Summer Mom, an essay

It's been a long week. Final gasp over the school finish line, lots of meetings and phone calls and doctor's visits, first heady days of summer break. Hyper kids, mom plagued by a scurrying brain and existential quandaries and--I'm not proud of it--a grouchy yearning to be thanked, acknowledged, appreciated for all the work I do, the things I've given up.

In the midst of all that, the boys and I had a relaxing Friday night by ourselves. Daniel had a work event. We made popcorn and hard-boiled eggs for dinner and parked ourselves on the couch for a movie.

By the time the movie was over, it was past 9:00. Way past the boys' bedtime. Jack asked if he could go outside for a little. We'd never sliced our watermelon. I reminded myself that it's summer. So we sat in our little yard admiring big puffy clouds smudged against a swelling sky as we slurped down hunks of sweet watermelon. Owen pointed out the crescent moon. "The moon is glowing," he said. We read a library book, one of Jack's early readers that happened to be about star-gazing.

After a while, I asked the boys to be still and just feel the night around us. How did it feel? Smell? Look? They sat, quiet as stones, for a few moments. And then Owen whispered, "This is a perfect time to pray." He folded his hands against his small chest and prayed, "Dear Lord, thank You for the lightbulbs in our house, for our family, for your world." Then: "It's your turn, Jack." Jack prayed, "Thank you for the night."

That sweet soft response to beauty, to quiet, to nature, to God. So spontaneous and fresh, like a green shoot unfurling itself to the sun.

It's so easy to miss these moments, to hustle on to the next thing, the mind frantically racing from past mistakes to future fantasies. Never really alive in this moment here.  

In The Gift from The Sea (published in 1955), Anne Morrow Lindbergh described being a mother in terms that still resonate in the 21^st century:

To be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother-core, like spokes from the hub of a wheel. The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass: husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider's web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes. How difficult for us, then, to achieve a balance in the midst of these contradictory tensions, and yet how necessary for the proper functioning of our lives. How much we need, and how arduous of attainment is that steadiness preached in all rules for holy living. How desirable and how distant is the ideal of the contemplative, artist, or saint -- the inner inviolable core, the single eye. 

In one of my favorite books, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), the narrator describes Mrs. Ramsey, the classic selfless mother figure, as a sponge: “They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.”

Sometimes as I'm wiping a pee-stained toilet for the one millionth time, or scaling the ever-flowing Mt. Vesuvius of laundry, I hear in my head a line from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh: "I too have my vocation, — work to do." The problem is I don't know what my vocation is anymore. I've consciously put it on hold to be a Colorado mama. I took a detour and although the woods are lovely, dark and deep, I don't recognize these trees. I sure don't know my way back out. And back out to what? To a past that is no longer there?

I've found delight, deep soul-work, refuge and purpose in being a mother. My friend Erin teases me, calling me Hestia, goddess of hearth and home. It's true. Mothering, hospitality, cooking, keeping a home, feathering a nest, tending a garden, nurturing: a lot of that does come naturally to me. It's like breathing. While I don't get paid or acknowledged by society for the labor I perform, I believe in my heart that it is valuable. It fits into the ethos of our family—that time is more important than money, that intimacy is worth more than possessions, that training up a child in the way he should go requires sacrifice and dedication. The reality is that I like getting my hands dirty, providing for myself and my family by the sweat of my brow. I'd make a good pioneer. And yet, and yet....

I am sopped to the brim, quivered to the core, with my attachments. The love and connection I feel to my husband, my children, my family, my friends, my neighbors, my community, my world all threaten to suffuse me. I feel heavy in body and spirit, anchored with steel cables to hearth and home. These days, without the steady outlet of writing or teaching, I find my restless brain turning in on itself, like a dog going round and round in circles, trying to find the perfect spot to lie down.

Sometimes what I want most is to be taken in hand, like Woolf's drenched sponge, and wrung bone dry. Emptied and clean and stripped down to my core essence, rid of the excess weight and baggage of motherhood and attachment, myself for myself alone. Free and light on a beach somewhere, the horizon wide and attainable.

Of course, I'd only want that for a brief time before I'd long again for intimacy and responsibility, for roots and stability. I know that, and I know these years are flying by in a blur. I'm grateful, so grateful, to be a mother, for this holy blessing. I realize I'm privileged to have the choice to stay home. But in this season of my life, when regular creative, intellectual, professional ambitions have been put on hold, I keep struggling, as Lindbergh put it, to "find a balance somewhere, or an alternating rhythm between these two extremes; a swinging of the pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return."

I could get up earlier or go to bed later, I could write in the wee hours as countless women writers before me have done (as I'm doing now). I could park the kids in front of a TV all summer, abandon the house, let it all go and put myself first. But that doesn't really work for me, either. At the end of the day, I want to get the sleep I need to be a good mom; I want to be healthy and strong for the vocation I already have. I like hearth and home. I don't want to rob Peter to pay Paul. Mostly, though, I'm afraid. That if and when I start writing consistently, some dam in me will break and I won't be able to halt the flood or keep this inner world under wraps.

This summer I think what I hope for is more intention, more being. Less tuning out, planning forward, desperately seeking solitude. I want to set up sturdier fences to protect pockets of essential quiet. Not frittered online research, not endless emails or calendar maintenance, not even escaping into a book. Essential quiet. Essential creativity. Good fences make good neighbors. Maybe if I find a way to carve out small, regular moments of solitude—even five minutes a day—I'll find a softness. If there is no solitude, there is no communion. If you never retreat, you can't return.  

Maybe then I can give in to the jumbled, sweaty flow of a full summer house. Let myself relax, like honey on a hot day, thoughts turning slowly to watermelon and homemade popsicles, to bike rides and camping trips. To late nights in the backyard, watching the moon roll in and the clouds glide away.