1/28/22
Our daily routine doesn’t leave a lot of free time: get the kids ready, school/daycare drop-off, work til a few minutes before pick-up ends, rush to pick-up, playground detour, make dinner, eat dinner, bedtime…and only once all that is done, a few precious obligation-free moments. Often by the time they’re all down, it’s late enough that all I want to do is passively take in something on a screen. But if I have any chance at time for myself, this is it. It becomes easy to see bedtime as something to get through so I can finally have some peace. Tonight I’m rushing things, eager to be excused, but as I try to escape the kids call out, “Wait! Consolation desolation!”
“OK,” I sigh, laying back in bed with them. “Tell me about your consolations and desolations.” We started the tradition sometime during the pandemic, a loose interpretation of an Ignatian spiritual discipline known as an examen. In the full-on version, you invite God to help you review mental tapes from the previous twenty-four hours, noticing spaces where God felt more or less present and walking through them, and what they mean for you, in God’s company. There can be overlap with best and worst moments, but it isn’t the same thing. God can feel present in some of the darkest places; the ordinary and overlooked can, upon reflection, turn out to be wellsprings of divine peace and joy. Often things surface that didn’t register in real time, and offer an invitation to pause and consider: Why that memory? What is going on under the surface I’m not fully attuned to?
For the 5 and under set, we still talk about God’s presence and absence, but without a storehouse of religious language and experience to draw on, it’s hard for me to convey what that might feel like: where did you feel like your heart was full of love, or joy? When did you feel a sense of being brave, or being safe? Where were you worried or scared? When did you feel yucky? I’m trying to give them language to start noticing, and describing what is going on inside. Even so, it is hard to know when they’re sharing anything beyond highlights and lowlights, or if what they share is even a real memory. Half the time the consolation is the lazy but perhaps still true “this very moment,” connecting together at the end of the day. Sometimes it just feels like an excuse to keep a parent there longer, procrastinating bedtime.
But every now and then, there’s gold. Tonight, my daughter looks up at me and grins, “My consolation is …” and starts to describe, in her eager, guileless way, the moment at the end of the school day when I show up and the front-desk teacher walkie-talkies the after-care classrooms. The teacher calls out my kids’ names and grades, and a few moments later, from separate sides of the school, my three and five year olds pop into different ends of the central hallway. They spy each other from across the hall and start running, arms open wide, calling each others’ names with glee as they meet in a running embrace, sometimes tumbling to the ground in the force of their affection. Then they stand up, turn toward me, and run together into my waiting arms. That moment, reuniting with her brother after a day apart, is today’s consolation. It seems exactly like a place where God is present.
02/21/22
A few weeks later, we are on vacation, our first real “let’s go to a new city and play tourists!” outing since Covid. Pre-Covid, we’d planned to drive down to Charleston, South Carolina for spring break, but like everything else, the trip was canceled. Seven years ago, shortly before my father died, my parents had a memorable visit there. I’ve never been, but between the family nostalgia and the food scene, I’m dying to visit. When we realize the school calendar has an additional mid-winter break crammed between winter break and spring break, we somewhat spontaneously drive down. Our first day in the city is magical: horse drawn carriage ride, oysters and cold drinks in the sun, splashing in the Pineapple fountain, all the biscuits we can eat in the park. With space to roam, adventures to be had, strangers to charm, our kids are pretty dreamy. We’re having a ball, and I’m awash with affection for this little tribe I’ve been graced with.
After the homestretch of a long morning outing, it’s time for the very best part of the day: the kids’ nap time. Even better than the few moments of evening free time, and rarer, a special treat on weekends and vacation, nap time is sacred. When my girls nap, I can finally be productive, accomplish all the things I want to do for myself, prune a rose, bake a cake, write a poem. De-clutter! Organize! Do our taxes! Read a book! Finally get the kids signed up for swim lessons! Finally respond to that text from a month ago! The possibilities are exquisite, but also endless. My ambition outstrips my capacity, and even two glorious hours of freedom will never be enough to accomplish a small fraction of what I dream of doing. I’m like a kid in a candy store with just a nickel to spend; at least I can have one thing, and I’d better make it good.
But over the past few years, an annoying and stubbornly persistent hunch has surfaced: the best way to spend my nickel might not be candy. What that looks like is giving over this precious, rare, short-lived time to nothing I can show for myself, nothing concrete or instagrammable. At the most basic level, it means realizing that often, it isn’t only my kids who need a nap. With all the projects on my list, doing nothing feels like waste. But the cost of ignoring my body’s demands can be comically disastrous.
Last night as we settle into our Charleston home, I have a total meltdown. I’m so mad that our takeout BBQ forgets to throw in the sauces that I launch the empty takeout bag across the kitchen with all the tantrum force I can muster. It floats limply, landing with a poof, denying me the satisfaction of a crash to mirror the frustration boiling over inside. I don’t even love BBQ sauce. But my body feels like it is at a breaking point and it is going on strike with some very basic demands: feed me, rest me. Nate is still putting the kids to bed, probably embracing the moment and treasuring their presence or something, while I huff from the kitchen, “I’m going to start eating dinner whether or not you join!” If that’s not a sign I need a nap more than a project, what is?
So today, once the girls are down, I eschew the espresso machine and make a beeline for the bed. There are things I want to have done, like another post on my blog, and things I would enjoy doing in the moment, like watching Bridgerton. But what my body most requires is sleep, and recalling with embarrassment yesterday’s tantrum, I’m ready to yield.
Shortly after I lay down, our three year old pipes up from the door of her room, “I’m ready to be done with my nap!” I remember a few weeks ago, when she was home from school due to Covid exposure and crawled to sleep in the guest bed in my office. She invited me to join her then, but I had to resist, I had to work. Right now there’s nothing else I have to do, or want to do. I go to her room, help her back into the bed, lay down next to her. She snuggles contendly into my arms, reaches up gently to touch my face in an unguarded gesture of affection, and within minutes, falls asleep in my arms.
That night when I put the kids to bed, instead of a single consolation I ask for the day’s top three memories. We had so many adventures! How could we condense it all to just one moment? But her consolation isn’t the biscuits, or splashing in the fountain, or even the ice cream, it’s me laying down with her, her falling asleep with me. A simple luxury, available for the taking anytime, for nothing but the opportunity cost.
“Leave the dishes in the sink, don’t overthink it” my favorite band beckons, in a dreamy lullaby of sorts, “join me on the porch if you can swing it.” In the midst of a long day of work, with more work still to be done, there’s the invitation to set it aside and sit on the porch with someone you love, watch the rosy glow of the sunset together. “Is this evening free or did it cost us everything?”
I find it compelling. I want to be on the porch, rosy glow on my face, drinking in beauty and letting the dishes stay dirty. It goes against something deeply ingrained in me: rest is the reward for work completed. The moments of free time I earn after the kids are in bed and chores finished, the first thing to cut. What do I make of the fact that the work will never be done? How do I account for the idea that rest isn’t something I earn at all, but a gift I receive, more freely available than my stinginess would ever allow? I’ve been trying to retrain myself, to count the beauty, connection, rejuvenation to be found in rest as necessary and valuable in themselves, not merely a reward for completing work. Even at the cost of work left undone. I believe it; I just struggle to embody it most of the time.
Yielding to rest, even bidding it, feels like a bold, defiant act, reinforcing other beliefs I struggle to embody: I am not what I generate or create. The good I seek doesn’t ultimately depend on me. It strikes the heart of the false self I’m always tempted to cultivate, the person who tries to work my way through and keep everything under control. The more I surrender to this practice, the more real these beliefs become. There’s an old adage that says faith isn’t believing the chair will hold you, it is sitting down in the chair. Choosing to rest–in the middle of uncompleted work–is sitting down in the chair.
2/25/22
It’s the final day of our vacation; we’re home but I’m still off work, feet up in a recliner, watching my kids play. It’s almost lunchtime, and I’m trying to finish up this piece, turn my ramblings into something I can post without the lurching feelings of both the vulnerability hangover that comes with sharing personally and the fear that the sharing is badly written. My three year old comes up to me and asks what I’m doing, and I tell her. “Writing a story about you,” I say. “And my brother?” she asks. “No, mostly you, about us napping together.” She looks up at me, face aglow, “Awww!” “I’ll read it to you when it’s done,” I promise. She grins. “Thanks mom!”
