…or more accurately, as I leave them to pile up in precarious towers beside the sink…I think, Why didn’t it ever feel this way when I was growing up?

Well, I know the answer: We had an m.o. We stacked the silverware on the top plate, piled the other plates beneath it, then carried the whole works to the sink. Which was two feet away, not on the far side of a peninsula. Still, the piles of dishes awaiting cleaning looked nothing like my haphazard dish-dunes. We also were not allowed to leave food on our plates. We ate every bite, and we’d better do it before closing grace. (We didn’t have a garbage disposal, either; no easy scraping into the sink for us!) We had a rotation of dish duty: one girl per night, responsible for the whole works: clearing, putting food away, washing, drying, putting away. With Mom, of course.

And as I reflected on why dish duty seemed so much more a well-oiled machine when I was a child, I started realizing that my mom’s whole house was set up that way. In her pantry and cabinet, everything had its place. You always knew the flour and sugar would stand like sentries on the bottom right, the peanut butter and jelly above it, the Jello and canned goods on the left.

This is my pantry. It defies organization. I’m telling you. I’ve tried. Many times. Things migrate back to a wrong place, and it’s not me who’s doing it. The kids clothing drawers? Same story.

When my sisters and I were little, we went to school every day in neat and tidy pigtails or braids, even French braids on occasion. She used to brush our hair so that the part was perfect, the hair lay smooth from all sides as it converged on the hair band. I’ve tried that. Julianna moves her head, and a lock sticks up. I’ve quit trying.  But you know what? My mom touches Julianna’s hair, and it lays flat, just like mine used to when I was little. Obviously it’s not the hair, it’s the mom.

Then there’s the linen closet. My mom could always fold a sheet so that you couldn’t tell whether it was fitted or flat; they looked precisely identical. She had very little storage space, so she worked out exactly which folds in which order would make things stack neatly in the closet. She tried to teach me, too, but I didn’t get it. About once every three dozen tries, I manage to make a fitted sheet fold properly. But it’s still a different shape from its companion flat sheet.

Now, don’t get me wrong. My mom is not a paragon of organization. She’s lost more driver’s licenses in her life than I can count, and the kitchen table had to be cleared of random papers every single day before we could set for dinner.

But the table was clean every night. The counters might have taken the overflow, but the table was set for six, without another speck of clutter on it. The laundry did not sit for days waiting to be folded. The whole house was clean at the end of every Saturday. We grew a garden, canned and froze most of the family’s vegetables, raised chickens, butchered them ourselves, collected eggs every day, which Mom sold to neighbors up and down the gravel road.

And I don’t think any of us still had to wear diapers to bed at age 6 ½.

How did she do that? And why am I falling so miserably below the standards she set?

This is not the first time I’ve fretted about my lack of housekeeping prowess. In some ways, I think the universal frustration over housework is a product of a new era. Mom grew up expecting and planning to be the best housewife and mother she could be. My sisters and I grew up in a generation of empowered girls who believed we could have it all, do it all. And so I have children closer together than my mother did; I’m blogging and writing and teaching and public-speaking, and only dabbling in raising my own food. It’s an impossible standard to hold. I know that.

Yet I can’t help feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. I know the solution is to enlist the kids’ help, but trying to teach them slows down the household process even more.

This is the point where I’m supposed to draw it all together in a nice tidy package, look all perky and domestic, or at least accept my own limitations and talk about how I will choose to be content with who I am.

Then again, as House said in a rerun last night, discontent is the only way we improve ourselves. Right?

Image via Wiki Commons

Some people say the hardest transition is the first. Others say the real challenge lies with the second kid. Still others think going from “man to man” to “zone” defense—i.e., from 2 to 3, when the kids outnumber the pairs of arms needed to carry/restrain them—is the one that really makes the difference.

But everyone I know agrees on one thing: beyond three kids, it really doesn’t make all that much difference.

I’m thinking about this today because over the holiday weekend, my mother’s family had a big family event to celebrate a wedding and a 91^st birthday. I was talking to my grandmother about cars. I asked how in the world they found vehicles big enough to haul ten kids. Of course, she couldn’t answer—who can remember minutiae like that? I can’t remember enough about night nursing to answer my sister’s questions, and it’s only been two years!

What she did remember was mothers coming up to her and saying, “I don’t know how you do it all! I’m so busy with the two I have!”

I suppose it’s a fair question. How do we do it?

Well, I’ve been thinking about that, and here’s what I’ve come up with:

I don’t have time to obsess about how I do it. That’s how.

When you’ve got one or two kids, you try to be everything to everyone all the time, and you think, “I couldn’t possibly do more!”

But actually, you can. See, when you cross into more-kids-than-hands stage, all the chaff burns away…all the emotional energy we waste worrying about, you know, how we can possibly do it all. You just put your head into the wind, shoulder to the wheel, nose to the grindstone (fill in the cliché), and you do it.

You know what? It’s probably a good lesson for other times in life, too. If I’m feeling cranky and whiny, and I have enough time and energy to devote to obsessing over the subject, it’s probably a sign that whatever I’m struggling with probably isn’t nearly as overwhelming as I think it is.

What do you think? Am I onto something? Should I compress it down to a slogan and trademark it? Or am I missing something obvious?