On the Need For Retreat

I am sitting in the dark this morning. Despite my hopes, I woke up a little before five, but instead of the usual mad scramble to figure out how to make use of the time, I laid in bed and allowed myself to drift in my sleepiness, listening to the sounds of the retreat center, praying and thinking and trying to find that quiet mental place that seems so elusive these days, the place where God speaks.

This week, for a few days, I am at the Liturgical Composers Forum, a week that serves as my retreat: a time to pray twice a day in community, a time not to fill every spare moment with productivity, but instead to be still. Or anyway, as still as I can.

It’s always so shocking when the kids come home after school these days–the level of noise and splintering of attention. It shouldn’t be shocking; this is my normal. But the middle of my days, when I’m not running around, is spent inside my head. I don’t play music because I couldn’t concentrate if I did. I don’t talk on the phone. Sometimes I play my flute, but really my days are spent inside my head. And then the kids come home and everyone wants a piece. Julianna’s little “Mommy? Mommy? Mommy?” So patient when I am sidetracked, which is pretty much always. Then there’s the quintessential example. We went out for custard a few nights ago, and we were all sitting in a single booth at Freddy’s, and while I’m listening to Christian talk, my two youngest are reaching across the table to poke me, over and over, trying to get my attention. OVER-STIMULATION.

I totally lost my you-know-what last week. Wednesday. It was hormonal, but that’s no excuse. The night before had been one of those days: I had to run kids to piano and then come home and make dinner, then get a kid to basketball and make it back in time to teach a flute lesson. All of this with a bad, bad headache. So Alex was assigned to supervise Michael loading the dishwasher. The bad day began when I discovered, Wednesday morning, a dishwasher full of crusted, un-rinsed bowls of chicken pot pie. The job that had been given to kids, that should have been well within their capability to help ease the burden on the parents, had instead become more work for Mom than it would have been in the first place. That was where it started. It went downhill from there.

Once the kids left for school, I spent five minutes walking around the main floor and throwing everything the kids had left lying around into a big pile on the living room carpet, to make a point. And then I calmed down, and after school I approached the topic without histrionics and we got started cleaning. Deep cleaning that they would have been paid for if they hadn’t shown such consistent and blatant disregard for the amount of work their parents put in already.

And then I discovered that a week earlier after “cleaning,” Julianna had thrown the toilet bowl cleaner into the cabinet under the sink open AND SIDEWAYS. Well, you can probably imagine I did not keep my cool.

I could see the effect my histrionics were having on Nicholas, in particular. And felt horribly guilty. As if he doesn’t have enough anxiety without Mom turning into a shrieking banshee. And I thought, “I am so ready to be in St. Louis on retreat next week, where I DON’T HAVE TO DEAL WITH ANY OF THIS.”

You would think that one would approach a retreat week with higher motives. But maybe the truth is, the time we most need retreat is not when we are in a good place and seeking to grow closer to God. Maybe it’s when we don’t have our you-know-what together that we most need the time.

This post went in a completely different direction than I meant for it to go when I opened my computer this morning. Well, I’ll save that for tomorrow, I guess.