A list of the things I’m craving today:
I’m heartily tired of that “supermom” line of discussion, but I bring it up because I actually know one. Or rather, I know a superwoman who is also a mom, and I think that’s part of what we’re talking about here. She posted on fb today:
In the last few minutes, while taking a break to pump, I edited a book review first proof, consulted with a colleague through the door about an e-mail, responded to my book editor about a change in an illustration, posted on Facebook to a friend, AND corresponded with Kevin about missing the deadline for Xavier’s chess tournament this Saturday (crap! he’s going to be disappointed). No wonder I feel pulled in a million directions! Just keep swimming…
The comments are even more fascinating — “I am wholly inadequate. Thanks for that”; “If you have a few extra minutes, can you solve the Israeli/Palestinian issue?”; “You are my hero. I went to the bathroom and played Angry Birds for 15 minutes.” It would seem that most of us don’t come close to achieving this remarkable synthesis (or at least synchronicity) of work and family life. I wonder: do we want to? Is there some satisfaction in keeping things cordoned off a little better? What are, in fact, the pros and cons of doing so much at once? I mean, of course we all THINK we want to — it would seem fabulous to have the skill, the ambition, the caring, the capacity to do and be so fully all the many things we are. But as my friend says, there’s swimming involved.
On my “About” page I offer the age-old image of a river as a way of thinking about the forces that carry us through our lives. This friend is among the most thoughtful, intentional, capable people I know; she has made conscious choices that take her well outside the conventions of social and professional expectations, and not in easy ways. The idea that even SHE is working hard to “just keep swimming,” well, that has me worried.
See, I envision a point of balance, or rather an act of balancing, as do we all. And of course there’s that juggling metaphor, too, that has us perpetually in motion, arms sore and eyes strained, working not only to keep the balls in the air but to remember which, when dropped, will bounce and which will shatter. The trouble with all of these images is, as Anne-Marie Slaughter suggests in “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” that they assume surplus. But there’s only so much of each of us, in reality, and while great professional and family lives make MORE of us (Gail Godwin’s beautiful novel “Evensong” posits this as one definition of vocation), there’s still just us.
There are choices to be made. I am in awe of people who make these choices with open hearts and curious minds. Every choice to be somewhere is a choice NOT to be somewhere else, and I for one get a little stuck on where I’m not, where I should maybe really be. People who center themselves in the many aspects of their lives do so not by some magical process of equidistancing but by embracing each aspect in its turn, or (as in my friend’s case), several at once. I picture my niece, who is blind, in a story her mother told me — she had an exciting activity at school, for which she had spent days preparing, and from which she brought home a series of artifacts. She arranged the objects in a circle on the floor around herself and lay down, touching them one by one, reveling in their presence and the experience that they recalled. Her mother told me that the “Happiness Project” describes joy as deriving not just from an experience, but from anticipation of and reflection on it…which makes that model of devoted time for centered celebration vital. To me, this means that doing fewer things more deeply, with more whole-hearted preparation, presence, and appreciation, seems a surer way to happiness. And yet, and yet…if I could be working with my book editor while I pumped, wouldn’t I? You betcha.
So maybe what we’re saying, again, forever, is that it’s not out there — it’s in here. If we can bring the joy and attention to what we’re doing, that matters far more than what we are in fact doing. The trick, it seems, is to feel okay about merely pumping, or changing diapers, or bathing a small person, when that is what we have chosen to do, instead of absently running our fingers over the rows of what’s missing. We can do as much or as little as we can do; what we deserve is to honor our own choices by showing up while we do it.
For so many things.
I watched my rotund eleven-month-old fall asleep in my arms today, punch-drunk on applesauce, oatmeal, banana chunks and breastmilk, and I thought about mothers the world over who hold too-light children and too-heavy worries.
I keep picking at the irritating scab of a search committee that doesn’t respond…and then remember how good it feels to even HAVE interviews, in this climate, and to have warm, supportive ones at that.
I am frustrated to not have more time to write, and I am reminded of the years when writing was work. This, then, is play.
In one of my gardens I grow roses, all carefully chosen for cold-hardiness and disease resistance; it’s every plant for himself at our house. When I think of the winterkill that mauled them last year and of my half-assed attempts to prune, heal, transplant, and protect them anew, I must also remember this: come June, whether I deserve it or not, there is usually grace. Come to think of it, I depend on grace. I build it into my strategy. The flowers, though, are a glorious bonus.
I once had to write down, every day, ten things that were beautiful or inspiring or somehow positive, and by god it was a struggle. But, as Thich Nhat Hahn says, “peace is every step” and compassion (with self, with world) is a habit. In these dark days, it’s a habit worth cultivating.
Six kinds of beets, three kinds of carrots…I feel rich.
I’ve liberated the last of the root crops from the frozen ground. They did not want to come.
It was a chilly endeavor, but a rewarding one.
Plus, I can’t think of the last time I was in the garden without someone “helping” and someone else crawling off into the shrubbery or gagging up leaves. I just hope my little helper isn’t furiously pissed that I didn’t wait for him to uproot all those carrots. He has a point: digging up brightly colored food from the earth is pretty well the awesomest.
Witness the genius of the Maine Garden Hod…sturdy, affordable, and you can wash your produce right in it. Also useful for picnics in the yard and toting small animals.
As I’m trying to feed C, who slept too late and seems not hungry, Len is in the living room changing E’s diaper.
“I hate these wipes,” says Len. As do I: they are environmentally responsible, but the pouch they come in is persistently reluctant to give them up, leading to much shaking-of-pouch with one hand while you try to hold the boy’s bottom out of his poopy diaper with the other. And then when they do come free, they’re all stretched out like damp ribbons, which vastly increases the chance of cleaning said bottom with your bare hand.
“I know,” I say. “They are the worst wipes in the world.” Len accuses me of hyperbole, which is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. But at least we’re both amused by it.
“There is nothing worse, in the entire world, than these wipes,” he says.
After a pause, he adds, “Well, maybe the Republican party.”
“The situation in the Middle East,” I contribute.
We both chew on this.
“Slavery.”
Fine. But the wipes are really annoying.
Every year I start thinking about Christmas gifts in June. Every year I SWEAR that I will start making them in June. And this year I did! I did. I made one small scarf. But summer is just so, well, summery, so perfectly designed for other things, like helping a very naked young man make a river habitat for his wild animals on the edge of the driveway. Crocheting fuzzy things just seems so pointless under those circumstances. And thus we arrive here, in early December, at a state suspended halfway between panic and bliss: the crafting imperative.
And so I spent my Sunday afternoon: felting old wool sweaters; upsizing a hat pattern I like; making experimental fleece hats (one of which my sweet partner has been wearing ever since). I am one of those crafters who takes such pleasure in the planning and anticipation that I spend very little time actually MAKING things. But now it’s all about the making, and that brings a whole new kind of satisfaction. Put differently, it actually brings satisfaction rather than its promise. Pam Houston: “In graduate school you learned that men desire the satisfaction of their desire. Women desire the condition of desiring” (from Cowboys Are My Weakness, probably “How to Talk to a Hunter). I hate to be so gender-conformist, but hell, I’m a stay-at-home mom making Christmas presents. I’ll just own that.
Back to the Making of Things and the Overwhelmingness of Creative Energy: I’ve got plans. They are good plans. The trick now is to get enough done fast enough that it still feels like generous gifting rather than crazed production. It’s a bear trying to live this whole mindful approach. But it has been beautiful to look back at the last few years and realize that most or all of our gifting is now either a) donation (Heifer, Kiva, local home energy assistance, or recipient’s favorite charity); b) handmade; and/or c) purchased from local crafters. That feels good on all levels — an appropriate way to honor a holiday I tend to think of as the birth of hope. And boy do we need it. In these dark months we need all the warmth, fellowship, and generosity we can get.
And hey — if you are interested in details of what I’m making, check out my Pinterest boards or just leave a comment here. I want to use the pages for that kind of info, but I’m not quite there yet. Prompt as needed.
We had a few friends over to decorate the tree this evening, and conversation turned, as it will, to the kinds of traditions we create, now that we’re grownups. Tree-trimming is the big one, for us; we’ve been doing it since back in the day when we had lots of friends, lots of energy, and the funds to throw an actual party. Times do change. We’re not sure how the rest of it will turn out, now that we have kids — there’s the whole Santa fiasco, the hiding of gifts, the efforts to secure the tree from small grasping hands. There are things we’d like from the season, but those seem elusive at best: music. Time with friends and loved ones. A sense of peace, perhaps even of joy. But where the hell are we supposed to find all that in the chaos we’re swimming in? We seem to end up instead with a short occasional visit, a panicked rush on making gifts that we’ve been planning since June, and a general sense of seasonal affective disorder. This is no real surprise, but it is a disappointment. I suspect my real problem is not the holidays at all, though there’s obviously enough trouble there. I suspect my real problem is the looming prospect of February. I may need to seriously consider moving to where there’s more light.
As if we stopped working in the interim. As if carrying, growing, birthing, nursing, and raising a child are not work. (Someone told me that the process of gestation and childbirth is equivalent, in terms of energy expended, to climbing Mount Everest. Someone more reliable told me that the single most energy-intensive activity a mammal can undertake is gestation. This seems obvious.)
But when you’ve had a professional career and you step away for a different kind of life, people always want to know if you’re going back to work. By which they really mean one of two things: a) will you get paid again, or will you keep sponging off your husband (who must make a MINT)?, and/or b) will you do something that uses your vast experience and training or will you just keep changing diapers ad infinitum? I’d be offended by these questions if I weren’t asking them myself. (Except for the MINT part. We wish.) But I kind of want to know, too. And I REALLY want to know if I’ll be able to go back to work in the ways that make best sense. Those are:
1. With limited hours so there is still time to spend with kids and so we don’t spend my whole paycheck on childcare. You’d think in a tough economy and a social context where more parents want to parent more, that we’d see an increase in smart, flexible, responsible part-time positions. No. Instead, most organizations are forcing more on overworked, underpaid employees in the strange American all-or-nothing principle. I don’t get it, nor do I like it. The parents I know could change the world, and the lucky ones get to do it in both ways at once: through paid work AND raising the next generation of citizens and leaders.
2. With a passion for the field and an excellent match for my distinctive sets of skills and capacities. Why aren’t there more (decently paying) jobs in the most creative and engaging fields of teaching and social change? Don’t answer that. I get it. I just don’t like it. Mostly, I can’t help thinking about how much positive change could happen if we actually embraced principles of prevention rather than treatment — if we made sure kids have what they need, and parents too. If we got people interested in building things early, instead of teaching them to behave like a cog in a wheel or an arm in a factory. The world is what we make it, friends. Let’s make it something we want to inhabit. That takes artists and engineers and organizers and teachers and doctors and environmentalists, and it takes cooperation and negotiation and the crafting of shared hope.
3. With a context and situation that permit and even encourage the recognition that all workers are human and deserving of dignity, flexibility, support, integrity, and engagement. Being a parent has made me a better human and also, I believe, a better worker and supervisor. And it has made me less patient with forms of interaction that are counterproductive. Ask for people’s ideas. Give them a chance to shine. Be honest with them. Encourage them to learn and grow. Remind them that they’re not just laying brick upon brick, as the old story goes; they’re building a great cathedral.
This is all to say: I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful that I can find ways to sustain us in the long haul, whether through writing or teaching or foundation work or crafting or consulting. And for now, I’ve got a job I love with two tiny colleagues and one great big one and a shared vision of fun, love, and creativity. Can’t beat that with a stick.
Bear with me, because I’m just starting this up, and I’m a little starry-eyed. It feels like one of those deep dark secrets we used to fondle, a little afraid of it and totally enticed. And now I’m pulling it out of my pocket, covered in lint and crumpled, ready perhaps to show it to someone before it falls apart in the wash.
A blog like this seems the last hope of the desperate. And a particular kind of desperation at that: a kind that demands that life have meaning and beauty and some sort of order. A kind that insists we keep growing, even when it hurts or seems just plain stupid. So here I am, typing away in my effort to keep living the questions I’ve been teaching about for years. Yes, this blog’s title comes from a course I designed way back when: “Passion and Sustenance: On Crafting a Life.” It was a study of community, vocation, sustainability, and work. Ever since I left my paid work to raise my family, I’ve been trying to cleave to these questions, to remember the readings and to live with the ideas we bandied about so carelessly in the classroom. And now the questions matter even more, because now they are wrapped around more of us.
So what will I do here? Remains to be seen. But at this moment, here are my topics:
Working (paid, free, idealized, crap, whatever)
Living (on earth; in the land; in community)
Growing (plants, people, whatever)
Making (food, art, words — craft is everywhere)
Hoping (what some might call faith, love, or imagination)
Nothing is neatly sorted or sortable, but as you’ll soon see, that’s just my speed. It’s all connected, anyway, so we might as well take a deep breath. Keywords: patience, humility, generosity. And hope.
On Crafting a Life 