A Capable Wife, Who Can Find?

Today is my 14th Wedding Anniversary. 

On June 2, 2001, I got married in central West Virginia carrying blue cornflowers and yellow freesia in my wedding bouquet. 

At the time, my husband and I were considered weird among our friends. We got engaged 9 months after meeting each other and married each other 18 months after we met. He was 29. I was 26. We both had grad school degrees. We didn't think there was anything weird about meeting the person you'd like to spend your life in our late 20s, but our friends did. 

Marriage was already on its way out.

Today, so many of our really close friends have still never married in their early 40s. We are still the weird ones. (Then we became more Catholic, had lots of kids, moved back to West Virginia, and became really, really weird.)

A few of our really, close big family Catholic friends have gotten divorced.

I know now that finding the right fit in marriage is only 25% of the battle, the rest of the fight is to hold on to what we have no matter what life throws at us.

At age 40, I've seen our life throw us some really scary things.

Through it all, there is just this promise, sometimes one that seems as frail as a cornflower blossom, that we will survive this --together.

My love. Our love. Together for life.

If you asked me what I wanted on my wedding day on June 2, 2002, I would have given you an earful of plans. I wanted  trips to London. I wanted a rental on Beacon Hill in Boston. I wanted a writing desk in a library for me, and a painting studio loft for him. I wanted no kids until after age 30, and even then, only 3.

Now, if you ask me what I want? 

I want some cornflowers on my grave, and I want that image not to be ironic.

I want to take the love that I have for my husband and move it all the way down the playing field of life. There is nothing commonplace about an ordinary marriage these days. 

My Fight With Acedia

I feel myself coming out of this long, slow stupor. It's acedia. It's the sin of spiritual sloth where I feel like there is nothing in my life but a long, dull list of meaningless activities.

Monks and nuns get acedia. So do writers. Stay at home mothers suffer from acedia also.

Acedia affects people who live a life of solitude. Solitude sounds boring but it is so critical for the full development of the human personality. Innovation requires courage and solitude. Healing requires solitude. Growth requires solitude. Even more social virtues like Leadership requires solitude. (A good leader is someone who knows herself and is unafraid of social rejection. That attachment to a strong inner voice and a detachment from what the world thinks is a quality that is best grown in solitude.)

Stillness is often boring. I want the peace that inner stillness brings but I hate doing the work to get there.

At 40, I'm tempted to look around and think "Everyone else is having more fun than me! There has got to be an easier way to live."

The cure for my acedia, is not for me to do less work. I don't need to hire a baby sitter. I don't need to take on a part-time job. I don't need more date nights, or parties, or coffee dates in Georgetown.

The cure for my acedia is to dig deeper into my daily routine and become more present in my work. I need to ask God to restore my youthful enthusiasm for my choice of a lifetime project. I need to glory my small, but "undelegatable" work.

What I found from this prayer for God to help with acedia is a new understanding of my individuality and self-worth.

I don't have to be wild and creative in my choices of writing, or housecleaning, or mothering. My work is already wild and creative because I'm a unique individual doing the work. I do my work for something, or rather, for someone.

When I'm clear about why I'm working each day, the work becomes easy.

There are not enough good, calm, cheerful and supportive homes for young artists to grow up inside the First World, so my husband and I made one.

There are not enough beautiful, clear, and spiritually calm websites out there, so I made one.

There are not enough clean, organic, and fruitful gardens in my town, so my husband and I planted one.

The best garden I plant each day is inside my heart. It's slow work, most days. Yet if I take time to feed myself first each day, I'm shock at how little my daily routine feels like dull work.

On Using My Government Degree To Run A Family

I'm in a place in my life where all my weaknesses as a leader show up daily inside my life. I'm 40 and I've got a new six month old baby.  I'm coming off of survival mode. There are a back-log of projects that are piled up in my life and usual "just smile and go with the flow" style of leadership isn't cutting it anymore. 

I need to lead!

I haven't seen a domestic leadership structure inside the Catholic church that works for some of my "hard to lead" children in my life. I've seen the top down "You must obey me" type of leadership style. I have one child who that type of authoritative command style just invites a major power struggle. It becomes this massive time suck in my day and I feel an emotional hangover afterwards that can last for hours. 

The opposite technique that I've seen is a quiet nurturing of a love for obedience from birth. As an experienced Mom, I can see myself growing in the ability to teach this skill. I've found out that there really is a window of time under age 5 where almost anything is fun to do with Mom, so I can teach "this is how we help Mom get good vegetables at the grocery store." There is so much natural learning going on with shapes, and colors and smells and the science of nutrition that asking my 4 and 3 year old to help me put the vegetables in the cart is an easy addition.

If a family was a business, the pre-school set would be the young intern eager to learn and my husband is fellow Manager who is incredibly kind and competent, but never around. I'm left directing the 3 smart, junior level employees who all have much more interesting things to do than listen to me tell them what to do.

I'm stuck in this awkward space where we have way more work than a regular two kid American household  but I'm down to one arm because I'm carrying a baby. We're late to the game so we didn't start "best practices" for good attitudes at birth.

Here's the thing I've never read before on another blog, I discovered that smart kids are hard to lead. My smart kids wake up with a firm agenda for their day, and its not easy for me when I interrupt their plans for world domination by asking them to help me unload the groceries. So my tendency was to do practically all domestic work by myself because it wasn't worth the hassle to ask for their help. The I would ask for their help in an emergency like situation and be totally frustrated that this wasn't an easy "listen and follow my directions because I'm the leader" type of situation.

In the middle of this chaos, I started using my Government degree.  If I get into a situation in ordinary life where I'm overwhelmed--such as I've got 10 bags of groceries to feed a family of 8, a grumpy teething baby, and kids who are in open revolt about helping me unload the car, I stop and hold a Town Hall Meeting.

I go for "consensus government."  I sit down. I get everyone to focus around me. I lay out the general problem and suggest a goal. Then I step back and let my kids creative talk and solve the problem themselves.  I call it "getting buy-in". They call it "not getting told what to do."

It takes time.  I need to be inside our house (which makes things safe and not time sensitive.) Yet I'm always shocked when better ideas come out of a consensus Town Hall style meeting, than either me or my husband can generate alone.

For example, unloading groceries from the car. I thought that I'd ask my 3 kids age 12,10, & 8 to help me unload my car all at the same time and put groceries away at the same time. Yet in the meeting, my kids decided to specialize in the food products that of most interest to themselves. Alex is handling all the meat and diary, which have the highest risk of spoilage if we accidentally forget them inside the car. Hannah is excited about her height, so she nominated herself "Tall Shelf Girl". Maria is the "Vegetable Girl." 

My kids asked me "Who are you?" I said "I'm the manager!" My son said "No Mom, you're our sidekick!" and he gentle hugged me to his side. I thought to myself, "This explains our problem. I think I'm in charge of you and you think that I'm your sidekick."

At first, I wanted to fight with that depiction because I felt like "Mom are supposed to be in charge of their kids!" I looked around my family and I saw this joy and this comfort with me. I thought "I can work with this!"

I'm thankful that reading a lot about government theory, helps me be more flexible in my thinking about authority. I have definite goals for where I want my family to move. Yet I can allow for greater creativity in how we move forward.

What I don't want to do anymore is argue about "fairness" because no everyone has the same definition inside my family about what counts as "fair." 

No matter how tired I am, I always have the energy inside to chair a committee meeting. If I can't be consistent in my discipline. If I can't be organized enough to never need to go grocery shopping midweek without my husband's help. If I can't have any other skill that will show up reliably regardless of my distraction due to my allergies, my  babies teething, or my neighbor's barking dog, at least I always have my Government degree. That inbred philosophy is enough to get me through the hardest of days.

Thank goodness for the practicality of a liberal arts education!