Big Day, Big Thoughts

Today is a big day for our family. My mama arrived at Emory at 5 a.m. this morning for an angiogram and then will have a procedure that will hopefully successfully treat at least one of her brain aneurysms. My dad gave us an update and there’s another procedure before hers, so we won’t know anything until at least 3 p.m.

As for me, I’ll be headed to my midwife’s office this afternoon to get an ultrasound to check the length of my cervix and how this baby is growing as well as to receive another fFn test. If it comes back positive, I’ll be admitted to the hospital again (ugh) to start receiving steroid shots to give our little one’s lungs a boost. Then I’ll likely be placed on strict bed rest (rather than this modified business). I’m very hopeful we’ll get negative results, which will buy us more time. But either way, I’m ready.

Like none of my quasi-bed rest* experiences in the past, these last few weeks have offered the baby and me much growth. Each day we avert labor, the baby grows physically as I feel like I grow spiritually. In my previous pregnancies, I learned small lessons, but I don’t feel like I experienced anything truly transformative. This time is different, and I know putting it into words probably won’t sound all that life-altering to others, especially since many of these themes seem to resurface in my emotional and spiritual landscape (and on this blog and in my other writing). But I’ll do my best at sharing some of what’s been going on in my interior life and the lessons I’m slowly learning.

This enforced quiet time has made me realize how much I need to make solitude a priority. There’s just been too much noise in my life, and for too long I defined time alone as blogging or exercising when what I really needed was to just sit and do nothing but listen (even if it was only for five minutes).

Elizabeth Foss said this book was for me. I believe she was right. One of the habits of healthy mothers, the book’s author says, is cultivating solitude. (More on the book in a minute.)

Since about January, I’ve been trying to convince myself that I haven’t been burned out; I was simply on the fringe of frying but since I was aware of the flames, I could keep myself from becoming so overwhelmed that depression or anxiety or a total lack of enjoyment in mothering would take their hold on me. Everything was under control.

I was being foolish. You don’t have to be completely fried to feel the pressure – or to eventually collapse under it.

For example, what about my tone when a child spilled something or another sibling squabble erupted? I may have appeared to handle it calmly if you didn’t pay attention to the tightness in my face or my clenched fists or the hard tone of my voice, but I often felt as if I was ready to snap at any moment. And sometimes I did.

Yet, I kept telling myself my antsy, irritable moods were rooted in my being chronically tired. Nothing needed to change in my life except that I needed more sleep, and since squeezing in more shut-eye seemed like an impossible task at this point of my life with too crowded of a family bed, a toddler who had started waking up in the middle of the night again, and the typical pregnancy-related insomnia, I might as well just suck it up, offer it up, and just keep plodding along, dragging my “mombie” feet.

The truth is, sleep is most definitely an elixir for more happiness and more purposeful parenting, but a shortage of Zzzzzzs was not the only thing that left me feeling like I was always on edge and that one unplanned catastrophe – say a toddler writing with pen on a new couch – would cause me to lose my footing and send me on a frightening free fall.

Peaceful contentment or just plain happiness sounds simple enough. Don’t worry, be happy. Smile. Enough said. But it’s more complicated than that, especially for someone like me who has this annoying tendency to over-analyze everything and/or assume that I don’t deserve happiness because I’m such a screw-up (or because I’m not thin enough). That sounds a little harsh, but even when I wouldn’t admit it to myself, these self-deprecating thoughts were often just waiting to rise to the surface and show their ugly faces.

Thanks to Elizabeth (and being sidelined),  I gobbled up The 10 Habits of Happy Mothers: Reclaiming Our Passion, Purpose, and Sanity by Meg Meeker, M.D.  this weekend. My husband saw me resting and reading and noted, “You’re really into your book, huh?”

I was because I’m really into being a passionate, purposeful, sane, and happy mother, but somehow in the last few months I’d been so caught up in getting it right (and right to me too often translates to perfect) that I’d been losing out on the joy of just being a mom and being with my kids. I’d laugh and tell people I was a recovering perfectionist, but my recovery process had been stunted. I hadn’t even realized it, but I was once again holding myself to impossible standards (and sometimes doing the same with my children).

My preschooler would hit her sister (again), and I would become infuriated at her and myself wondering what I’d done wrong as a mom that I had a child who so freely used her hands instead of her words to express frustration. A child needed speech therapy, and I wondered if it might be because I hadn’t read to her as much as I had read to her sisters. Another child would balk at doing schoolwork (fun schoolwork like listening to a story and narrating it), and I made a global assessment of the situation that homeschooling would never work because we would always be at odds with one another. We’d have a wonderful morning, a nice quiet time, but in the afternoon the natives would become terribly restless. Anarchy ensued, and I’d forget about all the good moments and be convinced that all this togetherness was tearing us apart. All my girls would fall apart, and then I would, too, and I’d retreat into my room and cry and think they’d be better off away from me.

Meanwhile, I started getting anxious about losing the baby weight when I wasn’t even in my third trimester. As if being a few pounds heavier for the rest of my life would do anything – anything – to make my life any less worth living. Haven’t I been down this road before (over and over again)? Then I’d feel like a real louse because who was I to write a book that was purported to help women reclaim the beauty of Creation and make peace with their bodies? I was at a healthy place when I wrote that book. I really was. I wrote it from the heart, and I even remember when I received a proof back in the spring and was struggling a bit with the pregnancy weight that I couldn’t believe I was the same person who’d written some of these soothing, edifying words.  (And really I give it all back to God. I don’t know how that book even got written. It was totally and completely the fruit of God’s grace and a good editor, some really supportive family members, and friends.) My husband says I’m probably making my weight more of an issue than it really is as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. I never really felt worthy to publish a book on body image and beauty, and now I’m making sure that’s the case. There’s probably some truth to that.

If we continue to believe we’re not worthy to do something – be a mother, homeschool, write a book – our actions may start to reflect this. At least we’ll be right about something then. See this mess? See how I raised my voice at my kids? See how we didn’t even begin to accomplish all of our academic goals for the year (never mind that we had time and freedom for spontaneous trips to the mountains or spent lazy afternoons reading poetry together)? See how I can’t ever catch up on laundry and my bookcases are covered in a film of dust? Clearly, I’m not cut out to be a full-time mom, a homeschooling mom, a good housekeeper – you fill in the blank.

Who was I to be blessed with another baby growing inside of me?

Who was I to homeschool my kids when I didn’t seem to have an endless supply of patience like I always seem to assume every other mom must have?

Who was I to be writing a blog with the primary purpose of encouraging moms or helping them grow spiritually, or evolve into more gentle, happy mothers when I was just stinking up everything?

But something has changed during these weeks of increased quietude. What’s changing is how I ought to see myself. And what has helped me change is solitude.

Solitude is an antidote to burnout; being alone with just yourself is also very helpful at combating perfectionism.

I’ve been able to take a good, hard look at myself and see that I am capable of doing all of these things because I am what everyone stumbling along in this muddled world is: Human. I am broken. I am imperfect. But I am also very, very worthwhile. I have love to offer, wisdom to share, and a life to share with others. I am qualified to do all these things in large part because I am so unqualified.

I also recognized that I need to stop coasting along, thinking that you’re only allowed to ask for help or seek solitude (this is not a form of pampering or a luxury; it is absolutely necessary for me to be a calmer, happier wife and mother) when a doctor tells you you’re suffering from postpartum depression or you have to be on bed rest for the sake of your growing baby.

Recently, I’ve had time to assess the big things in life: My priorities, what I really want to accomplish with these days I’m blessed with. It’s been liberating to assess the big picture rather than rating my daily performance (or my kids’).

In her book, Dr. Meeker writes:

“You want to get it right and you assess your performance daily. What you need to know is that you assess your performance far more critically than your kids do—they just want you. Kids don’t care if you’re thin or plump, they don’t care if you make brownies from scratch, from a box, or if you buy them. They just want to eat the brownies with you. Feeling good about your value to them is important because the better you feel, the better your relationship with them will be and the happier both of you will be.”

{We interrupt this ruminating to say just how much we love that we can highlight any passage we like while reading our books on Kindle, and then all these bits of wisdom and food for thought are saved on Amazon when and if we want to nibble on them again or share them on our blog.}

My kids want me. My husband wants me. They want me the way I am right now: What feels like a useless lump permanently positioned at Bed Rest Central. I don’t have to prove anything to them or to anyone else. I’m valuable not because I do everything right (or perfect) but simply because I am here.

My nana, who turns 90 next week, was playing Bejeweled on my dad’s iPad recently. “You playing Bejeweled, Nana?” I asked.

“Always. I’m good for nothing,” she joked.

And I retorted, “Our worth is not in our doing but our being.”

She didn’t need to be producing or even winning at Bejeweled to impress any of us. Just being around my nana, this funny woman who’s a bottomless cistern of wisdom, is a gift. And maybe for my children and husband, just being around me is a gift, too. My value as a wife and mother is not solely based on everything I do for my family but everything I am to them.

I’m also seeing that I didn’t quite have the humility thing down either. I’ve been feeling the call to increase in humility to help counter my intrinsic vanity and pride, but I had it in my head that being humble was the same as being lowly. That in order to become little, I must cast my own essence of who I am aside and just shrink and even hide my strengths.

But Dr. Meeker reminds moms that real humility isn’t about embracing inferiority or being a shrinky-dink at all.

“Humility means appropriating an honest sense of one person’s worth relative to another’s worth…The truth is, we all have equal value. Once we accept that we share the same value as another, two things will happen: We will appreciate others more and we will appreciate our own worth more. We think of humility as seeing ourselves as lowly or less than others. In fact, humility is just the opposite. It is embracing a realistic look at our frailties as well as our strengths and then believing that we, just as other mothers who have their own frailties and strengths do, share inordinate value. We can love others because we can accept and love ourselves in our less-than-perfect states.”

To be humble, I don’t have to be less. I don’t have to be more either. I just have to be me and to be happy with the person I am and to also appreciate the talents and gifts others possess.

I have plenty of faults. I’d been too focused on them in recent months (it’s a recurring theme in my life). But I have ample strengths, too. Spending time with myself during these last few weeks and appreciating my own company has gently prodded me to see all that I do right.

So have my little mimics – the children who soak up the way I show my love to them and then, like a mirror, reflect it back to me. Madeline has started leaving me notes. I leave her notes all of the time. They mean something to her, and I must mean something to her because she shares her own notes and little drawings with me.

“God bless you, Mommy,” my 4-year-old says as she traces the shape of a cross on my forehead. She shares with me this bedtime ritual I have given her because it makes her feel special and because I am special to her.

Then recently Madeline had a sleepover at her Nana and Pop’s and when she returned, I heard her feet thump-thump quickly across our wood floors directly into my room where I was resting. She gently brushed a few loose strands of hair from my face and the first thing she said was, “How are you doing, Mommy? Are you feeling okay? Is the baby doing okay?”

I make every effort not to take credit for the good as a parent because I know that means I’ll have to take credit for the bad, too! :-) But my daughter’s empathy, her concern for the baby and me, offered me hope and reassurance that perhaps I am doing a few things right.

Dr. Meeker says that in order to be happy, moms must give up fear and hold onto hope and be optimistic about what’s to come. That’s what I’m doing today for my own mom who has had to cling onto a very tenuous hope lately as she battles chronic pain and myriad medical mysteries. I’m hopeful, too, as I wait to see what medical tests might reveal about our baby and the imminence (or not) of labor.

I’m also feeling very excited about being a busy mom again after this mandated period of rest. I’m looking forward to hunting down missing socks, plying my children with food, picking weeds in our yard, racing kids down our driveway, and scrubbing them clean in the bath. All those menial tasks that were starting to feel like a burden start to feel like a precious gift when you’re just an observing bystander to them all.

So whatever happens today, tomorrow, or weeks from now – whether we have to face our first NICU experience or not – I am hopeful. I am ready. I am eager to just show up as a mom to my children, a wife to my husband, and a concerned daughter to my own mama. Because that is more than enough. It’s everything to them. It’s everything to me, too.

 

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*I want to apologize if when I throw around the term “bed rest,” I’m misleading any moms who have truly had to suffer and endure  “real” bed rest and fight for their babies’ lives. I had someone share her story about how bed rest was a terrifying experience where slapping on lipstick, caring for other children in any way, and keeping a sense of humor were impossible. She also faced giving birth to a 28-week-old and having that precious child in the NICU for four months. I know how blessed I am. I know that if this baby was born tomorrow, everything would likely be fine. I know there are people who have faced far more difficult trials during pregnancy – and in life. And I know that pregnancy, motherhood (no matter how you arrive at it – through an easy pregnancy, after being supine in a hospital with a PICC line, through the emotionally draining process of adoption, etc.), and living a grateful life no matter your circumstances are all great tests in sacrificial love. I pray I’m always up to the test.