For a lot of things. I'm not quite ready to say goodbye to white lights. I put away all the Christmas stuff last week but I just couldn't handle how naked and bare everything looked, so I re-did the mantle in a less Christmas-y, more 'winter light' style. I'm pleased.
I'm also not ready for a baby. For the time being, we're not expecting any. But God sometimes has a strange sense of humor.
For instance, we've struggled for years to get our kids to sleep decently. During the night is still kind of a challenge, with Jack waking up and sneaking into our bed at some point every night. It's rare, the morning I wake up in bed alone and I instantly think something's wrong because I'm not sandwiched between two wiggly boys. I read every popular book on children's sleep and we tried every trick(except for letting little babies cry; I can't do it), mostly to no avail. Recently, we moved Matteas' crib from its spot next to our bed into Jack's room. Previously, I would lie down in our bed with Matteas and snuggle him to sleep, but it sometimes took up to 45 minutes and then he'd still be in our bed to shout at me in the middle of the night. He is sometimes an angry sleeper. He doesn't really wake up all the way, he just yells. Then, if he can find me, he has to feel my hair and pet my face for about an hour before he can go back to sleep. I was going crazy.
My New Year's resolution was to identify everything in my life that isn't working and change it until it does. I got an early start with Matteas, moving his crib into Jack's room in early December.
It worked.
I put him in his crib, pray with him, kiss him goodnight, and leave the room. He lies there quietly and goes to sleep, usually in five minutes or less. He almost always wakes up sometime in the night, but I can usually pat him on the back if it's before I got to bed or, if it's at 5 a.m. like today, just put him in bed with me and we can all go back to sleep.
Life-changing. Aaron and I can get in bed together at night and talk. Or read. With the light on. I love co-sleeping and I'm sure I'll continue to do it with any more babies we have, but Matteas is hardly a baby anymore. So it seemed like it was working really well and everyone was getting more rest, and I was feeling so on top of my game that I even e-mailed a friend about the changes we'd made in the hopes she might find something she could use to put her kids to bed more smoothly.
And then the whole day went south. It was like God saw my pride and instantly hit the "smite" button for the rest of the day, because everything that used to go well didn't. It went very, very badly, very loudly, in public.
It was Jack's turn to bring snack to school that day, which starts around lunch time. That gave me plenty of time to get the boys to the store in the morning and pick up snack as well as some stuff for dinner. I always put Matteas in the back pack at the grocery store when I have both of the boys by myself, and Jack is usually very well-behaved walking next to me. If he has trouble, he goes into the cart and the trouble usually ends.
Something was up with him yesterday. He whined, he ran away from me, he touched everything, even knocking down several displays. He threw fits when he didn't get what he wanted. Usually, he is shockingly mature about just looking at things and not touching them or asking to by them. During Christmas time, we could walk through the toy section of Costco without incident. Yesterday we were only at QFC and he was going to pieces over not getting something from a mark-downs cart in the floral section. He started melting down, and I warned him that if he couldn't behave in the store there would be consequences when we got home. Furious, his upper lip curled in defiance, he made a fist and held it suspended a few inches above his crotch. I had no idea where this was going.
"If you don't let me have what I want, I'm going to punch myself in the penis! In the PENIS!"
People are watching at this point, but I manage to respond evenly, "Go ahead; it's your penis."
Realizing he'd made a tactical error, he resorted to throwing a tantrum. Matteas, still cheerful in the back pack, found inspiration for a song and began singing in a loud, happy voice a song about "Three penises, three penises, three BIG penises!"
At this point, mothers of little girls are scowling at me. I gather the rest of my groceries and what is left of my pride and we exit the store as quickly as possible, not escaping another meltdown(this time over a balloon) in the checkout line.
And later, bedtime is weird too. Matteas falls asleep in my lap while we're reading, which is never good. If he falls sleep anywhere other than in his bed, he wakes up shortly thereafter and he is disoriented and angry. Before that even happened, Jack couldn't sleep. He'd woken up at his usual time and I'd put him to bed at his usual time, but last night he just laid there staring at the ceiling.
And then Matteas wakes up, yelling and totally out of it.
I go in and hold Matteas, sitting in the chair between the boys' beds. Jack squirms around in his bed, making enough noise to ensure that Matteas can't fall back to sleep. After 45 minutes of shenanigans, I manage to get them both back to sleep in their own beds. I emerge from the bedroom feeling beaten and defeated, the cumulative struggles of the day making my nerves raw.
It was that damn e-mail, I know it.
"God, why must you humble me in such torturous ways?"
"Why must you be prideful?"
"I was only trying to help; I even said I knew my advice might not be helpful, I made room for differences."
"Maybe you should spend a little more time focusing on getting your own life in order, and less time trying to tell other people how to order their lives."
"Does this mean I'm going to get pregnant because I launched that
NFP blog?"
"We'll see. It depends on your attitude."
"Well, thanks for making coffee, anyway. I'm going to need it tomorrow morning."
"I always give you what you need; when will you learn that?"
"See, that's where I feel we disagree; I feel very strongly that I don't NEED whiny, sleepless children who embarrass me in public, hinder my productivity and deprive me of sleep."
"Are you sure? You don't think you NEED lessons in patience and humility?"
"You've got a point there, God; but must you teach me patience in humility in such infuriating ways? Wouldn't it be easier for me to learn if it was, like, easier?"
"Oh, don't think I didn't try; it was difficult to get your attention. I had to step up My game before you'd listen."
"Well I hear You now God, loud and clear."
"Just remember, there are seasons in life; a time to reap and a time to sow. Right now your family is in a learning season."
"Again, I'm going to have to disagree a little bit. Were you not listening yesterday? Clearly, it's penis season."
I took a little blogging break there for a while. There was some stuff going on that I couldn't blog about and it's hard for me to blog when there's stuff going on that I can't blog about. It turned out alright for now, but I was pretty distracted for a bit.
I've been thinking a lot lately about what's okay to blog about and what isn't, and while I don't have water-tight criteria, for the most part I stay away from telling other people's stories. Not everyone wants their stuff out there on the internet, and I get it; it's kind of scary to expose yourself, even when the exposure is controlled. And really, even the nosiest person probably has a limit for Too Much Information. Truthfully, I kind of panicked a little after I put up my NFP blog. I think it's still ingrained in my subconscious that talking about sex, even NOT having it, is taboo. So I panicked, but I put it up anyway because I thought about how grateful I would have been to have known that information when Jack was three months old, and someone else in a similar position might be grateful to find it.
I had another reason for putting up the NFP blog. In recent years a number of things have come up that I wished had been a conversation earlier. For example, no one ever once heard my brother Karoly say that he wanted to kill himself. He didn't talk about it. My guess is, like a lot of the other stuff he didn't talk about, he was ashamed. It can be tricky, growing up Catholic and emerging without a strong sense of shame. I once heard the difference between guilt and shame defined like this: guilt is directed at the action, shame is directed at the person. Guilt lets you know when you've made a poor choice, shame makes you feel worthless. I know the traditional phrase is "Catholic guilt," but I think shame is really more accurate. That phrase has always irritated me but I didn't really understand why until I'd done a few things that I was ashamed of. I know now that it irritates me because it's a distortion of the way things really are, of the way they ought to be. If a person is really and truly Catholic in an authentic sense, they would know that shame has no place in the Church. To feel shame is to believe God doesn't have the power to forgive you. I was standing in the back of a church with Jack once when he caught sight of the confessional and asked me what it was. He was three years old and we'd never really discussed Confession before, so I wanted to choose my words very carefully because I know how lasting first impressions can be. I said "That's a confessional. If someone has made some poor choices, that's a special place where they can go and talk to a priest about their choices, and the priest will help them make some better choices."
"Oh," said Jack, totally unfazed.
I still struggle with my attitude towards Confession. On the one hand, no one really wants to rattle off a list of their shortcomings in a public forum for all to hear. On the other hand, it tends to impart an illicit quality to something you do in a dark little room with the door closed, your voice barely louder than a whisper so that the people waiting outside won't hear you. You don't want them to know. It might change how they feel about you if they knew. But the fact of the matter is, it doesn't change you.
I'm all for discretion. I don't think that personal disclosure should be done in a way that is focused on scandal or generates gossip. I think it should be done in a way that is open and honest and authentic, in a way that says "I'm a real person with real struggles, just like everyone else." I once heard a priest say "You think you're original sinners; I've been listening to your confessions for 20 years and I've got news for you: you're all the same."
I know people who have carried dark secrets to their graves, and after they're gone and the truth comes out the reaction is mostly: big deal. I can't imagine keeping a secret about myself because I'm afraid my family will disown me if they know. I don't want that kind of weight. Aaron and I have both made choices we're not proud of, and we've told each other about those choices. We accept each other in totality, no exceptions. It's an amazing feeling, to know that someone knows absolutely everything about you, strengths and weaknesses, joys and fears, and loves you unconditionally anyway. I wouldn't know what that felt like if I held back. I don't want to live my life holding back; it's a waste of time and it leads to relationships that aren't authentic. It also saddens me to think that some people are so insecure in their relationships that they think someone might stop loving them if they really knew everything about them.
That being said, I'm not going to start posting everything I've ever done on my blog. I don't recommend that for anyone. Spewing all your flaws to anyone who will listen isn't real honesty anyway, and the people I know who do that sort of thing use it as a way to keep from changing, to keep playing and replaying the messages they tell themselves about who they are. It's a voluntary abdication of power: I am this person who screwed up this and that way and that's just who I am.
What I do recommend is, if there's something you don't want to talk about, ask yourself why you don't want to talk about it. The answer is probably that you want to avoid judgment. The interesting thing is, perfect people are boring. And they're not real; no one is perfect. I find it much more comforting to read about other moms who struggle to be good wives and mothers than the moms who appear not to struggle at all. Not struggle doesn't help me, I can't learn anything from that. In my experience anyway, not talking about things has done far more damage than too much talking.
That's why lately, I've found the hard parts of my life comforting. If I'm struggling it means I'm working, that I'm actively and consciously engaging what is challenging to me. It means I'm not keeping the hard parts out of the conversation, that the trouble spots are talked about, addressed, not passed over or swept under the rug to fester for years. This is the sentiment I was trying to get at when I named my blog "Body of Work," a term usually used to refer to a bunch of lovely finished products produced by an artist. I want my life to be both: lovely finished products, and ongoing work. I want my kids to feel like they can tell me and Aaron anything, no matter how awful it seems to them, so they will know they really and truly are loved no matter what. I expect a lot of those conversations will be hard, but they will be real. I'll take hard and real over easy and false any day.
And in the spirit of authenticity, I thought I should let you see my kitchen. Sure I make a lot of beautiful food, but I also make a lot of mess while doing it. And in the spirit of engaging life's challenges, I'm going to get off the computer and go clean the kitchen. It's good to be able to talk about the problem areas, but it's not terribly helpful unless you're willing to do something about them.
