Word for the Year: Joy

My word for this year is Joy.  Last year's word was "struggle," and struggle I did.  One of my biggest takeaways from the experience of the past year is that struggle isn't just a one-year thing; it may have been my word for one year, but it will be and should be a continual part of my life.  I've learned something about the value of struggle, about letting go of my expectation that life should be free of unpleasantness, and, finally, about the joy that comes in and through struggle applied correctly.  Since I know that struggle will be a feature of life going forward, this year I want to focus on that joy.

Joy can be difficult for me.  I'm feeling the reality of this more keenly now then I did a few days ago when this blog post began to germinate.  I've hit a rough post-partum patch.  Life is settling down into its new normal.  Landon is back at work today.  I'm figuring out what I can expect to get done while tending to the needs of my two boys.  The lack of sleep, however, probably in combination with difficulty getting a good diet and the dearth of exercise, is catching up with me.  I am less stable mentally than I have been in at least a year.  Whatever combination of anxiety and obsessive symptoms that float around in my brain are making their presence known.  I woke up this morning with life clinging to me like an ill-fitting outfit, seams in all the wrong places, twisted and too tight, impossible to ignore, making me want to scream and throw things.  Since I can't do that, I settled for yelling at Christopher, snapping at Landon over little things, and storming away from the breakfast table for a good cry in the bedroom because the tip of my strip of bacon (that Landon made for me, in addition to the rest of breakfast) was floppy.  Even I know that this is beyond petty, but when my brain is screaming for an unattainable perfection, something petty can be the last straw.  This is not healthy.  And it's certainly not joyful.  

My goal in choosing "Joy" as my word for the year is to be able to look through the chaos that I kick up for myself to the joy that life holds underneath.  I can't always help it when an out-of-order life feels like a kick in the stomach.  I can remind myself, though, of the joy of my life that makes it worthwhile to fight the lies that my brain and emotions conspire to tell me.  The purpose of all the struggling that I do is not just to struggle because it's the right thing to do, or because I don't want to be beaten down by my own weaknesses.  I am fighting to find the joy that is right under my nose, in my husband who does so much for our family, my toddler who is an explosion of learning and discovery, and my sweet still-but-barely-a-newborn who falls asleep in a squishable heap on my shoulder while I'm burping him.  Beyond these is a community of the sort that one finds perhaps once in a lifetime; wonderful family on both sides; fulfilling activities that keep my brain exercised; and all of this in a world saturated with heartbreaking beauty.  This is true, whether or not I feel the truth of it on a regular basis.  And I'm hoping that, by living into the truth, I will find more consistently the joy that seems sometimes so easy, and sometimes (like now) so elusive.   

On belief

In the course of a wide ranging conversation with a friend the other day, the issue of belief came up.  In spite of this friend's love of discussing God, theology, and their commitment to their Christian religion, they confessed to a rather weak belief.  It was easy for them to see the point of view of agnostics.  They believed that God was, but wondered at the necessity of this belief.

This struck a chord with me.  Belief, specifically belief in God, has always come easily for me on one level, and with difficulty on another.  A base level belief in God is impossible for me to dispense with, just because it's there.  When I look within myself, I find belief.  Having found this, I find all the other reasons that one might believe in the existence of God quite convincing.  They line up well with what I already believe about the world.  This, of course, leads to the difficulty with my belief, that is, that it's based on inclination more than reason, and therefore I find it difficult to trust.  I am vulnerable to persuasions of unbelief, specifically of the dismissal of the God of Abrahamic religions, with his personhood and self-revelation.  I flinch away especially from critiques of the existence of God which are based on an appeal to emotion or intuition; after all, that's more or less where my belief begins.  I read an account once of a person who lost their belief in God when they went on medication for their bipolar disorder.  It became apparent that the moments that they previously counted as contact with God turned out to be the results of emotional manic episodes.  How do I know that this could not happen to me, that the right medication wouldn't balance out my emotional life and suddenly my deepest beliefs would just evaporate?

All that to say that if anyone else out there both strives to live a life pleasing to God, while simultaneously doubting his existence, you have some company.  It's amazing to me how much doubt and faith co-exist in my life, similar to the simultaneous irritation and love that sometimes co-exist in my marriage.  I go about life as a brand-new Catholic, learning more about this tradition, relearning the basics that my parents and my church taught me as a child, and at the exact same time pondering whether any of this has any basis in reality, or, really, is the basis of reality.  I wonder at what point you could call both my friend and I optimistic agnostics - people who aren't certain that our reasons can carry us to our belief, but who choose, nevertheless, to live as though God does exist, and the vision of the world that we find so beautiful truly is the basis of reality.  Believers without certainty, who nevertheless continue to believe.

On vocation

I've been reading a lot of Catholic writing recently, from Catholic bloggers to the Pope.  And one idea that I've come across quite consistently is that of vocation as answering the question, "who will I serve?"  This has been an enormously helpful consideration for me.  After all, for me the primary answer to that question is made obvious by my situation in life: I am a spouse, and I am a parent.  This is my vocation, to serve my family.  When I look at any given day, and make my lists of what needs to go in it, the summation of my priorities is:

Serve Landon.  Serve Christopher.

And this has made several other things abundantly clear.  I knew right away that this was about more than housework and baby playtime; this was about my life having priorities so that there was a hook to hang everything on, and so that I would know when I was out of hooks.  So, because serving Christopher is a priority, and because Christopher and an open laptop do not happily co-exist, I've suddenly found the motivation to close my computer and find other things to do when Christopher is awake.  Christopher knows when I'm distracted, not just from direct attention to him, but from being engaged with him and his needs; he knows that when I'm on the computer, he has to work three times as hard to get my attention for something as basic as a diaper change.  This should not be, of course, and I knew that my computer and I had issues, but I've never been able to quite get a handle on it.  I think that this is because I was still thinking of it terms of how I would benefit from being off the computer - how much less guilty I would feel, how much more I would get done.  It wasn't until I thought in terms of serving Christopher that I was able to see how much of a no-brainer it is to just close the laptop while Christopher is awake, and I'm the only one at home.  I'm able to be much more in tune with Christopher's needs, and as a bonus I get some of the other things thrown in - less guilt about my computer use, and more productivity on the home front.  I still get on my computer at least twice almost every day, but I've found a hook to hang it on - it doesn't belong in the same time as my son.

These hooks, however, are not all full with housework and baby play time.  It's a dirty little secret in my stay-at-home-mom-of-one life that, honestly, I have time.  It might be somewhat unpredictable time, but it's still there.  And the thing about thinking of life in terms of vocation, the thing that differentiates it for me from some other notions of service to a husband or children is that I am not asking them to define my self by my service to them, but I am serving them by giving them my Self.  In order for this to be meaningful, there has to be a Self to give.  And in order for me to have a Self to give them, I need to be doing things that renew, refresh, and build-up that Self.  I know that in years to come, when there are two or three or more little ones running around, and they're making more work for me, and demanding more in terms of interaction, I might not have much time for this - it'll be manna in the wilderness time for me then.  But that time is not now, and right now I have time to do one very concrete thing to build-up this Self that I give in service to my family - I have time to go back to school.  Not a lot of time, granted, but a little.  And suddenly, I've found the willpower to spend a little bit of time, every day, working on going back to school.  So far, I've finished filling out one application and started in on another one.  These are things that I've been meaning to do, talking about doing, for a very long time.  My guilt, railings, and feelings of un-fulfillment weren't enough to overcome the inertia.  Seeing it in terms of serving Landon and Christopher was.  There are still lots of questions to be answered, like "how do you think you're going to pay for this?", but faithfulness doesn't require that I know the answers ahead of time.  If it doesn't work out to go back to school because of issues other than time, at least I'll have explored that avenue to its end, and I'll know that it's time to turn to other option.

In the end, here, I'm a little frightened at the sheer gift of this all.  As I look back at the past several days, and see the ways that I've found willpower where inertia seemed invincible, calm and persistence where anxiety seemed unstoppable, and an attitude of service where resentment seemed inevitable I am overwhelmed with the sheer grace of it.  These things are not natural to me, and since they are a gift, I both marvel at their presence, and hold my breath for their absence.  If the lives of those who have walked this path before me are any indication, the road will be much harder up ahead.  Knowing my weakness, God has lavished me with so much help here at the beginning; He doesn't owe this to me, and He can withhold it in the future.  But can I refuse to fully accept the gifts that He gives, because I want to protect myself against the pain of their surcease?  I could, and that's a whole 'nother blog post, but for now, I find that I am also give the gift of gratitude.

Tender-hearted

Tender-hearted.  It's not a quality that I think about a much, except maybe in its opposite when I joke with my friends about being a hard-hearted mommy because I let my child cry sometimes.  But today the word jumped out at me from the end of Ephesians 4.

"Be kind," says Paul.  "Be tender-hearted towards each other.  Forgive."

For a second after reading that, I caught a glimpse of a church, a community, a world where we all have, indeed, put away such things as bitterness, wrath, clamoring, slander, and especially malice (Eph.4:31) and are simply kind to each other.  Where our hearts are not just tender toward each other both sympathy, and in openness.  Where we forgive slights, offenses, and outright wounds.

Ideally, I would go on here to write about what a wonderful vision this is, and how much I wish that reality conformed to it.  But I can't.  Because although that briefest of glimpses made me catch my breath in the morning, I realize now, having pondered it through the day, that I don't actually want to live in it.  As far as concerns myself and those I love, I want people to behave like this.  I'm also happy to try it out among my peers; people that I like, and whose good opinion of myself I value.  But I don't want to be responsible to live like this with everybody, because a world where all is genuinely kind, tender-hearted, and forgiving is a world free of boundaries between peoples, and I thrive on boundaries.  Not the good kind of boundaries, where you don't let toxic people run all over you, but the negative kind of boundaries - the kind that tell me who is in (me and my little circle) and who is out (the people that me and my little circle like to disapprove of).  In fact, I am so far in the thrall of these boundaries, that I really start to feel at home in a new place when I have 1) found a few friends, and 2) figured out who we all subtly disapprove of.

I'm too well-trained of a person, of course, to just rip off on people - that might be slander, after all, or even malice.  I'm usually nice to everyone.  But as my common denominator of disapproval with a friend becomes obvious, I slowly become more comfortable with pointing out to each other the ways that this person or these persons either irritate us personally, or are just generally clueless about the little facets of life that we find so self-obvious.  Sometimes I talk about them in lowered tones, with the correct facial expressions to indicate that I really don't want to gossip, but understand that we have to have someone to commiserate with about this.  Depending on the situation the disapproval might be aimed at people that we know, generalized groups of people, figureheads of movements of which we disapprove, or people in various positions in our life.  I am well-aware of my failings in this area, but I don't always realize when it's happening.  In fact, as I've been writing this I've thought of more and more examples of doing this, many of them relatively benign and even humorous, but some of the insidiously close and nasty. Nasty is a strong word, but it's the right word for this, because when I do this, I am deciding who I will think of as a real person, and who will be considered something a little less than quite fully human; that is, a little less human than myself.  Once I've begun to think of someone as not quite fully human, one aspect of tender-heartedness - sympathy - is shut down.  If they're a distant group of people, their troubles and concerns roll easily off my back.  If they're a part of a movement that I don't like, I conflate all the things that I don't like about the movement with the person who symbolizes them.  If they're an irritating person in my life, it becomes impossible for me to see their perspective, to recognize their struggles, and to acknowledge their own difficulties.  They may even be another friend, in which case I can make the correct noises when we talk, but the words that I'm saying don't reach my own heart.  No part of their pain is really imprinted upon myself; I am not helping to bear their burdens.  I just want it to look like I am.  Words are not sympathy.

Not only would this be hurtful to the other person/s, were they to discover it (which I truly hope they don't -  I don't want to hurt them, just use them to make myself feel better without them being aware of it), but it's toxic to my own self, to developing new relationships, and to relationships that I do wish to nurture.  Living inside of my self-drawn boundaries, I have to keep a closely guarded heart to new people and experiences.  I'm nice; I'm polite; I'm downright friendly to most people (I think); but I can't let anybody really in until I've figured out if they're an in sort of person, or an out sort of person.  Clues from my already-friends are a short cut, but barring that I have to be on the lookout for ways that they might disappoint me as a person; I have to see if they're more accomplished than me in some area of particular ego vulnerability; I have to find some area where I can consider us at least on equal footing, if not where I have a slight advantage.  Are they prettier than me, more accomplished than me, more self-motivated than me?  Those are not strokes in their favor.  As you can imagine, this doesn't make meeting new friends graceful.  It's difficult to have a free and light-hearted conversation with someone when you're acutely aware of all the ways that they're wounding your ego.  Fortunately, I can often rise above this initial, paralyzing rush of analysis, or I would find no friends; in fact, I'm blessed to have some of the best friends that a woman could ask for, both old and new.  But even after a person has slipped past the outer ring of my fear and suspicion, my guarded heart interferes with relationships that I really wish to nurture.  I'm reluctant to take off the last of the armor and be honest about struggles that nobody else seems to have, prejudices that aren't fashionable to acknowledge, and desired ends that I fail to accomplish.  Revealing these things makes me too vulnerable, too readable, too... tender.  If subtle contempt interferes with my ability to truly sympathize with others, my fear of being cast outside of the boundaries that I have drawn interferes with the second aspect of having a tender heart - being open to the touch, influence, and impact of others.

Although my word for the year is struggle, this is a knot of influences, instincts, and inclinations that is woven so closely through my being that I'm not even sure where to begin struggling with it.  So while I struggle with some other things that I may find the time to tell you about soon (e.g., food, organization, and finishing things), this is one situation that I'm just going to need to sit with.  It won't unravel with my own cogitations, but soaked in enough prayer and interior stillness, the ends may slip out where I can see them.

A Gentle Divine Smackdown

Not quite what my day was like, but close enough

In today's late morning I began to do a dangerous thing.  I began, mentally, to write a blog post for this evening about how easy days aren't really good for me.  The post would discuss how I enjoy these days - the ones where my willpower is strong, the to-dos are practically accomplishing themselves, and I have a schedule worked out to make my complicated afternoon a breeze - but they present a problem because I then want to set them up as expectations for how every day should be.  I would then be disappointed were not the day of the sort where my tiny child sits with his feet dangling in the empty side of the sink while I wash dishes, and we listen to his CD of funky kids sing-along music.  And where, in my morning once-over of the bathroom, I did not hum carelessly to myself as I wiped up the random hair in the sink even though it wasn't bathroom cleaning day.  And where I effortlessly avoided the siren song of internet inanities to knit a repeat in my current project before enjoying a light lunch while reading an edifying book.

I really was reflecting on these very things.  And I really had no idea how much I needed to be slapped.  But don't worry - justice prevailed.  It all went south about the the time I noticed the fire in the oven.

I had turned the oven up quite hot to make pita bread, this being one of my smugly-reflected-upon moments of good planning and strong willpower, whereby I was going to accomplish something in the early afternoon that would render the evening practically struggle free.  Unfortunately, while mixing the pitas I noticed an unusual amount of white smoke emanating from various orifices on my oven.  Investigation revealed a small grease fire burning happily about the element.  Several applications of baking soda, multiple episodes of towel waving at smoke detectors, and a window opened to sub-freezing air later, the bottom of my oven had stopped bursting into flames but my plans for the blog post had gone up in them.

All turned out well, of course.  I baked the pitas - albeit sadly subpar versions of their usual puffy selves - in my neighbors' oven.  And although I could write a whole saga in itself about the preparation of the lasagna for my friends who just had a baby (frozen ground beef, for starters, and triple the prep time that I planned on), that too baked quite nicely in my neighbors' oven.  As the lasagna baked, those same neighbors invited us to stay for dinner, then helped deliver the lasagna and its accoutrements to our friends at what turned out to be a fairly reasonable hour.  After which said neighbors and ourselves put our kids to bed, and hung out at their place eating cheesecake and watching football until late in the night.  By which I mean 9:40PM, because we are parents of small children after all.

The day, then, was salvaged (although my kitchen could use some help), and actually improved by the aid and assistance of some stinkin' awesome people, and I end it with these two thoughts:

1. Good neighbors are priceless, and mine are the best so you can't have them.

2. I will never again muse about the ease with which a day is passing before said day reaches its midpoint.

Corollary: I will never plan fatuous blog posts about a day until the day has proved itself worthy by continuing in smarmy glory from beginning to end.

So there.

On struggle

Last year, Sarah Bessey chose a lovely word for the year: fearless.  Even though some of the ways that this word has worked out in her life have been pretty hard-core and nitty-gritty, the word itself just embodies a lovely sentiment.  When I decided to join her, and others, in choosing a word for the year I quickly realized that it would not be a lovely word.  My word for 2013 is struggle.

In the past several months I've begun to let go of my persistent belief that if only I could set my life up just right, being a disciplined, productive human being would begin to come naturally.  I've realized that sometimes (and maybe most of the time) when I fail to be the person that I know I can be, it's not the fault of the routine, system, or checklist that I used: it's the fault my own underdeveloped self-discipline.  I've come to see that instead of casting around for a new approach to exercise or the honing of my creative talent when I'm stymied by sheer discomfort, I just need to keep right on doing this uncomfortable thing.  I've chosen struggle as my word for the year to help me apply these lessons.

I hope that it's clear that I'm not talking about "struggles" in the sense of difficult circumstances that simply present themselves to us as we live life; I had plenty of those in 2012, and expect my fair share in 2013.  The struggles that I want to lean into this year are of a different kind.

I want to embrace the struggle that come from simply doing the best that I know with my time, my talents, and my resources.  I want to stop taking the path of least resistance when it comes to how I spend my free time; how I eat; how I spend money; how I exercise.  I want to struggle against my very self, against my strong impulse to fulfill my duties as basically as possible and then make myself comfortable, and I want to leave open the possibility that I will fail.  I want to take on practices and habits that I think that I can master, but that I might not after all be able to.  And when I fail, I want to take responsibility for my actions and omissions that contributed to failure.  Then I want to get up, and keep on going.

On Truth

Truth, goodness, and beauty.  Ideally, my life is dedicated to these, specifically as they are revealed in the person, life, and ministry of Jesus Christ.  Ideally.  But here's the truth about my relationship with Truth: I want to love the truth, but really I just love being comfortable.  I like to read things that reinforce what I already believe.  I like to hang out with people who believe what I do.  I like to find reasons that the beliefs of those with whom I am hanging out could be true.  I like being in the group that's rocking the boat a bit, but I really don't want to rock the boat all by myself.  As we all know, truth doesn't work this way.  


I've always known this, of course, but I began to discover it experientially as my life became more fragmented, and different parts of it started happening among diverse groups of people.  For most of the past two years, I worked with one group of people, went to church and hung out socially with a second group of people, went to school (some of the time) with a third group of people, kept in touch long distance with the fourth, fifth, and sixth groups of people, and was related to approximately the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth  groups of people.  Trying to cobble together a coherent set of beliefs by believing what is important in each of these groups is like trying to cram a spider monkey into a washing machine.  It doesn't work, and ultimately will not end well for the spider monkey.  But I tried.  


I tried to hang on to the bits of where I came from that seemed to be the most important to the people there, while simultaneously learning which bits of the new groups seemed to be the most important.  But while I was trying to be agreeable to people on both ends, there were real changes happening.  I'm a different person than I was two years ago.  The problem is that sometimes it's been hard to realize those changes, what with all the spider monkey limbs that I was trying to manage.  Is this limb a real change, or just one of these beliefs that I tried on for size?  Is that tail really something that I still believe, or just something that I don't want to let go of because it will cause a family ruckus?  These kind of questions make it hard to process new questions, debate new idea, and test new beliefs.  It's for this reason that I've been too silent for much of these past two years on what was happening inside of me.  I've decided that this has to change.  So I'm determined to begin to try to think clearly.  To face Truth honestly.  To question what I don't wish to question, and be ready to accept what I don't wish to accept.  To think out loud so that errors can be corrected before they form into beliefs.  To be ready to be wrong.  And to be ready to decide on what I think is right. 

A Confession of a Most Drastic and Startling Nature

My generation: earbud junkies. Landon pulls them out while we're waiting for or riding the bus. The girl talking on the phone has one in her free ear. The kids streaming across campus hither and yon have theirs securely tucked in, attaching them to the shiny ipods, generic brands MP3 players, or double duty cell phones riding in pockets and backpacks. It all makes me feel a bit left out. Not that I don't have earbuds. I have a really cool orange pair that Landon gave me for my birthday (incidentally, those are the ones that are likely to be found in his ears). And it's not that I don't have an MP3 player. I actually have two – our little black generic model, and my phone that holds a micro SD chip crammed with music and a few podcasts. It's not even that I don't like listening to stuff; I love music, and I have expressed intentions of using “down-time” wisely by listening to educational or thought-provoking podcasts. It makes me feel left out because I can't do it.

I have had a dark secret for some time now. I've suppressed my suspicions of it for much of my life, and my certainty for the past several years. I've been ashamed and confused, struggling with feelings of inadequacy and incompetence. Only recently have I begun to embrace this secret; to hope that maybe it wasn't just a crippling. Maybe, just maybe, it was a nudge towards a way of organizing my life that would be more conducive to my sanity. In any case, coming to terms with it has made my life easier. "What," you may be wondering, "is this dark secret with transformative possibilities? And what has it to do with orange earbuds and listening to music while walking?" Here it is. Marina's secret that makes her unfit for life in the 21st century: I can't multi-task.

I can't knit while listening to a lecture. I can't read a book to a child and keep track of an adult conversation. I can't listen to music while I write anything important. I can't even read a challenging book and listen to music at the same time. I can't (earbud alert!) be present in the outside world while piping Regina Spektor directly to my eardrums. I have trouble cooking and conversing simultaneously. Not to mention concentrating on eating and speaking in equal amounts. Not only do I feel guilty for lacking a much-lauded feminine quality, but I have to admit to using time in a scandalous manner: I do one thing at a time. I know. I'm ashamed of it, too. And I sincerely apologize for all the productiveness that you, the wider world, have been gypped of by my handicap. But honestly? Get used to it. I've fought this long enough. I'm ready to embrace my one track mind.

When I'm walking across the pedestrian bridge, or waiting at the bus stop, or riding the bus I will no longer feel ashamed of doing just that, instead of ingesting music or educational podcasts. Walking around with speakers stuffed in my ears makes me antsy, and gives me a feeling of hiding inside my own head. In addition, the long spaces between events that are a compulsory element of my current transportation modes are proving remarkably effective at keeping me sane. Some people may be able to mainline Switchfoot and have their brain treat it as background noise. I find this impossible. Music grabs my mind and makes it think. It's when I dedicate brain space to nothing more than the background noise of a city going along its business, or to taking in the amazing sight of the variety of people who get on and off the bus, or to whatever lazy thoughts it wants to bring up that my mind has a way of unraveling its own kinks and getting back in working order.

When I'm eating ice cream, sitting on the floor beside Landon, who is busily engaged in his homework, I will not allow myself to think that I need to be reading a book in order to make this time worthwhile. The ice cream and my husband are enough; if I try reading at the same time I won't enjoy those. Seriously - ice cream is its own experience, especially Edy's Rocky Road.

I will never again try to play Scrabble and have a serious online conversation at the same time. I will not allow myself to feel like I have to carry on a texting conversation and a real one simultaneously. I will do whatever it takes to not get sidetracked by conversations that are not my own. I will write down tasks for later so that I can concentrate completely on what I'm doing now. This is for now, that is for later. I will not attempt to listen to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! while doing anything else.

Since I don't want to appear naive, I have to put in a disclaimer: I'm not sure how long this can last. I've heard often enough that being a Mother (especially of young children), which I intend to be at some point (and they have to start young) is a case study in the necessity of multi-tasking. Even closer than that looms the prospect of working again, and then going back to school (plus working?). But I'm going to hang on to the habits that I'm trying to put in place now: I intend, as much as possible, to declutter my life to the point where I can do what I need to do effectively, instead of doing a mediocre job on all the things that I would like to do. We'll see how this works out.

So, shocked yet? Or is there anyone else who would like to confess to secret inabilities to do two things at once?

P.S. If you love to multi-task, and find yourself to be quite effective at it, please don't take offense at any of my descriptions of behavior that I eschew. I'm not condemning you for your earbuds and multi-track minds, just confessing that I am incapable of following your example. I'm actually jealous, so go ahead and feel superior.