Where Happy Comes From

Hi guys, I know it's been awhile.  I always feel a sense of hesitancy to post when I've been absent for so long, like I can't write about what's on my mind at this moment without first recapping where I've been and what I've been about for the last few months.  But I feel such a warm glow this evening.  I feel such a serene happiness that it would seem a shame and a loss to keep it to myself - because these things pass.

There are a small multitude of perfect-seeming things around me just now, and it's my habit to stop, when this little flutter of light, of peace, of...something sublime for which our language has no name - and analyze my surroundings.  Somehow, it will be all the better and what's more, more tenacious, if I can pin it to its source.

But as I rattled off to myself things that I certainly am happy about - and there were many - none of them quite resonated with the buoyancy I feel.  Each was a contributor, but none was at the core.  The bubbling, vibrant, almost-walking baby wandering the house at shin-height; the little girl who clung to my shirt at bedtime and said, "I wan' to cuddle wis you.  Mother, I wan' to cuddle wis you"; the blue-gray cloud cover and dappled tawny foliage, at long last acknowledging autumn; hope breathed into a long-cherished dream; the sigh of a Friday after a particularly hectic week and the impending arrival of my husband, after a week-long absense --

And the thing upon which I finally settled, the thing which, when my mind caught hold of it, brought the unmistakable feeling of yes was the soft, measured voice of Truman G. Madsen, as he delivered lectures on the life of Joseph Smith.  The CD recording carried me down the canyon and back today, through my errands and home again.  One cannot, I believe, learn about a devoted servant of God, one who taught the Gospel so vigorously and so joyfully, and who exemplified the things which he taught, without feeling nearer to God Himself.  It made me want to pray more fervently, to serve my neighbors more cheerfully, and to search the scriptures with greater energy and curiosity.  In short, I took the opportunity to saturate my thoughts, today, in the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and every aspect of my day was improved.

The Gospel adds vibrancy to our lives.  It liberates us to take joy in those things that we know to be most important, but in which we sometimes struggle to rejoice.  Every bright thing becomes brighter under its influence, and all true happiness is amplified.

All good things come from Jesus Christ, and He has not left us alone, to stumble in this world.  We have prophets - living prophets - to whom the Savior speaks and they speak His will.  Tomorrow and on Sunday, they will speak and we can listen.  Our lives can be saturated with this buoyant light, this abundant happiness.  This is real.

Burying Dreams

The grave digger carries a shovel.  In my mind, she walks with hunched shoulders against a grey sky.  In my mind, she has a heavy heart, so much so, perhaps, that her burdens have worn through its apex and fallen to the grave digger’s feet.  That grey-blue heart is perforated and ragged, with gaping holes.  I hear her heartbeats like gusts of defeat – weak, loud, empty, and really only suggesting a course to the air that wanders over graves, rather than compelling blood.  It’s a November sort of scene that I see when I visualize one who routinely buries stiffened and mottled flesh, pushing aside ghostly, withered leaves, and making a place to lay to rest long-loved dreams.

But another figure carries a shovel, too.  Another person, less weary, but with just as much reason to be, also  carries a dry and shriveled promise to be placed in the cold ground.  She prepares a place as the grave digger has done, presses and coaxes the earth to yield a resting place for it.  The placement is quick and the burial site marked, too, but she afterward looks up.  The sun is an April thing and leaves at her feet have been so long dead that they’ve forgotten to look forlorn.  Like the other earth-mover, she turns away and leaves the receptacle of her hopes in the cold and the dark of the ground, but she will return.  She will guard this place.  She will wait.  She will not forget, because she is a gardener.

I’m learning this about adulthood: the dreams that I cherished through my childhood, the vibrant ones to which I clung, and the visions to which I promised my heart, have, of necessity, began to gather dust.  As I change diapers, scrape dinners out of messy pantry shelves, and hurry between activities and obligations, those hopes have begun to wither.  Last October, I stole away a time or two, seizing a sunny hour at nap-time to harvest the beans that we had left out to dry for this year’s seed.  The pods crackled delicately and the beans had become white and hard.  My hands feel that way now, when I take up a pencil to sketch or open a blank word document to write.  My imagination and creativity stiffen with disuse and sometimes it makes me feel a little disillusioned, deadened. 

I wonder, but speculate that I would feel much the same way, even if these two precious girls hadn’t yet come into my life.  This disillusionment, this period of wandering is, I think, something most of us go through as we shed our childhoods.  If I wasn’t a mother, I might be realizing that the career I had chosen was not as fulfilling as I had hoped, that neither friends nor spouse nor busyness could completely stave off loneliness all of the time – that time could not be stretched or compressed enough to cradle my needs.  It’s a period when we all begin, probably never to cease, to realize that choosing the best things often means choosing the hard things and sacrificing other desires along the way.  And we do it.

When people ask me how I’m liking life, I usually answer wholeheartedly that I love it, that I’m working my dream job.  It’s true.  I am probably one of the luckiest people I know, to have all of every day to devote to two beautiful, healthy children who have more than enough energy to drain me of mine.  But there are moments, now and then, when I feel the weight of where I am and of those unanswered devotions to my teenaged ambitions.  There are times when, in spite of the work I do and the happiness it generates, I feel like a shell, and I miss the pleasures that I knowingly traded in for this hard-earned and mercifully granted joy.  I miss the exercise – the physical, mental, social stimuli and sculpting that I once thought comprised the path to becoming who I’m meant to be.  Sometimes, I feel lonely.  Sometimes I feel empty.  

The despondency rested a little heavily over me this week.  That’s a part of life, I know, so I pressed myself to move proactively through my routine.  It’s planting season and my neighbor and I have spent hours every morning in our garden plot, furiously digging trenches, tilling in fertilizer, and laying down drip lines.  Kneeling beside the row we’d designated for corn, I pressed holes into the soil with my middle finger, dropped two gnarled kernels into each, and pinched the loose dirt back over them.  Burying dreams, I thought. 

It wasn’t exactly an epiphany for me, really.  I’ve long thought of my extra-parental aspirations as gathering dust.  Atrophied, maybe, dormant, but not dead.  Still, as I thought about those buried corns, in the damp, cold darkness, it added a new color to my hope.  Yes, I will take up those dreams again someday.  I will have another chance to develop the God-given talents in my hands and body and mind, and when I pick them up again, they will be slightly wasted and wan, but perhaps they too will be changed from the last time I held them.  Maybe something will have sprouted, developed, that was not there before.  Something will be waiting to spring out of them that could not have come from my inexperienced, youthful vigor.

Right now, motherhood, and the effort to do things right and responsibly, has all but consumed me, like a hole in the earth; but I am not a shell.  I am a seed.  The life and light inside of me and the dark dampness around me, together, will do what pure sunshine and unbroken ease could not have done.  Even now, I am germinating. 

My Christmas Thought

In this, the season of giving, I’ve thought a lot about the concept of selflessness.  We give our time, our means, our energy.  We give to our children, our families, our friends and neighbors, and to complete strangers.  Sometimes, we give knowing that we’ll never see the faces of, or hear the gratitude of the recipients.  Yet, the critics will say that there is no thing as true ’selflessness.’  You give, because there is always, on some level, some personal gain.

And I must admit that I agree with them.

Giving is always receiving.  Though the primary purpose of the action may not be to receive the consequent personal benefit, it always follows.  I do not, however think that this diminishes the worth of the gift or the value of the giving.

The universe is governed by natural laws.  Some of those laws are physical, and we are likely more familiar with those.  The spiritual or moral laws operate much the same way: actions is followed by reaction.  There is always a consequence.

It is only natural that an act of love or of kindness will be followed by a sense of accomplishment, of meaning, of happiness.  There have likely been times in our lives when we have failed to find this satisfaction, because we have been too busy or distracted or self-conscious to recognize it, but it has been there nonetheless.

And there is nothing wrong with seeking the joy that accompanies service.  It’s not the same thing as seeking recognition.  I would argue that selflessness, far from being the opposite of selfishness, is overrated.  No, I’ll go even further than that.  Selflessness is impossible.  The fact is that each one of us has a self.  Each of us is an individual and is aware of the world only through our own experiences and understanding.  We cannot cut ourselves out of the equation.

In fact, what more selfish thing could we do, than to withhold our service from others and to deny ourselves of happiness because we are too concerned that we are giving only for our own benefit?  Yes, I serve my daughters and my husband because I love them, but also because it makes me happy.  When I give to neighbors, friends, and strangers, it’s because I know it’s the right thing to do, but also because I enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that I did the right thing, that by my actions, the ocean is one drop more.

We best maintain ourselves by maintaining others.  I am not ashamed to be seeking my own happiness.  If wrapping presents or working at a soup kitchen gives me a rush, that effect is only enhanced by the fact that I am afterward better able to care for myself and for others.

So this is the gift that I will give myself this Christmas.  I will allow myself to be motivated to do what is right by the hope of a deep and abiding gladness.  I will seek to give and to serve, and will strive to be awake to the resulting happiness that will find me. 

Thoughts from My Rocking Chair

We were out late the other night, which almost invariably means that a tantrum will follow in the wee hours of the morning.  As I sat in the rocking chair, cuddling my girl, finally calmed, it struck me just how big she has grown.  Her feet hung over the side of my lap and through the arm of the chair.  Her head rested on my chest and her little eyes blinked slowly and quietly in the darkness.

A year ago, she was a baby.  I nursed her and rocked her to sleep many a time in that chair.  Now she is, in every sense, a toddler.  A little girl.  It made me ache to realize how swiftly and surely time is already taking my babies from my arms.  This girl who scarcely sits still, who can climb almost anything, and who repeats everything I say, is becoming every day less mine and more her own.  It's such a sweet little ache.

When silence had reigned for a several minutes, I found myself hesitating, not only because the transition from Mom's arms to bed is always a delicate one, but because my desire to hold on to that quiet moment, that peaceful embrace, rivaled the desire to return to bed at 2:30 AM.

It was just another one of those moments that convinced me all the more, that there must be more to what we are and why we are here, than the life that ends when we stop breathing.  Too many mothers have snuggled their little ones only to see them grow up and walk away, too many of these perfect moments have happened and ended - not to mention myriad worse things - to have this earth, this life be anything but a tragedy, were it not so.

This moment need never be reduced to only a memory.  This child is and will always be more than a complex structure of molecules, forming cells and tissues and organs, governed by external stimuli and external chemical reactions.  This life extends beyond the confines of time.

And it is no tragedy.

Dex

A few months ago, this eight-legged guy appeared beside my front porch.  I don't have a photo, but picture this: black, white and yellow stripes, each leg at least an inch long, angular body - majestic in a terrifying sort of way...

Despite my strong aversion to spiders, I decided to let him stay with an unspoken understanding that, so long as he kept his distance, he wouldn't see the bottom side of my tennis shoes.

I decided to call him Dex.

Yes, I even gave him a name, maybe because it made me feel like I had a little control over him or something.  Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, right?  Metaphorically speaking, of course.  If he had built his web in China, I would have felt much more comfortable with the situation.

About a month ago, he moved right up behind the front door.  OK, Dex, I thought, but come no closer.  You're on thin ice.  I don't think I've passed once through that doorway without glancing his way.  And shuddering.

I mentioned him in a conversation with my spider-loving friend the other day, along with the mysterious disappearance of mini-Dex.  Her response (it was over text, but I just know she was elated): "Then it's a she and she'll have babies soon :)"

Oh.

She has plumped up in the last few days, huh?

Eew.  It makes my skin crawl, and not in a good way.  I don't think that phrase has ever been used with a positive connotation, but just in case it has, I want to clarify - in a bad way.  I hate spiders.

My conscience: Are you sure?  Hate is a strong word.

Yes.  I hate spiders.  And one big one living in plain sight and close proximity is more than enough.  How did Charlotte's Web make an arachnid invasion seem so not-creepy?

Be afraid, Dex.  Be very afraid.

Dear Stay-At-Home-Moms: My Response

I stumbled across this article today and while the title gave me the feeling that I was about to be attacked, my curiosity won out.  After reading it, along with a few recent comments, I began to write a response.  When I saw that my comment was becoming unwieldy, I decided to just make a post about it, rather than attempt to be concise.  

While I agree with the message of this article - that motherhood is a privilege and should be treasured - it proved to be every bit as volatile as the title promised.  I don't think any human being has the right to speak to another in the way that this author did, much less to a large population of people - such as 'stay-at-home-moms'.  Everyone faces unique challenges.  We have no idea what the mom who complains to us in the grocery store is going through or has gone through, although we may convince ourselves that we can make an accurate guess.  

Raising children is extremely difficult, but it's also a learning experience.  Children are very good at teaching us things like patience and perspective, both qualities that the article advocates.  We are all at different places on the path to acquiring them, moving at different rates, and facing different obstacles.  No one enters parenthood knowing fully what he or she is about to take on, but you will be hard pressed to find a mom, stay-at-home or otherwise, who is doing what she does for the wrong reasons.  We are all trying, we are all working hard, and we are all learning along the way.  

As a stay-at-home-mom, I try very hard to keep things in perspective and to express gratitude often for the experiences I have.  When I blog or use social media, I try to conclude with a statement or thought that illustrates the situation in a new, and hopefully clearer light.  I try very hard not to flat-out whine, and usually I'm not inclined to do so.  I don't claim that my life is harder than anyone else's, but I do write and talk about the hardships I face and I don't apologize for that.  

I think it's wonderful that we have blogs, social media, and other outlets that let us connect with other moms and support one another.  If you don't like somebody's posts on facebook or twitter, you don't have to follow her.  If you don't like someone's blog or website, you don't have to read it.  If you can't handle letting someone unload to you, don't answer the phone or invite her in to sit at your kitchen table.

I write the things I do because I recognize that I am in the midst of what is likely to be the most difficult and most fulfilling time of my life.  Writing is an outlet for me, a way of channeling my thoughts and troubles into something redemptive, a way of understanding.  I also realize that a lot of my friends are going through the same things that I am and it's a way for me to try to lift and relate to them.  I write for other friends whose lives are very different than mine, but who are genuinely interested in what my life is like.  If the things that appear on this blog come off as whiny, moping, or judgmental, please - and I mean this sincerely - please don't read them.  If I am dragging you down by what I post, please steer clear of it.

And I won't deny that I have my down moments.  Like most difficult things, motherhood isn't only daunting.  It's surprising.  I feel most inclined to complain when I find myself faced with an obstacle that was completely unforeseen.  I try to save my complaints for my mom, my husband, and close friends who are willing to hear me vent because they love me, respect how I've chosen to spend my life, and want to help me along.  Nevertheless, if I do happen to let slip, on a hard day, that I think my life is difficult and momentarily can't see beyond that, please consider that I am on a long journey that includes continual self-improvement.  I ask you to give me the benefit of the doubt and know that I will endeavor to do the same.

I am grateful for the opportunity that this article afforded me, not only to reflect on the blessings of motherhood, but also to step back and consider how I look at other people.  Both those who are and aren't mothers deserve my compassion if I am going to listen to them, and, if I am not able to be a nonjudgmental listener, my candor, in explaining quickly that I will not be able to provide the support that they seek.

Happy Thought - Extension

At the risk of sounding like a broken record - yes.  This post is also going to be about motherhood.  That's where my mind is these days.

As we have settled into our new routine, I can't seem to get a handle on all of the additional clutter that is appearing in every corner and on my counter tops.  Junk mail, toys, lonely socks and even vegetables from the garden (one of Addie's latest obsessions) accumulate more quickly than I can find homes for them.  I never was one for tasteful decorating, much less perfect order and cleanliness.  I can confidently say that my home is appropriately sanitary.  Beyond that, it's never been anything impressive.  Even my nesting instinct, in the last days of pregnancy, translated into massive amounts of canning rather than decorations for the nursery or deep cleaning.

I'm coming to accept that, despite my best intentions and daily efforts to get on top of my household chores, I'll always be a little bit behind.  Always, or at least, for the next decade or so.  Still, there's something special about the things I see around me lately, from the pictures on the walls to the homeless boxes that live, stacked, in corners, alphabet magnets on an around the refrigerator door.  My earliest memories are of similar things - cracked sidewalks, a screen door that I struggled to open, a blue rocking chair, a wicker laundry basket...  None of them were remarkable, but in my mind, they are accompanied by a soft, pleasant glow.

And this little house, even with my poor decorating and organizational skills, suddenly seems so much more significant as I look around it with those memories in mind.   I begin to see how the little trappings in and around our home now will remain with my children, pixels of the images that they will one day call their childhood.