My new art project

I had an "oh, duh...." parenting moment a couple weeks ago.

Queen Mab loves to write little notes to people. She'll scribble a little, draw a heart, and announce that it's a letter for Nana, or Daddy, or Auntie Kate (she's started pronouncing the "au" in Auntie like "ah," which is really delightful) So when I discovered while unpacking a bunch of little notepads left over from high school with my maiden name on them (I didn't write many notes back then!) I gave them to her.

Then Valentine's Day happened, and the deluge began.

There were little notes EVERYWHERE. Little hearts, little stars, little scribbles, piled up in the corners of the kitchen and the pantry and getting soggy on the bathroom floor. It was madness. I gathered fistfuls of them to recycle.

One day, though, she asked me if I would draw her a heart.

So I did, and I hung it in the entryway doors so she could see it as soon as she came home from school. She was ecstatic.

She liked it so much, in fact, that a week or so later as she and I spent a pleasant hour drawing together, I made her this.

Of course she loved it too.

But it wasn't until several weeks later that I realized, as I swept up still more little scribbled notes, that if this was how she was trying to communicate her love to us, maybe that's because this is what would make her feel loved. So I scribbled this down one day and stuck it in her lunchbox.

When she came home from school she was practically bouncing. She loved it! She told me how happy she was when her teacher read it to her!
...

Oh, right. She can't read yet (well, not well enough to read Mommy's scribbled notes, anyway).

So I started sending stuff like this instead.

A sauropod having a snack, Mab with her Nana and Papa, a Happy Thursday sunflower, and a tap-dancing Triceratops.

I like to think her behavior has improved since she's been getting these little notes. But even if it's not, it's still worth the effort, because I know she feels loved. Yesterday on the way home from school, she told me how much she liked the picture she'd gotten that day (the sauropod eating an apple) and said, "You're a really good artist, Mommy. I can tell you put a lot of effort into that."

If I hadn't been driving I would have hugged her. It was hilariously adorable to hear her saying back to me the same things I say to her about her artwork.

And Mab isn't the only one who's benefiting from this. It's hard parenting Mab sometimes. I think it's probably harder being Mab, though. The world is an intense place when you have big emotions, limited life experience, and everyone else is twice as big as you (except the toddler, who is the same size and always wants the exact thing you're holding/doing right at that moment). And when I spent a few minutes every day trying to think of what kind of little picture I can draw that will make her smile, I find myself seeing the world from her perspective. And when she's furious and exhausted and screaming and hitting, it's easier to pick her up and go sit someplace quiet with her until she's calm enough to talk to me, rather than scream back. 

I remember reading about an analysis of a bunch of studies on the efficacy of spanking children, which revealed that while spanking didn't actually improve the child's behavior (if anything, it had the opposite effect), it did make the parents think the behavior had improved. When I make these notes for Mab, I feel more connected to her, and that sense of connection helps me parent her more patiently. I lose my temper less, and so even if her behavior is the same, I feel better about it because I'm not losing control over the situation.

Even if her behavior hasn't improved, mine certainly has, and the end result is a happier, more peaceful Mab and Mommy.

The blog post is pretending to be about yoga but is secretly me working out some thoughts for my Kalamazoo paper

On my previous post about the word “awareness,” my friend Kate commented on my Facebook link that “I think in yoga-speak awareness is like mindfulness, not just knowing that something exists but paying attention to that thing, in this case, the sensations that yoga is producing in you, which seems ridiculous at the beginning but gets easier with time.”

Which made concrete (concretized?) something that I had a sense I should be doing but of course didn't really grasp and was not terribly good at. Yoga, once I didn’t have to dedicate all my effort to the plain old “what is this and how do I do it and is this really a good idea?” thinking, has ended up being the place where all my writing thoughts happen. Of course, even after this reminder I still think about writing while doing yoga because I haven’t really had the necessary time to practice yet. Also, I rationalize it by telling myself I’m thinking about writing about my body and yoga, so there’s that.

But pursuing this line of thought also sent me down some other bunny trails. I have a sense that paying attention to how my body feels when I stretch and push it isn’t entirely distinct from paying attention to and loving on the people and places that surround me. After all, paying that kind of attention to my body tends to lead to me loving it ("Oh, what a nice patient body you are! Thanks for trying to cooperate with me when you would rather not! Also, while we’re on the subject, you’ve done an awesome job with the whole carrying-babies, thing, not only on the inside but also in my arms and on my back. That’s hard work! I love you, body. High five."). I recently stumbled across a collection of essays that discusses that in a lot more detail (Yoga and Body Image ed. Melanie Klein and Anna Guest-Jelly, Llewellyn Publications, 2014), because everything I know I read in books. I’m a veritable Twilight Sparkle.

At any rate, my research tends to consider the ways in which our bodies themselves are not entirely distinct from our environment. Some people call that “posthumanism”—the idea that our bodies include/overlap/intersect with our transportation, our technology (David refers to his smartphone as his “brain extension device”) and so on. See Donna Harroway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” for example. But the delightfully controversial Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has argued in Medieval Identity Machines that this was actually a very common perspective for medieval authors as well. 

Take a look at the Zodiac Man, for example (go ahead and check Google Images for examples—I’ll wait. Cohen’s is from Biblioteque Nationale MS lat. 11229 fol. 45r, but there are many others). There’s a human body, but with arrows and lines shooting out of it connecting him to the stars. Medieval medicine (yes, that was a thing—also, they bathed. Let’s not have any of what C.S. Lewis termed chronological snobbery around these parts ;-) ) was very concerned with how the movements of the stars and planets affected the movement of the humors in the body. As Cohen takes readers through his examples in art and literature, medieval bodies reveal themselves as not just organs and skin and bones and muscles, but also stars and planets and continents and weapons and tools and (in the case of knights) horses and armor.

Which makes me wonder. If medieval monks had invented yoga, what would it look like? What if Margery Kempe or Julian of Norwich had been yoginis?

Awareness (and a garden update)

The word "awareness" bothers me. Most basically, it means that you know a thing exists, like having awareness that there may be traffic on the street, hopefully resulting in looking both ways. It's also developed a more nuanced meaning of being deliberately conscious of things like breast cancer and domestic violence and other social issues, though these calls for "awareness" mostly seem to stop with, "Hey! Thing exists!" (like those gimmicky bra color things on Facebook on Breast Cancer Awareness Day, which I loathe). I don't think anyone today isn't aware of the existence of cancer, or violence, or whatever. Calls for mere awareness seem grossly inadequate to the challenge.

So when the directions on a yoga website instructed me (paraphrasing because I don't remember exactly) "with every breath commit to greater awareness," I interpreted it as, "Blah blah blah buzzword blah." What am I supposed to be aware of? And why does it matter? But I tucked the idea that awareness is to be committed to someplace safe where it wouldn't get lost.

Today Glennon of Momastery posted on Facebook, "It's World Autism Awareness Day. To all the little ones with autism: we are not just aware of you, WE LOVE THE BLOODY HECK OUT OF YOU. We are not just aware of you, WE VALUE YOU and THE GIFTS that only YOU, JUST THE WAY YOU ARE, can offer our world."

Yes. Ok. Thank you. When someone tells me to be aware of Thing, I should read that instead as "LOVE THE BLOODY HECK OUT OF" everyone involved.

So I started thinking about the awareness that the skinny-stretchy-bendy yoga lady in the picture online told me to commit to. And I remembered gardening yesterday with Margaret. She was sent home from school on Tuesday with a low-grade fever, and being the responsible parent I am (forgetting that I'm the one who sent her to school when she obviously wasn't feeling like her usual self in the first place) I kept her home for a full 24 hours after her temperature was normal, which meant that on Wednesday, she was feeling fine and I wasn't going to let her spend all day watching Dinosaur Train.

We went outside and planted sunflowers, zucchinis, and a pumpkin.

They went here because no one wants to mow this area and the sooner it gets turned into a garden the better.

We checked on the little sprouts that I posted pictures of a few weeks ago. I'm thinking daffodils.

There were these little purple crocus things that seemed so fragile I couldn't imagine how they would ever survive in our yard, but here they were.

Also these. No idea what they are, but they're intriguing.

Later I took all the minions for an adventure in the field behind our house, sleeveless in the sunshine.

So. Awareness. Small things growing (both children and plants), sun on my back, birds singing (there's one that's been spending a suspicious amount of time in the neighbors' shrub--perhaps a nest?) and an intensely blue sky.

Every day I will commit to loving the heck out of it all. And believing that the heck is being loved out of me, too.

Rights, doing right, and Holy Week

I started writing this Wednesday night after my sister asked for a blog post, and I realized I hadn’t actually written much here lately, even though I feel like I’ve been writing all the time. But lately I’ve been using up all my writing mojo on academia-related things (job letters, a couple conference papers), which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Writing these materials has forced me to balance two necessary but opposing forces in my life right now—saying “no” to the things I don’t want, while also saying “yes” to the things I do. Deciding what I’m into, and what I’m not. I’ve thought a lot about what I don’t need or expect from this new chapter in my life, and that approach is necessary but by itself a dead end. So in many ways, it feels really good to write a cover letter, because it forces me to remember how awesome I am at teaching and research and to imagine what I do want from a job. Painting an image of myself as a teacher and scholar has been a shift away from this idea of “what am I not?” to “what am I?”

It’s easy for me to be negative about things—not in a pessimistic sense, in which everything is terrible, but in the sense that I have become adept at looking at something and realizing that it’s not for me. I look at the goals I had been pursuing earlier in my graduate studies—the idea that I would be a tenured professor at a research-oriented university with an office with bookshelves and a window and maybe some kind of potted plant—and think, “Maybe not.” I’ve spent a lot of energy on clearing out unhealthy assumptions and preconceived notions about my future, about Life, the Universe, and Everything. There are a lot of things I thought I wanted out of life that I’ve decided aren’t actually right for me, and even more things I thought I knew about God that I no longer believe.

In reference to God, there’s a word for that: apophatic theology. And having always believed that growing close to God was about learning more things about God, it’s been refreshing to realize that there’s a long tradition of doing the exact opposite—contemplating what God is not. And this approach to the attributes of God has, of course, much broader implications for how I relate to the world. I see churches that limit who gets to do what based on reproductive organs and businesses that try to discriminate against who they’ll serve based on religious differences, and I think, “That’s not of God.”

But like I said above, deciding what I don’t want, what I don’t believe, and what the world shouldn’t be like is only half the process.  

Last spring there were a bunch of blogs I quit reading, not because I disagreed with them, but because the bloggers in question spent almost every post writing about what was going on in the world and in the church that was wrong. And there’s a place for that. But it’s exhausting to only be fighting against, and not fighting for.

You can probably guess, having read this far, my general feelings on Indiana’s new RFRA. I don’t live in Indiana anymore, but in many ways, it’s still home. I’ve heard lots of chatter about what the RFRA does and doesn’t mean, and how it’s the same as, yet also dangerously different from, similar laws in other states (including my current state, which also has laws protecting people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity).

To be honest, I don’t know enough about the topic to issue a simple “this is wrong,” and I’m certainly not a Constitutional scholar (would I be more employable if I were, do you think?). But I think Fred Clark at Slacktivist (linked above) hit on what bothers me the most about this act—“the language of RFRA is being twisted to turn an attempt to defend the rights of religious minorities into a tool for defending the hegemony of religious majorities.” Especially considering that the religious majority that this law caters to is a tradition that worships a God who, while walking the earth in human form, had a reputation for partying with sinners, asserted that he did not come to be served but to serve and told his disciples that if they were compelled to cooperate with members of a pagan occupying army to not only cooperate, but to do exactly twice as much as required. 

This is Holy Week. I hope I don't need to remind anyone what God did this week. 

As Christians following our sacrificed God to the Cross this week, our focus should be what on how we can serve others, no matter who they are or what we think about them, and not on who we can avoid associating with. There’s a big difference between something being a right, and something being right.

So right now, rather than simply say “NO” to this so-called right, I want to find something right to which I can say “YES.”

If you live in Indiana, please support these businesses. (also see http://www.openforservice.org)

Spring!

Spring is here!

I almost didn’t think it was possible—when David and I came up to Lemont to look at houses, it was already an icy-gray autumn. And it only got colder. Then it snowed….and snowed….and snowed….

I didn’t even know what my backyard looked like.

The thaw arrived this week with a sudden flare of warm sunlight, and the only snow remaining is in the dingy, shriveled piles that line our neighbors’ driveway. Margaret went to recess today in tulip-adorned galoshes and no snowpants (also tights and a baggy t-shirt under a halter-top sundress, but I digress...). Meanwhile, during Blaise’s nap I went out back to pick up sticks and choose a home for some transplants that have been sleeping for the past few months in their little pots under the snow, tucked in a sheltered corner next to the house.

I found these.

I don’t know what they are, but they're beautiful. They’re clustered all over the place, among the rocks and gray trees lining the WPA-constructed drainage ditch that cuts our backyard in half. It was desolate over the winter.

Which of course has me thinking about resurrection and Resurrection. Most days I almost don’t think it’s possible. Then there’s a thaw and I see little buds waking up in the sunlight—little buds that I didn’t even know existed—and I think….well, maybe….

I don’t know what it will be, but I hope it's beautiful.  

sin and my smartphone

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I really like systems and rules and structures. Clear, explicit expectations for my performance are reassuring and comfortable, and vague instructions make me anxious and tense.

So the major cause of my stress during this Lent is that, for the most part, I don’t have a nice clear set of rules to follow. Let me explain:

I need to break my addiction to my smartphone, particularly Facebook. For a long time, my phone became the thing to flip open when I was so stressed I couldn’t think—when I was dealing with an existential crisis and a dissertation and if left to sit in silence my choices were to doubt the existence of God or to doubt the existence of a valid argument in chapter three. In those situations, a Candy Crush or bubble shooter app is essential for maintaining sanity. And you know, I don’t begrudge myself that coping mechanism. It wasn’t optimal, but coping mechanisms usually aren’t—they’re for dealing with non-optimal situations, after all! But it became a habit, and now that the stress is gone, I still have a phone in my pocket that I pull out every time Things stop happening for more than fifteen seconds or so. Or even if the Things in question just don’t seem to require my full and undivided attention, which has given me the sinking feeling for some time that a lot of Life is happening when I’m not looking.

There are a couple of problems with simply giving my phone up for six weeks. For one thing, my smartphone IS MY PHONE. We don’t have a home phone. So why not just give up Facebook? Well, me giving up Facebook for Lent would also mean forcing my family and friends to give up news and pictures of grandkids for Lent (I mentioned this to my mom, and she assures me that not giving up Facebook is the right choice :-P) Living three (or more) hours away from all my people limits my options as far as cutting myself off from temptation goes.

So for the past week I’ve been making little rules for myself about when using my phone is and isn’t ok. Like, “Ok, you can check Facebook once during the day while you’re nursing Blaise before his nap, but then no more!” or “Don’t do anything online once Margaret is home from school!” or—well, you get my drift. But then I check Facebook real quick in the morning while I’m waiting for the water to boil for coffee and the kids are in the living room looking at books anyway, or I have to get online to look up the recipe for tikka masala for dinner after Margaret’s home (because that’s a lot of spices that I never remember), and then I feel like a failure.

The other day I read this blog post on Lent, which on the one hand felt very familiar to me with the sense of shame at failing an easy fast (neither this blogger nor I are Catherine of Sienna!) and on the other hand just felt very off. I remembered a friend who had posted on Facebook on Ash Wednesday, “Giving stuff up is to Lent as Christmas shopping is to Advent. ‪#‎notthepoint.” While Voskamp’s conclusion, that “[g]rief is what cultivates the soil for the seeds of joy,” is true and beautiful, I can’t help but think that spending our days trying to beat ourselves into perfection and then feeling bad when we fail isn’t actually what we need. There’s already enough grief in the world to cultivate vast acres of joy without deliberately increasing our reservoir.

The point isn’t that I shouldn’t be using Facebook—it’s that I should be present and listening to God and to the other people around me, and Facebook distracts me from that. Feeling guilty over checking Facebook, on the other hand, doesn’t make me more present. It just makes me more distracted and depressed over my failure.

Then what am I doing to make myself present? So far what has worked best is simply not keeping the phone in my pocket. It’s on the kitchen table, where I can get to it easily if I need to, but I can’t indulge the reflex every time life slows down (which is frequently these days).

I would like to think there are broader implications here than just Lent. What do you think?

dust

Last year, Lent marked a major transition in our family. There were big decisions made about how we were going to practice our faith and hand it down to our kids. This year is different. The choices I'm making feel smaller and less spiritually and emotionally fraught. Which of course makes them more difficult in some ways, because there isn't the same sense of urgency. I'm giving up little things that have taken on way more importance in my life than they merit, to try to make room for silence before God and vulnerability before other people. These little things are not particularly impressive--I'm not even giving up Facebook, much less tea, chocolate, booze, or coffee. This year my challenge is to be quiet and find God in the everyday of nursing a squirmy toddler or doing laundry or sighing over job applications.

We're finding a place for ourselves in a new faith community and completing our first full year of following the traditional church calendar. Last night Margaret and I went to our first Ash Wednesday service together. I'm the grownup so of course I acted like I knew what I was doing, but I think inside I was just as nervouscited as her. 

She sat on my lap and doodled in her notebook for most of the time, except when we were singing or responding. Then I held her on my hip like a baby (7 o'clock is sleepytime for Margaret) and she said the Lord's Prayer with everyone else.

From Margaret's notes during the service

After we got home, she asked why the pastor had put ash on our foreheads. "Well, do you remember what she said to you?" I asked.

Dust you are, and to dust you will return.

She asked what that meant, so we talked about the old story that God had a beautiful, beautiful world and no one to enjoy it with him, so he took some dust and shaped it into a body and poooof--blew his breath into the body and it became the first living person. And someday when we die our breath will go back to God and our bodies will turn back into dust.

She made me retell it several times before I finally insisted it was time for bed.