Enjoying the remaining quiet moments and simple scenes of the season. Thankful for traditions, family, old friends, sweet children, happy times with my beloved, onion rings, pound cake, impromptu rain boot purchase, and sockless warm weather.
Marking time as a family means evolving traditions and habits. We’re lighting candles, opening doors, telling the story, moving shepherds and magi around like action figures, hanging stars, and tying bows. These are all waiting ways, and each is lovely.
Pumpkin seeds are roasting, costumes are coming together, cardboard is being painted, and this song is on repeat.
We’re not super big on Halloween (unlike my friends who set up a cemetery in their yard on October 1), but our middle-of-Autumn rituals are more and more fun each year.
I loved looking at this blog today and seeing older children as they created their jack-o-lanterns.
The Boy drew his design on paper, and My Love carved it out with considerable supervision and input from The Boy. Lots more fun to anticipate as the week begins. BOO!
Thinking of family today and the anticipated shift of one less chair at this year’s holiday table. Thinking of a strong great-grandmother who raised seven children with wild names. Thinking of the legacy I inherit through these women and wondering what parts of each one live on in me.
This post was published August 18, 2008. At that point I’d completed a year-long interim position and was beginning to announce the news of expecting our daughter. Until I started work this week, I have been home with some of the questions first posed below. My thoughts more than two years later are, of course, more refined than what’s articulated here (I’d strongly clarify that this dilemma of having it all applies to both men and women but that I am speaking out of my experience as woman). But that’s the joy of keeping journals, right? I love that I’m still holding many of the same questions but with much less anxiety and old questions have birthed better questions . I am thankful for the luxury of time to make space for asking such questions and for seeking such balance.
I remember speaking with a work supervisor many years ago about babies. I don’t know why we were talking, but someone offered the cliche, “Having a baby changes everything.” The (childless-by-choice) supervisor was shockingly passionate about this and responded, almost with venom, “It doesn’t have to. People just let it.” At the time I think I was most surprised by the conviction in her voice, but from today’s vantage point I’m also struck by the fallacy of her response.
Having a child doesn’t have to change everything, people just let it. I think that’s intimately connected with the more common belief that women can have it all and do it all. Hear me out on this. The logic of both is that we can fill our days to overflowing with career and family and spouse and friends and workout and volunteerism and church and maybe even find time for self somewhere in there. We can wear high heels and lipstick while we change that diaper, file that brief, run that errand, cash that paycheck, run that board meeting, and look good to all those around who are watching.
It’s not really about a feminist dream, either, though it’s often packaged and sold that way. This is really the offer of the American dream. So maybe women have felt they weren’t allowed to be part of that dream and for a few decades now have fought hard to participate. But I don’t want to participate. I don’t want that dream for myself. I want a different dream. (Scroll down and find the earlier link to an article in The Atlantic to read some great comments from a mom about her dream for herself and her family. She’s mocked for it, but I love what she has to say.)
This summer has been full and rich, but not necessarily in the American-dream-you-can-have-it-all kind of way. I preached a lot and loved it, but that gig sure isn’t about money. I painted with my son on the front porch and created an art gallery for him on the staircase, we played at the beach as a family, we grew tomatoes and herbs and wildflowers in the yard, and we talked in the street with new neighbors. It doesn’t fill up spots on my resume; if anything, it creates gaps. This life is constantly calling me to slow down, to live with less, to be present in the moment. It’s calling me to reconsider the potential and fallacy in saying, “I can have it all.” What can I really have? What do I want to create? What dreams am I holding that I need to release? How or will I respond to hurried sisters around who want me to hurry with them? How can I welcome abundance and simplicity simultaneously? Is that the real offer to have it all?
As I continue to reflect on what feels like a monumental shift in life balance, I am reading old words from my short mothering life. Before A Still Life, there was The Great Mother. (Here’s the first post about the blog’s name.) I kept that blog for about 18 months and started when The Boy was only 26-months-old. When my daughter was a few months old, I wrote about missing home, label confusion, and vocational longings. Below is the follow-up post that ran on May 20, 2009:
It’s been almost a month since I wrote of some in-between feelings that have been strong lately; feeling in-between callings, in-between physical homes, in-between identities. I’m amazed by how much of my experience of motherhood has been this journey of identity–a steady revisiting of who I really am at my core, what makes me deeply happy, what ignites my vocational passions, and the truth that I am (we are) whole without packaged labels of profession.
I do miss home, the Gulf Coast home in Alabama with pecan trees in the backyard, jumbo lump and Gulf shrimp waiting in the freezer, 19th century house with wide-plank hardwood floors, cheese straws and sweet tea at the ready for unexpected guests, oak trees bowing to meet me over the street whose name my daughter now bears. That home is in me even if I never get to return. (Deep breath.) That home will live in the new home I have created with my husband.
But oh, oh, oh do I miss my mama.
And I still feel in-between in my vocational identity. I don’t want that to matter as much, but it’s a nagging that doesn’t go away and that hasn’t gone away since middle school. I was one of those kids that took church camps really seriously, and summer was always the rededication-recommitment-call-to-full-time-Christian-service time of year. Maybe my decade of youth ministry has trained my body to anticipate some increased sense of calling or renewal as summer approaches. For almost twenty years I have felt that my life would be about, to paraphrase Buechner, my passions and the world’s needs meeting. That is not to say that motherhood isn’t “enough” for me or that witnessing my children’s lives isn’t calling. I hope and pray that my husband and I have such a home that our children will become partners in caring for a world in need.
But I still can’t figure out how the passions and words and desire to make change fits with who I am both as a mother and, according to my seminary degree, a Master of Divinity. It leaves something fidgeting and wrestling in me. At times I think I need to learn to breathe and move differently, release some of that busyness. Right now I think this disquiet is a Holy Fidget (did I make that up?!)…a discomfort that precedes some new thing that will make sense of seemingly disparate pieces of my life. I want to pay attention to the unsettled places in hopes that lessons are hidden there, paths are being carved out. I want to pay attention in hopes that my mothering ways speak to my vocational longings and that my vocational ways inspire my home. My disquiet, at its best, may continue this ongoing work of knowing my whole, true self.
The start of the school year always feels like the right time for embracing new structure. As we have prepared for The Boy to return to school today, we have shopped for supplies, completed all the proper forms, started a new folder for all of this year’s information, and purged his wardrobe of too small clothes. I am ready for some of that organizing, preparing, straightening, and purging, as well. Though many new beginnings will need attention in the next month, I began with a fun one.
The cookbook shelf.
There are moments when I am able to sit and thumb through cookbooks in search of something new. Rare are the moments when there is actually time for seeing those new ideas come to life, however. I am more likely to try something based on what is in our pantry or treats that arrived in our weekly CSA share. With two small children, a fast approach is almost always the best approach. Lately, my filing system has turned into a piling system. Time for order. I moved forward hoping to create something useful, beautiful, and a tool that will truly nourish my family.
The new supplies.
I ran out to a big box store (yep, sure did) and bought two binders that I’ll love holding, flipping through, adding to, and seeing on my shelf. I also bought a large box of sheet protectors. For a decade or so, I have kept favorite recipes from family, friends, magazines and whatnot in one of half a dozen file folders. I typically pull from these folders rather than actually sit and flip through cookbooks because they are favorite, tried and true recipes. And the best ones have a story.
Like this one of my mom’s persimmon recipes.
My father planted persimmon trees along the front walk of the home where I grew up. There are legendary tales of strange folk stopping by to steal persimmons. The paper is stained from batches of pies and cookies past, and one sheet has the fax date from the day my mother sent the recipe to my work. Hilarious! Our kids won’t know what fax machines are.
The legendary cheese ring.
Found at every important function in Mobile, Alabama, including my wedding reception in 2001 and my brother’s wedding reception in 2009, this cheese ring sometimes includes bacon crumbles. My mother has noted below the recipe that pre-shredded cheese is just too dry. Although the treat calls for a gracious helping of mayo, you still must grate your own cheese for proper moisture. No wonder my home is one of the fattest states in the country!
My grandmother’s Thanksgiving dressing.
My interest in this recipe came along a little late as she no longer cooks a hen to include in the family holiday staple. She doesn’t have a single thing in writing, but we arranged a lesson one year well before Thanksgiving when I was in Mobile for a visit. I quickly scratched out notes as she threw ingredients together, and the scrap paper has already been torn in half once by my kiddos. I love that the instructions include phrases like “already pretty soupy before you add the water.” It’s a family concoction with little precision and lots of second helpings.
Now, instead of losing these treasures to time or a kitchen mishap, I have two beautiful new cookbooks that will evolve with our family and with my own culinary skills. If you’re curious to try one of the favorites above, just click on the photo above or give me a head’s up before you drop by.
Some might find the ebb and flow of this blog to be, er, maybe a little schizophrenic. One day it’s petroleum addiction, the next day it’s waterfall watching. One day it’s addressing the complex problems of poverty, the next day it’s finding Waldo. Rather than feeling scattered and frantic, this is the swing of balance for me. There’s a movement to my thoughts as well as to my days, and the two inform each other. Sometimes, the days remind me to slow down the thoughts. Sometimes, the thoughts remind to choose to make the days more substantive and intentional.
Today, I want to move with intention. How can I make the most of this Friday with my sweet Boy and my wild Girl? I like lists, as I’ve said before, and find good list making to unify thoughts and movements. Today I hope to:
Make this bread and this hummos. I was on a foccacia kick in the past couple of weeks but am ready to get back to the simple bread.
Make a version of this dress with part of a once-favorite, now-torn bed sheet.
Make this pie just because it makes me happy. I suspect I may be the only one in the house who wants to eat it.
There’s mopping and cleaning and tidying to be done because the house needs a little balance and order, too. There is a looming deadline and small writing project for the weekend ahead. There’s my Netflix date night with My Love. There’s a weekend to enjoy as a family of four. So much to do!