Welcome to the May 2012 Carnival of Natural Parenting: Parenting With or Without Extended Family

This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama. This month our participants have shared how relatives help or hinder their parenting. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.

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This post would be awesome if I had family that lived nearby.

The topic of this month’s Carnival of Natural Parenting is exactly what I lamented over two years ago in a post I wrote for DC Metro Moms. It is hard to do this parenting gig without help, and when there is no family, and your friends are as busy as you are, well, for me that means that every slice of babysitting I need requires scheduling. And that means time, texts, and changed plans when the sitter’s kid gets sick.

As a stay-at-home mom with a few hours a week of tutoring and freelance work and multiple random hours of volunteer stuff, in addition to my current role as interior designer/realtor for our house renovation and sale, I rely on sitters who don’t always come through. I often feel like I can’t count on much. And that drives me batty. If my folks were in good health and lived in town, that would be a game-changer.

But they don’t want to leave Michigan, and I don’t want to go back. I like living near DC. And they’re not of the persuasion or stamina to take the kids for more than an hour or two anyway. My husband’s parents would not be options for extended or regular help either, though I can leave the kids for a few hours with their grandma when we visit her and when she visits us, each once or maybe twice a year.

Part of me wishes that the kids knew their grandparents more and that we could just drop in whenever and that they could come help out whenever. But since health and age and inclination don’t point in that direction, I’m okay with it being special to have visits with them.

What has been great has been help from my sisters and their kids, as I first wrote over two years ago. A community of youngsters is a place for my gregarious son to thrive. Now 6, he’d have felt so much more comfortable as a baby and toddler, I think, if he weren’t the oldest and if we had more familiar folks around all the time. I can see the difference in my similar temperament toddler daughter who has no problem with a new sitter or an unfamiliar situation if her brother is around.

We’re in the middle of a house renovation that has taken all my time and energy, and then some. The actual move, I’m sure, will take weeks, if not months to crawl out from under. When a friend moved a few years ago, she said she didn’t even unpack; her parents did it all. Then they painted her basement one weekend. That is not the kind of support I could ever expect. If I need help packing, I either need to ask a friend, which I’m generally not comfortable doing since she’s likely to be as maxed out as I am, or I have to pay someone to watch my kids and/or help me.

Last week, after the sitter got my daughter to sleep easier (and then longer) than I ever can, she helped me move around furniture in the house so that I could stage it for photos. This week the sitter has been sick, and man, it takes a lot longer. And if the baby won’t sleep, forget the bigger sorting and packing. She’ll undo whatever I did in a heartbeat. So I stay up late, and my health suffers.

So yes, it would be nice if I could send her and her brother to grandma’s. I even tend to cop a righteous attitude at times that people with family nearby simply do not understand what it means to parent in the same way that I do. Oh, woe is me, she who has to pay people to keep her sane! But seriously, it just ain’t the same as people who use their parents for childcare or as my friend who lives with her folks.

And yet, I know we are lucky to have this choice to make. A lot of the people in the recent NPR Family Matters series would opt not to live under one roof if they didn’t have to, and my friend, a mom of two who owes more on her home than it’s worth, would probably rather her family be on its own. But she also admits that it works well to live with her folks. She can go out whenever she needs to, go back to work without needing to bundle her baby to a daycare, or wake early without wondering if someone is going to have texted her a cancellation and change the entire look of her day.

With my health issues and especially with the current house project — doing renovations on the new one and prepping this one to sell — and with my husband’s schedule not putting him home before 6 p.m., I couldn’t get by without some help. I know other people who do it, people whose husbands travel out of town for days or even weeks at a time. If that were the case here, I’d need to get a full-time nanny. As much as I don’t love the stress of doing too many things, I also know I cannot take care of myself and my kids being a full-time mom without taking time to cook what will sustain me and eat it without interruption at least some days, and without pursuing things I’m passionate about. If I didn’t have a partner coming home each night, I’d set out to earn enough to pay someone to help enough that I could get all my needs met.

Do I wish that person were a family member? That the time my kids spend with another adult be with someone who shares their DNA and can tell them stories that have ancestral import? Sure. Am I jealous of people for whom this has worked out? Yes. Does my parents’ age and health today give me pause when I think about having children past 36, the age they were when I was born? Yep. Would I advise young folks considering parenthood to live close to family if that’s at all an option? Absolutely.

But I do appreciate the fact that my parents and my in-laws love us and our kids, that they respect our wishes, support our choices. There are plenty of ugly situations out there, and it means a lot my kids know that they have generous and loving grandparents. Even if they do live hours — and hours — away.

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Visit Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama to find out how you can participate in the next Carnival of Natural Parenting!

Please take time to read the submissions by the other carnival participants:

(This list will be live and updated by afternoon May 8 with all the carnival links.)

• Dealing With Unsupportive Grandparents — In a guest post at Natural Parents Network, The Pistachio Project tells what to do when your child’s grandparents are less than thrilled about your parenting choices.
• Parenting With Extended Family — Jenny at I’m a full-time mummy shares the pros and cons of parenting with extended family…
• Parental Support for an AP Mama — Meegs at A New Day talks about the invaluable support of her parents in her journey to be an AP mama.
• Priceless Grandparents — That Mama Gretchen reflects on her relationship with her priceless Grammy while sharing ways to help children preserve memories of their own special grandparents.
• Routines Are Meant To Be Broken — Olga at Around The Birthing Ball urges us to see Extended Family as a crucial and necessary link between what children are used to at home and the world at large.
• It Helps To Have A Village – Even A Small One — Jennifer at Hybrid Rasta Mama discusses how she has flourished as a mother due to the support of her parents.
• The Orange Week — Erika at Cinco de Mommy lets go of some rules when her family finally visits extended family in San Diego.
• One Size Doesn’t Fit All — Kellie at Our Mindful Life realizes that when it comes to family, some like it bigger and some like it smaller.
• It Takes a Family — Alicia at What’s Next can’t imagine raising a child without the help of her family.
• A new foray into family — As someone who never experienced close extended family, Lauren at Hobo Mama wrestles with how to raise her kids — and herself — to restart that type of community.
• My Mama Rocks! — Kat at Loving {Almost} Every Moment is one lucky Mama to have the support and presence of her own awesome Mama.
• Embracing Our Extended Family — Deb Chitwood at Living Montessori Now shares 7 ideas for nurturing relationships with extended family members.
• Doing Things Differently — Valerie at Momma in Progress shares how parenting her children far away from extended family improved her confidence in her choices.
• Snapshots of love — Caroline at stoneageparent describes the joys of sharing her young son’s life with her own parents.
• Parenting with Relies – A mixed bag — Ursula Ciller shares some of her viewpoints on the pros and cons of parenting with relatives and extended family.
• Tante and Uncles — How a great adult sibling relationship begets a great relationship with aunt and uncles from Jennifer at True Confessions of a Real Mommy.
• Tips for Traveling With Twins — Megan at the Boho Mama shares some tips for traveling with infant twins (or two or more babies!).
• Parenting passed through the generations — Shannon at Pineapples & Artichokes talks about the incredible parenting resource that is her found family, and how she hopes to continue the trend.
• My Family and My Kids — Jorje of Momma Jorje ponders whether she distrusts her family or if she is simply a control freak.
• Parenting with a Hero — Rachel at Lautaret Bohemiet reminisces about the relationship she shared with her younger brother, and how he now shares that closeness in a relationship with her son.
• Text/ended Family — Kenna of A Million Tiny Things wishes her family was around for the Easter egg hunt… until she remembers what it’s actually like having her family around.
• Two Kinds of Families — Adrienne at Mommying My Way writes about how her extended family is just as valuable to her mommying as her church family.
• My ‘high-needs’ child and ’strangers’ — With a ‘high-needs’ daughter, aNonyMous at Radical Ramblings has had to manage without the help of family or friends, adapting to her daughter’s extreme shyness and allowing her to socialise on her own terms.
• Our Summer Tribe — Justine at The Lone Home Ranger shares a love of her family’s summer reunion, her secret to getting the wisdom of the “village” even as she lives 1,000 miles away.
• My Life Boat {Well, One of Them} — What good is a life boat if you don’t get it? Grandparents are a life boat MomeeeZen loves!
• Dear Children — In an open letter to her children, Laura at Pug in the Kitchen promises to support them as needed in her early days of parenting.
• Yearning for Tribal Times — Ever had one of those days where everything seems to keep going wrong? Amy at Anktangle recounts one such day and how it inspired her to think about what life must’ve been like when we lived together in large family units.
• I don’t have a village — Jessica Claire at Crunchy-Chewy Mama wishes she had family nearby but appreciates their support and respect.
• Trouble With MILs– Ourselves? — Jaye Anne at Wide Awake Half Asleep explains how her arguments with her mother-in-law may have something to do with herself.
• A Family Apart — Melissa at Vibrant Wanderings writes about the challenges, and the benefits, of building a family apart from relatives.
• First Do No Harm — Zoie at TouchstoneZ asks: How do you write about making different parenting choices than your own family experience without criticizing your parents?
• Military Family Separation — Amy Willa shares her feelings about being separated from extended family during her military family journey.
• Forging A Village In The Absence Of One — Luschka from Diary of a First Child writes about the importance of creating a support network, a village, when family isn’t an option.
• Respecting My Sister’s Parenting Decisions — Dionna at Code Name: Mama’s sister is guest posting on the many roles she has as an aunt. The most important? She is the named guardian, and she takes that role seriously.
• Multi-Generational Living: An Exercise in Love, Patience, and Co-Parenting — Boomerang Mama at The Other Baby Book shares her experience of moving back in with Mom and Dad for 7 months, and the unexpected connection that followed.
• A Heartfelt Letter to Family: Yes, We’re Weird, but Please Respect Us Anyway — Sheila of A Living Family sincerely expresses ways she would appreciate her extended family’s support for her and her children, despite their “weird” parenting choices.
• The nuclear family is insane! — Terri at Child of the Nature Isle is grateful for family support, wishes her Mum lived closer, and feels an intentional community would be the ideal way to raise her children.

I met my future husband at a dorm room party on Friday, April 24, 1992. Twenty years ago today.

“You were babies!” people exclaim when I tell them this. Yes and no. I was 19, he almost 21. We did, in some ways, grow up together.  We’ve seen the world change together, from days of waiting for letters in the mailbox to texts moments before we walk in the door. It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years. Sometimes I feel like we are exactly the same people, and other times, when I think about the details of our courtship, I have to admit that my life today is many moons removed from that one.

The night I met LJ, I’d earlier been out to dinner to Olive Garden to celebrate the birthday of a new male friend. B and I had met just a few weeks earlier, at the beginning of the spring quarter at Kalamazoo College where we were both first-year students. I wandered into my friend Hannah’s suite in the newly remodeled Severn dorm while B and a group containing some folks I knew and some I didn’t were going around saying nice things about one another. He said my lips looked “kissable.” As someone fresh out of a year-long relationship with a high school beau, the attention of college guys were something I’d just opened my eyes to.

A few weeks later, on April 24, I went along on a group outing to the mediocre meal spot and gasped at the prices of what appeared to me then as fancy entrees. I opted for the plain marinara pasta after I realized I could fill up on the table’s free bread and salad. Kissable comments aside, this was a group thing, not a date with B. The thing that made it special was my actually getting off campus and getting out with new people instead of pining in my dorm about my jealous (newly ex-) boyfriend back home, still in high school.

Still, it was spring, and though I was not looking for love, my newfound freedom was apparently attractive. Not only had B shown an interest, but I was also going to have a date the next night with a basketball player a year older than me. What a 6′7″ guy would want with a 5′0″ girl like me, I had no idea, but I was ready to branch out!

There was a new group of girlfriends I was trying to connect with now that I fully planted in college and had lifted my boots out of the mud of my previous relationship. It was through the Outward Bound-like program I’d done at the beginning of the year, Land/Sea, that I met one of these women, a gorgeous creative spirit named Ivana. I met up with her and her roommate, Denise, and some other friends of theirs who  looked beyond my frizzy hair and the nerdy rayon shirt I was sporting from The Limited — hunter green, with gold and green buttons down the front — and let me pre-party with them before we headed over to Severn for a suite party next door to where I’d met B.

Not a whole lot of details stick out about that night after that. I know people were selling beer behind a makeshift counter in the far back bedroom, and I went to get at least one. But the rest of the evening, my butt was pretty well glued to the wooden framed dorm couch, sitting next to LJ. A junior just back from study abroad in Germany, he’d happened upon the first-year party with some friends because there was nothing better to do. It was a small school with a subdued nightlife.

He and I spent much of the night sitting next to each other on the boxy cushions of that couch, looking into our dark brown bottles and sharing the darkness of our souls. His parents were just splitting up, and I shared how my (so young!) life had been shaped by my older brother’s suicide five years earlier. Not exactly flirtatious material.

But it stuck. He walked me home across the quad in the chilly April air, and we hugged goodnight on the steps of Dewaters dorm before he headed to neighbor Trowbridge Hall. I figured that would be it; we’d shared a connection, we knew each other better than we knew some of our friends, but this was not the stuff of romance. And I was on the rebound anyway. Too early for anything too deep.

Sitting alone at breakfast in the cafeteria the next morning, I felt a little funny as he walked by, tray in hand, alongside another woman. (This was also the season of defining myself as a feminist, so my classmates were no longer “girls”). Smiles were exchanged, and I think I might have passed him later that day while he was playing frisbee golf near my dorm room. I do know the day was grey, and I know that later that night I had an innocently awful date with the basketball player. We rented White Men Can’t Jump. I probably don’t need to say anything more, but it’s too tempting not to add that he made me pizza with pepperoni, not realizing I didn’t eat mammals.

Rather than accept his offer of staying over in his extra room, I drove back to campus mostly sober and to answering machine messages from Ivana who told me that LJ from the night before had been wearing a funny hat and looking for me. She said he seemed disappointed that I was on a date. She didn’t know a lot about him except that he seemed nice, and she thought he’d been on Land/Sea, too. So our start was build on somewhat false pretenses. I thought he, too, had hiked through the Ontario wilderness.

It wasn’t long before I learned that he hadn’t and that I got a chance to learn a whole lot more about him. He found me that night and we chatted in the florescent light of the “lounge” in my dorm, an underutilized square of cinderblock walls that looked like a place furniture went to die. I wonder how the green and black stretchy sweater I was wearing would look now. At the time it seemed clingy, but in an age just after oversized was fashionable, it’s hard to know.

Our first date soon after was a trip to Meijer’s so I could buy deodorant. The next time I bought tampons. I didn’t even really consider that he’d flinch, and he didn’t. We had dinner at Pizza Hut and Burger King. This was all on my dime, our excursions in my car with my new feminist bumper stickers. LJ hadn’t much worked, and his folks were fighting at each other through his finances. I was buoyed by parental allowance and my own earnings from summer jobs.

LJ made me a mixed tape of jazz and I didn’t really know how to appreciate yet, and I took him to see Tracy Chapman. When tickets for U2’s Zoo TV concert went on sale, I stood in line at a Harmony House back home where I ran into high school buddies. We all bought tickets in a block together, me musing I hoped I would still be with this boyfriend when the concert came around in September, something like three months and what seemed like a lifetime away to a 19-year-old.

I was still with LJ, after a summer of visiting LJ on campus for K’s then-year-round calendar while I was living at home and working at the now-defunct F&M drugstore. I used to buy I bought discounted Entemann’s goodies to bring for my weekend visits to Kalamazoo. At the time of the U2 concert, LJ and I both were sick with bronchitis, but we went anyway and watched Bono talk live to the MTV awards show.

We spent the fall together on campus and then most of the rest of our relationship long-distance, through him graduating in 1993 and me going to France for six months. LJ visited over Christmas, and when we fell asleep to the smell of a honey candle I’d bought at a farmer’s market in Lyon, I knew it was his arms I wanted to spend my life in.

After that, I found a way to take my summer off so I could live with LJ and work, and be involved in my sister’s wedding preparations.  I also got myself a student-teaching job in Ann Arbor the next winter, so we lived together then, too.

But meeting someone at 19 seemed too young for forever. So after I graduated in 1995, I set off for Washington, DC to work at the Feminist Majority Foundation. LJ came out for our big conference, Expo ‘96 for Women’s Empowerment and brought my underslept and overworked self a lot of food from local restaurants. He’d moved to Austin, Texas, and was working for the central offices of Whole Foods Market even before they opened a Bread & Circus in DC or eaten up all the Fresh Fields stores.

He transferred to Chapel Hill so we could have a year of living only 4 hours apart, and then we moved together to Cincinnati so I could pursue graduate degrees in English and Women’s Studies. I started to think of marriage an arcane and sexist institution, and watching my sisters with their kids did not inspire maternal instincts.

After a few months working at Joseph Beth a super cool independent bookstore, LJ got himself a consulting gig and started to ride the dot-com bubble, jet-setting across the country and living out of hotels. While he built up his bank account and filled our cheap apartment with furniture for then-little-known Room & Board, I was reading and teaching about social justice and finding myself wondering if we were headed in different directions.

But we planned to move back to DC, where I started teaching in 2000. The transition hit me with a severe bought of depression. When LJ communicated his intention not to live like that forever, I got motivated to get help. Within months of getting on medication, I felt like a better version than I’d ever known of myself. Our landlords said they intended to sell our apartment. We decided to buy a house together, and while we were at it, I said, we might as well go ahead and get married. The meds helped me see both the forest, and the trees, and even the leaves, and I knew I wanted to be with LJ. So we put in a contract a month before LJ got laid off and began planning a wedding and 10-year-anniversary celebration for the following summer, to be held near our new home in July 2002.

LJ was unemployed and home painting the house when 9/11 happened. I called him from my classroom at school, and we went to an Ethiopian restaurant that night, pondering our future just miles away from the Pentagon. We’d met just weeks before the Rodney King verdict and LA riots set off a “Day of Gracious Listening” on our campus and protests, undoubtedly, nationwide. All the major historical markers of my adult life have been shared with LJ.

LJ benefited from the post-9/11 unemployment extension and got a job just before our wedding, which we did a little on the cheap but had a lot of fun. It made me sad that none of the girlfriends who’d been around when we met could attend and that two of LJ’s friends didn’t make it, dealing as they were with divorces of their own.

We had a wonderful time in spite of missing company, and it was great to celebrate a decade of togetherness. Still, it was a lot to plan for a wound-up gal like me (no J.Lo event planner in the budget!), and between the stress of that, the bigger crises of 9/11 and the DC-area sniper scare the following fall, combined with the day-in-day-out craziness of teaching high schoolers in crisis, my health started to suffer. My history of medications and a diet that wasn’t suited to me contributed to my finding myself in a bad way in 2003. Just when we were ready to start a family, I started to get depressed and anxious. My thyroid was out of whack, my gut was a mess, and my periods were nowhere to be seen. It was not pretty.

On my journey to heal it holistically, I learned I had celiac disease and was intolerant of dairy, too. Research and consultations with alternative health practitioners and mainstream docs alike became a part-time job. Although I was earning a decent wage, what with two master’s degrees and four years in the school system, it was a good thing that LJ had found his way back to employment that put teacher salary to shame. From a rough place to a healthy one cost a pretty penny.

In 2004, I was much improved. One weekend we attended the standout Napa valley wedding of our best man, who married his Kalamazoo sweetheart, and the next weekend we went to Colorado for another classmate’s nuptials. The former included lots of reminiscing, and the latter, not so much. LJ had been that friend’s best man at his first wedding to the woman he started dating the same spring LJ and I got together in 1992. What a blast that first wedding was in 1994. How bizarre to refrain from “remember whens” a decade later at the celebration of a new pairing. And humbling. Take nothing for granted.

When LJ’s mom remarried in 1995, she changed the date because I had a college friend getting married that same weekend. That friend, too, has since remarried. There have been moments I’ve wondered if LJ and I could make it. After my health had improved by our conception prospects looked uncertain, we started going to counseling, ostensibly to get support for dealing with potential infertility.

We got pregnant a month later, and have been riding the parenthood rollercoaster since. With both kids, there were months in the postpartum year when the lack of sleep and the trippiness of hormones converged to put me in great doubt about our future. We are not always the partners we want to be to each other.

Last fall, when it became a possibility that we could buy the house next door and renovate it exactly as we wanted, I knew it was his dream come true. His college application for Kalamazoo said he wanted to be an architect, to go to the 3-2 program and finish up at the University of Michigan after getting the best of the small liberal arts college experience. He didn’t pursue that path, but the desire to design remains.

And for us, the opportunity to take a look at how we live in our new family of four and shape a nearly identical home to suit that was an opportunity we could not pass up. So, for the past several months, we’ve been looking at our space and our habits and spending every waking moment thinking about what makes sense, what will be beautiful, and what will make us and our kids happy for years to come.

Although I’ve all but checked out of my friends’ lives in recent weeks and have spent a lot of money on babysitters while we manage this project, and although there are times when we’re at each other’s throats about all there is to do before we can sell this place and move into the new one, the process has helped me appreciate my husband in a new light.

For one thing, it kicks ass that he has figured out how to manage this insanity from a financial perspective. He did all the research to find out how to get us approved for a second mortgage while we still own this house, and then he did everything to get us to buy the new place directly from the owners, with whom he negotiated a deal worthy of neighbor envy. He’s an impressive realtor, without the capital R.

He’s also done a ton of work on both homes, in and out, and has designed most of the place such that we’ve needed architects only for permitting, drawings, and for feedback. The one we’ve turned to for design consultation says repeatedly, “You’re really good at this.”

She’s not kidding. He is. And he’s funny. And he can still play the piano like no one’s business, even though he hardly ever gets a waking moment to sit down at the bench without a child climbing on one of his extremities.

And, even though I am someone who unfortunately set expectations too high for any mortal to meet, no one can argue with the fact that he is an amazing father. When he comes home from work, it takes only one “Go see your daddy!” to get our 20-month-old daughter off my pantlegs and giddily waddling toward the front door. When I woke up next to her this morning, admittedly in the futon in our son’s room while he and my husband slept in our king-sized bed across the hall, I felt such a feeling of gratitude.

This person has seen me through so much. Through stress, frustration, success, joy. Through accomplishment and embarrassment. Through accolades and disappointments. Through sickness and through my journey toward health. Through two pregnancies and a lot of time wondering if they would happen. Through a c-section and an homebirth. Through breastfeeding struggles and successes, going on five years’ worth now. Through mothering, with all its attendant ups and downs, and extremes. How astoundingly lucky am I?

I wouldn’t want to go back and tell the 19-year-0ld me where she’d be in 20 years because I wouldn’t want to change a moment of its natural unfolding. But when I think about her, I think about the magic of that night and a night a few weeks later when I jumped into LJ’s arms after a Saturday apart and before a spring dance. It was this night I spoke of in my wedding vows, of this moment on the quad looking up at the stars, asking for this to last.

It has. For a really long time that sometimes feels like just a few breaths even though it’s over half my life. When LJ and I met, I used to jog around campus in the evening, wondering what it would be like to own a home, to be a family. I imagined the babies I would have with LJ, never seeing being baldness into what has become redheaded childhood. I am living the life I dreamed of and so much I never knew to expect.

The other day, before LJ got a much-needed haircut, I looked at his shaggy head and saw a glimmer of the young boy I’ve seen in photos from a few years before we met, at his sister’s wedding. He was in a late-80s Don Johnson pastel suit. I didn’t know him yet, but after 20 years of sharing our stories and looking at albums that now show us where our children’s eyes come from, nothing is a total surprise.

And at the same time, everything is.

I love you, LJ. Thank you for a wonderful 20 years. Happy anniversary. I love what we’ve built together.

No one has to convince me not to try to be perfect. Okay, I do have perfectionist tendencies in some areas, but when I read about mothers having epiphanies that they don’t need to keep the house spotless, I feel like I am living on some other planet. One with lots of spots.

It looks -- and sounds -- pretty messy and conflicted around here!

My floors get vacuumed fairly often, but they are so dirty my daughter’s white socks are permanently light brown on the bottom. And that’s even with her taking them off and walking around barefoot half the time. There is always stuff on the floor.  “Done with it? Drop it!” appears to be our family motto.

Reading Chapter Five of Renee Peterson Trudeau’s Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal at first glance didn’t do anything to make me feel any better, or to inspire me to slack on my expectations. It actually made me feel kind of bad that I really don’t hold myself to very high standards – I let plenty go! – and I still feel frustrated!

Yes, I would like my home to be a lovely place of beauty. Yes, I would like my kids to grow up with respect for their toys and to learn to treat things with reverence rather than refuse. These things are about values, not because I feel like I have to reach for some externally-defined sense of perfection.

A large part of the desire to renovate the house next door came from an interest in re-imagining home: figuring out what doesn’t work and finding creative solutions to make it work when the template is closer to blank.

Yes, I would really like to get this right. But that’s so that I can actually enjoy the place I spend so much time because it looks pretty and feels calm. Not because I think I “should.” I know I can breathe better with space.

I seek beauty for its own sake, not out of some external sense of necessity. But still, beauty — living in it, creating it, appreciating it — proves elusive amid all the other things there are to do just to exist.

I make all my food from scratch, not because I fear the organic police will give me a bad consumer citation but because I will get sick if I don’t.

I live without caffeine and chocolate and chocolate, not because I’m depriving myself but because their negative impact on my health will be keenly and quickly felt.

Everything I do is purposeful, and yet nothing seems to actually get done.

Last May, when I wrote about the book Good Enough is the New Perfect, I felt freed by the idea that many things I saw as conflicts were not really conflicts. It was a matter of perspective. Yippee! I could change my reality by changing the way I looked at it!

Well, now these different pulls/commitments/desires/needs really do feel like conflicts. Because I simply have got to sleep more or I will never get well. That eats into time I could be pursuing another leisure activity, or meaningful work, or cleaning the home. And it’s hard to feel like doing any of those when your energy is so low. I know it’s time to seek another healthcare practitioner, but I haven’t been able to find the time or energy to do that research. One bright spot is that I emailed a friend who had adrenal fatigue and was on the GAPS diet for a long time, and she said sure, she could chat with me. And Ann Marie at Cheeseslave, having kindly already responded to a comment of mine on her GAPS Diet Myths post, wrote me this week that she’d soon post the question I sent her on an upcoming Sunday Q&A.

Really, I want some giant healing hand to pick me up and hold me safe while, with its other hand, it pushes a pause button so I don’t have to miss out on my children’s lives, my friends’ lives, my home project, my pursuits.

But there is only one now, and if sleeping and breathing and mindfully eating are tops on the agenda, that’s just what I have to do.

I need to be my own giant hand.

And my own pause button.

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Share with me your self-care secrets!

It makes me sick not to write. There are so many interviews pieces I want to finish, ideas I want to share, moments I want to record. Even healthy food putrifies if it stays in you too long. To not write is intellectual constipation. It hurts. And it stinks.

But I feel like I have little choice. That’s probably not true. But that’s how I feel.

When I finally did the homework for the second Mother’s Self-Renewal class scheduled for yesterday (which I didn’t end up attending), the first thought that popped into my head at the prompt “What is your heart’s greatest desire?” was: “Expression.”

Any wonder I have a thyroid disorder, at my fifth chakra?

And then, when Renee Peterson Trudeau’s Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal asked me to imagine myself full of regret at the end of my life and think of what would I most regret not doing, the answer was “travel.”

The thing is, when you can’t eat grain, starch, fruit, or fresh vegetables, travel is a challenge. Either I spend hours in preparation and then tote around a ton of food (and cook wherever I go), or I get sick. Sick and in tummy pain in the short term, and I’m delaying my recovery for the long term. So I stay home.

And as I read the book, my self-pitying rather than self-renewing mind crossed off all the fun treat-type things she suggested that I can’t do (not without negative repercussions) because of my stomach or skin or overall fatigue: swim, pick up food for a picnic, get ice cream or yogurt, go to yoga (just sounds exhausting right now), sip green tea, go to a wine bar. Even a pedicure seems out of the question.

Sure, I could care for my own feet at home or do a gentle yoga practice. But with the time it takes me to prepare food and try to eat it without being rushed or interrupted (ha!) so that my wimpy gut can actually digest, and the time it takes me to try to get the baby to nap, and the time required to make decisions about our house renovation, there’s not much left.

Add in the fact that our little toddler has no sense of boundaries and loves nothing better than to take things out of places. She often puts them back, in her own unique way, on her own timetable, but there’s only so long I can step around all the scattered tea bags on the kitchen floor.

It’s one thing to be a terrible housekeeper on your own. It’s another thing to teach said slovenly lifestyle to your kids. Payback in Legos, a thousand-fold.

Choking hazard, slipping hazard, tripping hazard. Life has become hazardous to my health.

Or so it seems. On one hand, self-care seems like it’s not even an option: it’s just a necessity. I eat poorly, I hurt and can’t function. So I don’t eat poorly. But I do eat annoyed, or rushed, and without having really breathed or connected to my body during the day, because it just takes too much time to pause and focus when there is so much to do.

And so many packets of tea on the floor.

When I read in the book, “What would motivate you to make your self-renewal a priority?” the answer that came was “cancer.” I don’t mean this lightly. The seriousness of a diagnosis has been on my brain, with the recent death of Toddler Planet’s Susan Niebur (known not so much by me but a close friend of many in the DC blogging community) and with the year anniversary of my friend Liz’s surgery and the necessary weaning of her son as she pursued breast cancer treatment. It was heartening that doing some Emotional Freedom Technique at last week’s Holistic Moms Meeting helped me get over the jilting of a mutual friend and be able to make it to a celebratory playdate for Liz. The friend actually asked me a question about my son’s school, and I answered. Small talk never seemed so sweet.

But the mojo couldn’t keep up with my February-Into-March blues. It’s now been 25 years since my brother committed suicide in this bleak midwinter time, a week before my 14th birthday. But the pall still hangs over the calendar.

So when it began snowing on Saturday morning, I almost wished it would continue so that I could rationalize skipping the Self-Renewal class. Ridiculous, I know. What brings me joy also causes stress. That’s kind of a recipe for disaster.

After the first class, I came home joyful but then felt like my balloon popped when I got home and that joy wasn’t reflected back. It felt like if I went again — on this day when our contractor scheduled a last-minute meeting to go over some important details — I would pay for it later. All my “energy goes out of the house,” I’m really good at “doing things for other people but  not my family,” I “prioritize time at the computer and not  keeping things organized and uncluttered,” that’s an awful “lot of gas to waste” … these are the arguments  replay in my head when I’m weighing whether or not to pursue something that isn’t necessary.

The self-renewal class was to start at 3:00, which meant I should have left at 2:15. That meant I needed to get the baby to sleep, shower, and eat by about 2:00. I managed to print all the info I wanted my husband to share with the contractor when he came at 3:00. The baby didn’t wake from her nap after I left the room. She didn’t wake when I showered. But just as I was finishing eating, she woke wailing.

My husband brought her downstairs, and she was not pleased. “Was she at the door?” I asked. “In the bed,” he said. “Then she probably wants to sleep some more.” Up they went again.

It was 2:19. I was just finishing eating, listening to her cries.

Forget it. I’m not going.

To the email I’d pulled up for address and directions, I hit Reply All and sent my regrets. After a few minutes, I went upstairs to take over operation “get-the-baby-to-nap-more-than-45 minutes.” LJ waved me off before the baby could see me.

I could have left then. But I didn’t. What if the contractor came and LJ was still upstairs, what if they were both asleep? We needed to talk about our windows, dammit! If I’m here, at least he and I can start the conversation while extra precious drops of sleep slip into my daughter’s cup, possibly giving her the cue to sleep longer next time. The intricacies of slumber are all-consuming these days, especially after last week’s  talk with a sleep consultant.

No, I didn’t leave.

The idea of getting joyful, speeding away to enjoy a car filled only with the sounds of NPR and then communing with other mothers felt impossible, irresponsible. I was still sick with a sinus infection, still hungry with nothing safe to snack on for the next four hours out of the house but nuts, nuts, and more nuts. My son would come home from his playdate in an hour and ask for me. I’d come home to who knows what for the kids’ dinner and likely nothing but grumpiness for my dinner. And surely I’d be starving again by then. The baby might wake mad again any minute and ruin my husband’s chance to talk to the contractor without distraction.

So, instead, I cleaned. It was productive. The contractor meeting was useful, though if I’d known it was going to start a half-hour late, I might not have rationalized myself to staying home. Still, I was kind of glad I was here. There was about twelve minutes of being happy to be all together as a family after my son got home before he started whining and threatening nasty stuff.

No decision I make is right. I don’t know how to parent.

Something in me died, or went into hibernation: the idea that there was any hope of my getting my needs met. The idea that my needs were worth meeting. The idea that I could prioritize anything over tasks in front of me, like cooking, diapering, stopping to give my son attention, and dealing with household matters.

I turned off the self-care switch.

It’s probably safe to say that my son’s meltdowns that day and the next might have had something to do with a dour-looking mother. One whose face seemed to be having an exceptional reaction to gravity. Shit, I can’t even be selfless and not have that fuck up my kid! Nothing I do is right!

It’s taken me three days and at least five different times sitting down to write this (but I’m putting the time stamp back to when I started it). It’s likely that writing actually helped me climb out enough to see that I can make it the rest of the way. So did tutoring, and talking to a friend, and sunshine, and going to my son’s school to watch him mesmerized by author/illustrator Laurie Keller’s presentation (and the subsequent book he started writing, that he made sure I understood he wanted people to buy).

If he can manage to follow a stranger’s directions and, in the space of eight minutes draw an otter and a happy doughnut, maybe his mom can try to follow some directions to “reclaim, rejuvenate and re-balance” her life.

So what’s the homework for next class?

This time of year is always good for smacking me around. Even on a sunny day like today, when the quince and camellia are blooming and you swear it can’t be January it’s so warm, winter is in my bones.

And my mom’s too.  Right around this time in 1995, while I was doing my student teaching, she fell in her kitchen and broke her leg so bad it popped through the skin. At the time, my father was on his always-dreamed-about trip to New Zealand. Travel was not an anomaly for him; he’s done plenty for business and plenty for pleasure, including a trip to Thailand after he fell in love with the cuisine. I’m told he went bird-watching in Arizona (I think) shortly after I (his fifth child) was born. To say that my mother does not share his love for travel is a grand understatement.

When I signed up to read the novel The Art of Hearing Heartbeats for the From Left to Write book club, I hoped I would be able to reward myself with the novel read after finishing a volunteer project I was working on. But then I got more work tutoring in the last week of the semester at the boarding school where I help a few kids. And my children here at home kept needing a mommy. And their mommy needed more sleep. So she didn’t finish the book, but its tale of travel in search of a lost father is certainly intriguing.

Last week, I was on a high after the successful fundraiser, and I was pleased with how well I was feeling. And yet, I’ve also been reflecting lately on just when it is that my health gave me clues that I would have a challenging road. My mom has been wondering the same for years. Maybe that leg break was as bad as it was because she was (like me) celiac and didn’t know it, or because of some other health condition that weakens bones. The skin issues and digestive issues I’m having now are not new; they’ve been cycling through my body in various permutations for years. And even my mom has admitted that her body was not the ideal place to start a life, belonging to a stressed out (and a smoking) mother of four (ages 8-12 and up when I came along).

I bet she and I share more health issues than we are aware, though I hope that my discovering things at and earlier age and the newer research around these days will contribute to an easier road for me eventually. But right now, it’s a little challenging. The heaviness I feel around the time of a drop in my thyroid is knocking at the door like a canvasser who won’t disappear. And, even if this mild winter continues, it’s always tough to go into the month of February, recalling the death of my brother in 1987.

The year before he took his life, my parents and I went to the Bahamas for my seventh grade mid-winter break, a week that Michigan schools take off so that everyone can keep a little sanity. Finding green helps. The year before that, sixth grade, we went to Hawaii. My mom probably hated every minute of both trips. I loved them but wanted to do more activities and wished I had siblings closer to my age to join. When Pat died, I was on a vacation with a friend and her family on a small island near Barbados where we went on the most spectacular hike to a waterfall. A few days later — a week shy of my fourteenth birthday — I had to fly back home alone to the dreary Midwest.

Today, I still have my father’s zeal for adventure and his propensity to get and stay busy, but my body isn’t exactly keeping up. I’d like to join my sister-in-law’s yoga retreat in Costa Rica in March, but seeing as my thyroid really crashed just after meeting her family in Vermont for the Anusara Grand Circle and Wanderlust last June, and seeing as I have to cook all my food from scratch or face a lot discomfort, travel will have to wait.

I’m not even sure how I’m going to make it to Baltimore for even one day of the three-day Fourfold Path to Healing Conference this weekend. Although I fantasize about staying overnight by myself without having to wake to nurse my 18-month-old back to sleep, my not coming home Saturday night wouldn’t magically disappear all my issues. I’d still need to bring a bunch of food with me, and I’d probably want to pump. In order to reap the benefits of something that would be therapeutic, I have to make some sacrifices that might otherwise jeopardize my health (not to mention that of my daughter, son and husband, who I’m guessing wouldn’t have the greatest night of sleep since we haven’t done a dry run on the night weaning).

And what would they do all day Sunday if I stayed at the conference until it ends at 5:30, or would I leave at noon? How would my daughter react once I got home, and then had to go out after dinner to tutor? How would my body react?

Tonight, when my husband was trying to use playful parenting to get my son out of whining mode during dinner, he took on the voice of a train conductor. E didn’t understand the “sh-clunk” sound of the pretend hole punch. We realized our little boy, almost six, has never been on a train other than the Metro. Maybe my husband could take the kids up to Baltimore on a train partway through Saturday, and we could all drive back home that night, I suggested. “With both of them?” my husband asked, his eyes practically reflecting the shine of headlights. After a few minutes, he said he’d look into it.

Maybe the promise of adventure can somehow give me the space to pursue some healing without a whole lot of guilt. But probably just for one day.

—

How do you balance physical and emotional needs?

What did you inherit from your parents?

What pushes and pulls?

—

When Julia travels to Burma to search for her missing lawyer father, she discovers much more than she expected. Join From Left to Write on February 1 as we discuss The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker. As a member of From Left to Write, I received a copy of the book. All opinions are my own.

The instant I read the words, I regretted picking up my BlackBerry that one last time before going to bed. A well-meaning relative of mine had read my recent post about my health and my leaky gut problem and told me: “This is not the time to volunteer for things.” She intended to point out that there would be plenty of time later in life for me to pursue my interests when I didn’t have as many health challenges to face and when I wasn’t in such a busy time of motherhood with a kindergartener and opinionated non-verbal toddler.

I get her point. Really, I do. The problem is that her note assumes that volunteering is something that detracts from my well-being. Sure, it might have seemed that way in the post she read. I’d rushed to finish it and get it up rather than wait until who knows when I’d get a free moment to sit down again. I did, I realize, sound a little overwhelmed. And yes, balance is something I’m working on.

But I don’t regret my choices, and I don’t want them restricted. That wouldn’t help. If I weren’t busy with something that felt meaningful, that contributed to my priorities, that gave me joy, or that fueled me with passion, I would be, simply put, depressed. Staying busy and engaged in something bigger than myself is a necessity for me to stay mentally healthy without medication.

And staying off medication is something I feel is a physical necessity as well; I simply don’t think my body can handle being on anti-depressants. They made an amazing difference for two years, and then again for a year while I sought treatment for hyperthyroidism (Graves’ Disease).

But they are drugs. Even if I weren’t a true believer in the healing power of nutrition and energy work, my system has shown me it simply cannot handle anything artificial. As much as SSRIs helped, I’m also pretty convinced that they contributed to the mess I’m in now — a much smaller role than 30 years of eating gluten, probably, but a role nonetheless.

No amount of saying no to volunteer work is going to undo all the damage that was caused by decades of eating food my body couldn’t handle, to say nothing of mild but young substance abuse. What will help me heal is continuing to eat real food, pursuing what makes me happy, and cultivating a mindfulness practice. It takes a lot more time and energy than popping a pill, but I really don’t see that I have a choice if I have my long-term health in mind.

Until I got this late-night email, I was, I admit, stewing a little about the lack of time to do everything I cared about. But rather than push me to step aside, as was its intention, the note inspired me to remember why I have chosen what I’ve chosen to do and to be grateful that I have the opportunity to do it.

The fundraiser I was working on was a great success, both in money raised and in positive momentum and a spirit of community, which was probably even more valuable to this project about which I care deeply. Even as I wished for more hours in the day to proofread the program and organize the volunteer schedule, I remembered that I proposed this event because I believe in the cause and that I offered to head it up because it’s something I knew I could do well. I knew it could be a great thing, and I wanted to create that.

So I carried that purpose with me into the event and sincerely enjoyed it. I lapped up the kudos with nary a self-critical remark or “if only we could have” lament. It was just good, plain and simple. We can debrief and learn from it, sure, but the thing I am most proud of is just enjoying it.

And then, when I came home after being gone at the school 11 a.m.-5 p.m. and launched right back into domestic goddess mode, I took on that role without resentment. Sure, there was a smidge of “really?” in my brain when my husband said he was super tired, but rather than go to a place of bitterness, I just chalked it up to a confirmation that the job I usually do of managing house and home is, indeed, a tiring one!

I wanted the laundry and dishes dealt with, so I did them.

I wanted celery and other veggies for the next day and to not cook that night or ask my tired husband to rally, so I went out to the grocery store after picking up take-out.

I wanted to do yoga before eating in peace and quiet, so I waited until after the family meal and bedtime to get on my mat and then eat my own safe food.

Somehow, that email sparked — or stoked — a fire. What started as angry turned cozy and glowing. The email inspired me, in part, to take the Mother’s Self-Renewal workshop to explore issues of balance and honoring our many selves. That first session then gave me the sense that I am both not alone in my dilemmas about time and also that my process is one to honor. It is part of my mothering to model not perfection but an embracing of personal growth and inquiry.

So thank you, dear relative, even if noting you wish you’d gotten advice from your elders still doesn’t convince me that you weren’t being more judgmental than supportive. Regardless of their intent, your words helped me see through the messiness of internal conflict and to look toward something varied and beautiful.

When a two-hour workshop that requires almost an hour of driving leaves you feeling recharged like you had a nap, I’d say it lives up to its “self-renewal” title!

Today was the first meeting of a “Monthly Mother’s Self-Renewal Group” based on Renee Trudeau’s book, The Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal. We centered, we talked, we drew. It was great! I can’t wait to start working on some of the exercises and sharing them here! What an inspiring way to start the new year!

Thanks to Lil Omm yoga studio and parenting counselor Jennifer Kogan for putting this together. I’m so motivated, I’m going to cheerily clean up the house while my husband puts the kids to bed, even if he has made at least two or three wisecracks about my taking three hours out of the day on a busy weekend to do this. It’s up to me to keep up my mama mojo.

And yes, I did notice that one of the other books Jen had resting on her yoga mat was Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family by Amy Tiemann. Next on the list!

Baby girl has been a little under the weather, so we’ve been spending more time together — less babysitter, no outings. There were lots of things I intended to accomplish in the past two days, but many of them had to just go out the window. Or, rather, she sat on my desk in front of the window while I sorted files of papers in my overgrown office.

At 17 months, baby A is still not talking much, but she sure does have opinions. And she does nothing half-assed. Every act is intentional, whether it’s putting a random tea bag into a new box, taking my credit card out of my wallet and sliding it under her booster seat, or inspecting the tampons she finds in the non-baby-proofed bathroom cabinet. (When you have nothing toxic lying around, it’s easy to get complacent about latches. And then really easy to get embarrassed when little o.b.s from 1998 end up unwrapped in unexpected and cringingly public places).

This child has a lot more hair in the back than her brother did at this age. It’s coming in straighter but the same color (red!) and in the same location as her brother’s: party in the back. She doesn’t get dressed much in girly clothing, and I was just resigned to her having the same homely mullet her brother had until he was two and a half. It just occurred to me that I could consider actually doing something with that hair.

Even though I feel like I model busy more than bodhi, she actually came over to my yoga mat the other day intent on doing down-dogs with me. Looking at her increasingly long red locks, I said to myself, “You have a girl. A daughter.”

Someday she’s going to care how she looks, and she’s going to be embarrassed by my clothes, if she isn’t already. Her brother recently asked why I looked “fancy” when I put on jeans and a 10-year-old ribbed turtleneck that flared out at the bottom “like a ballet shirt,” he remarked. “I’m not fancy, honey, I’m just dressed.” My husband reminded me that he was the one to pick out that sweater back when it was in style, and from Bloomingdale’s no less.

Without my fashionisto boys, where would I be?

By the time the girl is in the mom-sucks years of middle school, I may have taken frumpy to a whole new level. Or maybe I’ll be in my midlife crisis-cum-renaissance, but I find that hard to believe.

At any rate, the cute barrettes my daughter’s brother insisted we buy her months before she was sporting anything like enough hair to stick them in, finally got a trial yesterday. Each attempt to put them in lasted almost long enough for my husband to take these photos.

I think pretty soon we’re going to have a Pippi Longstocking on our hands.

—

How did you handle hair differently with your daughters versus your sons? Or how did you manage not to?

Yesterday there was no childcare or playdate. Just a lot of rain. I truly felt like a stay-at-home mom, like back in the day before I took on freelance work or started up a chapter of Holistic Moms.

Some of yesterday was full of giggles. Some had me wanting to rip out my hair.

I consider it a victory that: I did a few stretches at home, then made it to the grocery store and then to yoga. My daughter had a few fussy moments during Lil Omm’s yoga playtime (an adult class where kids can hang out), but for the most part, I got in a decent practice. Of course, I was going just on fresh juice (kale, carrot, lettuce, parsley, lemon, beet) and didn’t eat breakfast until 11:30 after I’d put the babe down for a nap.

It would have been nice if she’d slept more than an hour and if she hadn’t been so whiny during the time of just us girls. At least, after her insanely mammoth poop, she amused herself in the tub while I folded clothes. (Note to self: get replacement plug for tub since husband threw out the old one). And then, before we headed to the bus stop to pick up her brother, we both gorged on Artisana coconut butter.

The happy surprise was that after she rejected my attempt to nap her again while her brother, ravenous after a hard day at kindergarten, was eating a second lunch, she was in a great mood. The two of them played individually and together for a good long while, during which time I chopped vegetables, washed dishes, and read and wrote emails related to work, the house, school and weekend planning.

Last week, I caught a piece on NPR about a study in the American Sociological Review that talks about how much more multitasking working mothers do than working fathers — and how much more stressful the mothers’ multitasking is. It’s worth a listen. When your brain constantly is engaged in three projects, it can’t do any of them well. Our circuits get fried. It’s tiring and not rewarding for us. And for our kids who have only a small pie piece of our attention, it’s got to be annoying. I don’t advocate dropping everything to coddle your kid 24/7, but some more focus on words that start with h, c, f, and d might be nice, I’m sure.

So the time from 3:30 to 5:30 was more productive than it was glorious. I got to plug in while they played well, and I only had to wear the baby on my back for a small chunk of time. She perked up when I fed her pomegranate, and I actually bounced on the rebounder (a few different times, since she kept climbing up to join me) and did a little more yoga in the few minutes between dinner being ready and my husband getting home. The physical activity alone made this a banner day!

But, after my son came downstairs at 8 p.m. complaining that he couldn’t sleep, I felt a little guilty for not giving him more focused attention and for not getting us all outside despite the rain. Ironically, I was in the middle of writing about natural playgrounds and playtime at school when he toddled in his too-small red jammies into the dining room, blinking at the light.

After I led him back into his room and tucked him back into bed, I realized, “Oh, you probably didn’t go out today, did you? No wonder you’re not so tired.”

“Just for morning break,” he replied, acknowledging that lunch recess was indoors. “We always went out in the rain at my old school,” he said of his Waldorf school. “I don’t know why they don’t go out in the rain at my new school,” he mused, pointing a knife toward the heart of his mom who chose free public school with a full day over returning to the outdoor-enthusiastic but tres expensive half-day Waldorf school.

I asked if he ever missed his old school, and he said yes, a lot. When pressed on what he missed, he described in great detail the joyful experience of playing with the rain that dripped down from the gutters of the old church that housed his school.

And then he switched his gushing praise to the current state of affairs, where he can pick to ride a trike or scooter on the track at school (and where he’s previously said he loves the big playground, and the soccer games at lunch). The enthusiasm about the new place was heartening.

I came back downstairs, checked a few items off the to do list my daughter had scribbled on hours earlier, finished an email, and went back to pacing out the floorplan of the next door house we are going to renovate starting as soon as we can make our decisions and get drawings ready to submit for permits.

When the baby started crying at 10:10, I said goodbye to the day, knowing that in the morning — after I got juice, broth, veggies, egg and sausage made, lunches finished up and packed, newly washed (and dried in the dryer because they were still in the wash when I went to bed) diapers stuffed and a new one on my girl’s bum before she went to the sitter’s — I knew that I’d get to pretend for a few hours that I am my own person who can do one thing at a time.

Like write about being a mom.

Fall’s draperies have fallen and are mulching on the ground. The woods behind our house are quieter, the tall trees naked of leaves even as deer nibble the green undergrowth.

I am astounded by the light.

It pours in now, like sleepy eyes that have just awakened. It comes at funny times and at new angles, finding new crevices to creep into and casting tricks of shadows on the plainest of surfaces.

We are moving.

Moving into winter. Moving into a new season of emptiness ready for the filling. Moving out of babyhood toward opinionation. Moving out of little boyhood into large hands and strong muscles.

Moving, literally, next door.

Having accepted the rare gift of an opportunity to renovate a home at a cost we just might manage, my family is on the verge of beginning a renovation of the house next to ours, a nearly identical Cape in origin but one in need of much love and tenderness.

I intend to infuse it with beauty.

And intention.

As we embark on a new season of our family lives, we pore over design books and muse about forts and gardens in the bigger lot, I may heed the call to draw inward. While I remain committed to feeding myself and my family nourishing, real food, it may be time to break from following the news toward a time of looking at the light and seeing where we live within it.

If I am quiet, it is to think and imagine. To conjure home. This may take me toward other writing, toward writing about green in building more than the green in my morning juice.

Like everything else, it’s a work in progress.

But let the work be play.