The Year in a Word

A few days before 2012 reached its timely end, my friend Joanna asked me a question I wouldn’t have asked myself and that I didn’t instantly have an answer for. She was the perfect person to ask me this question, since she has become good at exploring it herself on her blog: What word would I pick to sum up my 2012?

I thought hard about this as I pottered around the kitchen making us poached eggs on hot-buttered crumpets, letting my mind wander back over the last twelve months.

I recalled our recently gained permanent residency in Canada, my corrective eye surgery in June, and my choice to pull back from some work commitments in order to give more of my time and energy, while it matters, to Amélie. And I remembered the unexpected pregnancy and early miscarriage that only some friends and family know about but that, now almost a year in the past, perhaps I will begin to write about. So, with all these memories, the word that came to me on one of my trajectories from stove to toaster was this: HERE.

“Is that allowed?” I asked her, lifting an egg out of the swirl of simmering water. A noun or an adjective seem worthier of summarizing a whole 365 days. But HERE was the word that came to me, so I told her what it meant to me as we sat down to the orange goodness of free-range eggs seeping into buttery crumpet holes.

Firstly, I mean being HERE in the sense of physically here in Canada. There has been something unexpectedly settling and comforting about gaining permanent residency after more than four years of temporary visas and some uneasy moments of transition and uncertainty. But our new immigration status has come at the right time. It takes longer to really settle somewhere than you might think and the four year mark finds us with roots having grown deep down into this New Brunswick earth, well and truly committed to this place and these people as far into the future as we can foresee or predict. Because, of course, settling means more than just being here in body, but also being here in heart and spirit and will. And we are – for better or worse, for richer or for poorer, four years having already given us a good test run on those highs and lows. No-one can throw us out now - unless we commit a heinous crime of course! – and that feels good.  (Being able to stay, that is, NOT committing a terrible crime.)

In 2012 I also made some deliberate choices to be more HERE, not always trying to be everywhere and ending up nowhere, not always waiting for life to be how I want it to be before I ‘show up’ and give myself to what IS. The biggest choice I made was to work less in order to be around more for Amélie. And, again, I don’t just mean being physically there for her, but with some energy and creative brain space to spare because I’m not trying to juggle 101 things outside of the house and ending up with only the rat ends of myself to offer at home. Pulling back, pulling IN, was both a hard decision to make and also felt like an absolute privilege and gift to me for this season. Hard because though some of my deepest desires have to do with being a mother, this is also the area in which I feel I fail most consistently and dismally. And, apart from that, parenting and Stay-At-Home-Mum work is often thankless, endless and somewhat monotonous, whereas work outside of the home is more measurable and challenging – often more varied – and usually brings more recognition and instant ‘reward’. But though in some ways I struggled to make the decision to put more of my eggs into this precarious but precious basket, I was ready for it: ready to try and fail and try again, ready to actually attempt to give myself more fully to what and whom I profess to value most. I have also been keenly aware of the luxury of this choice – one that not many have – and the fleetingness of this season in our family life, one in which it still matters to her whether I’m there or not. So although trying harder inevitably brings more failure and heartache, there have still been enough moments when I have KNOWN that I was more present, available and invested than I would otherwise have been, to make this a choice I could never regret.

Getting my eyesight corrected with laser surgery might seem too trivial to feature in a summary of the ways in which I have been HERE during the past year, but it was a significant step for me, and not just because I have been blind as a bat all of my adult life and can now see perfectly! I have always felt rather hidden behind glasses, as if it were these paltry frames and lenses rather than my eyes that really got seen, and I have been torn between resenting and feeling comfortable with this. So taking the risk of having my precious eyes pushed and prodded (and burned!) felt a little like a courageous coming out of hiding, as well as representing a choice to spend a decent amount of money on myself for something I would have in the past considered superficial, vain and wastefully extravagant. Since being given the gift of new eyes, enjoying wearing eye make-up more often has felt similarly significant as a choice to shine rather than hide – and as a push against the inner voices that still whisper their reproach. In the wake of my surgery it was very telling for me to realise that part of me still wanted to be able to have regular ‘glasses days,’ meaning days when I could somehow hide, or at least try to! But I can’t hide behind my glasses anymore. I am Here and I can SEE!

Finally, perhaps it’s hard to imagine how a miscarriage could have anything to do with the word HERE. Although it was my fourth miscarriage after (it now seems, miraculously) having Amélie almost nine years ago, this one came out of the blue after we had mostly come to terms with only having one child. So this pregnancy and its loss at 8 weeks, near the beginning of last year, brought with it so much suppressed longing, tentative hope, fear, sadness and loss – past and present – that you would think I’d wish to be anywhere but ‘Here’. But the surprising gift of this situation was that I felt, really for the first time, able to simply be present to the rollercoaster of desire, hope, fear, longing, pain, sadness and loss that life took me on, and not try to wish it away, deny it away, even pray it away, as I have in the past. For the first time I truly, deeply knew that nothing I could do, say, think, imagine, feel or, yes, pray could control or predict the outcome, for good or ill. But I could be Here, Now, in the gift of the moment, and present to the truth of what I was experiencing. And, incredibly, I discovered that there was true Life in that ability to be present Here and Now – even if it’s painful – rather than always thinking Life is elsewhere or waiting for it to be otherwise. So I just let myself cry a lot, and that was good. And then I mostly stopped crying, and that was good too. And I was truly ALIVE.

So that’s what I realised over breakfast with a friend. Although when I think back over 2012 there are a myriad of moments, days and weeks that I zoned out, stressed out, numbed out and was far less present than I would have liked to have been, still I am encouraged that I have been able to be just a little more HERE, and in some significant ways and situations. And I want this to grow. I don’t want to miss the one life I have been given.

What about you? Grab an egg as we leave a year behind and look to the next, have a think, and tell us what 2012 meant to you.

Saying the words I hate to say

We are sitting opposite each other in the diner waiting for our breakfast to arrive, her pale little face elflike below the new khaki beret. The mad rush to get here in time, her infuriating slowness and indecision, my sickening nagging and unnecessary criticism – these fall away like water below a dammed up stream. Above the dam created by this break in our routine, by a time painfully carved out, the water settles and stills. It’s as if I’ve been caught in a torrent of frustration and needless stress, and I’ve wounded with my thrashing limbs and thrashing words. Why do I do this?

The table between us, the sitting and waiting, is distance and time enough to stop my thrashing and look around me and come into my right mind, right heart, again. I look across at her and see the precious, fragile thing she is and I take her elfin face in my hands and look her in the eyes, hoping my shamed and loving gaze reaches deep into her soul, and I say the words that still come hard, get stuck in my throat:

“I’m sorry.”

I tell her it’s not her at all (her eyes show me she needed to hear this); that’s it me and I hate it and I’m sorry; that she is the dearest, most lovely thing to me (eyes open, soften and brighten as love and delight begin to heal what should never have been), and that I hate the words that come out of my mouth – so small and mean – even as I hear myself saying them; that I know these small, mean words are flowing more often, more freely, these recent days (she nods shyly in assent) and I don’t know why or how to stop but I see it and will try, and I’m sorry, again.

“I’m sorry.”

Oh how I hate these words as well: Hate that I have to say them; hate what has come before them and made them necessary. I hate them because they are so small, too, and never seem enough. They can’t roll back the waters of time as I wish they could; they can’t affect a miracle of absolute healing and oblivion; they can’t guarantee that this same devastating flood will not ravage our world again next week, even tomorrow. I hate them because they wound my ego and lay me bare to the reality of my power and my misuse of it, of my desires and their constant disappointment, and of my apparent helplessness at times to be anywhere close to the human, woman, wife, friend, daughter, mother (oh yes, especially mother) that I long to be.

If I hated these words less, maybe I would hate my hard, critical, harsh, unkind, careless, uncontrolled, hurtful words more? Enough to hold them in and hold them back? Enough to stop the torrent and step back from the edge of that crashing, hurtling, shattering precipice?

But though I hate the sorry words, still I love them and need them, as much as a drowning man needs the rock that agonizingly stops his freeflow freefall down the raging river. Though they are hard words, yet they soften – the hard places in me and the hurt places in her. Their very hardness is solid ground for me if I will cling to them, and a foothold for the long climb back up if I can stand on them and move beyond.

Moving beyond means accepting the forgiveness that I see mercifully, graciously leap up in her riverblue eyes from who knows what deep, clear inner spring. It means accepting the truth that I am, today, not mountain-climber, rockface-scaler, summit-reacher; but simply one who ackowledges the need to start again, again, at the foot of the towering cliff, thankful to be on dry ground and be given the chance to try again.

It is a humbling, praiseless task, this trying again; but a timeless one too. Even those who have dedicated their lives in monk’s cell to the pursuit of God and holiness and right-relatedness (I remember this with growing courage) embraced this task as worthy life’s work and spiritual discipline. I would expect more from them (from me) but this is the age-old truth and tale:

A curious outsider asked the burning question, hoping for spiritual enlightenment: “What do you do in your cell all day, Father?” The old man replied: “We fall down and then we get up again.”

So I get up again.

And I open the story book we had forgotten and had had to go back home to get, wasting ‘precious minutes’ and provoking one of my frustrated tirades and her hot tears now dried. She moves around the table to sit next to me and be able to read along and see the pictures, and we are together again – warm limbs and happy imaginations, healing hearts and hungry tummies.

We find the place where we left the story last time, and we begin again.

“Always we begin again.”

(attributed to St Benedict of Nursia)

Dead woman, dead woman, come alive!

So I’m playing when it happens...

Out in the spring sunshine with my girl, flat on my back on the warm trampoline after bounce-running together in a circle while singing A Thousand Years, throwing in our very own dance move actions on various words!

I don’t often play. I’m not very good at it (I’ve told myself for almost eight years). Sure: I can read bedtime stories with expression; I can go for happy walks hand in hand; I can bake with her; we can talk and talk about everything; I can watch her play. But playing myself has never been my forte.

This may sound strange, but it feels like such an effort to me. A physical effort, yes, because it usually involves crawling around on the floor, or jumping, running, dancing... moving, basically! But it’s more the mental and emotional effort that I resist expending – the effort that it takes to leave behind my o-so-serious adult world with its concerns and agendas and schedules, and just... play.

I do try... I have tried regularly for the eight years of her joy-filled, playful life. And I HAVE played – because I love her, and because I’ve felt guilty, and because I’ve wanted to be better at it. But there is always so much TRYING, so much EFFORT involved. And, however hard I TRY, it often just makes me feel tired and grumpy, and that’s not much fun for either of us.

How sad – to find it such a struggle to play.

But it goes far deeper than childrearing, this struggle.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the many different ways that I, perversely, resist the Life I profess to long for. I never really noticed this before so even seeing this strange pattern feels, though painful at times, like a gift and a sign of change on the horizon. I see now that so many of the things I do are subtly or not so subtly saying “No” to Life – to pleasure, joy, excitement, love, gratitude and delight. And because my gift of a girl is so jam-packed full of all these things, I notice my “No” most often with her, whether it’s the seemingly constant, verbalised “No” to the constant excited requests, or just my internal “No” – my fearful, or perhaps shame-filled, resistance to Life in all its Fullness.

Actually noticing this internal resistance has made me want to run into each day shouting “Yes!” to Life. And it’s made me want to play more... and laugh more... and love more... and create more:

“Art involves one in a recovery of childhood... The fear of pleasure is a deeply held political issue, and the creative person is out in front insisting that ecstasy and pleasure are what life is about--but everyone's pleasure, not one's own private pleasure.” (Matthew Fox)

I can feel it – my fear of pleasure – but I cannot comprehend it. Do I fear its power, and what it might mean or where it might take me if I follow it? Do I fear the pain and disappointment that cannot be avoided if one dives into life head first, wildly abandoned? Or is it that I feel undeserving of, or unfit for, true, deep joy? Or, in some unfathomable way, does the pointless, unproductive, childish nature of joy and play and pleasure offend my misguided ego?

If so, I want to offend my ego. It’s time to PLAY!!

So here I find myself playing outside with Amélie, being told to lie flat on my back as if dead in the centre of the trampoline, eyes closed, so that we can play ‘Dead Man’, a game I have never heard of. Thankfully, she seems to have noticed I am a woman and so changes the words that she chants as she bounces around me:

“Dead woman, dead woman, come alive!”

I lie stock still, taken aback by the profoundly prophetic nature of the words being spoken over me in play.

There are so many ways in which I have been dead, lifeless and barren; asleep, unresponsive. And these words – “out of the mouth of babes” – have the smell of the Spirit about them; they are words whispered to my very soul and words I’ve heard echoes of already in recent weeks, as I live and write and pray.

So I play dead, and I try to open my ears and heart to these words as wide as I can, and to say “Yes!” to this call:

“Dead woman, dead woman, come alive!”

And after the count to five and the final command to “Come alive,” I rise to my feet as instructed, eyes still closed, and feel around blindly for her, following her giggles and the bend of the trampoline under her feet. This, too, I know to be true: though I am blind and uncomprehending and wildly searching for the way forward into life, I have been CALLED; and Fullness of Life is beckoning me, close at hand, right at my fingertips, sometimes just out of reach but waiting, longing to be caught.

I can learn to say an unequivocal “Yes!” to Life, because Life says an unequivocal “Yes!” to me.

My blind groping meets a warm body and generates another squeal.

And then I catch her, and we cling to each other laughing and fall down in a happy heap.

Finding the keys that unlock mercy

So what does it PRACTICALLY look like for me to “take the plunge and dive deep into the bottomless, audacious, un-earnable, freely given, life-transforming mercy of God” that I wrote about yesterday? I asked you all if you had any secrets to 'diving deeper' to share, and then decided I really should try to notice and catalogue my own! So here are some of the rusty keys, personal to me, that have unlocked mercy for me in these last precious 24 hours:

Key One: Noticing that part of me would be quite content to write nice words about mercy and feed off them rather than actually doing the hard work of putting them into practice: to feed off the pleasure of ideas and pictures and poetry, the acknowledgment of others, the appearance of maturity and wisdom and insight that such words suggest. But this is baby food and I am hungry for more.

Key Two: Noticing both the moments of grace that I had enjoyed yesterday – especially when I suddenly had eyes to SEE the incredible beauty and aliveness and gift of my daughter, and gained a heart to wonder at this, at her – and also the moments of unmercy I have shown as I snapped at her, demanded too much, criticized; or as I responded with irritation or simply indifference to others. Noticing both of these helps me see that there IS “a river that makes glad the city of God”, there IS a flow and ‘wondrous loop’ that I can choose to remain in, or choose to step outside of.

Key Three: Asking for forgiveness quickly yesterday when I noticed that I had spoken a harsh word, and marvelling at the way this softens me, softens her, softens the atmosphere we live and breathe. So often hurt pride and resentment and shame stop me from doing this, but when I resist this I resist mercy - the mercy I need so desperately.

Key Four: Letting my heart break that so many of the moments of grace pass me by as I choose unmercy instead, and allowing myself to (uncharacteristically) weep by my sweet girl’s sleeping body last night, begging God to help me love her more truly, deeply, consistently, mercifully. And this is a prayer I know he hears and runs towards me to answer, for he is its author and perfecter.

Key Five: Taking time this morning to ACTUALLY write down the gifts of God to me over the last days, not just read about other people’s gratefulness or tell myself I am on a gratitude journey because I’ve thought about it and written about it and listed a few of my ‘one thousand gifts’ a few days ago. And – what do you know?! – heartfelt gratitude and joy welled up fresh inside me just from this simple act. When I stop to NOTICE the gifts, I find out I am full to overflowing, cup running over, rather than the empty I often feel.

Key Six: Choosing to act out of the fullness God promises me – and Jesus seems to assume is mine when he makes all his unreasonable demands! – by not allowing the ‘emptiness’ of others around me to empty me, but instead to choose to see fullness and live fullness regardless of what others are experiencing; then to reach out to give to them from within this fullness.

Key Seven: Doing the little things I could, as I took joy to create a chicken pot pie for our supper, to ‘go the extra mile’ and create a table of meeting that was beautiful and love-filled for us to eat at as a family, with grandparents added to our small three for this week. Good food, good drink, pretty napkins, candles, nature’s treasures scattered around... these simple things felt like sacraments to me as I prepared them and laid them out, and I knew mercy was soaking my heart and grace was soaking the atmosphere.

And, as this meal began, I asked Amelie to choose and read a grace from the little book that I began to compile many moons ago for our family meals, and that has largely gathered dust. She asked me if I would PLEASE, finally, handwrite the sung grace “Johnny Appleseed” in there next to her yellowing illustration, instead of waiting to print it out as I have been meaning to do for over three years! So I sat down and did it; it took me one minute. And the page that had been blank and years-long waiting – waiting for perfection, for the perfect moment – was swiftly filled with simple words of childlike gratitude that are bathed in the mercy that God rains on 'the just and the unjust alike':

"The Lord is good to me, and so I thank the Lord, for giving me the things I need, the sun and the rain and the apple seed, the Lord is good to me. Johnny Appleseed... Amen!"

And so – with all these simple, rusty, but powerful keys – I present my own blank page to God, finally deigning to handwrite my simple, childlike gratitude and bathe in God’s mercy-rain right here and now (I am the just and the unjust) rather than waiting for another day, the perfect day, the perfect way, the perfect words. I am counting the ways he loves. The Lord is good to me.

Amen.

No need for you to read on unless you want to read the next of those 'one thousand gifts' I am cataloguing! :-)

Joy Dare: 3 gifts worn:

7 - A piece of handmade jewelery on a new acquaintance that speaks of skill and gift

8 - A beautiful, brightly coloured shirt on a sad friend

9- My snuggly red robe!

3 gifts hard to give thanks for:

10 - The gospel singing from downstairs in the retreat centre when I longed for silence

11 - So busy with so many wonderful people that I didn't manage to get outside all weekend!

12 - The people who made and served our meals - my judgment about what I perceived as their fussiness could have buried gratitude for their presence and service

3 gifts found:

13 - 'Treasures' in the SSU pantry that I didn't need to go and buy

14 - A game for Amelie to play with Granny and Grandpa

15 - Organic fair-trade coffee on a 50% off special to refuel the students of Park Hall! ;-)

A gift bent, a gift broken, a gift beautiful:

16 - Bent me, asking for forgiveness from Amelie; a bent gift is the joy of making it right and receiving mercy

17 - Amelie's purple beret minus bobble and growing a fraying hole gave her Granny the chance to darn and show her love

18 - Every time I actually stop long enough to SEE her, my daughter is Beauty itself for me - her wild, dark hair, her new sunlight-yellow top, her peach-soft skin, her lit-up eyes

3 gifts in the kitchen

19 - A hug with Amelie that lasted until she was OK again

20 - Ian and Jacqui faithfully doing the dishes so that the sink and countertop are always clear

21 - Evening light catching me by surprise as I cooked supper, and reminding me to pour love and grace into my preparations

Expectations about expectations

One of the treats of living in New Brunswick, Canada, is that we are no longer forced to go and sort through spindly, overpriced trees at the local garden centre but, instead, can tramp out into the snowy woods and choose a real live, bushy one, chop it down, drag it back to the car, and carry it home triumphant like the proverbial caveman with his quarry (or woman!). This year the snow was absent, but the presence of our good friends – and some ice to stamp on and crack – more than made up for this unusual lack, and the kids all ran around among the trees, usually invisible and so only traceable by their shouts and laughter. Thus it came to pass that the fated tree was chosen without the participation of dearest daughter number one, who has grown to love the way we wander and deliberate and choose together. Bad idea. Both Amélie and I always think we need a taller tree than we can actually fit into our sitting room, but this year she decided it was ‘tiny’ (and so it WAS compared to the giant specimen that can fit into our friends’ house!). Tears were shed. Angry words were spoken over the accursed tree.

Cue my allergic reaction to ingratitude, which sadly isn’t the most accurate radar and can read lack of thankfulness into the simple (but, admittedly, dramatic!) disappointment of a little girl’s deeply-felt desires and wishes. How long will it take me to learn that an attempted clampdown on the emotional reaction of a seven year old is more often a fruitless stab at control than it is a loving or helpful response?! Yes, sometimes a line has to be drawn in the sand, but often a simple ‘being-with’ is enough to allow the tide to reach its lowest ebb and then begin naturally to rise again.

A blessed pause in the proceedings followed. The tree had to wait a handful of days until we could bring it in from the cold to finally stand upright and be dressed in its finery. This was enough days for my dread to grow over what sort of scene would ensue during the tree-decorating afternoon that is ‘meant’ to be a time of family frolicking and fantastic fun! Enough days for me to angrily contemplate another clampdown on unacceptable behaviour so as to ENFORCE gratitude and fun-having! How infuriating that this little person was so unable to manage her high and inflexible expectations of what a tree should be like that she would end up ruining her own enjoyment of what IS – and ours along with it! Truth be told... she would end up ruining MY own (high and inflexible?) expectations...

Oh.

The day rolled around. The tree rolled in. Even with a ton of trunk sawn off, its peak still touched the ceiling. The perfect size. We laughed. Jeremy is ALWAYS right about this, despite our habitual lack of a tape measure and the subsequent female insistence that our ceiling is higher than he thinks. We put on Christmas music and laid out gingerbread eggnog, crisps and chocolate biscuits. We complained about the sap on our hands. We contentedly arranged each treasured ornament on the fragrant branches. Amélie claimed that this tree wasn’t quite right; it wasn’t like trees we’d had in previous years. Jeremy said he thought she was just getting older, taller, and her perspective was changing. We turned out the overhead lights and Little Girl sat on her Daddy’s lap in the dark silence and stared at this year’s twinkling tree. Expectations had mercifully lost their urgency – along with expectations about expectations! – and we could just be, as we were, with the tree that just was.

It was a typical beginning, at times a tough beginning, but in the end a good beginning to this special, challenging, sometimes magical, sometimes trying season. If we can just BE, just enjoy what actually IS, in all its imperfections – if we can ALL do this! – ours will be a happier, more restful, more loving Christmas.

So be it.

Wild animals

Earlier this week I quoted C. S. Lewis when he says that: “The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back.” I relate to this very strongly, though ‘wishes and hopes’ sounds far too positive to describe much of what rushes at me first thing in the morning! It’s often simply the memory of mundane everyday chores that I know are waiting for me downstairs, my long mental ‘to do’ list (which I know I really cannot do ALL of in one day!), and of course the sometimes harsh demands of my own wounded psyche. In fact, my wild animals rush at me so very violently when I awake that I am usually unaware that I have any other option but to give in to their clawing and yowling, and then charge through the rest of the day with them snapping at my heels. Some days this works better than others. Perhaps because the wishes or hopes I am first faced with are gentler or healthier than normal. Perhaps because, for once, my untamed desires don’t get into a fight with each other – a battle for supremacy – that will leave me either frantic or frozen still. Or perhaps it’s because now and then my desires aren’t thwarted quite as quickly as they usually are. I don’t know. Most of the time, though, life really doesn’t work well when it starts in this way. But the incredible thing is that, every morning, I get to choose.

This morning, for example…

Despite an oft-repeated agreement, Amélie had woken us up with loud shouts from the bathroom in an attempt to escape the arduous task of wiping her own bottom! As I lay there and listened, I could feel the annoyance rising inside me – not just at her waking me up, and not just because she was once again not sticking to what we had agreed, and not just because of the self-centredness that comes so naturally to her, as it does to most of us… I was also annoyed because I knew that this time round I finally had to follow through with what we’d arranged, not get up, bear with her insistent and increasingly impatient cries, attempt not to get impatient myself, and wait until she dealt with the poo herself! To be honest, I resent this. I resent being woken up by another person’s agenda and demands, and I resent having to jump straight into parenting – especially the discipline and consistency and follow-through part of parenting – when I’m barely awake. But this morning I chose to do what had to be done: I stayed in bed and waited, Amélie eventually did the dirty deed, and then she came proudly in to tell me what she had done and how good and clean her bottom now felt. Instead of getting cross I was able simply to confirm to her that I had ignored her cries, and congratulate her on following through with our agreement and doing such a good job of it! Then we got up, I gave her a homemade blueberry muffin, apple slices and some orange juice for breakfast, and we started our day quite happily.

This might seem remarkably unremarkable to you – and I suppose it is – but I know what a terrible cycle I can get into if I give in to the resentment and irritation first thing; if I let it lead me into recriminations or back-handed criticism, and then self-hatred and self-criticism which, un-dealt-with, just begs to be turned outwards onto someone else again…and on the vicious cycle turns. This is one of the tediously habitual ways that those wild animals rip me to shreds. But how differently the day can start and continue when I am able to stop, take stock, acknowledge rather than ignore my troubling emotions and conflicted desires, and truly CHOOSE a course of action rather than begin – and continue – with knee-jerk reactions. This morning, for instance, it turned out that all the wild animals needed was to be noticed, given a little pat on the head, and sent on their way.

All joy and no fun?

Last week a friend sent me a fascinating article from the New York magazine about why parents hate parenting. It was entitled ‘All Joy and No Fun’, and took as its starting point a range of academic research that shows that, although “most people assume that having children will make them happier”, in fact “parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so”. The article also discussed the fact that child care and parenting come pretty low down on surveys in which people rank how pleasurable they find different tasks. A similar result also shows up regularly in relationship research, with children “invariably reducing marital satisfaction” (not a surprise really, when you think about the strains parenting puts on a relationship!). There follows some really interesting discussion about why this might be – the challenge that parenting has always been, plus recent changes in society that have changed roles, tasks and expectations – and a couple of passages about the reality of being a parent made me chuckle in recognition.

One such statement, that “While children deepen your emotional life, they shrink your outer world to the size of a teacup, at least for a while”, reminds me of the moment when we finally got eleven week old Amélie to sleep in her cot at a decent hour in the evening, got excited that we’d at last be able to go out for a relaxing twilight stroll together as we had loved to do, but then realized that at least one of us was actually stuck in the house! It was one of those moments when the penny drops and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry – I think maybe I did a bit of both. The other part of the article that made me laugh out loud was the story of a famous psychologist who, when he finally got around to having children, told a colleague that: “They’re a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.” This expresses so succinctly and colourfully the feeling I often get when an otherwise pleasant meal, road trip or walk in the woods is subtly or dramatically ruined (for want of a better word!) by the presence and needs of my darling daughter. Don’t get me wrong, I want her to be there; it’s just that sometimes I would like her to be there in a quasi-adult form, without the demands, meltdowns and whines, or even the very reasonable need for my attention and care. And there is no denying that when, as we did last night, Jeremy and I get a rare evening alone to jaunt off to St Andrews-by-the-Sea, sit on The Gables restaurant terrace by the water, eat without responsibility for the nourishment of a child, and talk without interruption, it is a far more purely pleasurable experience, and our ‘marital satisfaction’ probably experiences a sudden surge!

But the article also goes on to ask why, if parents aren’t happy, we as a race keep choosing to have kids, we generally love them dearly, and most parents do not regret having children (except on really bad days!). Then, in discussing a particular video clip of a stressful and rather typical exchange between a teenage boy and his mother over ‘screen time’ – a video referred to as brilliant birth control! – the article points out that neither a video, nor the content of one conversation or argument, can show the very deep love that is in the heart of this mother for her child, nor the hopes and values she has for the child that cause her to enter into a conflict zone she would probably much rather stay out of. And this is what it comes down to for me, and why I have never regretted becoming a parent, though there are days when my resentment levels are higher than normal, or when I think it’s a task I cannot manage: I’m ultimately not in this for easy, instant pleasure or personal satisfaction. Sometimes those things call out to me so loudly that I can hardly hear anything else, but the voice that calls me back is, I hope, love. That’s what I want to grow in, and into, who I want to become. That’s what I’m hoping is slowly drawing me out of my self-centredeness. So I’m happy that the article chooses to finish with some research that sensibly, instead of asking only about the pleasurableness of tasks, asked people to rank how rewarding different parts of their life are; unsurprisingly, parenting came high on the rewarding scale, though much further down on the pleasurable scale. This makes total sense to me, and also demonstrates the arbitrary and slippery nature of words. What do they really mean, all these words? Pleasurable or rewarding, fun or joy, satisfaction or love, happiness or contentment… Yes, my life is more challenging and less ‘unruffled’ than it used to be, but of COURSE there is happiness, pleasure and fun in living with a little person bursting with life and love! When I picked Amélie up from her sleepover this morning, a fresh explosion of unnamable loveliness and lightness entered the car along with her precious, pint-sized body. So perhaps what is really at stake here is how we as individuals and as a culture define the important concepts embodied in the words we bandy around as desirable goals and experiences. And perhaps parenting is one of the significant life experiences or ‘encounters’ that could help (or force) us to redefine our concepts, words, goals, values – even ourselves – for our own and everyone’s good. A longer quote from the article:

“Martin Seligman, the positive-psychology pioneer who is, famously, not a natural optimist, has always taken the view that happiness is best defined in the ancient Greek sense: leading a productive, purposeful life. And the way we take stock of that life, in the end, isn’t by how much fun we had, but what we did with it. (Seligman has seven children.)”

There’s something to this idea, but I’m not utterly convinced (seven kids must kill a few brain cells, don't you think?!). What about this for an idea though? If all you’re looking for is ‘fun’, life will inevitably blindside you and you’ll end up with very little of the experience you so desperately seek; but if you’re willing to aim for the sort of ‘joy’ that takes some hard work and sacrifice, fun will jump out at you from behind a tree while you’re minding your own business, and want to come along for the ride. That’s my experience, anyway. And one I’m hoping will – lack of sleep notwithstanding – repeat itself when I camp out with Amélie in the garden tonight!