unless the lord builds the house

the bookcase was on top of her, propped up partially by a chair it had fallen on. She was in the chair, a shelf over her neck, motionless. My husband had just left the room, and our youngest was asleep, and I had just run up to work for a couple hours.

When he heard the crash, he ran back into the room, lifted it off her, checked to see if she was fine. Thank God, she was—the bookcase she had decided to climb, to get her “favorite book” from the top shelf, was lightweight and had mostly dvds in the middle.  She was a little shaken up, like we were, but fine. Not seriously injured or dead, like she could have been. 

I’d seen those articles that float around facebook from time to time about securing your furniture to the wall, but I’d never done it. I always thought that since we’re pretty  much with the girls 24/7, this would never happen. But it did. Despite all of our vigilance and care, she still got hurt. 

Even after securing those shelves to the wall though, what other million things are there in a home, even a baby-proofed home, that a toddler can hurt or kill herself on? I’m a mom, so I can pretty much spot 100 things that can kill a baby in a room at a glance.  

Not to mention the scary world outside the room, and the home—sometimes raising girls feels likes being the mother of Gretel or Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks—tender little things skipping through the dark, wolf and witch and monster ridden forest.

Last week, I was reading the Psalms and came across this chapter:

Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.

Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
the fruit of the womb a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the children of one’s youth.
Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them!
He shall not be put to shame
when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

Psalm 127

I’m familiar with that first verse in the second stanza—“children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward”—what mother hasn’t heard that, and tried to remember it when the kids are screaming and covered with crusty whats-it and sleep is little and disciplining the children is lots.

But I had never paid much mind to the first half of the poem. The first half can’t be divorced from the second though—good poets don’t arbitrarily pair stanzas together, they are meant to be read in relation to each other, and in the order they are written in. I don’t think it is too wild to interpret the first half in relation to the second—to see it as, also, about raising up children.

No matter how hard I work to raise up my kids, feed them good food, educate them, clothe them, play with them—unless God builds my house, I labor for nothing.

No matter how much I babyproof, no matter how many bookshelves I nail securely to the wall, unless the Lord watches over my house, I stay awake in vain.
 

No matter how much I work and worry, no matter how many hours I stay up late to get the floor mopped and breakfast prepped for the morning, no matter how many mornings I wake up at the crack of dawn to take care of the baby who loves to wake up before the sun, all of this is for nothing, it is vanity, unless I am resting in the Lord’s promises to take care of us.

“He gives to his beloved sleep” – what a promise! Of course God knows a promise involving sleep will woo any hard-headed parent of little ones.  

Not only do I not have to worry that my children’s ultimate safety, well-being, education, health, etc, all depend on my performance, my intelligence, my self-sacrifice and mommy-awesomeness, God reminds us in the second stanza that we aren’t rewarded when our children are the best kids in the class or make it to adulthood perfect, we are rewarded by the fact that we have children.

They are the reward. We are living with that reward right now, spit-up stained shirts, messy-ponytails and all.

unmade

What do you need, baby? I asked her, running my hand over her clammy forehead and off into her blonde, fine hair. in daylight hours, she would protest my calling her “baby” with an “I’m no baby, I’m a big girl, mommy”. But she was too tired and too sick to mind. 

I need you. eyes still closed, head turned to the side. she looks small, curled in her twin-sized bed, a nest of stuffed animals and pillows crowded around her. 

A few hours earlier, she had told me her tummy hurt and threw up in the hallway, on the way to the potty. I scooped up her newly-toddling baby sister and plopped her in her crib. June howled angrily, unfairly forbidden from the fun of sinking her hands into the Vomit–Clean-Up.  zu cried as I wiped her down with a washcloth, rinsed the chunks from her hair, vacuumed and scrubbed the carpet.

It was one of those evenings that makes me miss Tennessee. Where is my mom, my mother in law? I could’ve used a grandma about then, with my husband working nights and all my nearby friends with toddlers of their own (and newborns too, now).  

Sometimes it feels lonely to live in a town you didn’t grow up in. rootless. 

I’ve found myself talking lately about going home. What it would take to get us there, what it would cost. Not that I don’t love so much of what there is here—this town where my second daughter was born, with its double-tongued rivers and commonplace mountains. 

I don’t know if we’ll ever leave or if that is really what I would want. But I don’t have what my husband has—that rock-steady, solid, dependable heart. On good days I call what I have a sense of adventure; on bad, a born and bred discontentment. I’ve never felt like there was anything so good in one place to live that I couldn’t cultivate in another. 

besides family, I tell bryan. But he points to our babies and mouths family, right there, family

I need you. not her grandmothers, as much as she loves them. Not a new state, a new city, the woods I wandered in when I was younger. Just me. How terrifying.

Nearly everyday, I pray that God will make me a good mother. I don’t want to take her entire childhood to get it right—for her to be grown before I know how to do this. The daily reminders of my insufficiency. Like when I lose my temper from the something-th poo-poo accident she’d had that day. when I don’t feel like playing hello-kitty dolls with her. When I’d rather eat the last strawberries myself, so juicy and red and sweet. 

The lie I want to believe is that the Other Moms have it figured out in a way that I never will. That if I could only live near family or work less or do more pinterest crafts with the kids gathered around me into a photographic moment, I could really do this. I could be a really good mom. 

Zu is sleeping deeply now, too heavily to notice when I stand up. across the room, june lays on her back in her crib, arms spread above her like she fought sleep on the very edge of dreamland. The meaning of her full name: young and vibrant warrior woman. 

I’ll go to sleep too, in the half-empty bed, perpetually unmade, knowing he’ll be home soon. Because the day starts early, and I start it with two little girls who want their first touch of  every morning to be a hug from their mother, half-awake, wild-haired, rumpled and perpetually unmade. 

laundry day

Zu and I washed and hung to dry her doll’s clothes one day last week. She had fun scrubbing them, playing in the water, and mostly using the clothespins to hang them to dry. “we can’t let it rain on my laundry!” she says, when I told her a few hours later that it looked like it might storm. 

finding t i m e

I never knew what it meant to truly have no time to myself until I had kids.

My (every other) day:

I wake up in the morning to the sounds of my baby girls talking and babbling in their room, i get ready for work on the days I work with my toddler next to me putting on her “make up” too and brushing her teeth too and fixing her hair too. I eat breakfast while tearing up little pieces of my breakfast for baby june to eat. I go to work to lecture for a few hours, then come home and fix lunch for my husband and babies, and play, and put them down to nap then go back out to lecture again. 

When I’m not meeting with students or other faculty, I do have "alone time" during my eight weekly office hours—to plan my lessons, answer emails, grade-grade-grade, and work my tail off so that I don’t have to try to get all that work done while watching a toddler and baby at home (which is considerably more difficult than working on those things while in the office). I come home for more play time and outings and family time til bryan goes to work and its just me and the girls (more playtime, and bathtime, and movie time). zu goes to bed, then june goes to bed a few hours later. Then I have an hour between june’s bedtime and my “Reasonable” bedtime, which I use to do housecleaning and preparing for the next day. for me, being a professor has been a semi-work-from-home situation, especially during semesters when I have many online classes. I love that it is that way, since, given our lower-middle-classness, otherwise i'd be working a 9-to-5 and see my babies less. 

I have an absolutely full life, even on the days that I don’ t have lecturing. So when do I write? 

I've read a few things this week that have led me to think about my writing time--I wrote a post earlier this week about how I likely will not become a "great" poet because of my time limitations. Then, reading this, felt like an answer: 

For those of you who are beginning your stories, who might believe, as I once did, when someone tells you there are certain conditions necessary to be a serious writer, a real writer, let me say: I am writing this in a dollar notebook from Staples, with purple gel pen. - Susan Straight

April, poetry month, I’ve written exactly once, for ten minutes, while bryan was changing june’s clothes. Though my life is busy, I know the fault is with me—in my choices. Yes, there are always things I have to do—those 50+ student papers aren’t going to grade themselves and I don’t have a maid and no one knows how to make a homemade pizza like I do—but if I keep putting off my writing until I have Everything Done, then I will never write. 

So this week I made a commitment—to use gap-times in my day to write.  in between classes, while watching the girls play in the tub, while stirring dinner. To use non-existent times in my day to write. to write on the back of receipts in the car, on my daughter’s coloring book, on my hand, if needed. to write like I need to write. because I do—it’s a soul-healing work, a necessary work so much more necessary than a spotless bathroom sink. 

It’s haphazard—it’s not well planned. My response to not having time to write is well just do it, time or no time. what are some ways that you find time to do what you love, even in the busiest months?

Portrait of My Poetry in Mom-Jeans

I’m teaching through different poetic schools and movements in my advanced poetry class, choosing what to focus on by my students’ requests. one week The New York School, the next the Romantics, and so on. Yesterday I was thinking about these poetic movements and lasting poet-names associated with said movements and about what gets published and what books are important. Even, further than that, why they are important. Do I write “important” work? 

Whenever I have students who say they can’t write, what they are really asking for is a topic—they don’t have a lot of life experience, so they can’t write that poetry book about a hurricane or about their decade living in a van down by the river. What I tell them and I suppose I ought to tell myself is that I believe that God values *and loves* the individual so anything written from a particular perspective is important. Maybe it won’t revolutionize poetry as we know it, but it is not without value. 

I’m a woman and I write about being a woman. I’m a Christian and I write about that too. I think those two things alone probably make my work largely unimportant—niche, maybe even regionalist with the southern Tennessee bent in my poems. All my students hate Kate Chopin but as an author I have to say I think we’d be friends. 

I don’t want to be “that woman poet”, but the VIDA seems to indicate that it’s a tough-gig. Though in my limited following of po-biz, I notice women poets and, even more specifically, mother-poets publishing books. Nicole Cooley’s Milkdress, that I read recently (and wow! Read it!). many others. Are they winning prizes and pats on the back though? I don’t know. 

Ultimately I think our society is pretty clear on its distaste for pregnancy, babies, children—if they’re inconvenient, or too expensive, or in your way, or not fulfilling exactly whatever it is you want out of life, then discard them or never have them. Certainly never write about them!

Then there’s the separate question of how do mother-poets ever have time to write. I turned down a scholarship to a summer writing workshop a couple of weeks ago. I love writing and poetry, and a couple weeks devoted to writing? Goodness. I can’t even think about it. 

Right now with my littles so very little, my writing (as a top priority) is part of what I lay down. And I know that it means I won’t be the poet I could’ve been or that my eighteen year old self wanted me to be, but I’m trading up, I know I am. I’d rather be an ok poet and a good mom than a really great oh-so-important Poet. not that those are mutually exclusive. or that there will never be time for poetry in the way i would like to have time for poetry...

Anyway, I’ve got to wrap this up—the baby needs more cheerios and the toddler wants to wear her ladybug wings.

stress baking

Over the past few years I have become a stress baker.

At first, bryan enjoys the stress-baking. It means made from scratch scones and muffins in the morning, pot-pie and lasagna for meals, cookies and brownies for dessert. Zu helps me extra in the kitchen. A half hour or so of stirring and kneading and measuring, and I’m a happy momma again. Something about the sole concentration on simple, textural tasks of pouring and mixing is soothing.

But then my stress reaches a level where being in the kitchen a little extra stops helping. I start to burn things, skip ingredients, forget steps. It makes for some really bad meals.  Which leads to budget stress and not-pleasing-my-family stress. 

So that is where we are right now—the balance has tipped, and so I am laying off the flour sugar and eggs and trying to find another way to deal. 

Being a teacher, my stress is seasonal. Mid-october to November, then again mid-march to april. (though you should have seen the chaos in my kitchen when I was a week overdue with June! I couldn’t boil water right by the end of it). Try as I might, eventually my defenses against stress wear thin and I’ve got ulcers and knotted muscles and sleepless nights. (Next semester I'm teaching all online classes though, so I've got high hopes for less stressful seasons!)

Over the years there were different ways I handled stress. Yelling at people was a favorite way when I was younger, but I’ve since learned that makes me sort of hard to be around even if you really love me extra much, so I’ve opted for internalizing the stress. Then I used to eat more when I was stressed, but this year I’ve been changing my eating habits (and 15lbs down because of it)  so I’m trying to find something healthier to replace that habit. For a while cooking was helping, but I have so much on my mind that I find it too hard to concentrate. 

It makes me a mess in all areas—nine out of ten little disasters we have had this month are the direct result of my carelessness. I’m thinking about trying out breaking things on purpose next to relieve stress, since breaking them on accident seems to happen so often lately anyway. Bryan and I have a date this weekend though, so maybe some one-on-one time without kids and just with my honey will help.

I mean, I'm just raising two kids two and under, working full time as a professor, editing my first book--what is there to be stressed about?

What do you do to relax when you are stressed?  

deck the halls

Our first Christmas tree in five years.  every Christmas we’ve either been moving, sick, or too poor to afford one. Tuesday I took zu to storytime at the library,  and at the end of storytime, instead of lining up to pet the puppets like most of the kids she wanted to look at the “baby” Christmas tree, and so I figured we could stand to take a bit from the grocery budget this month to make going out and getting a tree possible.  we spent the evening decorating it, baking sugar cookies, and reading our advent story for the night. 

One thing I’ve really enjoyed about parenthood is starting our own traditions. Some things we’ll carry over from each of our families, some things we start new.   Like my family, we dedicate an evening to decorating the tree together and we don’t do the whole santa claus thing, and like bryan’s family we celebrate advent.

This is our first year to do family advent devotions each week, and I love it so much! We’re using a devotional guide that goes along with the jesus storybook bible. I had never even been aware of the liturgical calendar until I was in college (I don’t understand the traditional country church penchant for spaghetti dinners and flannelgraphs while kicking the liturgical calendar to the curb), and its something bryan and I want to emphasize as a family. 

Zu is too little to get all of it, but she has learned a little bit about waiting. Each day we have her open a door on our advent calendar and take out a prize (past prizes: a sticker, acorns, a vitamin, candy, a bracelet, a pretty leaf…), and each day she asks “more?” and we tell her to wait. The first couple days she huffed about it (and even threw down her acorn! Bad!), but now she is getting the hang of this “Waiting” thing.

Honestly, Christmas has never been my favorite holiday. The materialism, greed, crowds shoving and trampling each other, fake glitter and gaudiness makes me sad.

But that is Christmas without jesus! And with jesus we have so much to celebrate—hope in a little baby born! And joy in us, such very broken things, being mended new.

oh the world owes me a lemon...

we got rid of internet/tv a couple weeks ago to help with our budget, and it is possibly the best thing I’ve ever done for my writing. Suddenly, I have all these tiny pockets of time that I wasn’t aware of—that likely got sucked up by social media or email or whatnot—and in them I’ve instead put reading and writing (but no arithmetic). We don’t have smartphones either—we are really amish-ing it up over here. we do go to the public library for books and movies, and I use internet at work sometimes. 

i don’t use the internet at the public library though because, aside from our really fantastic children’s section (complete with miniature, child-sized doors next to the larger, mommy-sized doors), our library is the creepiest library I have ever been in. not the building—the people. the building is up on a little hill overlooking the river, between downtown and the park. when the river floods, which often happens in the spring, the water creeps into the parking lot and our trail from the library to the park is overwhelmed with muddy river water.

there is no good way into the library--just a steep double set of stairs or an inclined roundabout path--not too inconvenient, unless you're eight months pregnant and carrying a two year old because we're late for storytime and it takes two years olds an awfully long time to safely climb stairs. florescent lighting, the check out front and center and isolated narrow paths past the often-read magazines into the less-read bookstacks, when you first enter. i rarely dig deeply into the bookstacks since poetry is only middle-deep from the center, and the audio-visual side is for computers, dvds, cds. upstairs is lined with local art--some bad, some good--and books even less frequented than what they have downstairs.

I never noticed the creepiness before because it isn’t in a bad area of town, and zu and I always made a bee-line for the cute children’s section for story-time and puppets. now that I’m browsing around a bit more, I can’t stand to be there more than just to grab what I need.  I think it is mostly because there are lots of men loitering about. I just get that feeling—that be-on-alert feeling. Maybe it’s the way they look at us? I don’t know exactly—it makes me look over my shoulder to make sure I’m not followed out to my car… and I also carry a knife in my purse so I can stab someone if they attack me. So, don’t get any ideas y’all. 

back to the topic at hand…after braving the library, I finally finished bossypants by tina fey last week (the chapter on motherhood is the best so read that if you are just going to read one chapter) and I’m reading the journals of Sylvia Plath right now (it is my rocking-june-to-sleep book. Sometimes it takes so long that I pick up a book and read a bit). I’m also reading through the southern poetry anthology, Tennessee volume, and I think it is my favorite poetry anthology that I’ve ever read—I know so many writers personally who are published in it (I’m in there too, but I wish my poem was better), and it is so good and it is so close to my tennessee born-and-bred heart.  

Zu has been watching old cartoons—like mickey mouse short-cartoons. Why are there so many drinking and drunkenness scenes in old cartoons? And why is goofy’s theme song “oh the world owes me a lemon…”?  June has been neither watching anything or reading anything from the library. She does however like to try to eat our personal books, when I’m reading to the girls with them both in my lap. 

i miss having internet on some days, since I can start to feel a little disconnected from the world, though for the most part I think this has been a really good thing. being disconnected is nice. It’s the reason I never have gotten a smartphone—maybe I’m a luddite at heart (I write, as I type this on my laptop… to later post on my blog…)