As I draft this, we are T-12 days from moving cross country. The last couple weeks have been filled with get togethers with friends and family, some emotional roller coastering, and far too little packing, so today will be a short one.
I listened to this Lazy Genius episode about what to do when life feels like you’re drinking from a firehose, and I had two main takeaways. The first was that her description of a firehose day sounded suspiciously like my normal day. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, it was just interesting to observe, “Hmm, my daily level of chaos is what someone else would consider very overwhelming, so maybe it makes sense that I feel that way.” When you don’t have a basis for comparison, it’s easy to think that you’re the problem, and sometimes it’s just helpful to take a step back, give yourself a mental pat on the back and admit that it feels hard because it is hard! My second takeaway was that I absolutely loved the discussion of “urgency triage”, something I think any mother has to learn. It’s like order of operations, but for life. For example, on one very memorable occasion, I had a child run into my house with a head wound, then 30 seconds later his brother walked in the door and peed his pants, all while the baby was crawling across the floor crying because he had his nursing session interrupted by the screaming. In this case, urgency triage meant that I had to decide very quickly which of these emergencies was the *most* emergent. It’s almost always blood before pee, unless the child is the one who freaks out about a scratch and someone is potty training. The moral of the story is that everyone needs an Eisenhower matrix on their refrigerator and I will be using this tool to survive the next two weeks.
I’m going to be very transparent here — while
has been a great project, I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed by juggling two publications. I’m brainstorming how writing this stream of content could look, given my real life limitations. One potential solution that keeps floating to the top of my mental queue, is the idea of combining publications but creating an “opt-in” section for content. This would remove the pressure of publishing so frequently, but still allow me to have a separate resource that isn’t automatically sent to everyone. I created the new ‘stack, because I know people don’t want health content without opting in, but have noticed there’s a lot of overlap in subscribers between the two. What do you think? Would it be helpful as a reader to have things a bit more streamlined? And of course, if you are currently a paying subscriber that would translate no matter where the content is. Let me know what you think, I’ll be mulling it over and looking into the logistics. It’s hard to admit that my current pace is unsustainable, but fighting reality usually leads me to disappoint a lot more people in the long run.I don’t like Mother’s Day. At all. I love being a mother, but this holiday? Can we please just skip it? The saccharine tropes, the expectations, the plastering of perfect looking families all over social media? Nope. If you also grit your teeth, hoping to escape the day relatively unscathed, you’re in good company. I know there’s about a million reasons you might struggle with the day, so here’s a virtual hug to let you know you’re not alone in wanting it to just be Monday already. I hope you’re able to enjoy any part of it that’s enjoyable, and give yourself the permission to opt out of the rest. Hallmark doesn’t run your life. A few things that have helped me over the years are to let my children have fun with what they want to do to celebrate, and to ask very clearly for anything that I really need (like a nap, room to cry, and to not make dinner).
Speaking of motherhood, I ran across this quote I’d saved and thought I’d reshare here. It’s
talking about the interrupted life, and the idea of motherhood as a monastery posed by Richard Rolheiser:“The lesson was rather that there was something wonderfully right about what his mother had been doing all these years as she lived the interrupted life amidst the noise and incessant demands of small children. He had been in a monastery, but so had she.”
Then Rolheiser goes on to define monastery.
“A monastery is not so much a place set apart for monks and nuns as it is a place set apart, period. It is also a place to learn the value of powerlessness and a place to learn that time is not ours but God’s.” He refers to St. Bernard who writes of the monastic bell that whenever the bell rings in a monastery, the monks are to drop whatever they’re doing and respond to the bell to attend to whatever the bell summoned them to do, prayer, meals, work, study, or sleep. They lived by those bells and the bells called them to task, to sustenance, and to worship, and so this widening definition of a monastery is one I can get fully behind. There is something wonderfully right, not only about the interrupted life of a parent with children, but there’s also something wonderfully right about every interrupted life, whether you have children or not, because the reality of our fluid, uneven, unpredictable lives is often our next right thing isn’t a decision we make, but a monastic bell that rings inviting a response from us to be called to task, to sustenance, to worship, even though the thing itself feels disruptive.”
I teared up when I heard it a year ago, and it’s no less true now. A mother’s life, a caregiver’s life, a person’s life,is so often one of interruptions. It reminds me of yet another favorite saying from C.S. Lewis,
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.
And, speaking of interruptions, I am going to be taking a break from writing this newsletter for about a month. Next time you hear from me, we’ll be settling into a new everything. There’s a lot of moving pieces, and so I’m going to ask for your prayers over the next month, for a few specific things.
Sleep — we’ve had at least one child with sleep disruptions and often more than one for the past several weeks. It makes them cranky, it makes us tired, and it wears everyone out.
My health — you know how I wrote all about how stress wreaks havoc on our bodies? Case study of n-1 but it’s certainly true here. Autoimmune flares are not fun, and while I have confidence that I have tools to get things settled down, it can be hard not to get panicky when symptoms surface. Bodies are just weird and unpredictable and sometimes living in one sort of sucks. Prayers for a calm immune system and wisdom to discern what I can and can’t control would be wonderful.
Emotional presence — the thing about having some “stuff” in my background is that I’m really good at surviving things. The problem with that is that I want to live this, not just survive it. That means I need all of me to participate. Survival is useful, but it doesn’t tend to be the most, uh, integrated, experience.
Last but not least, we’d appreciate your prayers for traveling mercies, good communication and the working out of all the endless logistics involved in getting a household from point A to point B.
I hope the remainder of your hundred days of May is full of joyful celebrations and endings, and that you’re able to receive all the grace you need along the way. Everyone I’ve talked to recently is exhausted — hang in there!
This letter is free for you to read, but costs me time and precious brain cells to write. If you’d like to support this work please like it, leave me a comment, or share with a friend. I’m so glad you’re here!
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Lately:
Listening: I’ve been binging Myquillyn Smith’s (the Nester) podcast interviews, because I’m thinking a lot about homes and decorating them. I especially liked this interview with Jennifer Pepito, because it hits on so many important things in the home conversation — I loved the transparency around contentment, learning to name what is most important about our home, and stopping apologizing for where we live. We’ve lived in a lot of houses, a lot of them rentals, and I still find myself dealing with a level of house shame, frustrated by my “bad decorating skills”, or feeling like I need to apologize for not having a Pinterest perfect house. But what if it’s my attitude, not the actual house, that gets in the way?
Reading: Zilch, nothing, nada. Okay, just kidding I’ve read a lot of Substack articles. This discussion of literary mothers, with
, , , , , , and was one of my favorites of the week.If you’re unaware of John MacArthur’s statements (ugh), this read by
and this one by speak eloquently and graciously to why he’s (very) wrong.Writing: In case you missed it, I put together a guide for gluten free sourdough — all my best tips and tricks :)
Laughing:
3 year old: *playing “snake catchers”*
“Well, I catched that 'nake, and it not have teeth, and not vemonous, so it my pet!”
has informed me that this is the point at which I need to start checking under his pillow for dead reptiles 😵💫😬.Wondering: What are your must have child/beach/baby items? We don’t yet all own swimsuits that fit, so we’re kind of going to be starting from the ground up. But, there’s probably some great parenting hacks for the beach, right? Tell me your ways, please.
Farewell from CO…
T-12 days! Wow! I will be praying for a smooth transition for you!
When I saw you chatting a little bit with Tsh Oxenreider about the Everything Free Life stuff you mention here, I wondered whether it might be a good idea to move EFL to a tab/section here (as I think Tsh suggested?) but then make it the foundation of you paid subscriber benefits. That way paid subscribers could get everything in one place, and free subscribers would get a taste of both on occasion.
Thanks for sharing our literary mothers post!
Saying many prayers for your final days in CO and new ones in NC! Thank you for sharing those quotes on interruptions; they were exactly what I needed to read in this current season.