Me and Elijah at last Saturday’s Halloween parade

Hello again, dear readers. I’ve missed you! My mode these days has been survival (baby’s due in two weeks!), and it’s been all I’ve been able to do to wrangle our little clown and keep our family clothed and fed. I’m looking forward to the day when naptimes and evenings are freed from sleep for things like, oh, engaging the world that I only assume still exists beyond the walls of this confinement pregnancy.

The good news is that I’ve been able to maintain my novel-writing sessions throughout these crazy months (would you believe that sitting in front of a computer is actually easier than watching a 2-year-old?), and last week I completed a revised outline of the whole thing. I have to say that out loud to buoy me through all the things I haven’t been able to accomplish…like emailing and blogging and reading and keeping up with the people I care about! To those of you whose emails have gone unanswered, or answered after great delay, I send heartfelt apologies and all my best intentions of being back in touch soon.

Our c-section is scheduled for November 15, so barring unforeseen labor, that’s when my body and heart (and lungs and intestines and veins and…) will be breathing big sighs of relief and embarking on the new, but, at least from where I sit now, more appealing challenge of caring for a newborn.

Thank you so terribly much for your love and prayers and words of support through these months. I’ve treasured them all.

Until soon (I hope!), and with love,
Kristin

It’s evening and Elijah’s asleep. The dishes are done, and the air outside is cold enough to warrant closed windows. So it’s quiet. Much more than usually so.

I came here to check my email quickly, to browse a few blogs, to put some music on an iPod I’ve never used, which N won in a raffle, with the aim of tackling, to music, more things on my list. The time it just took to figure out the iPod makes me feel old and a generation removed from cool. And then this, a Ben Harper ballad from a CD my dear friend made me, starts playing in my ears:

Beloved One

I’m feeling vulnerable these days, daydreaming, often more subconsciously than consciously I think, of being loved and rocked and tended like a child. Elijah’s been teething this week, waking often before dawn, needing to be rocked and sung back to sleep. And I have often been awake already, tossing and turning in this body that won’t sleep. I want a mama to help me to sleep, too. I want to be sung to. I want to be smiled on, throughout my days, and have meals prepared for me and activities chosen. I want to know viscerally that this body, with its burgeoning belly and veins, its racing heart, its squished up lungs and the aches that make me feel 80, is beautiful. Miraculous. A thing of awe. All things other than what I now feel.

I want to be able to sing Beloved One to myself.

Christine wrote a beautiful post today at her Abbey of the Arts, about bathtime. Its womb images, so poignant to me in this “season of expansion”, sooth me. Vicariously I feel the love I want to be given, the love I want to give myself, and feel myself surrounded by.

I press repeat on Beloved One, offering it as a prayer. Receiving it as an answer.

There’s a place inside of me I miss. A place where wonder pulses like a heartbeat - now quick with in-loveness for everything - a word, a sight, a sound, a person - now slowing with the lull of the crickets outside, or the fans that make these summer nights bearable. It’s a place that’s full with beyond-mere-survival, or rather, that knows survival as integrally related with music and contemplation, good books, deep thoughts, conversations with friends. It’s where words and the unworded stuff of experience mingle, tickling each other with the joy and utter frustration of remaining mostly, but never altogether, “other” from each other. The place from which my writing springs.

I’m in it tonight, though, miraculously. My body creaks and groans still with this pregnancy, a wooden ship made better for the wiry frame of a single captain and few supplies than for barrel upon barrel of rations: blood, fluid, tissue, fat. And this not even mentioning my second passenger. I love her already, and know it a privilege to navigate her passage.

But I creak. I groan. I bail water (four? five times a night?). And rarely get to that part of the ship I so treasure.

But.

Here I am tonight. I have no idea when I’ll return again, and even less what tomorrow’s winds or seas might bring (fortune? pirates? peace?). But for now, I’ll light a candle. Dip pen in ink. Open a scroll. Try to forget the fatigue that makes my heart beat strangely, the stomach that doesn’t want to hold my meager offerings.

The sun sinks well below the western sky. The pines that guard this strip of dwellings blacken. I hear crickets, fans, a distant plane’s propeller. The click of N’s keyboard.

Past place and surroundings, I hear groanings of people I love - strong people whose strength is pressed to breaking with sufferings they don’t deserve. I hold them in the Light of this flickering wick, this quickening heart. I pray the womb of this Ship, this Mother that’s bigger than all of us, this Sea that we all of us sail, will give them safe passage. Will take them through their night. Will birth them and rebirth them as the tender, beautiful, honest, beloved creatures I know them to be.

And I hear joy. The paradox of it! Joy and suffering both on this Ship. And my own little vessel. Just now joy’s un-words resist being worded, though. Fair enough.

I try to move on, but the winds upstairs have shifted and I need to check my sails. More stores must be unpacked. A belly needs filling.

I give my candle an earnest stare, my quill, my surroundings. Be well, dear room. I love you.

Hi everyone! Just checking in to say hello.

I’m now half way done with a challenging pregnancy, which is both wonderful and also unnerving, considering I still have 4 1/2 months of challenge yet to face. The nausea of the first trimester subsided wonderfully at about the 3 month mark, but was replaced by a heart problem that handicapped me until we could do the many tests and appointments necessary to discover its remedy. I am on medication now to slow down an over-active heart. The risks of NOT taking this, to me and the baby, far surpass the risks of taking it, so…pills I will take.

Our mid-pregnancy ultrasound also revealed what looks like the development of something called placenta accreta, which means the placenta may have imbedded too deeply into the wall of my uterus. If this is the case, it is very likely that the uterus will have to be removed at delivery, in order to avoid life-threatening bleeding that could happen if the placenta and uterus are attempted to be separated. We go back in a couple of months for another ultrasound to determine whether this condition continues to be present, and if it does, to more concretely plan for what we’ll do about it.

So…I have been a little preoccupied lately.

In between sleep and doctor’s appointments and novel-writing and trying to keep up with a lively toddler, I’ve enjoyed a few books that I’d love to tell you about sometime soon. Paulo Coelho’s Veronika Decides to Die (an exploration of sanity and insanity) and his Eleven Minutes (an exploration of love and sex) are two of them. I’m mid-way through Reza Aslan’s No god but God: the origins, evolution and future of Islam as well, which has been a wonderful read for this mostly Islam-ignorant girl. I’m amazed and intrigued by the similarities between Islam and Christianity, or more specifically, between the people who identify with these traditions. Humans look and act like humans no matter what, I think.

But that’s for another review…

Mainly just saying hello. Hope you’re all enjoying a summer rich with the things you love!

Do any of you remember this post? - the one in which I practically danced off the screen and kissed you all? I have to chuckle at how true the last part of it is - how all that (broadly-defined) sexual energy just can’t sustain itself forever. How it seems to come in seasons.

Since writing that post, and expressing its inspiration most viscerally, N and I have discovered that another munchkin is on its way! This was a much desired discovery, so we’re happy, and happy to share the news. But as for energy - sexual and otherwise - mine’s greatly altered from the writing of that post. Our due date is Thanksgiving, so I’m 2 months along, and feeling very much that way (read: tired and nauseated).

My heart is bursting to get my book written sooner than later, so once again, in light of my energy drain, I’m stream-lining my activities to try to make that possible. I’ll post here when inspiration hits, but if the last few weeks are any indication, I’m largely out of line of fire these days.

In the meantime, please be most welcome to explore the archives, or the essay links on my writings page. And drop me a line any time! I’m always happy to engage that way.

Much love to all, and blessings on your Spring!

After that flurry of posts and conversations about sex and sexuality, my mood has shifted into a quieter one.  I’m not sure what to attribute this to, but for now it feels fine.

The highlight of my week was a trip I took to a shoe store on a rainy day.  I needed to return some sandals we had bought for Elijah, and after doing so, Elijah insisted on being put down.  He had noticed a girl - maybe 10 years old? - who he desperately wanted to follow.

Around the corner she and he went, and to his great delight, the girl had a brother AND a sister, both younger than she.  The youngest was a girl about 2, and when Elijah saw her, and she him, they embraced.  They held on for a very long time.

Without batting an eye, the brother, maybe 5 years old, looked me in the eyes, pointed at them with a hitch hiker’s thumb, and explained in his most adult, let-me-explain-this-clearly-to-you voice, “They’re in love.”

Yep, buddy.  I think they might be.

One of the high and low points of my month away from blogging was a trip N (my husband) took to Memphis for a conference. It was a high because normally N and I spend a lot of time talking in the evenings, but with him gone, I was able to get a ton of writing done. I cranked into productivity mode and just glued myself evenings and naptimes to this screen. The result was an enormous boost of momentum and morale on my book.

The trip was a low point of the month because, well, who wants their sweetheart gone for 5 days? And to be 100% ON for childcare for that long? Please don’t pick me.

The first day N was away I looked at the days of his absence stretching off toward the horizon and got a little woozy. Our son is 17 months old. That’s old enough to know how to climb and reach and object vociferously to whatever he finds objectionable, but young enough to not have words to explain himself, or reason with which to navigate the many decisions with which he finds himself confronted. Will I eat any of the ten things offered me at dinnertime, or will I rub them into my forehead? Will I unroll the entire roll of toilet paper while mom is grabbing something from the bathroom, or will I bolt into her bedroom and try to wedge myself between the wall and the weight bench? These are the types of dilemmas the average 17-month-old is bound to face.

So you can imagine how necessary it could feel to me to have physical and moral support around the house every day. At least a portion of every day.

So like I said, I looked ahead and felt woozy, and then looked down at my son, whose forehead wound from where a seed pod punctured it is almost healed. He patted my knee sweetly and smiled like I was the best thing since the watering can he discovered last week. And I thought to myself: this is a really sweet moment. Just a sweet, sweet moment.

Things went remarkable smoothly as that day progressed, and a couple of hours later another moment happened. I was sitting on the living room floor, eating an apple, and Elijah came and straddled my knees, which were extended out in front of me. He waited for a bite of the apple and quietly nibbled until it was time for another, when he opened his mouth like a bird. He was so sweet, and so happy to be sitting there, that I could not help laughing. “This is another moment,” I thought.

And would you know it? but moments kept happening all over the place, and before I knew it I had a sack full. I did this every day of N’s absense, and discovered that the more moments I recognized, the more they began bleeding into each other, so that by late afternoon of even day four, I wasn’t thinking to myself, “Wow, that’s 7 moments today,” but rather, “This is turning out to be a really great day.”

Isn’t this magic? How you don’t have to have grandiose hopes for the best day ever, or even the best hour, but can just keep your eyes open for moments, and maybe discover that all those tiny insignificances–often only seconds or milliseconds long, maybe just the way the sunlight catches a tree, or that lady’s bright red laces–actually turn into something you’d only ever dreamed of: a way more than tolerable day?

I think parents and caregivers need magic like this, but I think everyone else does too. I think moments are what can make lifetimes beautiful.

Since about the middle of September, Elijah and I have been part of a play group (beyond the impromtu one we have each day at the park). This group meets every Monday afternoon at various parks in the area (there–I’ve already said “park” now twice–okay thrice–in one paragraph, so you can only imagine how much more it gets said in our household these days). Elijah seems to enjoy the other kids, and I’m enjoying getting to know the moms. They’re easy to connect with, friendly, good conversationalists–and this despite the challenges posed to our talks by wobbling toddlers and play structures.

Two weeks ago we joined a spin-off of this group. A couple of the moms with experience in preschool education decided to spearhead what’s turned into our own little preschool, complete with planned educational activities, songs, snacktime, etc. And the cost? Free! Having no extra money for things like this these days, I feel like I’ve struck gold.

Last week was our first week attending, and our first time seeing the home in which the group gathered. It’s in downtown Palo Alto, and if that doesn’t mean anything to you, let’s just say small shacks there probably cost more than a million these days. This particular one was of a more…expansive size.

So I was silenced, to be honest, while walking to the door. The woman who owns it was the same warm, easy-going self that I’ve gotten to know and enjoy at the parks, and everyone inside seemed well at ease. But I found myself internally goggle-eyed. I’ve never been up close to so much wealth.

This week my experience was similar. We met at a mansion in the hills of Los Altos. The rooms in which the kids were free to roam could each hold most of our apartment. The toys available for play made our collection look like one you might fit, in its entirety, into one of those plastic eggs you buy from the gumball machines. Elijah went nuts for the first hour, running everywhere, playing with everyone and everything, and then finally stopped in the middle of it all, overwhelmed. He turned a few slow circles, taking in all the options, and then started to cry.

I left there quiet.

Wealth is such a relative thing. By most of the world’s standards–indeed, much of our own country’s–I’m more than rich. At times I have felt awkward, since moving here, to see our home become more posh than ever it’s been before this. Our couches, lamps, lamp table, area rugs, curtains, artwork, dining set–all of this is less than two years old. This, after having furnished our place ten years ago with fifty bucks, spent at a handful of yardsales.

But our standard of living compared with those of many in our playgroup is pittance. From toys to vacations to clothes to dwelling to the food we buy to eat, there are significant differences.

What do I do with these disparities? And the ones between me and those who have far less? What does it mean that some kids will always have everything money can buy? What are their advantages? What are mine?

I want to say everything is equal; everyone comes from different places, has such different stories, that to put a moral value on any standard of living–high or low–is unfair. We’re just people, right? Doing what we know to do?

But something inside of me says that’s not the route I want to take. Not exactly. It’s the part of me that knows globalization means knowledge, at least on most of our peripheries, of what consumerism is doing to our planet, of the growing gap between haves and have nots, of the interconnectedness of people on both sides of borders and jailbars and oceans and tracks. It takes all of us to make our systems what they are. We’re all to be lauded and blamed.

In light of this, however, ascetisism isn’t a route I want to take either. Or guilt, or self-righteous indignation. Any of these sucks life clear out of me, and no doubt from those within my reach. I’m interested in something more…inspiring to fill my thoughts about bank.

I’m inspired by people who are wealthy in things like compassion, mindfulness, involvement in public life, at whatever level. I’m inspired by people who have learned to be content with little, and not because they’re obsessed with levels of consumption, or looking down noses on those with much, but because contentment and gratitude are things they genuinely want to have. By people who are curious, people filled with wonder, people awake to the interconnectedness of us all. People who feel privileged to know you, and you, and you, no matter who you are, how much you own, or how pleasing you are to look at. I think this sense of privilege goes along with being inherently curious. And jolly.

My list could go on, but it seems like everything on it doesn’t have to be correlated with a particular income bracket. My guess is that wealth and poverty and the entire middle class all carry inherent challenges for cultivating the kind of wealth for which I long. Life does.

But this, too, feels like a conversation cop-out.

I want to think more on this topic, and reflect on it here. But I’d love to hear what any of you think. How do you feel about having what you own? About the amount of money you make, and the challenges and opportunities made available because of it? Have you found a way of sidestepping such questions altogether in pursuit of something better?

I got tagged by Christy for this meme: Five Things Feminism has Done for Me. Let’s see…

1. I grew up believing that when I grew up, I could do whatever I wanted to do. Vocationally, I mean. :) I didn’t think that because I was a girl, I was automatically excluded from anything. I had no idea that the Christian denomination I was a part of would not ordain women or allow them to be lead pastors of churches. I assumed that women were just not choosing to do these things, like being president, and that if I wanted to do them, they were open to me. I’m guessing this latter assumption had a lot to do with my parents’ views on men’s and women’s roles, and a little to do with my churches not being particularly vocal about the limitations that women had in them. Or maybe I was oblivious to the vocalizations there were? In any case, feminism helped make vocation an open field in my childhood mind.

2. Leading up to and throughout the ten years of our marriage, N and I have worked hard to be conscious of power imbalances between us, and to do whatever we can to lessen them. This has been the hardest long-term project that either of us has ever worked at. The hardest, but the most rewarding.

3. I’m a writer, giving a significant number of prime time hours (after 8am and before 6pm) to writing each week. This while also being parent to a one-year-old. And having no money for childcare. N is in school, so we’re in a unique situation in that he has a schedule that can flex for shared kid-duty. But I think feminism has made this set-up conceivable at all by helping both of us see my writing, which at this point has no dollar signs attached to it, as a real vocation, and my pursuit of it as equally important as N’s pursuit of his. (The fact that there will be dollar signs attached to his in a few years, and that his is what will enable us to pay our bills (and loans!) and eat food that we actually buy at stores makes us give a lot more hours of work-beyond-home time to him each week. But that’s a pragmatic more than philosophic choice.) The task of coordinating work-at-home time and work-away-from-home time for both of us, and being as present to Elijah and each other as we want to be, is probably the second hardest long-term project that either of us has worked at. And of course, also totally worth it.

4. Increasingly I’m able to feel–and this beyond just knowing intellectually–that the entertainment and make-up and clothing and hair-product and skin-product and teeth-product industries are bankrupt in the ways they define feminine beauty and sexuality and life force as narrowly as being 18-25 years old with smooth skin and straight, white teeth and thick, highlighted hair and large, firm breasts and designer clothing and gym memberships and curves here and not there and fingernails that look like they’ve never seen dishwater. I feel the narrowness of these definitions, the way these industries have not stripped women down in their adds to expose our true beauty, but rather stripped beauty itself down to expose the ugliness at the heart of machines that would want all of us–as many as is inhumanly possible–not liking ourselves, wanting bodies that aren’t real, funneling huge portions of our incomes into becoming ever less so.

I feel the evil of this. And I feel the beauty and life force and sexual attractiveness of people–men and women–in things far deeper and broader than any ad will ever convey.

5. Number five is a catch-all drawer: I’m happy most of the time. I don’t feel like the world is only depressing and that an oppressive God exists. I haven’t had an ulcer for a very long time. I feel gentle toward my body. I like wearing feminine clothing and don’t have dreams anymore where I’m trying to pass as a man. I take intuition seriously. I take art seriously. I don’t feel obligated to fit my spirituality or metaphors for God into patriarchical frameworks. I’m a mom, and this by choice.

None of these would be true or possible apart from the feminist thinkers and writers and artists and theologians and mentors and friends who have helped me in my work of healing and self creation/re-creation in recent years.

Okay…I tag Jen, Adam, and Trish. And Adam’s wife, Sarah. :)  Okay, and Trish’s husband Richard, too.  Jen?  Heck…and Jen’s husband Dave!

This probably isn’t the right week to write this since I’m on nearly 100% kid-duty while N TA’s an all-week class, and therefore feeling/thinking these things more intensely than I might otherwise (normally I have three afternoons away from home a week to write), but I think they all still stand.

I’m feeling the tug of work-outside-of-home these days–a growing internal momentum for it, a kind of ripeness for all the things I’ve studied and learned and experienced and contemplated to be funnelled into my writing life.  One’s 30s are often a time of intense engagement with work–when careers start to hum and when the gangliness that for many of us is our 20s starts to mature and deepen into something more like full-blown adulthood.  Couples who have young kids in this decade, and no nanny, probably all have to choose which in their pair will run with this outside-of-home momentum, and which will run with the inside stuff–which will work primarily with the kids, and which will "work" primarily with other things.  (intentional, even if not totally serious, use of quotes in that sentence)

But then there are those, like me, who are trying to do both.  And this is what I’m thinking about tonight.  At the same time that I feel the tug of outside-of-home work, I feel a tremendous tug to be home.  Or rather, multiple tugs, quite literally, on my legs all day.  The work of being present to and engaged with Elijah in the ways I want to be and the ways I think he deserves, combined with the work of running a household well–it fills up every hour I’m willing to give it.  And more.  This dance that is running a household and tag-teaming childcare with N and working on my book and maintaining this blog and keeping a percentage of my brain active on dreaming up next projects, well, I have to say it often feels less like a dance and more like a tug-of-war.

Sometimes I daydream about how spacious my life would feel if I just gave up writing–if I devoted myself to home stuff and kid stuff alone.  On one level, the thought feels like utter relief.  It feels like letting waves push me to shore rather than struggling against them, like joining the current rather than fighting my way always upstream.

But every time I have that thought, the very next one is a kind of voice, calling me to not give up.  It sounds like parents do when encouraging infants to walk.  "There you go–YES–nice work!  You can do it!  Yes, keep going.  Alright!"  Unlike them, it’s a lot more subtle, and speaks more with the twinkling of eyes and a beckoning glance than actual words.  But it has the same effect on me:  it keeps me standing up again and again, no matter how incessently gravity pulls me down.  It keeps a kind of hopeful grin on my face, and my banged up (or, as per the tug-of-war, pulled-apart) mind and body ever pressing on to sit down in front of this screen.

I feel like the universe wants me to write, and like something in me is alive and strong and beautiful when I am.  I can’t give this up.  I don’t want to.  I so terribly don’t.

So I keep doing it.  And living in the midst of all these tugs.  I feel weary of it, wanting to say to any one of them, "Fine!  I give up!  You win."  But I’m simultaneously energized by the writing part and the childcare part (no, I will never love spending hours on the phone with insurance companies, nor scouring the tub.  And I’d totally love the next place we live to have a dishwasher.).

But…so…is this just how it’s going to be?  Is living in this tension just the way of life as a dual-career person?  Can tug-of-war, practiced long enough, ever turn into a dance?