Sweating the small stuff
January always seems to strike hard and leave me somewhat bewildered and flustered. Not, certainly, by the weight of countless New Years resolutions; I gave up on those sometime in adolescence. I may not have had much self-awareness then but I knew this: I am fickle.
Somehow January gathers around it all of the Un-done, like a hangover from the previous year. E-mails, bills, tax returns, multiple car hassles, official letters that have lain for months in a threatening pile. At the very same time it conscientiously assumes responsibility for the burdens of the 11 months following it. And so I find myself drowning in To-do’s: thank you’s, phonecalls, dentist, tyres, cheques, fundraising and how the hell do you Air-Care your car? (bloody Canada). I can’t even find the eye of the storm – if I could do that I would at least know where I was. But instead here I am, dizzy from circling, exhausted from worry and terrified something might fall through the cracks.
I hate being a grown-up.Way back in the day, when I was that fickle teenager, being a grown-up seemed amazingly sophisticated and meant one thing: freedom. Having your own house, driving, a credit card (we’ll gloss over the job….and maybe the kids). But the small print of freedom and self-determination is burdens and responsibilities. I’m hardly wanting to return to those days of furious blushing, zits and teenage-girl-power-games but I’d still like to find somewhere to hide from the army of To-do lists that grow legs in my dreams and chase after me with drawing pins.
So I’ve upped my intake of herbal stress meds and increased my merlot dosage. I try and take on Jayber’s mantra: ‘Even the end of the world wouldn’t be the end of the world’, but it isn’t really cutting it. Probably because 1) I’m a perfectionist and a control freak, and 2) It’s easy for Jayber to hold forth when family ‘management’ gets delegated to me. Not that I’m bitter……
I wrestle with what my faith means in broad daylight. If I pray will God send me a personal assistant, a nanny? Will the piles of letters and sinister To-do lists disappear? Cheesy faith and one-line answers I no longer have any patience for. He says we are to have freedom, peace, joy. Not as some pie in the sky aspiration but knowing the world in which these things are to have their context. (I’d like to argue that 1st century Palestine didn’t have car insurance premiums and canadian bureaucracy, but I think that misses the point). Somehow I get to rant and rail and ask for help and help comes: perhaps not in the prescribed form, but it helps nonetheless. My job is to prise my sticky little fingers off my worries and stresses and admit that I can’t cope and that is probably the hardest part. Truth be told I still want to be in control, to be self-sufficient. As my son would say, “I want to do it MYSHELF’.
The thing is, self-sufficiency is a bit tiring and not much fun for those who have to live with me. I can’t make up my mind if it seems too easy or just too hard to ask my Father for help.Dying to my pride and handing myself over to the mystical or living with a head full of stress and a heart full of worry. I’m such a stubborn eejit.
Right, enough pontificating. I’m away off to ask for some help – freedom, joy and peace are looking good right now. Good enough to get off my high horse for.
Comfort and Joy
Tree’s up, lights are on. Have been for a whole week now. This was prompted not by the warm, premature glow of Christmas spirit but by another force entirely: keeping up with the Joneses. Yip, Xmas comes early to community housing and once one family has their outside lights twinkling brightly round a window the race is on. What we lacked in outside lights we made up for in the Xmas tree heat – ours being the first up takes us straight into the semi-finals. Of course a place in the final is only guaranteed by the presence of a singing Santa, preferably one that can withstand the outdoors, but I know when I’m beat.
I was secretly delighted to have the excuse to put up our Xmas things in November, something I would never dream of doing back home. The penny is only really beginning to drop for our 3 year old about Christmas (something about Jesus, who is kind of God but a baby? Like my brother? So, is my brother God?) Needless to say he was VERY excited when I suggested we put our tree up. I put the traditional xmas music on (Michael Card, much to Jayber’s disgust) and got the big box down from upstairs to squeals of delight and anticipation.
It began as I started assembling the tree and by the time I was doing the lights the transformation was complete. Nice-Xmas-spirit mummy, bestowing goodwill to her family and sweetly introducing her oldest child to the joys of Xmas tradition became Mean-control-freak mummy aspiring to reproduce the picture in the IKEA catalogue.
Little hands were encouraged to ‘Put that down, now!’ and told ‘Yes, yes, you can help…in a minute’, followed by ‘I don’t want that there’ and the grand finale ‘Go and play outside until I’ve finished’.
Much later as I gazed at my ravishing tree I began to remember when I was wee and we decorated the tree. Mum didn’t care in the least what her tree looked like, the point was that she and her two girls did it together and all got into the festive mood, warbling along with The Andy Williams Christmas Album. Looking back, most years the tree looked a bit of a sight – ancient chipped baubles, ropey tinsel and every single decoration my sister and I ever made graced its branches. But we loved the ritual and we were proud and happy of our tipsy looking tree.
At the end of the day, my tree may look pretty classy, but it has none of the heart of the bedraggled one from my youth. And I don’t want my kids to look back and remember a grumpy Mum who was more interested in the vanity of a good-looking Christmas tree than their joy of participation. Jayber has already banned me from being in charge of Xmas festivities next year and I’m thinking that may not be a bad idea. Let the little sticky hands take over and toilet roll Santas and cotton-wool Snowmen abound.
Dirty Hands
A bit more on the aforementioned frustrations of being at home with the kids. This vomited itself on to the page a couple of months ago. I don’t pretend to be a poet, as you will discover.
I want to have dirty hands.
Hands that know the goodness of work and purpose.
I want my fingernails to have layers of indefinable gunk,
So you will know I have engaged with life.
Dish, spoon, diaper, steering wheel:
I am more than the sum of these parts.
My hands need pen, book, people and brush.
Trowel, seed, balm and bandage.
You will say ‘But motherhood!
No greater task! You have work enough!
And it is, and I do.
These chubby smiles fill up my heart.
But I have more than heart.
I have hands.
Hands that want to be dirty
With more than poo and puke.
Hands that will work
To show me who I am.
Where the rubber hits the road….
(no pun intended)
The past few days has seen some serious discussion in our house, (in between furious blog watching). It’s not something I had imagined would be up for debate and there will no doubt be a few gleeful readers delighted to see me eat my vehement words: ‘I WILL NOT BE HAVING ANY MORE CHILDREN’. And boy did I mean it – as only a women can when labour, stitches and breastfeeding are still causing flashbacks after child number two.
But we’ve been looking at our wee family of late and we’re not sure it’s complete yet. There’s room for a bit more mayhem and wonder, in fact it’s beginning to feel like we might miss a key player if we continue to base our decision on how much I hate pregnancy and all that it and newborns entail. Not to mention the systematic destruction of the body I once knew and loved (well, maybe not loved, but it’s all relative).
Anyway, I like to approach these things with nice tidy columns of ‘pros’ and ‘cons’. But unfortunately those aren’t the most helpful categories in this decision because on the ‘cons’ side the list seems endless; the biggest factors being time, money and environmental impact. The last of these is probably the one that is making me hesitate most and I find myself tied in knots as I try to bring my thoughts on Christian family and Godly stewardship into conversation with each other.
Does God have an opinion on the number of children I have? Kids are part of his blessing to us aren’t they? Would he rather I save the planet or follow the desires of my heart for good things?
I don’t want to make this decision in the bubble of my family and their needs. Some of those who study the impact of population growth on the environment recommend we simply replace ourselves: two kids at most to limit the damage we are doing to our world. I want to take seriously my call to be a good steward of God’s creation and I know that means a bit of self-denial and sacrifice for the greater good – and let’s remember the ‘greater good’ includes my own two children and the world they will inhabit. But in this case isn’t the cost a little high? In later life I may get to sit smugly and remember how I helped save the world but what about the regret of the child I never had. Is that desperately self-indulgent?
Which brings me back to my nice, tidy, useless little list and the ‘pros’ side. And here it is: I would really love to have a third child. That’s it, that’s all I got. Despite my struggles with motherhood, and the frustrations of being a stay-at-home Mum (more on that in another post) my family doesn’t feel complete yet.
Luckily, environmental impact is about far more than numbers:
‘If we had 9bn people who were all vegetarian and walking to work, that’s very different to 9bn Americans driving to work and having hamburgers every day. For sure, if there were 1bn people we wouldn’t have the problems we do today, but numbers per se are not the problem alone – we have to look at the other side: consumption.’
The Guardian to the rescue once again.
So maybe deciding to have a third child goes hand in hand with a commitment to a more radical lifestyle – one that doesn’t just pay lip service to being ‘greener’ but treats seriously the call to sustainable living. I could almost get caught up in the romance of a plot of land, organic veg and a rain butt…… until I think about the realities of reusable nappies.
Hmmm….more thought and discussion to be had with Jayber I think.
He may escape the scalpel a little longer.
