Illuma Journal: 2008

I've spent the morning reading other people's blogs. People who are open and honest, who spend time thinking. Right now, I feel like life is chaos. Like I don't get to think much anymore. Like what occupies my mind the most is Avery's next meal or nap, or if I'll have enough milk for when the babysitter comes. I feel obligated to take advantage of every nap to get a shower or finish the dishes, to respond to emails or make a grocery list.
I want to slow down. (Ha! I assumed life would be slow with a six month old!) I want to eat fresh, local food, buy/grow/make my daughter organic food and find her nonthreatening skin care products. I want to enjoy her for her. To soak in her laughter because it won't always be this way. I want to walk places with her (where do you walk when you live in RB? The library-my latest love). I want to read and craft and write letters and call those I love. I want to make Nick things. I want to write in Avery's baby book and have all of her photos printed and put in a book. I want to put pictures in the frames on her walls. I want to find used furniture to redo for our home. I want to be alone. I want to go to the museums. I want to remember what I learned about Art History in the five years I spent in college. I want to take action because the election in November means so much.
I'm still in my pjs this morning. I made sweet potato pancakes from the leftover sweet potatoes I made for Avery and that she refused. And now I'm sitting in bed with the computer, listening to the birds sing outside while my daughter and husband sleep. A luxury I rarely allow for myself. And I return to a book I read before I had a baby, that is all the more applicable now.

"For to be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mothercore, like spokes from the hub of a wheel. The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass; husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider's web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes. How difficult for us,then, to achieve a balance in the midst of these contradictory tensions, and yet how necessary for the proper functioning of our lives. How much we need, and how arduous of attainment is that steadiness preached in all rules of holy living. How desirable and how distant is the ideal of the contemplative, artist or saint- the inner inviolable core, the single eye.
With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children, the running of a house with its thousand details, human relationships and their myriad pulls- woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of Woman and Career, Woman and the Home, Woman and Independence. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.
What is the answer? There is no easy answer, no complete answer. I have only clues, shells from the sea. The bare beauty of the channelled whelk tells me that one answer, and perhaps a first step, is in simplification of life, in cutting out some of the distractions. But how? Total retirement is not possible. I cannot shed my responsibilities. I cannot permanently inhabit a desert island. I cannot be a nun in the midst of family life. I would not want to be. The solution for me, surely, is neither in total renunciation of the world, nor in total acceptance of it. I must find a balance somewhere, or an alternating rhythm between these two extremes; a pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return. In my periods of retreat, perhaps I can learn something to carry back into my worldly life."
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh A Gift from the Sea