A pep talk about time
My pep talk is below, but first I have to tell you: I have made a huge mistake.
In the past, I have pretty much failed at zucchini, which I know is like saying you failed at falling down, but there it is.
But this year I have these two giant plants that are already a success, plus the zucchini-ish volunteer that I have carefully trellised due to lack of faith in myself.
It’s early July and I already have a glut.
Having given thought to preservation methods for this watery vegetable that might not be too appealing in many forms later on, I decided I would first roast the ones I had picked (probably already about 3 lbs) for freezing. I love a vegetable lasagna layered with roasted zukes and eggplant. Later I will shred some and put that by for zucchini bread.
However, I spent too much time while they were in the 450° oven looking up how to preserve them and… they burnt to a crisp.
They burned so thoroughly that I had to stick the pan outside last night lest all our smoke detectors go off!
I don’t know how I didn’t notice that this was happening. I’m so out of it and also allergies have me all stuffed up!
Sigh (but can we admire the many blooms on my heretofore sparse hydrangea?). I’m sure I’ll have another chance though!
Okay, time for this quick pep talk. I hope you are having a wonderful summer and enjoying yourselves! I hope you are letting your children splash about in the water, make mud pies, play baseball, and generally get physically worn out and mentally recharged. If you live in the antipodes and it’s mid-winter or if you are one of my Arizona friends huddling in the AC, sorry. I am still hoping you are enjoying something!
This is my pep talk, and I don’t know how to make it sound like what it is — the key to a life that isn’t frantic — and not a truism that you can brush aside and go on with methods that might be contributing to general angst.
Here it is: Schedule less in your day and in your life generally.
Most of the things will schedule themselves (doctors’ appointments, social events, baptisms, and so on). The man of the family definitely has most of his time scheduled for him. He is beholden to an outside force. Even if he works for himself, he has to provide a living.
To have a peaceful family and a life oriented to the good, we need time — unscheduled time. The woman of the house needs to fend off the urge to make use of every hour and minute.
That means that often she will be somewhat haunted by the thought that others are judging her for not being enterprising!
Think about it — in order to be available to take up the slack, meet an emergency, or even be mentally and physically present for an unforeseen opportunity (say, with a child who is discovering a feature of the world fairly common to every adult, but magical to him at the moment), the mother will by definition require time that is unscheduled. She has to live within this tension of being at rest in order to leap into action. If she doesn’t accept the potential for tension (at least as a perceived by others and thus a matter for self-judgment that she might succumb to), she will not be available. To a certain extent in our society, to be calm we have to accept that we will always feel the pressure to do otherwise; hence, the tension.
There is even more to protecting the wife’s time. I have noticed that the one thing that makes most women accept feminism (even if we can’t really define the ideology) is, if we listen closely to what they say, that they really don’t think women should have to do housework. Housework seems like the worst drudgery, the worst fate, avoiding which would justify doing any other sort of work, even work that is objectively far more tedious and limiting than sweeping a floor or even, gasp, cleaning a bathroom.
Yet housework loses all its horrors and even becomes a pleasure if we don’t have to rush through it. Making best use of our time can mean using it fully for the task at hand and no more, not, as we so often interpret it, being so efficient that we regard failing to rush as a sort of defect.
It’s true that mopping a floor with a couple of toddlers running about can be frustrating. But one of the factors that makes it almost intolerable is the sense that we don’t have time for it, that there are pressing matters we have to get to. Without this pressure, even housework with young children can be, dare I say, fulfilling. It can even give us mental room in which to contemplate much higher thoughts; it can even be a means of prayer. We just need time in which to do it.
Certainly, the family has no room for pursuing creative ideas and activities if the normal pattern is to be busy with the world’s demands. You’ve heard it before, but it’s worth thinking about again as a real challenge: just because everyone is doing something, doesn’t mean our family has to do it!
This is why I insist that basing family survival on two incomes is not a good idea. When both parents have outside commitments and time that is spoken for, there is no wiggle room, no cushion, no buffer. They think they are providing more security, but the choices are made on the basis of everything going right. That means that any disruption is perceived as an attack instead of how life actually is.
The need for everything to go perfectly well, since the buffers are removed, underlies what I have talked about as “baby resistance” — the idea and really fear that another child will create untenable disturbances (for instance, some time when mom feels sick and can do little). Yet children are the blessing of marriage and a great gift to all. The ups and downs, even if the downs are sometimes catastrophic, can be managed where the family has chosen to leave breathing room.
Deliberately choosing catastrophe? What am I saying? But catastrophe is part of life. We can’t control illness, accident, even death. We can only control our attitude towards these things and our arrangement of our choices to meet with serenity (or at least not utter panic) what we know we cannot avoid. If instead we accept the world’s idea of busy-ness, avoiding the vulnerability of leaving our time open, we miss out on the joys, small and large, of life lived differently.
Husband and wife should view time as a gift and prioritize keeping it as free as they can, especially the wife’s time. Even for those who have made the decision to have the wife home, the danger is therefore to think of her time as available for scheduling.
Choose not to do more. Guard the time.
bits & piecesI have a new, very short (15 minutes!) podcast on the topic of beauty saving the neighborhood!
Melody Lyons had posted about her miscarriage and how she dealt with it. A discussion ensued on my FB page about the collective memory we have lost. Some resources in case of miscarriage that we should bookmark and share with the pastor of our church and our mothers’ networks: Management of miscarriage; practical spiritual help. (A priest at the Abbey near us suggests ordering a headstone from a company that provides them for pets as much more affordable than the alternative.)
A bit of a rough podcast, but we need to wake up to the dangers of transitioning, so called, especially for children.
A beautiful documentary about the Carmelites of Fairfield, PA; their life and the specific challenge they face from those who wish to eliminate their charism of being hidden and living simply with God. I found that watching it helped me to think more about the value of the housewife deciding not to rush through her chores. Why do we despise our little tasks?
I kind of like this funny guy, and here he listens to a 16th century song.
A new, monumental altarpiece!
from the archivesThe other day a new friend came by to pick up some sourdough starter from me, and we were chatting about this and that. She mentioned that she loves The Summa Domestica (so sweet of her to tell me!) and has given it as a gift to several of her friends, especially one friend who suffers from UTIs, because I have a chapter in the appendix with this post. I said that this is good to know, because my (totally darling) editor had asked me if I really thought this particular post should go in the book; it seems so different from the others. Oh yes, I said — and my new friend nodded her head vigorously — UTIs and mastitis are two issues women have that feel very defeating and make motherhood so hard. Trying my best to keep the collective memory!
Men Without Chests… and all sorts of virtues we withhold from our children and then lament that they have no self control.
liturgical living
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My book, The Summa Domestica: Order and Wonder in Family Life is available now from Sophia Press! All the thoughts from this blog collected into three volumes, beautifully presented with illustrations from Deirdre, an index in each volume, and ribbons!
My “random thoughts no pictures” blog, Happy Despite Them — receive it by email if you like, or bookmark, so you don’t miss a thing!
My new podcast can be found on the Restoration of Christian Culture website (and you can find it where you listen to such things) — be sure to check out the other offerings there!
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