At least until we set up the crib & find the comfy chair, here’s the room.
By FAR the most organized & pleasant office space we’ve ever had. In fact, we just ate supper in here (though mostly because the rest if the house has been so neglected that we can’t find a clear surface in the kitchen).
We live in a giant 2 bedroom condo. In city terms it’s huge. In suburban terms, not so much. One friend recently told me that someone asked her where we planned to move in order to make room for the baby.
There are many pieces of planning that involve making room. Not just physical, but mental, spiritual, psychological, professional…I’ll write more about some of these later.
For now, our current focus is on the physical. We’re not exactly doing a nursery for this one. If anything we’re doing the garage & spare room office space. We figure that once the baby is a decent sleeper, Zora will be getting a roommate. Yes, I know that could take awhile. The garage us about four things: getting rid of stuff, sorting baby stuff, making room for a freezer so we have room for milk storage, and, last but not least, being able to park in the garage to reduce the chances of giant pregnant me falling on the ice in January. Also, it was just embarrassingly filled up.
We thought about redoing the spare room as a nursery. But then we realized that we want that room to still be the office space once the newest one moves in with Zora, plus it would have to do double duty even with a baby in residence, and fir the first few months, we’ll be using a bassinett in our room anyway.
It dawned on us that it would be a waste to plan a full-on nursery only to redo it as an office within a year. So we’re redoing the office with the goal of creating a pleasant office into which we can fit a crib (probably set into its own corner with floor to ceiling curtains creating kind of a canopy bed effect) and a big comfy nursing chair.
Erik wanted gray walls which apparently are a favorite for design types (it started the same blah off-white as the rest of the place, and smudge-prone matte as well). I wanted less stuff (physical and emotional room for the baby). We both love the Shakespeare posters from Yann Legendre, even if they are a bit topically mature for a baby.
Truth be told we’ve had the gray paint in the garage for months. And, those who know us well can confirm that our spare bedrooms have always held the well-deserved nickname “the scary room” (seriously, imagine the worst and that’s pretty much accurate…I was too embarrassed to take a before picture.) Fo give you some idea, though, the first picture is the stuff in crates in the hall that we moved out after I took out everything that didn’t belong. Obviously, some sorting still needs to happen.
On Friday, I cleaned out everything in the scary room that belonged in other rooms in the house. Then, on Saturday, my superlatively wonderful parents came out to help with the clearing of the garage (another horrific home organization story) and offered to paint the room. They painted it in under 4 hours, a skill they attribute to years of marriage & frequent moving.
The second through fourth pictures are the room as it is this afternoon.
And now I am going to work miracles (it is Sunday, after all) and get the crates in the hall sorted and whip this room into shape. Meanwhile Erik is hard at work finishing the garage. (obviously, Zora is not here or as we would never plan on this level of productivity…another gift from my parents was to take her home with them last night.)
And then we’ll have a few months to find the comfy chair, stow the futon in the garage, get the crib up, make crib linens (planning on bold graphic black& white to match this space & Zora’s room), rig up the curtains to surround the crib (gray velvet would be awesome with the walls, I think).
I think I’m officially in the nesting stage.
Call it advanced mama-guilt: I’m starting to realize there are some special things I can pull off with one kid that I will not be so able to do with two.
Zora and I were at a fabric store a few weeks ago and she was entranced with the Halloween costume pattern books. I have yet to make her a costume: we’ve bought them from thrift stores in the past. I don’t remember if she was anything her first year. Then was an elephant two years running (I highly recommend the use of the costume that’s a bit to big the first year and a bit too small the second), although no trick or treating was involved the second time: she wore the costume to our dear friends’ wedding rehearsal on Halloween.
And last year she was a lion, but only for her class party and another party because Erik and I decided we were too pooped to take her out and she hadn’t quite caught on to how the whole thing worked yet.
I’m pretty sure that with two kiddos, there’s no way I’ll ever be this involved again with costumes. Plus, oddly enough, find creative pursuits to be a fulfilling sabbath for me. Although I will admit that I feel a little tormented by the desire to do these things when the ready-made costume aisle has some perfectly good options, too.
So this morning Zora and I hit the fabric store, picked a costume, picked colors (admission: I did some steering to avoid full-on pink), and made a flowery fairy costume.
By the way, would you believe that this is a no-sew pattern? I didn’t even touch the sewing machine!
And I even had time to do some cleaning and organizing in the spare room! If I can get dinner on the table before Zora turns into a pumpkin, I might well win the domestic goddess award for the day!
I did a horrible job of keeping a baby book for Zora. So bad in fact that I didn’t even start one.
But this is huge. Yesterday, while trying to entertain her during a meeting, I wrote words on a card for her to copy (she loves this activity).
And, for the first time that I was really truly certainly her doing this on her own, she READ a word. She looked at the card, looked at me, and said, “but I don’t know how to make a c for cat.”
Now, I would not yet say she can officially read.
But it’s a start!!
And a big deal for a reading-addicted mother!
I woke up this morning feeling like crap. There are probably a number of ways to explain this, and I won’t go into it right now because I’m sure it would spill over into shameless venting.
My pastoral care professor used to say that if you feel lousy emotionally in the morning that’s not a problem so long as you start to feel better as the day progresses. It likely means that you were just working stuff out in your subconscious while you slept.
I’m going to go with that explanation for now. And hope that my subconscious accomplished some incredible thugs last night. We’ll see.
In the meantime , I think the general thing I’m trying to work out stems from the laundry list of things I promise not to vent about.
But, swirling around in my head, three recent conversations related to working motherhood are converging.
(1) One friend of mine commented in the last week that the key right now to making her complicated life work is simply believing herself that she can pull this off. If that’s the case, she figures the people around her will decide it’s working too ( kind of the working mom’s version of the idea that if you think you are beautiful and glamorous, other people will pick up on that projection and agree).
(2) Another friend described the goal for a crazy month as “survival”. Which I’m starting to think is pretty much every parents’ root goal. It’s even somewhat evolutionary, huh? It reminded me of the comment my sister made in the card she sent for Zora’s first birthday: “Congratulations, you kept the baby alive for a whole year.”
(3) Last night after a long and not so fabulous day, a more seasoned working mom than I said the thing that I probably needed to hear: “I don’t know how you do it.” (And whether she realized it or not, I took it as a full-on Holy Spirit moment when God knew that I needed just that).
The collision of these three things: I honestly don’t know either. I have no idea how I pull together a life that involves the needs and demands of a preschooler and a baby on board, and a husband with a job he loves but. Ridiculous commute, and the tensions and pull between areas of ministry, and the ever-growing to-do list.
Some days I feel like I get one little piece of this right. Most days I can also list the pieces I completely bungled. Some days I am ready to pop out of bed and conquer the world. Others I would rather go back to sleep. Some days I can’t imagine this any differently, others I start scheming about the most drastic ways to reconfigure the whole deal.
I imagine this is true to some extent of everyone’s life. And I wish we could all be more honest with each other, and perhaps a little more grace-filled around the places where others bungle things.
The disclaimer first: I’ve never really been a football person (or much of a sports person). Oh, sure I did like the curly fries and the general small-town camaraderie at Chenango Forks High School football games.
But I was raised in the only American family that seems completely uninterested in the Super Bowl. I chose a college which, while it had a football team, has been described as “kind of like a big football school, except the choir is the football team.” And I honestly dread the possibility of having a boy (we don’t know what number 2 is yet, so make no assumptions) because he might grow up to be interested in playing football and Erik and I are not really football parents, as far as we can tell.
So, yes, this article is kind of preaching to the choir when it comes to me.
But, I think there’s a broader application here. The issue around bodies to begin with: girls’ soccer teams where significant numbers of the team have serious knee injuries. Track and cross country (and I DID participate in track, thank you very much, so I am not a total non-athlete) teams where coaches train kids so hard (and wrong) that they wind up unable to run without pain by the time they are 25.
But I also cringe when any extra-curricular activity takes over a teen’s life. It’s partly that teenagers are passionate by nature…if they love something, they LOVE it, and there is often that impulse to immerse oneself in the activity. Eat, breath, and sleep football, soccer, theater, choir, model UN, pick your favorite.
However, what about when adults make it a life of death sort of matter? When a coach tells a kid that “this is your most important season…you can’t miss this practice/camp/etc. for anything”; when the stakes are set so high that it’s impossible to do more than one thing. I mean, seriously, most of us are not going to go pro. And that shouldn’t be what sports, music, drama, whatever are about.
I’m all for commitment to your game, and to some extent, it is absolutely necessary (another athletic foray for me: rowing, in which you literally CANNOT go out and practice unless everyone of your 7 teammates is there…the boat will tip because it’s unbalanced).
But I wish, for the teenagers I know and love, and way far down the road for Zora and #2, that they had a chance, when they were young, and their minds were quick, and their bodies were strong, and their passions were high, to explore many things, but nothing so deeply that it consumes everything they have, and not so many or so much that they never have time to breath.
Conversation after a fine afternoon and evening of birthday fun with Mom and Dad.
Zora: Mom, do you like to be close to your Mama?
Erica: You mean do I like to live close by her?
Z: Yeah.
E: I do. Because I would miss her if we lived farther away. Do you like to be close to your Mama?
Z: No. I like to be close to Grandma. I like to be at her house.
E: But what if your Mama gets lonely?
Z: You won’t because I come back to see you and Daddy.
Little pricks and prods, day long irritation, the buzzing and swarming around while I try to reach back into the mangled, fruit heavy mess that are my tomatoes…because there are beautiful cherry tomatoes, earthy red and a fine yellow, buried back there in the leaves.
To walk in this garden before the heat of the day has been a slow breath for me through a busy summer.
And I should have known: if I’ve chosen this garden as a metaphor for living these weeks, then the day there are mosquitos, I will feel a few stings, and I will itch through the day, not just from these bites, but from the small irritations and attacks life brings.
Oh, of course there are many reasons. Facebook (so easy to post a little status once in a while). The general hubbub of life (who knew working full time and chasing a 3 year old was this time consuming). Laziness (and the general addictiveness of a crossword or number puzzle).
But there’s something larger going on as well.
When I started blogging, I made a decision that blogging was a public act. I have a public job…not that I am a celebrity or any sort of major public figure. But, in my own little sphere, as a pastor, I am public. It’s a kind of fishbowl life. Ministry is, modeled after Jesus’ own ministry, incarnational, in the flesh, lived out amongst God’s people. And while they do not own your life, your life is part of the package when you sign on to be a minister. Who you are and how you live are sometimes just as important as what you say.
All of that is an overly intellectual way of saying that when you are a minister, people are in your business, and you have to, at least to a certain extent, be OK with that.
So, when I started blogging, I realized that I had two choices: try as hard as possible to disguise who I am and have a readership made up of those who are near and dear and who I alert about the blog AND anyone else who might happen to track me down OR just be right out there about my identity.
I chose the second and I’ve never questioned that decision. It meant that I had to filter what I write, assuming that not only family and friends, but also colleagues and church members, present and future, would see my blog and know who it was. When you google my name, my blog is one of the first things you get to.
There is often quite a bit that I don’t say on the blog. I try not to vent. I try not to say bad things about people. And, I limit some of what I write about my own life.
When I was pregnant with Zora, I didn’t say much, if anything, about that on the blog. The practical reason: I was looking for a new call, and my blog, being public, was also the place I pointed search committees to for examples of sermons.
Now, I am pregnant again, and eager to have some opportunity to think about that on the blog.
But it’s the process of getting pregnant that may explain why I haven’t written much in the last year or so. Because a big piece of what’s been going on for the last year is something that I know is not considered appropriate to share. It’s one of the things-we-don’t-say of my generation. And, honestly, it was not something I really wanted everyone to know about while we in the moment: infertility.
Almost exactly two years ago, Erik and I threw out the pill and started trying to get pregnant again. It was time. We figured it would take six months at most, based on our experience with Zora. That time, we decided to start trying, figuring it would take 6-12 months, and we were pregnant within a month (honestly a little sooner that we had bargained for). And I was pretty clearly “fertile” pretty quickly after her birth.
And this time, nothing…for the first year, we figured it was just a quirk.
Finally, we saw a doctor. And things got rolling.
In the grand scheme of the infertility world, we got pregnant pretty quickly as soon as there was some medical assistance involved.
But it felt like forever to us while we were going through it. And each month felt like a new level of awful. My lowest point came on Mothers’ Day, when I sat in front of the congregation, watching babies get baptized, all the while being reminded by cramps and flow that, yet again, I was not pregnant.
I shared what was happening with my colleagues…for practical reasons (explaining a sudden departure from church when the clinic called to tell me it was time; the frequent doctors appointments, etc.) and because they are wonderful people.
I shared with some folks in the congregation. Partly because I needed to talk about it, but even, to some extent, as a bit of a pastoral experiment.
Here’s what I found out: if your pastor tells you this is a struggle, you suddenly have permission to share what has happened to you.
I heard about miscarriages. I heard about lifetimes of identifying with the “barren women” of the Bible. I heard about the gratitude for the one child they had and the tinge of grief that there wasn’t going to be another.
The other associate pastor asked me, at one point, if I would ever think about mentioning it from the pulpit. Maybe, was my answer. If the text pointed to it anyway. If I could find a way to say it without being too emotionally raw. If I could find a way to say it without feeling like I was overplaying my own situation in the face of people who had tunneled deeper into the the process. It never really came up in the text, and sometimes I wonder what I’ll do now that I am pregnant if I have a clear opening into the issue of infertility in sermons or other parts of my work.
Meanwhile, it has me thinking about where one sets the personal boundaries as a pastor, when it’s OK to allow the personal not just to inform the pastoral, but to create openings for conversations. It has me thinking about the things we don’t talk about at church: infertility; mental illness; disease related to parts of our bodies that are “questionable”; anything that is taboo, but still wounds people deeply, and cuts into their souls, things that I wish we could open up to the healing light of God, filtered through God’s people.
And, I think it’s time to start blogging again…
Genesis 45:1-8, 14-15
Fox Valley Presbyterian Church
August 8, 2010 (VBS Sunday)
I’m the oldest of 4 kids: me, Emily, Mark, Anna. We’re packed in there…Anna is only 6 years younger than me.
A few months ago, Anna started a new job at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. The agency where she works has a weekly staff spotlight, and one of the questions they asked when it was her week was:
“What’s the story your family always tells about you?
Here’s Anna’s answer…
When I was 2 or 3, the youngest of four, I used to sneak out of my room at naptime and head down to the kitchen, where I’d dump the trash can on the floor and eat all the food scraps I could find. As my mom tells it, “That’s when I looked at your father and said– ‘Now this one– she’s a survivor.’”
I think it’s a great question: what’s the story your family always tells about you. We do all have these family stories, and they tell us something about who our families are. My family was laid back enough not to freak out because the baby was exploring the garbage can. And optimistic enough to spin the story into something positive.
And the stories tell us something about who we are: Anna is the super-independent, adventurous survivor of the family. She wasn’t a neglected child, but my parents will admit that by the time she came along, with 4 kids under 6, everything was kind of a blur…
I love family stories…both my own and other people’s families. Think of how many well know stories are some sort of family stories: cinderella; Hansel and Gretel; Snow White Winnie the pooh–all those animals in the 40 acre woods are sort of like a family for Winnie; even Barbie has a family of some kind…all those dolls who are somehow part of her entourage; and comic book and action hero character stories eventually get around to explaining where the hero comes from.
Big parts of the Bible, too, are nothing more than family stories…Joseph’s family story is a bit ore extreme than Anna the garbage eater, but there it is: another story that a family tells to remind themselves about who they are.
And another story about finding your way as one of the youngest in a big family. About family at its best and at its worst, about how families can fall apart and how they come back together, about how families can setroy each other or take care of each other.
It’s not a story about a perfect family: this is a family with a father, Jacob, who shows blatant and unfair favoritism to his youngest children (maybe I notice that because I’m as oldest child!); this is a family where brothers get jealous and lash out at each other; this is a family where a talented child (Joseph) brags about his talents; this is a family where someone gets sent away, and a father becomes so devastated that he barely cares about the sons (and the one daughter) he still has.
Even when we’re very little, I think we know that our families aren’t perfect. Hopefully, not as bad as Joseph’s family. But it doesn’t take long to know that families are messy things. They are places where people grow, but they can also be places where people get hurt.
I asked the kids at VBS this week about this moment in the story, one morning, the morning before we told them that part of the story. I said, “If Joseph met his brothers again, after they were so mean to him, what do you think he would do to them? What would you do to them?”
One boy, with incredible honesty, gave the non-churchy answer: “He should punch them in the eye.”
We know we’re supposed to forgive, but let’s be honest: if your brothers sold you into slavery, what would you do? Would any one blame you if you never let on to who you were; if you threw them in the same prison you were stuck in; if you punched them in the eye?
There are so many stories in the Bible about families, but they are not perfect families. And I, for one, am glad…
Because God uses people and situations that are not perfect, sometimes even really messed up, God uses these things to work out good.
And I, for one, am glad, because I come no where close to being a perfect person. So it’s good to be reminded that God can use even me.
But if there’s one thing that we learn from the Joseph story, it’s that great moment at the end where all the brothers are trapped in a room together.
When Joseph sees his brothers again, of course, he doesn’t punch them in the eye. But he does poke and prod and test, and it takes a couple visits before he can even tell them who he is:
He finally says to them: I am your brother Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years; and there are five more years in which there will be neither ploughing nor harvest. God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God
It was not you who sent me here, but God…don’t worry. You did a terrible thing. But God turned it into something good.
See, it’s not just that God uses imperfect people: God FORGIVES imperfect people. And if we’re honest with ourselves, if someone can forgive us, we can learn to forgive other people: to be like God, and to try to make good things come from bad.
Even this story of forgiveness in the Bible is a family story: and not just because there are families in the Bible who desperately need to forgive each other.
Because Joseph and his 12 brothers and their children and their children’s children, and those children’s children, and those children’s children, and on and on and on, they survive the famine. And they survive slavery in Egypt. And they survive 40 years wandering in the Sinai desert…and on and on and on.
Until, one day, one of the children’s children’s children has a baby named Jesus. A baby who is God’s own son, but also a great great great ever so many greats grandson of Joseph’s father Jacob. Part of Jacob and Joseph’s family.
And Jesus is God’s answer to all of us, daughters and sons of God, who need so desperately to be forgiven.
Our God is a God of forgiveness.
And that means that we can forgive others, even our families.
And even when the hurts feel to big to get over, too much to bear, we can know this:
We are part of this one big family, God’s family, messy as it is, but a family where we are all children of God.
And where we are all forgiven,
And where we can all learn to forgive.
This is our family story…
Thanks be to God!