Absence, Pneumonia, George Bailey, Rainstorms

Have you ever just not shown up? For your own life?

Just kind of kept hitting snooze and hoped your own reality would understand?

I do this, often.  I just get all busy about being busy and then I burn out and then I can't be bothered with my actual LIFE life portion of the program.

In college?  I pretended to be sick for MAKE A DIFFERENCE DAY.  Who skips out on Make a Difference Day?  That's like saying, "I do not want to make a difference.  I want world hunger to persist and I want my part in remedying it to remain unspoiled.  It is more important for me to catch up on my napping because I am a college student and I do not nap nearly enough three times a day to interrupt naptime for a couple hours of service to my community for which I will receive a free t-shirt and many donut holes." I apparently skip out on Make a Difference Day.  I pretended to Not Hear the voicemails from all of my earnest friends telling me they'd wait another 15 minutes for me...maybe I was still in the shower...or maybe I got the meeting place wrong or...

Maybe I just was an epic fail of a person at showing up for her own life.

In my home, you would not believe how often I fail to show up.  Um, hallo. Clearly too busy here watching "House Hunters" and "Design on a Dime" to swiff the floor right now!  Or paint a cream-colored wall covered in finger prints that I ruefully stare at every day wondering why I have lived here 3 years and still expect Kool-Aid man to come bursting through the wall and give me an excuse to give that wall some attention.

***

This week, the following happened:

Lovey Loverpants got pneumonia.

***

This week, I started showing up for my own life.

I did dishes and laundry and spent time cleaning a home in which the mess was not mine, all of which I have failed to show up to do for months and months and months.

I went grocery shopping with Little Man at 7 a.m.

I bathed Little Man at midnight o'clock, and then rocked him while singing to Baby Girl at dead tired o'clock.

I learned to redirect Baby Girl's petulant behavior. I schlepped Baby Girl to daycare even though she just started falling to pieces about going.

I prayed and I prayed and I prayed.  For strength. ***

The strength came.  It came from the recesses of places in my mind and heart that had grown dim and moldy from inattention.  You know the part in "It's a Wonderful Life" when George Bailey scampers around the house just loving on his old dilapidated home with the drafts and shifty staircase?  That's how I felt this week.  I felt delirious from the exhaustion, but also delirious from the reminder that, Ahh, this life is just a mess, a great complicated mess, but how lucky I am with this gorgeously messy family to care for and this simple purpose:  just to make sure there are bananas and cereal and clean cloth diapers and the crumby floors get picked up so that there are no ant picnics indoors.

Oh, this messy, simple, loud and gorgeous life!!!!! ***

Loverpants, please get better soon, though.  I would make an awful single parent, and we know you are suffering and we miss you so.

***

Here is Baby Girl looking up at me.  We are playing a game called "On your marks..."  It is a very complicated game we invented, no one could possibly have come up with it other than we, especially since we made it up in a rainstorm.

Little Man.  Love.

One Sweet Day

Not that we're keeping score, but today is the 10th anniversary of my first Valentine's Day with Lovey Loverpants in which he was confused by my verbiage and thought that when I said, "We are going out to dinner," I meant with him and not my roommates. This misunderstanding meant he drove 7 hours to my apartment in DC and was dressed in a BOWTIE awaiting my arrival so that we could go out to dinner.  Only, shoooooot!  I had just eaten!  With my roommates.  Don't you remember? So I ordered him a pizza and together we enjoyed it, he eating it, and me enjoying him in a bowtie.

To let the circle go unbroken, we celebrated tonight with a similar circular-shaped pie, only with Baby Girl (and, by extension, Wee En Utero Baby).  We all ate together this year, though, and that was sweet indeed.

***

Prior to that, though, there were CHOCOLATE BUFFETS to orchestrate, and this was perhaps one of my proudest feats in the kitchen to date.  I hosted a little Mary Kay showing of our new products (and still have a few gift bags and one of these gift boxes left if you are in the market, I'll send it your way with free shipping). To sweeten the deal, I offered my guests a self-guided tour of chocolate.  Somehow we all managed to find our way....

***

Chocolate Pretzel Tart

Homemade strawberry marshmallows

Made with help from Baby Girl

The world's largest shmallow

A glimpse of the buffet:

A few valentines made by Baby Girl and a gluestick:

A few of my sweethearts

I am barely Proverbs 31ing it

When it comes to how we operate as a couple, how we run our household, and how we exist as a family, the little things are extremely important to us. A simple post-it note with our code word (what? you don't have one with your loverpants, too?), a text when I'm standing in line at the post office, a sink of dishes cleaned without supplication --these rule the Loverpants school.

So when I examine the things that I have been especially begrudging lately, this is what I see:

How am I to be faithful in large matters, like raising a child that doesn't just know it's wrong to keep turning the dial of the vending machine with all the slime globes in it even though one knows they're going to keep coming out for free because the machine is BROKEN. I want my kid to know it's wrong and therefore, to do the right thing. Which is what I should have done in the lobby of Kmart in 1989 when my mother was still checking out her Laura Ashley towels at the register.

How can I be faithful in the big matters when I am so whiney in the little matters? How can I accept and be diligent in the tasks that this world so needs to be done when I am throwing a hissy to match up my own socks?

I think about Proverbs 31 --the chapter I made a part of my vows, my anthem for our marriage, our household, our family. It describes a woman who is so lofty compared to me. She never complains. She gets up early without being a total bearcub about it. She tills her garden. She probably matches up all her socks and those of her kids.

I read this recently and I realized what I was missing.

King Lemuel describes an amazing woman in the last chapter of Proverbs. It would profit every Christian wife to read this chapter often. She is a talented woman. In fact, she even helps with the income.¹⁰¹ It is not wrong for a wife to pursue a career if it does not interfere with her domestic responsibilities. Judging from all that she does for her family, the ideal woman of Proverbs 31 is an industrious, self-disciplined woman who schedules her time carefully. Nothing is too much trouble for her. She even rises before daybreak to prepare breakfast for her family.¹⁰² One word is probably more important than any other in the passage. It is the word that describes her sustaining attitude: “She worketh willingly with her hands.”¹⁰³¹⁰⁴

The literal meaning is “with pleasure.” Her deepest joy and satisfaction is found in making her family happy. You see, the Lord is interested not only in what we do, but also in how we do it. Our attitude matters to Him. When a Christian wife is yielded to Christ she will be able to accept her God-given role joyfully, and her husband’s heart will cry “Amen” when he reads the words, “The man who finds a wife finds a good thing; she is a blessing to him from the Lord!”

I may not find pleasure in the actual work of the little things, but the little things do amount to something much bigger than socks and spilled milk and the total crap job I do of cleaning the bathroom every. single time. But I can find pleasure in knowing that the love I have for my family is manifested in some fractional way by the instance of my refilling the toilet paper, and even if my family doesn't thank me for it, Someone Upstairs is pleased with me. Nothing says loving.