Finding the Balance Between My Job and My job

I suppose this is meta- because I'm talking about what I am talking about.

I spent two hours yesterday working on a blog post I had intended to post this morning. When I woke up this morning, I realized that it cannot be published. Not this morning at least. Why? Because the first part of it is clean and neat and flowed out of me in a matter of minutes, like Athena from Zeus's head, though no one would mistake it for divine. The second part is the part I had labored on, and even though it has taken up more time than I have, it isn't ready. It is a treatment of someone else's ideas, and therefore I have to take the time out to make sure it says something I really want to say.

I don't always take that sort of time. Whether I should or not, I don't know because I am still at the very beginning of this process. What process is that? The process of taking my own writing seriously.

There's a struggle here by virtue of the fact that I am not a writer, though that is what I have always wanted to be. I am a wife and mother. As Nancy Wilson reminded us a couple of weeks ago, when she and her husband were in Tuscaloosa speaking at Riverwood Presbyterian, motherhood is a high and important calling, and I don't wish to devalue it. In another sense I am a writer because I write. Besides that I am a published writer because you are published the moment you hand something over for someone else to read. I've been publishing these things regularly, in various qualities of dress, for a couple of months.

Here's something I've been wondering about. Writing is work. It's a lot of work if you do anything more than a quick draft. Occasionally an email will take me 45 minutes or more to complete. If I am to value my primary job, which is running a household, as I should, how do I do this other thing as well? I imagine some people would tell me that I have to wait until the children are older and don't need me as much. I suppose other people would say I have to write because the writing is the most important thing. I'm not comfortable with either of these answers. You have to have something of your own is the accepted wisdom, and I don't disagree. But how do I do both: do them justice (my husband, my family), and have this something of my own (reading, writing, study)? It isn't as though I can really set them, my husband and children, aside when the need to write arises. It isnt' as though I can always write during those times when they are occupied with other things.

I imagine this is something that all mothers struggle with. I'd like to start looking around for other women who have a similar mix of anxieties, because many of them are bloggers, women who also have intellectual goals, but who combine those goals with a high view of the calling to motherhood.

Consider this a call for help. If you've been reading this thing for long, you probably already have an idea of what kinds of blogs I'd be interested in (i.e. writers, readers, University people, theology buffs). If you have any recommendations to make, please submit them now.

Timing-Provision/God has been Very Good

Isaac, gentleman that he is, waited to arrive until after Michael's immediate obligations as special events deacon at Grace had been fulfilled. He chose to come before my Dad had to commit to whether or not he would travel to New Orleans to lecture for the Marine Corp. He waited until after Michael and I had the opportunity to go to lunch alone together just that afternoon.

I have often been disappointed in thinking about the neat ways God hasn't provided for us and for our needs. He's never given me an automobile out of the blue (something I have always dreamed would happen). He's never given us a specific amount of money immediately before or after we have needed.

But here's what He has done.

We needed a baby bed and mattress for Isaac to sleep on. John and Linda are loaning us a bed. Cori has provided a mattress. We needed a place for Isaac to sleep until he's old enough to make it through the night without nursing, when he'll join Parker. Shelly bought us a bassinet for a dollar at a yard sale. We needed a cover for the bassinet. Elizabeth had that would fit.

The automatic breast pump I need to establish nursing has been provided without cost beyond it's use of electricity. Heather and Anna Grace were available without question to spend parts of the night with Parker the night Isaac arrived.

Isaac has diapers because Michael's office gave us a diaper shower the Friday before Isaac was born. Linda watched Parker while I got my driver's license renewed only the weekend before.

Anna gave me clothes to wear the last couple of months of my pregnancy. Isaac has clothes to wear because Laura and Tina and Elizabeth and others gave us their old ones. Isaac has his own new blankets thanks to Pam and others. My parents live close by so there was never any question of where Parker would stay while Michael and I were at the hospital with Isaac.

Our kitchen range was dying, and so Michael's parents helped us to purchase a new one over Thanksgiving. My parents have bought us groceries since Isaac has been here, as well as various household needs. My mom often buys me clothes when I need them and she's available to help me with the boys until I adjust to nursing with a two year-0ld in the house. Daniel and Shannon were able to be here the day Isaac arrived.

Our mortgage is low, which as been a tremendous help in coping with the rising costs of living. We get the dependant tax exemption for 2008 even though we had no expectation. God didn't exactly GIVE us a car, but in reality He did, because we were able to buy a mini-van this year from someone we know and trust, who provided a complete maintenance history and even had the oil changed and the tires rotated after the sales agreement had been made. Best of all, two car seats fit in it easily, which they never could have in our other car.

We have our own washer and dryer this time around to cope with the tremendous amounts of laundry a new baby generates.

Michael has been able to take time off work to be with me and Parker and Isaac with very little difficulty, and he's off again tomorrow for New Years.

How has God not provided for us?

He is good anyway, by the way, apart from anything He may or may not do for us. I have to tempt disaster and thank Him because this is His due.

An Old Post, Never Before Published

The reason why I haven't been blogging recently (This is how it goes):

I'm pregnant, and when I am pregnant I have trouble stringing words together. Maybe I'll get together a paragraph in my head while I'm supposed to be working on something else, but then I'll start to write it, and... There's an interruption of some sort, or I can't get it to work the way I want it to. It happens over and over again until I finally decide that I'm not going to do this for a while.

In graduate school just before Parker was born my inability to write proved disastrous. Three papers due at the end of the semester--the one I turned in to my Black Women's Metaphysical Fiction professor was total crap. I couldn't come up with anything interesting to write about, and what I finally did write about was incoherent and possibly offensive without any sort of redeeming usefulness. Seriously. I've tended to feel like an outsider a lot of times in the past and tried to write about being disappointingly marginalized by Ntozake Shange's expressed intent concerning the play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf.

The paper I turned in for my Shakespeare class that semester, I don't even want to think about, and to this day I turn over and over in my mind possibilities for completing that incomplete earned in Theory of the Novel because I simply couldn't do anything with it. The incomplete haunts me because as long as it exists I damage my chances of ever being able to go back to Graduate School, even though by now I don't know whether or not I really want to go.

At this point I've said way more than I meant to say when I'm supposed to be posting pictures. Anyway here's a post I started at the beginning of May, and so instead of throwing it away, I'm posting it here, almost eight months late:

Parker slept late this morning, which turned out to be a good way to start the day. Especially since I wasn't in the mood to put anything away last night; so there were toys to redistribute, dishes to add to the dishwasher, and others needing personal attention. He atypically slept through one and a half showers, giving me the opportunity to do some devotional reading. I'm slowly and inconsistently working my way through Devotional Classics edited by Richard Foster and James Bryan Smith. Today's selection was from Jonathan Edwards, and I confess that it did not get the attention it deserved. Maybe I'll have better success with comprehension tomorrow.

Parker has lately become a hugger and a cuddler and a climber and a talker. He doesn't blab, blab, blab away all day, but he is saying more and more words.

I've emailed two different people blog worthy material this morning, so I'll lay aside the guilt I feel at not revisiting those subjects afresh, and reproduce what I have already written here.

The first item I considered blog-worthy on May 2, 2008 was a story about how pregnancy hormones affect the mental faculty:

Two coffee cups. One has residue from yesterday's coffee because I found it this morning under my bed. The other has been freshly used then rinsed because I've decided to make a cup of tea. Which cup do you think I chose to put the tea bag and hot water in?

My used-to-be perfectly-good brain says, make sure you use the right cup. My perfectly-good brain does not say, put the old cup in the dishwasher before you do this. Thankfully the tea tastes okay anyway, and Parker is temporarily placated. Unfortunately I just realized that I forgot to put a bib on him, so he has oatmeal down his shirt.

Honestly, I no longer remember what the other blog-worthy post was meant to be.

Reading and Writing--What Are They?

I always have strange thoughts while putting Parker to bed. Often they have to do with that incomplete in Theory of the Novel I still have to make up; usually these are strategies for writing it that make a lot of sense right up until the moment I leave my son's room. Tonight I was thinking about modes of interaction with texts.

Question: What do you mean when you say you have "read" something?

Once upon a time I had this great memory. I remembered things I had read, where I had read them, what they were about. I remember one time discussing A Separate Peace with my friend Joy over the phone, years after I had actually read the book for class. We talked about what the book was really about at its core. I can't do that anymore. I barely remember the plot of the Diana Gabaldon (The Fiery Cross) I read four months ago.

I finished Reflections on the Psalms this afternoon. I read it fast because I needed to read something quickly after spending so many months on Orthodoxy. Now I want to go back and simmer in it for a while, absorb Lewis's insights into secondary meanings. I've read the book, but I don't feel like I can say that I have really read it, because I did not give the book the sort of textual interaction it deserves.

Ben Talmadge said (hopefully he'll correct me if I get this wrong) that he can barely enjoy a movie unless he can journal fifteen pages about it later. I can hardly bear to summarize an essay paragraph by paragraph. While putting Parker to bed I thought--crazy thoughts about writing and writing and writing as I read, because writing clears so many things up for me. Writing helps me work out things I don't understand, posit answers where I have questions, answers that actually make some measure of sense. It help me figure out what I really think about another person's ideas. For some reason I find this very difficult to do without writing.

I wonder if this is why so much of what I read is ultimately lost on me. But then, could I, would I ever stand to do it?