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 Embodiment

In a comment on this post by Jessica, I prefaced a statement about my sleep habits by saying: "I am much more mortal, embodied, and human than I realized when I was 18...."  And then this morning, as I clicked through some links from Sarah Bessey, I found this article that put into words (ironically) some of my own struggle with using words.  And all of this made me think about embodiment.

Before I wrote this, I washed the dishes.  I put my hands in hot, soapy water, and wiped a dishrag over ceramic plates and cups.  I scrubbed a wood cutting board that smelled of the onions chopped on its surface.  I drained the water from the sink, then brought my cast iron pans over from the stove to coax the debris of breakfast cooking off their surfaces - eggs from one, bacon from the other.  I rinsed coffee grounds out of my french press.  I wiped the counters and the stovetop.

After the dishes, I took care of a diaper, left to soak before I started the dishes.  There's little that's more embodied than a dirty cloth diaper, waiting to be swished, rinsed, scrubbed, wrung out, and dropped in a pail with other diapers to await wash day.

This, here, is life.  The thoughts that I think about it in my head are not life.  The abstractions and lessons and principles that I take from it are not life.  This is life.

Embodied.  Rinsing eggs off of cast iron.  Wringing toilet water out of cotton.

I struggle with how to use the words that I have been given, because I want life to embody the abstraction of my words, instead of using the abstraction of words to convey the embodiment of life.  When I kept copious journals as a teen, they weren't so much for the purpose of pouring out life as it was, but for rationalizing life as it was with the big things that I thought life should mean.  They were for wrangling, bending, and obfuscating, not for expressing clearly.  As a coping mechanism for an emotional teen, this isn't the end of the world, but now as an adult I struggle with the place of words (which I love) in my life.  I would still like to use them to construct what I think that my life should be, instead of conveying what my life is.  I want to skip ahead.  I want to use abstraction to justify, excuse, or rationalize life.  But over and over I have heard a call to embody.  To use words to show things as they are.  I hope that in the future, this space will do a better job with that.

And now everything that I need to learn in life (embodied in my child) has woken up from his nap.  So long!

On Days and Years

Five years ago, I was 19.  The beginning of the school year in 2007 marked the end of a golden summer, full of the relative independence of young adulthood at home, fun work at a coffee shop, and a solid group of friends. Although a major tragedy in the life of a close friend knocked me flat in August, and in the upheaval I made the decision not to go back to school for a year, I still spent the autumn and early winter working at my coffee shop, talking to my now-distant friends by text and telephone almost every day, and travelling to see them at every opportunity.  The next year I planned to go back to Bible college, then maybe to California to finish my Bachelor's degree, then maybe somewhere else for more school, or for some mission work.

Five years later, I am sitting in the living room of our small apartment in Notre Dame, IN.  I'm married to a physicist who is working on his Ph.D at the University of Notre Dame.  My 8 month old son is playing happily on the floor with our neighbor's 23 month old daughter.  I'm babysitting her so that they can attend the football game this afternoon.  I need to get the dishes done soon and tidy up the apartment so that my little family doesn't go crazy from the disorder soon.  And I need to make food for tomorrow.  I do have the Bible college degree to my name, but only one semester - so far - put in of that Bachelor's degree.

Five years is all that it took to turn a 19 year old student, unbeholden to place or person, into a 24 year old wife and mother, with a little house to keep and friends' children to babysit.  I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised by this; after all, as I look back I can see that five years worth of stuff has taken place.  I met Landon, married him, worked, went back to school, and had Christopher.  The surprise isn't that a lot has happened in five years, it's that I didn't feel those years go by.  It's only in being brought up short by the strangeness of my comfort and contentedness in a situation radically different from where I was at 19 that I feel the movement of time in years, years which seem suddenly to move more quickly than days.  Days I can feel passing, stretching out before me to the horizon, then collecting themselves into weeks and months behind me.  They move slowly towards me, and I can feel the weight of the ones that will pass before the ones on the horizon reach me.  Years, however, seem suddenly to be rushing underneath me, flashing by almost too quickly to note each one.  As I live my daily life, I have no sense of them going by.  One year seems always to be the same as another - only filled with different weather, new locations, and unique days and months - until suddenly they have piled up behind me with frightening suddenness.   

Is this how it always is, I wonder?  Or could it be that as the years pile up behind me they will slow down in front of me to be like the days?  Will I someday cease to feel them like a constant rhythm around me, and instead feel them passing one by one?  Or will they always be invisible until they are gone?   

On compensation

Between two and four weeks of age Christopher started crying on occasion when we set him down, and ever since then he grows more and more demanding of distraction, stimulation, and interaction.  But as he grows more demanding, he also grows more delightfully interactive.  He started with smiling.  Then cooing expressively.  After that, he began giggling when Landon and I made faces at him.  And then when we tickled him.  Eventually, he started reaching for us and trying to pull us closer.  Currently, he is bored with all of his toys and very insistent in his desire for playtime with Mum-mum, but he has also started giving giant, slobbery, gummy baby kisses.

And now, he is crawling - mobility has arrived, the ultimate in parental time and attention demands.  He can crawl towards the phone cord in the wall.  He can crawl towards the open door into the bathroom.  He can crawl toward the book forgotten on the floor.  Nothing is safe.  But in addition to all of the above, he can crawl towards me, place his tiny baby hands carefully on my toes, and look up at me with a face covered in drool and eyes full of living delight.     

On pain

I carried Christopher into the study room last night for his bedtime story with his dad.  He's a wiry baby, all upright body and active limbs, with barely an ounce of superfluous flesh.  As I held him, facing away from me, I felt his little tummy move with his breaths - out, in, out, in.  Effortless life.  And for a moment, caught in that boundless vitality, I saw a reality that I'm aware of, but don't often feel.

I saw myself and my Little Guy mapped over other mothers, other infants; people who are occupying my thoughts, but as they once were, not as they are now.  I saw my grandfather, my Saba, once the small infant of another woman.  I never met his mother, and I know so very little about her.  Could she possibly have ever imagined the moment on Saturday when we buried him?  Could she have pictured her tiny child become an old man, white bearded, leaving behind, after nearly 62 years of marriage, a widow, 8 children, their spouses, 42 grandchildren, and 6 great-grandchildren?  I don't know if she could have.  My own tiny child is one of the six, and this future is too strange for me to imagine.

For another fraction of that moment I became my aunt, holding her own firstborn son 30-some years ago.  She and I share the position of being the first girls born into our respective families, and her firstborn is the oldest grandchild of her parents, as is mine for my own parents.  This image brought a flash of panic, a flare of anger, and a threat of tears.  30-some years is easier to imagine than 80, and that firstborn, my oldest cousin, is lying in a hospital bed in Mexico recovering from stab wounds in his chest.  His little tummy breathed against my aunt's hand the way that Christopher's does against mine.

Kyrie eleison.  Christe eleison.    

This child, this little man who lives and moves and breathes in my arms, has cracked open some of the deepest veins of joy in my heart, and yet his every breath draws me in, closer than I ever wanted to be, to all the heartache of this moment in my family's life.