Photo by orangebrompton, via Flickr

I’ve been out of balance lately, and it showed: short fuse with the kids, a constant sensation of barely keeping my head above water, a house so disorganized and messy that it grated on my nerves. I don’t like feeling this way, and every time I do, I question whether I’m actually doing what I’m supposed to be doing with my life.

I brought it up in Confession last week, and braced myself for his response. But the associate pastor went a totally different direction than I expected. We all think balance is static, he said. But that’s not how it works. Balance is always in motion. It has to be. Like when you cross a tightrope wire. Because you’re in motion, the balance is always shifting. That’s just the way it is. It’s not like you’re ever going to reach a sweet spot where the balance stays still.

It was a very freeing thought, one that relieves the guilt, though not the urgency to act. And so last week, I spiraled downward in writing productivity and upward in the direction of family and home. I let myself be distracted from my work and lengthened the list of housekeeping tasks until Friday the only writing I did was finish a blog post. For Easter weekend, I was mother, wife and homemaker.

At the end of it, I am exhausted, but feeling less crazed. A new balance, and an appropriate one for the occasion. But last night as we prepared for bed, I began the mental preparation for the week and realized that I can’t remain in this place. I have four deadlines by the beginning of May…and wedding season is beginning, with five on the books before Memorial Day. Clearly I have to make room for my other obligations.

I would like to make this blog post deeply meaningful and poignant, but the fact is I must shift my efforts elsewhere right now. And that, too, is okay.

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?

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.

You’d think that a mother approaching the birth of her fourth child in seven years (well, 7 ½) wouldn’t be floored by the sheer tininess. But as I pulled out our trusty cloth diapers, counted them, stacked them in the drawer, I couldn’t believe it. Every single baby diaper fit in one drawer. After close-on four years of double diapering, it just blew my mind.

I have to admit, I’m kind of freaking out here. People get out of the habit of having babies around, and then they feel a tug in the heart to have another, but they think back on the intensity of the experience, and they get scared off. When we started trying for #4, we were still in full-on Baby mode. But it took us six months to conceive. A lot can change in six months. And a lot more in the nine months that follow. We are no longer a baby household. We are a nighttime-and-nap-time-diapers family. A my-youngest-child-is-talking family. An everyone-has-chores (although they don’t always do them) family.

But seven weeks from now…

Well, let just say it’s making me think about how many more things than diaper drawers are going to change.

Some nights, I already get up seven times in six hours. How in the name of all that is holy am I going to comfort Julianna after a nightmare, the drama king when he has a runny nose, AND nurse a baby during the night?

How am I going to exercise? And post a blog? It’s already a delicate balance to do those two things and still get Alex off to school.

How am I going to chase down the munchkins when they run in opposite directions and I have a baby attached to the breast? (Is it possible to run and nurse simultaneously?)

I’m well aware that the writing is going to have to simmer down for a while. A good long while. But, um, I can’t even get the house clean now. How can I add the time commitment of a newborn on to the kid commitments I already have? The last time I had a baby, Alex was in preschool for a whopping two mornings a week. I freaked out when he had eight weeks of baseball once a week. And now it’s all-day school and piano lessons and homework, and Julianna on the bus, and Julianna’s speech homework, and…

Folks, I’m a little intimidated by what my life’s about to become.

Don’t get me wrong. It’ll all be worth it. The back shot, the surgery, the two weeks without driving and six weeks without lifting, the sleepless nights. It’ll already be worth it a week in—a day in. But there were plenty of times in Nicholas’s first six months when I lost all semblance of cool. And as I begin to contemplate the change to come, I’m kind of scared.

Pour some loving on me, folks.

Novel writing is a bit touchy in our house. My husband supports my writing, but fiction makes him a little nervous….and with good reason.

When I was a kid, I didn’t play. I built houses and castles out of brix blox, and I read, drew and wrote stories. At night, instead of going to sleep, I would lie in bed and “pretend.” On the playground I preferred to withdraw from the other kids and spend the time in my head, imagining stories.

I grew out of it enough to make some friends in high school, to enjoy the usual teen stuff. But in a lot of ways, I continued to live in my head, imagining myself as my main characters. I wrote love stories, and as my understanding of life grew, so did the complexity of the inner life. And then, my expectations of real life began to mirror what I had created in the inner. As you might imagine, real life never measured up.

Still, it’s one thing to live a fantasy life when you’re single. Getting married raises the stakes. When I really started writing in earnest, I got into trouble. Mundane reality began to grate on me. I loved my husband, but compared to the richness of the world in my head, our life seemed dull and prosaic. I didn’t want to quit writing at night; I resented being forced to exit my dream world to spend time with my husband. I spent all my free time living in my head, imagining the novel in more and more detail, creating characters, linking their back stories. If you’ve never experienced the buzz of creating a world and having it take shape under your fingers, it’s hard to communicate the thrill. Perhaps some of my fellow writer/readers can help there. It’s exhilarating, fulfilling…but if you let it overrun reality, it’s the worst kind of self-indulgence.

Fortunately, I recognized the trouble before it did too much damage…in part because Christian didn’t mince words in pointing it out. I had to make a painful sacrifice and stop writing fiction altogether for a while. It was the only way to break the thrall. And when I began again, I placed limits on myself—limits often stretched, but which nonetheless did their job.

The good thing about writing in a house full of kids is that they don’t allow self-indulgence. Children are a limit less elastic than any I could self-impose. These days, my problem runs the other direction: how to get enough concentrated time to get the momentum going in the first place. But recognizing the richness of my life, the heart-stopping beauty in it…I’ll take that option any day.

Image by bixentro via Flickr

(Note: if you’re one of the many who skip my “writing” posts…don’t. Not today.)

For thirty hours last weekend, I lived out a fantasy. I left behind diapers and whining and runny noses and kids who change their mind ten times and food prep and cleanup…and I went to a writer’s convention.

I walked the halls of the Westport Sheraton with purpose, knowing the time was short and this was my time to seize the hour. I filled every moment with conversation, with mental stimulation, with picking the brains of people who share some of the same dreams. I asked questions, I made connections, handed out business cards, and honestly didn’t dwell much on those I’d left at home. Because this was my weekend. A weekend to be a writer. Not a writer mama. Just a writer.

As Saturday wound down, I found myself regretting that I hadn’t stretched the time, paid the extra money for masterclasses on Sunday morning. But I knew that at the other end of the highway, I had a husband who was probably quickly reaching his saturation point with single parenthood. It was time to go home.

I left the convention center on another freakishly hot afternoon destined to end in thunderstorms and restarting the heater. I had to stop somewhere for dinner, so I whipped out my emergency-only cell phone and called my sister. “Whatcha doing? Want to come have dinner?”

A spur-of-the-moment dinner date? Me? It felt …strange. Unsettling. A little guilty. Because as the pavement unfolded between me and the dreamy unreality of Convention, all the Mommy parts of me began to wake back up.

After a flying dinner at Culver’s (for which the scales is still chastising me), I apologetically took my leave and got back on the road. Zooming toward the setting sun, my mind and heart, which had remained firmly focused on me all weekend, began to stretch homeward. And for the first time I felt a pang of longing for those at the other end of the highway, who surely missed me.

It wasn’t time enough. I wanted more time to spend by myself. I hadn’t gotten to stretch out across the bed and read, to get up and write an essay on my NEO without having to worry about rousting someone out of bed. I wanted more time in which I was not responsible for nurturing any young hearts or caring for mature relationships. I wanted more time just for me. And yet I knew that if there had been enough time, I would still have been dissatisfied, because still a part of myself would be missing.

They say that parenthood is having your heart walk around outside your body.  I realize now that parenthood is a perpetual state of dividing yourself, a state in which there will never—can never—be enough of me to go around. I’ll always wish I have more time for me, for them, for husband, for revisiting the unencumbered me of earlier years. Part of me will always long to sit on the old tin roof back at the farm and watch the sunset fade into starry night. Part of me will always long for more time (and money) to attend conventions, to network, write, and fulfill the questing of my heart. But if I did any of those things as much as I wanted, another part of me would cry out. Because wherever I am, a piece of me is walking around a house, a school, a campus…looking at books, punching buttons on that stupid Mozart cube, playing superhero-of-the-day, repeating “Ma-ma? Ma-ma? Ma-ma?”

It will never be enough. But that’s a sign of the richness of my life. And for these moments of understanding, I am so very, very grateful.

(Photo credit: Broken Heart, by TimOve, via Flickr)

Image via Wikipedia

My freshman year of college, the director of bands came into an orientation for new music majors. “You’ve picked a great major,” he told us. “Employers, even medical schools love to admit music majors because they’re such good time managers.”

I always wondered if he was blowing smoke; I found it hard to believe that a medical school would want someone who spent four years studying music theory instead of biochemistry. But he was definitely right about one thing: Studying music made me a time manager extraordinaire.

I imagine that sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. When I was in college, I took 18-20 hours a semester, and usually 3-4 of those credit hours were ensembles, meaning that for one credit hour, I was in class 4 hours a week. You do the math. I didn’t spend a great deal of time studying, but I spent a ton of time practicing my flute—up to 4 hours a day over and above ensembles.

And of course, nowadays I get the thrice-daily comment: “I don’t know how you do it all!” So, although ordinarily I would hesitate to call myself an expert on anything (there’s always someone who knows more), in this case, I’ll risk it. Head on over to Real Zest to see what I have to say on the subject of managing time!

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
-Henry David Thoreau

There are times in life when every word I read seems to be a message from Heaven hammering home a single point. The last two weeks or so have been one of those times. At first, it was just a hint here or there, whispering “joy in the moment.” But although I recognized the squirm in my belly, indicating that this message was looking for a home, I was too busy focused on my family, which looked more or less like this, to pay attention:

Since Christmas, it’s been nothing but sickness and interrupted nights and snow days, and the associated hits to my productivity. I have been gripey and complaining in increasing negativity, in defiance of Heavenly messages. So God upped the ante, until every blog post and news story and every word out of my husband’s mouth pounded at the message of celebrating the moment and the need to stop worshiping at the altar of productivity. And then, I went through the last six months’ pictures, sending $40 of developing to Target in preparation for a new round of scrapbooking, and I realized: Holy cow. Look at those moments! I had forgotten. My life is made of joy.

Living in the moment. Celebration, a blogger said, is how we live in the present. Me, I live in a world of multitasking, the antithesis of living in the moment. My brain is always skipping ahead, wrestling with writing issues, or wallowing in past experiences, comforting myself through the painful slowness of my goals with the thought that someday, the kids’ll all be in school and I’ll be able, like Thoreau, to go to the woods. I can hear Yoda saying, “This one, long have I watched. All her life has she looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never her mind on where she was.”

Here and now. This moment is all I have; the future, as the green guy said, is always in motion. (Wise little alien that he was.) It’s foolish to pin my hopes on an ideal world that in all likelihood will never materialize. I will always have sick kids and snow days, doctor appointments and IEP meetings, school pickup and dinner to make, that will prevent me from retreating for weeks to a woodland paradise. But then, without them, life would be empty. Where would I learn about suffering and joy, beauty and pain, and the way they are all inextricably linked together?

So today I recommit to the count of a thousand gifts: sparkling moments sprinkled in among the gray winter of discontent. Today I commit to learning that elusive skill of living here, living now, of sucking the marrow out of life and celebrating the present.

-Perfect Snowflakes: One drifting down to rest on spidery crystal legs on the rubber strip below the window of the truck. One on the head of one perfect little girl (sorry the focus isn’t terrific–you try getting this girl to stand still long enough to have her picture taken!)

-The way the energy level of the house changes when Alex comes home from school, an immediate electrification of the air, an instantaneous alchemy of completion.

-The warbling giggle of my almost-22-month-old as said big brother chases him around the house roaring, and Julianna sits off to the side giggling uncontrollably at the rank silliness of the menfolk.

-A DQ Chocolate Extreme blizzard, shared with my girl

-Wonderful teachers for my children

-Choir members who build a community around us

-A few stolen moments by the river, watching the ice grind itself into perfect circles as it spins around the bends on its way to warmer weather:

-Gratitudes that are not meant for public consumption

-The chance to submit a manuscript

-The chance to make a difference by working at the diocesan level, and by teaching NFP

-The privilege of the writing gift, which I must remember is just that, a gift, and less important than my ordinary, humdrum life

-The structure that limits my writing time, which makes me focus and produce instead of wallowing and wasting time. (At least, not wasting as much time.)

-Grandmothers who have lived long enough to be known and loved by their great-grandchildren

What do you have to be grateful for today?

1. I’ve been having one of those weeks again. One of those weeks where I found myself out of balance, focused myopically on writing, unable to sleep at night for being wound up about it, and spending far too little time being wife and mom. Any time this happens to me, it calls into question the whole vocation, makes me doubt whether I’m really supposed to be writing, or whether I need to stop trying to live in both worlds.

2. And then, out of nowhere, a week like this. A royalty check, payment for an article, completion of a really good query class, two queries and a personal essay sent out into the great beyond, a not-quite-rejection from a literary agent, and to top it off, forward motion on my new flute collection with GIA. Talk about a celestial message that the struggle for balance is worthwhile! If every week was this good on the writing front, I’d be making a living at it. Then again, I probably would never sleep.

3. Okay, enough about writing. I’m curious, folks—who out there still has movie rental stores nearby? Because all of ours closed. All but the one locally-owned one that has no parking b/c it’s downtown. Anyway, being movie lovers with three small children (which means that we hardly ever get to the theater), we have been driven to something we always thought we’d never do. We joined Netflix.

4. We always thought Netflix would be one of those things that we never deemed worthwhile—like cable TV. We keep basic cable—the kind of cable that they don’t even advertise because their standard package is “family cable.” But after we gave up TV for Lent for a couple of years, and saw our life shift for the better, we called the cable company and said, “Hey, whatever happened to that basic package? You know, the $15 one?” Yes, we miss out on a lot. But the more TV you have, the more you feel compelled to watch, and TV is really not a very good use of time. And it shields the kids from a lot of commercialism, too.

5. I always looked at Netflix that way. I mean, how many movies do you need to watch in a month? If you’re going to be socked with a monthly fee, you feel compelled to watch a bunch. But I have to say, I’m sold on it. We’ve more than used our money’s worth this first month, finally getting to watch the last season of Alias (we watched them all on videos, borrowed from friends, but never got to the last one…life intervened) and playing 1940s Superman videos for Alex on the computer.

6. Julianna’s summer school ended yesterday, so now summer begins in earnest. No more cute schoolbus moments till fall, and then Alex will be going to school, too. Six weeks. Wow! They say in parenthood, the days drag and the years fly. I think that about sums it up.

7. I have a babysitter this morning, so I get to go out to the nature area and sit this morning. I definitely need to find some stillness. And then, I will come home and work on adding 4000 words to my novel. Sounds like a good day. Let’s get on with it! Have a great weekend, everyone!

Chocolate cake (w/buttermilk); PB icing (w/2 sticks of butter & a cup of cream). As one of our student's parents cried last night, "That must be like a thousand calories! WHY did you do it????"

 …and THE AFTERMATH…