Our Way

Today was the first day of a shiny new future, it seemed like, because today was the first work day after leaving my previous job...and I didn't go to work. Because my new job is affording me something I've desperately ached for since the moment James was born: more time at home, being just a mom to just my kid.

It looks so silly typed out, and like it shouldn't be a big deal. But it is. To me. I was not always as grateful as I should've been for the job I just left, because on paper it was great: earn an income while still getting to be with my own child. (I was a nanny.) But for three years I worked outside my home for nearly 10 hours a day, five days a week; and that and other reasons wore me out. Now, I've found a different family to work for, and while my pay has decreased, so have my hours - and my whole outlook on life has brightened. I feel a hundred pounds lighter. I feel so grateful for this tremendous blessing. Today I did just my own family's laundry, I sewed, I painted, and I took my son to the zoo, just me and him. It was heavenly. We walked and explored with his little hand in mine, and it was just us, and I praised heaven for allowing me that moment. I realize it's silly, that it shouldn't be any different because I'm with him every day anyway, but for the first time in a long time I felt like this burden was lifted, and I was allowed to be the mom I want to be, and spend time with my son without all these other negative feelings weighing me down. I let myself relax; we did whatever he wanted to do, and we could do things our way, however we pleased.

It probably won't be long before we settle in to the new routine and life becomes life again, and I feel the stress of a lower income weigh me down. But I'm grateful for right now anyway. I'm grateful for a new moment.

Trees for the forest

I'm forcing myself to write today, because I mean what I said in yesterday's post: I really don't want to be only negative.  But I also use the word "force" because it's hard.  Not just trying not to be negative when I'm feeling down, but just writing in general.  I want so much to cut through all my personal bullcrap and write words that are pure and honest, without trying to sound a certain way or be funnier or more clever than I really am.  I really, truly am on a journey to know myself and speak myself...and I know that sounds very corny and cliche, but I guess sometimes maybe truth is cliche?

So my point is, today's post might end up being like a meandering stroll through a forest with no clear destination.  But I tend to be a "trees for the forest" person anyway, so maybe it's good.  Let's spend some time looking at the trees.

I hope I don't worry my parents too much with this one (though it should come as no surprise to them, their girl who never really followed convention) but I struggle sometimes identifying as a textbook "Mormon".  Not near as much as I used to - I've come to terms with some things - but still just a little bit.  I feel calm and secure in my faith, like I don't have any thoughts that are too radical, and I'm not a boundary-pusher just for the scandal of it.  Ordain Women has no siren's call for me, for example.  But sometimes I worry that I appear just a bit sacrilegious to some people.  I love the church, I love the gospel.  I love everything it teaches.  But, my friend Brooke put it beautifully one time while she was teaching a Relief Society lesson - and I wish I could remember exactly what she said - but she said something along the lines of how sometimes our words or our wording, inside the church or inside Christian circles, gets in the way.  And sometimes it's easier to understand a concept or a principle when you hear it called something else, or described in a different way.  I feel that way so, so often.  Like I get so used to hearing the same phrases over and over again that I become deaf to their meaning, and it's refreshing to hear it described with different words so it can reach me again.  Not that the concept or principle or whatever  becomes bad or not true anymore, but sometimes I feel that our terminology within the church can feel a little exclusive to people on the outside.  There's nothing wrong with trying to find new ways to say the same thing.

So I really like Buddhism.  I had a little conversation with my dad a few days ago about how much we like Buddhism, and that many of the ideas and teachings we've found in it are really applicable to living a spiritual life, even one centered on Christ and the restored gospel.  I've recently discovered a woman called Pema Chodron, who I'm tempted to say is one of my favorite authors even though I've yet to fully read one of her books - and that's only cause I don't have a bunch of money to spend on books at the moment.  She's a Buddhist nun, and she has a way of speaking that opens me up to understanding.  

Here's an excerpt I love about meditation (I love meditation), from her book Start Where You Are:

"Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself.  It is healing to know all the ways that you're sneaky, all the ways that you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways.  You can know all that with some sense of humor and kindness.  By knowing yourself, you're coming to know humanness altogether.  We are all up against these things.  We are all in this together.  So when you realize that you're talking to yourself, label it "thinking" and notice your tone of voice.  Let it be compassionate and gentle and humorous.  Then you'll be changing old stuck patterns that are shared by the whole human race.  Compassion for others begins with kindness to ourselves."

I'm sure someone at church has said basically this same thing at one point or another, but for some reason hearing about how knowing and being kind to yourself is important and is what allows us to be kind and compassionate to others from this meditative, Buddhist perspective helps me internalize it so much better.  

I also started reading this book called Restless: Because You Were Made For More, by Jennie Allen, who I guess is a non-LDS, Christian author.  And in most cases I seem to find myself relating even less to "christian" speak outside of the Mormon church than I do to non-christian spirituality, but so far I'm relating to this book.  This is a passage I particularly liked:

"Some of us have decorated our prison walls so beautifully that we have altogether forgotten we are sitting in a cell, wasting our lives.  We don't know there are chains that, though they no longer bind us, still seem to tangle us up.  We sit and listen to talks or read books about God, and we wonder why nothing changes when we so desperately want it to."

I love this, because it reinforces the principle of acting, of doing the work that's required instead of just thinking nice thoughts.

Anyway, those are just some of the trees in my forest. It took me like an hour to write that, which is probably really sad; but like I said, this is hard for me. It would be really nice if this were the kind of thing that gets easier the more you do it, but I guess we'll see.

Slump

I'm slumpin hard over here.

I don't know what my deal is.  I don't know if I need a hug or to be smacked around for a while, but I just can't get my head in the game.  The game of life, or whatever.  To borrow an overused-yet-apt phrase, it feels like a roller coaster, like as soon as I seem to get it together, and I'm motivated and inspired and having adequate energy and thinking clearly, a fog rolls in.  The tide goes out and I'm heavy on the wet sand.  My mind blanks, my energy saps, my willpower takes a nap, and all I want to do are things that sustain me for an instant and leave me feeling extra crappy in the long term.

I find my eating habits are a good barometer for how I'm doing in general.

The weather in my life has been an interesting mix of stormy and calm, lately.  It's confusing.  One minute everything seems like it's never been better: I've never felt better, my marriage has never been happier, my house has never felt so much like home, I've never loved my child more.  The next moment I'm climbing the walls.  Nothing gets done.  Clutter builds.  Patience vanishes.  Tears well up and repress or fall.  Tony said I was sleepwalking last night, or at least that I got up several times during the night and tossed and turned when I was in bed, though I remember none of it.  I felt like I slept good, I dreamt, but I woke up exhausted.  How is that helpful?  Waking up tired is a travesty that should throw the entire universe out of balance.

So, as far as this blog is concerned, I'm afraid I'm developing a pattern I've always worried I would do once I started writing, which is writing about only negative junk all the time.  I don't want to do that! It's just that, I guess when I'm feeling good, I don't have this same urge to write as when I'm feeling all bungled up.  Is bungled even a word?  I don't know.  The desire to write is there when things are peachy, but I always second-guess myself or decide that whatever I want to say is trivial and has probably already been said before.  Not that the negative stuff isn't or hasn't either, but the bungled me doesn't know what else to do.  The foggy, confused, desperate me is begging for some sort of release, some connection, and it's either whine to a computer screen or else consume all the chocolate and then beach myself on the floor while my precious little boy tries to entertain himself.  I hate that I just typed that, and I don't really want to push publish anymore. Because the thing is, I was such a good mom when James was a baby.  Really, I feel confident in saying I was pretty great.  But now that he needs me to move around and be more present, I'm falling behind.  I'm dropping the ball.  And oh, I so don't want to admit that to you, whoever is reading this, but it's the truth.  All the dreams and expectations I had for myself are crumbling in the reality of how I really mother in the day to day.

Please be gentle with my reality.  I want to apologize for it, but I won't - I'm trying to work on accepting me and things exactly as we are, and moving on from there.  I'm going to try and disperse the fog, and when I do I'll try to come back and write some of the good things I've been thinking about.  Try, try, try.  It seems like such a pitiful offering.  The good things are there, I promise; they just take more energy, and my stores are empty.

Buckle up, we're diving right in

I ran across this article today on Facebook. The Important Thing About Yelling, by Rachel Macy Stafford, otherwise known as Hands Free Mama. I've heard of her and haven't read much of her writing before, but I'm grateful this piece of her fell into my sphere today. I needed it. I needed a reminder that I'm doing some things wrong, and that I'm not alone.

I don't want to say I have confessions to make, because that sounds too dramatic. I know the world doesn't care about my problems near as much as I do. But I do have confessions. One: I'm a yeller, and Two: I'm an Internet addict. The Internet addiction isn't new because I've been an addict since we first got the Internet at home when I was 10 or 11 and I discovered I could talk to people and not have to speak; it was the shy, self-conscious kid's dream.  But when you're little, you don't care that you spend too much time doing one thing. At least I didn't. Surfing websites and playing video games for hours was super awesome. But now that I'm grown up and a parent with all those associated responsibilities, too much time absorbed in a screen is a bad thing for me.
To be clear, I've known this for a while. Other than occasional bouts, I haven't settled in to a video game for a long time, and not with the same level of immersion as I did in high school. But I have an iPad. And I reach for it constantly, out of habit, when I'm uncomfortable, when I'm bored. Which is why I think it's an addiction. It's my numbing agent. Lately I've been reading and thinking a lot about how we numb, how we try and run or hide from discomfort instead of being still and sitting with it. I want to learn how to do the latter bit. I'm not interested in living a shallow, comfortable life. I want to live deep, and seek truth, and face fears and really look at things. I want to be present with my fellow humans, and especially with the ones I love, the ones I'm sharing my life with. I have this foreboding sense that my young son is growing up assuming we all have screens attached to us, that it's normal and good that we live this way. It fills me with guilt and sadness that his memories of me might be of me hunched over the iPad, face lit by the glow, instead of engaging with him. That thought breaks my heart. It's also a good wake-up call. So lately I've also been striving for a lifestyle not dependent on electronics.

I could write for days about that striving. About gardening, about my faith and the gospel, about joining the SCA, about all the things I want for my family and myself. Which is why I created this blog. That's all the stuff I want to fill this space with, and plan to write about in the future.

Today though, I want to talk about this. And yes, I see the contradiction in talking about less screen time while typing on an iPad with the intent to publish it to the blogosphere. So let me take this moment to say that I think this technology is amazing. I still love the ability to connect and communicate with people in a way that's much more comfortable to me. But it begs for limits. I need boundaries around it.

So my other confession is that I yell. And this is hard for me to admit. Because I never, ever, in a million years wanted to or thought I would be a yeller. I grew up in broken homes, with multiple step-parents and bad blood between my own parents for a very long time. There was a lot of yelling. Sometimes I forget what it was like because I've been removed from it for long enough now that I don't think about it as much. But it was awful. Only recently, in my "grown-up" stage of life, have I not felt scarred by it anymore. I can hear and even have arguments without much anxiety, and I know now that people can disagree and that it's okay. But as a kid, i didn't know that. I couldn't handle it. Someone yelling would absolutely wreck me internally, even when it happened in movies and tv shows. I was so traumatized by all the negative energy of my childhood - I don't even really know how to describe it now. Now it seems arbitrary, but kids see things differently than adults. I remember being so fragile, so sensitive, and so afraid. Everything seemed like such a big deal.
I would think how I would never be that way when I grew up.

And now I'm grown up. And I yell at children. At my own child, whom I love so fiercely it hurts deep down in my chest where words to describe it don't exist. How did this happen? How have I let myself be the embodiment of what hurt me so badly when I was young? I am so ashamed.

I don't yell all the time. But when I do it explodes. And in the very moment I can see the fear in my baby's eyes; at the very moment it happens, I can see and feel the severed connection, the pushing away. I immediately feel lonelier, wretched, anguished. My child I birthed from my own body, who is actually a part of me, is learning to fear me, bit by bit.

I'm trying very hard to overcome this. Love prevails, and when I calm down I immediately go to him and kneel down, I tell him I'm sorry, I try to give him words like frustrated, grumpy, and sorry, to explain what happened and for him to use when he feels the same way. I tell him I was wrong, and that I'm trying to be better and work harder. And sometimes I do do better; sometimes I do manage to stay calm and patient and loving and helpful. But, inevitably it seems, I still reach a point where it feels like the only way to release the pressure inside me is to just scream. To bark orders and stomp around like an ogre bully in a desperate attempt to reclaim control. In writing, it's painfully clear how ridiculous this tactic is.

So. If you've made it this far, you probably deserve a prize. I'll let you go ahead and take care of that yourself. I guess the point of this whole jumbled mess of a blog post is partly self-therapy, and partly getting it out there in case you, too, need to know you're not alone. I don't have answers, but I feel instinctively that, like the Hands Free Mama article claims, the two - distractions and yelling - go hand in hand. Not long ago I came to the realization that the magical internet is not actually necessary for my happiness, and in fact can detract from it; and so I made a rule for myself that my tablet would remain off during my son's waking hours, and used minimally, if at all, once he goes to bed. So far I've broken the rule a great many times, but I'm keeping it in place and trying again today. I'm guessing it's a slow, difficult process, like so many of the good ones seem to be. Does anyone reading this have the same problem? Is it truly fixable?

Thanks for listening. Be excellent to each other.

Embarkment

I struggle with this: the beginning. The first post. The act of corralling my thoughts and forcing them into words and sentences. They never seem quite as grand as i think they ought to be. But that's kind of the whole point of this new blog - coming back to basics. Grounding myself. Disposing of my old ideas of how I think things ought to be and instead exploring and celebrating things as they actually are. I am very interested in reality these days.

And really, that's a pretty good introduction for this blog. I'm not writing this for followers - if they come that'll be awesome, but it's not my motivation. I'm not interested in creating a beautiful front or putting my best foot forward or having a perfectly manicured online presence. All I want is to show up without any makeup on. I'm writing this for me. I need an outlet for my thoughts and feelings, and I choose this medium specifically because I need the potential for other people to see them. I need them out of my head and occupying space with the rest of humanity. I need to be seen as I am.

So there we go; I began. For me the first step is always the hardest, but once I take it then I can get down to the business of creating what I want to. If you're reading this, thank you for being here. I'm not sure exactly what it is I'll be creating, but I hope it ends up being personal and honest and fun, and therapeutic and healing and healthy and many other positive adjectives.

So...here we go!