Ready or not

“This is like the Advent for winter,” WJ said to me as we lay in my bed one morning looking out the window at the dawn of a dull and blustery fall day.

The clocks had moved back over the weekend but not the one inside this child.  Mothers and fathers near and far know these early moments alone with children for whom the changing of the clocks mean nothing.  The first number on my clock that morning was still five when WJ climbed into bed to share his big ideas about hosting a hot chocolate stand and several realizations about words that start with C but sound like they start with S.

But his company was somewhat welcome.  I had been spending many of the early morning hours alone and awake.  As he babbled next to me I fought back exhaustion, replaying the fitful night and realizing that it was entirely possible that I had gone to the bathroom four times between 3:20 and 3:40 AM. 

As the calendar pages had been flipping by, I had begun to feel like I had been pregnant forever.  WJ’s recognition of the hints of the coming winter drilled that home and I felt weary.  I started this pregnancy at the end of last winter.  And now it felt as if winter would be here again soon.

Forever.

Waiting can be an attitude but sometimes it is just a verb.  This particular waiting had become a challenge for me.

One week and four days past the due date written neatly on our calendar.  Those of you who have carried children into the 41^st week know of these things.  Of getting a super-manageable, short haircut in time for the baby to arrive and having it grow out to shaggy and messy while you still are waiting.  Of emptying into your tea cup the remaining drips of the milk carton from your fourth, and maybe even fifth, stock-up-before-the-baby-comes shopping trip.  You know the unique torture in these last weeks of speed bumps and flights of stairs and tying shoes and keys dropped on the ground as you pull them out of your bag.  You know about long walks and acupuncture and spicy foods and a reluctant friendship with castor oil.

WJ lay next to me thinking of the fall as an Advent for the winter, full of anticipatory hints and momentary glimpses of light and goodness to come.  But my waiting felt more a moment in Lent. Lent in the middle when the joy of the discipline has worn off but the hope of the Good News is just not yet breaking through.

Sometimes waiting is a chore we endure.  We trudge through it; we grumble; we hang our heads and fix our eyes on the difficulties and rockiness of the path.

And sometimes when we finally look up, we see that for which we have been waiting and the joy comes as a delight and a surprise.

Is it time to conga?

As I sit here with my feet up, there is a party happening in my belly.  And for once it is not the result of my indulging in some decadent recipe found during my daily trolling of the food blogs.

I am very pleased to announce, to those of you who have not yet heard our good news, that our family is waiting.  We are waiting for a lot of things.  We are waiting still for kindergarten.  6 more days, six-year-old WJ will proudly tell you if you ask.  We are waiting for our annual family Labor Day weekend getaway.  All of us look forward to a day at the pool.  We are waiting to soundly have an understanding of what it means to take life slow.  We make progress here and then forget a lesson or two.

But it is with the most joy and hope that we are waiting to meet in earnest the baby who is, as I type, getting down-you might say-at her own personal dance party that can be found just above my bladder and just below my rib cage.  I am beginning the eighth month of this pregnancy and our daughter offers at every possible opportunity a reassurance of her vitality and strength. 

Praise be.  It is good to wait.

Impossible

Photo by SF Knitter

If you are a mother, and probably even if you are not, you know the joy of finding the impossible moment when you can do just want you needed and wanted to do.  For me that is usually a long walk. 

The stars aligned today.  A good night’s sleep, waking on time, clean exercise clothes, a couple of hours when my child would be busy with someone other than myself, work completed, a silent cell phone, cooperating weather, even a few extra minutes to update my iPod (which was charged) with new music.  Impossible.

After delivering WJ to school I set off in the sunshine for a brisk walk along the waterfront.  Did I mention the weather?  Warm sun, cool breeze.  Impossible.

It was in the middle of this impossible moment when I spotted the springtime ducks swimming in the river.  There is just nothing like the fuzzy sweetness of a downy duckling swimming obediently behind its mother.  Multiplied by seven, I had to stop and watch.  And stopping I saw more.

Mama Duck was slightly frantic, more than slightly, as she ushered these seven young ones along the Hudson River.  “Relax!” I wanted to yell to her,  “Look around at this day!”

But it was I who looked around.  Behind her and the new babies rose up the skyscrapers of a metropolis.  Yards beyond her in the water, ferry boats zoomed commuters to work.  A giant barge chugged by.  Strange debris floated all about.  The strong current pulled out towards the sea.  The mother’s eyes darted in search of safety.  Her pace was too quick.  And the ducklings were pulled unexpectedly close, touching her and each other as they swam. 

Photo by Katherine "Cody" RobinsonIn that frantic mother duck, I saw myself.  I saw most of us.  I am bringing my child up right here right alongside of her.  Steel and concrete tower around us.  People and time zoom by and we dart along trying to keep the pace or keep out of the way.  I walk my child down streets that have known screaming and hatred and parked SUV’s that sometimes smoke and sometimes tick and sometimes are filled with destruction meant for the likes of me.  Cars crash, planes fall out of the sky, children vanish, the media bombards, abuse poisons.  Mama Duck and I, and probably you, face an impossible task.

Last weekend I had the privilege of attending a benefit concert for New City Kids Church, an amazing ministry in this area that is making an impossible impact on the lives of the children about whom we often forget.  Kids growing up right here, along with mine, along with the ducks.  Recording artist, Sara Groves, sang these lyrics that night.  They were on my iPod this morning thanks to those extra minutes and aligned stars:

"We are pressed on every side; Full of fear and troubled thoughts; For good reason we carried heavy hearts."

For good reason. 

Heavy heart and darting eyes.  I too search each moment for the safety I can find, places to huddle and hide.  And I pull my child close.  Maybe too close.  And I move fast.  Too fast.  For good reason.

I have good reason to think it impossible to offer freedom and independence to my child.  I have good reason to hold him too close.    

No? 

Do you wonder about this?

Do I have the hope and trust that I need right now to provide enough space for my child’s roots to grow without crowding?  Can his sprouting leaves catch the sunlight or does my shadow hover too close?  Will his trunk grow strong around its broken places or will it wither and bend as an overzealous gardener pokes and prods too much with misguided protection?

It seems impossible to me, and probably to Mama Duck too, but the time is coming when we will let the ducklings wander a little farther from us.  And soon even out of our sight.  And soon even off to make a way of their own.  Will the Mama Duck rejoice as they waddle away?  Will she swell with anticipation and pride?  Will I? 

I hope so.  Because there is good reason.  Sara Groves’ song continues:

"For good reason hope is in our hearts… For good reason this joy is in our hearts…"

Letting go begins at birth.  It begins before birth when everything happening to the child is tucked away and hidden and there is no way to know if all is well.

For good reason I hope.  I have joy.  I relax.  This child is not mine alone.  It is an impossible task for me but it is not impossible.

What seems impossible to you?

Doing it all

We cannot do it all. 

Say it with me, ladies (and gentlemen, if you are out there, chime in too). Seriously.  Stand up, throw back your head and let’s whoop together in our outside voices:

We cannot do it all!

I say “we” because I know that we have this struggle together, this struggle for a life that is full of the things we love and need to do, the things our children and families need and love.  Our marriages.  Our work.  Our desire to be fully human and humane and participating in the world.

But we cannot do it all.

This is a realization that I come to regularly.  About twice a day.  Easily.  And I say this hanging my head with a due degree of shame… each and every time I discover it I am just as surprised as I was the first time.

My morning dose of this reality came as I was standing in my underwear in the gym locker room, looking into a gym bag that contained no sneakers. 

I can do quite a bit.  I will not bore you with the list, but I actually did do quite a bit today before foiling my own attempt at squeezing a workout into it all.

The second dose is coming right now as I sit here beside a sniffling boy who started the day with some sneezes, which then progressed slowly to glassy, baggy eyes and listlessness.  I am looking at him and sighing deeply and thinking about how this is the afternoon before I have a busy, booked-every-second kind of day at work.

I cannot do it all.

But there are things I can do. I can hold the door for that woman struggling with her stroller.  I can tuck my sniffling boy in and bring him tea. I can be kind.

And I can stop for a bunch of budding willows at the corner store.  I can bring a little bit of beauty into our home.  Something to gaze at just now, to remind me that at the end of this winter there will be spring. 

This is just a season. 

It is always just a season and there will always be spring.

Unhurried

Empty time is not a vacuum to be filled. –Harry R. Lewis

A little over two years ago when I had just gone back to work—back to work as in a salaried, scheduled, signed-on-the-dotted-line position in a school—I arrived home to find my favorite parenting magazine in the mailbox.  Anticipating a cup of coffee and some gentle mental stimulation, I carried the issue of Wondertime into our apartment and dropped it on the kitchen table.  One of the titles on the cover caught my eye and my heart sank:

The Unhurried Child

I am not exaggerating when I say that it took more than a year for me to open the pages of the magazine and confront that article.  I carried the issue back and forth to the gym for a few months but never took it out of the bag.  With the best intentions, I tossed it into my carry-on bag every time I flew, into my backpack for every weekend away, into my tote every time I headed to a coffee shop for an hour or two of reading time.  I moved it around the apartment, from the pile of reading material on the coffee table to the decorative piles and baskets of magazines and books on various other pieces of furniture. 

I wanted to read that article, I really did. I was certain that the ideas contained within would fit with my hopes and goals for our family.  But when it came to actually opening the pages and moving my eyes over the words, of absorbing the ideas and challenges found in The Unhurried Child, I was a complete coward. 

I was like an addict, unwilling and incapable of looking myself in the mirror.  Somehow I knew that opening up to those pages would put me face-to-face with the questions that would have been eating at my heart if I had not been so adept at forcing them back down below the surface. 

Was I living a hurried life and raising a hurried child? 

Probably.  When I finally read the article, Catherine Newman’s description of our practice of hurrying children through the day, through even their leisure time, hit close to home.  While I have never felt like we were overly scheduled, having more than two commitments a day when you have young children sets anyone up for those moments of hurrying and nagging, of interrupting the child’s play and process, of valuing the clock and its numbers over almost all else.

I knew that this reading would force me to evaluate my choices.  And it did.  It was a more gentle push than I expected (Thank you for that, Catherine). This reading and a series of events and longings and discussions and other readings have lead me to the place I am in this year, a place of working with intention at limiting our obligations and providing more time for WJ and for our family that is free from the pressing need to move on to the next thing.

But it is not easy and I am often weak.  I am sitting here looking at a pile of registration forms for extracurricular activities for the winter sessions and I am overwhelmed. It seems very easy to make the wrong decisions.  I know that I do not want to break our commitment to going slow but the possibility of missing out on something sits like a miniature me in a red devil unitard on my left shoulder.  And I am fretting.

What would WJ really enjoy doing with the time we have?  How much is too much for a five-year-old?  How much is too much for our family?  Which of these activities are ones that will feed a passion growing in our child?  Which will meet the needs he has, strengthen those places where he needs to grow?

Piano, drama, soccer, karate, dance, swimming…  I’ll let you know what we decide.  I am hoping with a great hope that our choices will be made with slow and unhurried in mind.

How do you decide?  What guidelines do you keep when choosing activities for yourselves and your children?