Tiny Things

I have been feeling sick for a couple of weeks (or more, I can’t remember now). As a result, my ability to get things done has varied greatly depending on whether I’m willing to push through the exhausted, swollen, weak self that I have become. I would guess it is a cold. But mixed with the heat and the workload it is impossible to tell whether the cold is worse from running around or I just have a bad infection. A doctor’s visit is now in order.

I have finally decided to put every thing down for a day and see if some rest will help. My husband made breakfast, got a load of laundry in (I might have done that actually), got the kids dressed, and off to day care and I lurked around in the shadows feeling useless, trying to back him up and failing miserably as I fell on the couch for yet another ‘lie down’.

Now I am sitting half-alive slouched on the couch filling in reimbursement health care forms, checking off school supply lists and assembling backpacks, looking into credit card payment options for our farm produce online etc. (and yes, writing a blog post). All the things I can do in my slumped fog. I promise that at the end of the day I will feel awful that I have gotten ‘nothing done’.

I learned some things this morning. One is that what I once took for granted turns out looks like a lot of work. I felt so much guilt watching my husband undergo my tasks of the early morning. But I can’t rightly assume I don’t contribute to the family, then ask my husband to do my work and feel terrible about all that he has to take on alone, can I?

Husband is now doing the barn chores for me. 10:30am and still not able to get to his usual work. And yet still, I have always assumed my work to be negligible.

I recall the days not long ago that I would feel so frustrated as I ran the kids to day care, and did the morning errands in town (feed store, tractor diesel, fencing parts, plumbing parts, canning jars…), did my morning barn chores and then wondered why at noon I had still not started my day.

I’m not exactly sure what it is I’m hoping to ‘start’. Isn’t the meal-making, the laundry-doing, the chores, the drop-offs, the form-filling all part of a day? Why would I exclude that in the definition of a productive day?

I think, my friends, that I have discovered a major kernel of truth about the day women chose or were expected to get out and earn an income. I know for me, the day I dawned a crisp, clean outfit and proper click-clacking shoes to head to an office somewhere was the day all other jobs were rendered ‘free time’. And with my ‘free time’ I was able to do things like put food in my fridge, clean my clothes, service my car, clean my house etc. if I wanted to.

Or, as time grew more and more scarce, especially once children entered the stage, I could pay for my meals in the freezer section of the grocery store or the local take-out spot and pay someone to clean my house, do my oil changes and take care of my kids. All of that so that my ‘free’ time could now be spent doing things that I actually wanted to do – like read books, listen to music, take dance classes, learn origami, go surfing in the Bahamas, whatever suited my fancy.

But here is the truth I figured out. Once you are responsible for the care of other living things, there is no such thing as free time. This is true whether you have 3 off-site jobs or you do all your work around the home, fields and barn. There are only choices about which things need your attention more urgently. There might be ways of sticking out your arms and carving out small windows of time to intentionally go on a date with your husband, take a trip, or do nothing! But the free time doesn’t appear in vast expanses as it had when we were younger, less responsible human beings. You will never stand there and say: ‘wow, I’m all done my tasks for the day, perhaps I will make myself a coffee and sit down for a bit.’

Well, if you’re anything like me you make that coffee and sit down anyway. Probably with a thunk so loud the neighbours can hear. But the list is never done. The work is never finished. And the guilt about this great ‘rest’ you are taking never goes away. I think the best we can do is justify the rest as the sane thing to do. It is the right thing to do. It is human to need to stop. If only for 66 seconds.

So now it is time to start viewing the day-to-day work that I am doing as important and necessary. It IS my day. I can’t assume that all the stuff I do is just what gets done before my day starts. Under this perception, my day may never really start.

These things that make up our days, wherever our work finds us, they matter too. They are the building blocks of a life as strong and valuable as any other. But I don’t have to tell you that, do I? You knew that already. It seems I needed to learn it.

This Magical Life

Do you ever wonder if somebody else would do a better job at your life than you? Do you ever think that somebody else could handle it all better? They could come out of the challenges unscathed, be happier in the joyous moments, figure a way to speak their mind at just the right time, be more kind to their loved ones?

That’s the problem I find with being a mother. You are the most important person in your child’s life – you are the center of their world no matter how you play it – and yet it seems so common for mothers to doubt their competence for the job. From the day that my newborn babies were handed to me in the hospital, I have been uncertain of whether I can give these little humans all that they deserve.

We are so willing to displace ourselves. Here: take my chair, eat my breakfast if you’re still hungry, take over the space in my bed, take my sweater, take my mind, my heart, my soul. I don’t need any of it?

Have you ever gone hungry for three hours before realizing you actually forgot to feed yourself a meal as well? Have you ever lost sleep to stay up with a sick, wired or frightened child? Have you ever gone cold, postponed going to the bathroom for hours, left out the shower? I think you’re laughing at me right now. Who would bother asking such a stupid question of a mother?

Lately I’ve been deeply wondering if someone would do a better job as my husband’s wife. As my farm animals’ keeper. As my mother’s daughter. My brother’s sister. Here: take my life. In my exhausted delirium I have even tried to think up alternatives for all of the above. But how would I slip away without being noticed? If someone would do a better job at being me, how would I go about seeing this transition through?

If you’ve ever had thoughts like this – stop them now! Shut them up immediately!

You are the only one that can live the life that you’ve created for yourself. You are the best one for the part. Only you can play out this role. You are unique – there is only one of you and only ever will be, only ever was just one of you. If you slip away your life will go unlived without you. The walls will tear down and all that’s left will be the place where your life should have been.

A friend recently said that her summer was magical. I was so proud of her as I watched her work so hard to give her children a number of wonderful experiences and memories. Camping trips, zoos, beach wanderings, hikes, parks, family, friends. She made garden stones out of artifacts collected from beaches that were visited. Picture books were printed. And when the adventures were all over, she kept them home to rest their tired heads.

So small, these things that a mother will do to build a life for their children. So many sacrifices gone unseen. So many doubts and fears that all that is done isn’t enough.

But this, my dear friend, is your magical life. Only you are fit for this role. And you are doing it just perfectly.

Mid-Life Solution

I recently heard an excellent definition of mid-life crisis. It is simply the realization that life does not get better. We spend our childhood and youths with hopes that the future is going to be a big, bright playground where all of our dreams will come true.

Next comes the reality of having to buy your own groceries, pay your own bills. The responsibilities of education or work. What cats and/or kids require. This is before we start caring for our own bodies that are inevitably ever-changing with age.

The realization that none of it is going to get any easier.

Well now, lets have a look at that. What makes life easier? Is it gadgets? Money? Health (definitive yes here). Friendships and support? Feeling worth? What does an easy day look like compared to a ‘hard’ one?

Hard days for me are the days when the things I attempt don’t turn out as I expect. I don’t have energy, I am sick or someone close to me is sick and I can’t get to the things I’ve planned. Time goes too quickly when I need more time.

What surprises me here is that receiving bad news does not make this list. Things out of my control – well, those are the things I can’t do anything about so why beat myself up about it? Disappointing, sad, infuriating – all of these things don’t necessarily mean hard. If the situation reasonably calls for anger, then that is okay for me too. These reactions are not my first choice, not necessarily easy but also not worthy of struggle.

In short, hard days are the ones where you try to control everything.

Easy days are the ones that go by as though the universe is perched symbiotically on your shoulder, making sure that all traffic lights turn when you want them to and all of your efforts work out as you hoped. Easy days can be challenging but are usually without expectation. The kind of day where you go with the flow and let things happen as they will.

In short, easy days are the ones where you give up control.

So is our problem that we built dreams in the first place? Is having expectations or willing a certain outcome the worst possible thing we could do for ourselves? Do people who have no desires end up the happiest, avoiding the great mid-life crisis altogether?

Buddhists would have a field day with these thoughts. According to Buddhist philosophy desire is the source of all suffering. But in my opinion it is not so much the desire itself that creates suffering. It is the thinking that you can completely control the when, where and how of achieving your desires.

I began writing this post without an answer. In fact, two days later I am finishing it because as always, the answer has come once I opened the door with the right question. At least an answer that works for me.

In my foray working in an ‘alternative’ bookstore in the nineties, I came across an author who spoke to me. Her name was Marianne Williamson. At the time I had no connection to the Christian faith, however, so many of her words were lost on me. Recently, I have begun reading her books again. And as these things happen, one printed from 1993 called A Woman’s Worth found me in a second hand store. It sounds like she wrote this shortly after turning forty.

In it is what I will call the mid-life solution. I will share it with you here:

“Without a spiritual life, what are we left with? What is there to strive for? Where do we look for clues? In magazines?

Here are some basics for spiritual renewal, what to do to make age less scary.

First of all, meditate. Do transcendental meditation, Christian meditation, Jewish meditation, Buddhist meditation, open-eye meditation, full-moon meditation, Quaker meditation – it doesn’t matter. Just do it.

Also, pray. Engage in some sort of daily spiritual practice – nonreligious, religious, whatever.

Above all else, try to forgive.

And lastly, treat your body well. Practice yoga or some equivalent form of concentrated physical exercise.

Do not look to your husband, your lover, your children, your job, your money, or your therapist to make you happy. It’s not their function, nor within their capacity to do so. Look to yourself, to the Goddess within you, and take responsibility for your own state of mind.

Women can be masters at negative programming. We constantly tell ourselves what is not right: our figure, our hair, our relationship, our job, the weather, someone else’s behaviour. Sometimes, we do this because we have legitimate complaints; at other times, we criticize simply because it is the turn of our minds to do so. Every time we do, regardless of why, we attack ourselves. We are programming our subconscious – the part of the mind that hears what we tell it and then creates more of the same – to manufacture the life we’re describing.

And then magicians that we are, lo and behold, we have a new, even more negative life the following day….

….We are not a little powerful; we are enormously powerful. Every time we say a negative word, we lay the mental plans for negative things. There is no escaping this law of the mind. As we think, so shall it be.

…Spiritual techniques cannot not work. The question is not whether they work but whether or not we actually do them. If we remind ourselves often of the woman we want to be, then the woman who has been masquerading as us all these years will breathe her last breath and give us back our life.”

Marianne Williamson: A Woman’s Worth – 1993 (some sentences removed, nothing changed).

My report card on this? I’ve done no manner of spiritual practise or intentional exercise since the farming season began. Some might say that farming itself can be meditative and/or exercise. I will say that the latter is true a lot of the time but the former completely depends on the individual approach. I have been a ball of negative promotion for my fragile mind.

Thank you Marianne, for reminding me to look somewhere bigger than myself for solutions.

I finish with this quote that has been circulating as an email for years and showed up in a recent blog post I read:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." -Marianne Williamson
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." -Marianne Williamson