joie de vivre

Since I became a mom roughly three and a half years ago, I've found I'm becoming more interested in, and much better at, celebrating. Which seems ironic, right? But I'm realizing my interests in celebrating, mindfulness, and minimalism -seemingly separate things- all dovetail beautifully into, simply,  joie de vivre.  Because those three things, I think, are ways children naturally are inclined to experience life until they become jaded; sometimes much too soon.

I think in large part my attention to being "plugged in" with my surroundings (in my "Depleted" post, I write that this is possibly the biggest factor in my celebrating style) is due to seeing things through my daughter's eyes.  A ride on the subway isn't a mere ride on the subway.  It is full of sounds, smells, heat (oh, the heat!), and so so so many people to meet.  Lissie has the talent of melting just about everyone's chilly disposition when she inevitably asks "What's your name?" and, without waiting for a reply, "My name's Lissie."  Derrick and I were remarking today about how our daughter seems to bring out the best in everyone we've met here so far. Especially that elderly black woman Lissie insisted on holding hands with up the subway steps. They'd met about, oh, two minutes before, and the woman gently and happily obliged. 

Lissie has brought out the best in me, too.  Though I was formerly resigned to jadedness, she's been training me in the art of creating and appreciating new experiences.  She's taught me to savor them too.  Because by plugging into wherever I am, I am creating something beautiful and rich; I am creating the person she will become, by virtue of the things she is experiencing and will continue to experience, wherever we may be.

 (Eating Chinese food in China Town, Lissie style)

 

(Watching the squirrels in Central Park)

 

 

Giving up, Giving in

Returning from Jordan I was wrapped in a cocoon of familial bliss. Learning all of Lissie's newest tricks and habits had me open-mouthed and happy to be home and not missing out on any more of her growing up. And Derrick - I love living with this man. I love sharing spaces with the guy, as weird or kinky as some of them might sound: fridge, couch, bed, shower, kitchen, yard, bathroom, the list goes on and has less to do with you-know-what than you might think. I really like being with Derrick, going about our daily movements and coming home to each other at the end of the day.

I got home Tuesday afternoon. But Delusional Jen had signed up for summer classes, remember? And I'd already missed a day. So I had no choice but to shuffle out the door, jet lagged and unhappy, to my Spanish classes Wednesday morning. By the end of the day though I decided that nothing, not even that oh-so-tempting Spanish Language Certification, could keep me away from my family, both mentally and physically, any longer, especially after that arduous two month separation.

I had an uncharacteristically brief internal struggle, then dropped the classes and felt ready to celebrate. So I gave up. I gave in to an overwhelming desire to enjoy the summer with my little girl and to simply be. I decided to give - to myself and my family. It feels wonderful.

Caitlin's Mother Blessing

Most of you know that my theme for this year is celebrate, so when I got an invitation to attend a friend's Mother Blessing, I unhestitatingly said yes, even though it meant a commute to Provo on one of my off days. Of all things worth celebrating, I think a woman about to bring new life into the world should be at the tip top of the list, don't you think?

Unfortunately, soon-to-be mothers sometimes go uncelebrated in the excited anticipation for the child itself. Baby showers, though necessary, certainly celebrate the expected child more than the mother, and do so in a way that can come off as rather materialistic. A Mother Blessing, instead, is a spiritual, mother-focused ritual.

"A Mother Blessing is a special ceremony designed to acknowledge, honor, and celebrate a woman's journey into motherhood. Surrounded by some of the most important women in her life she will gain a sense of power, confidence, and support that will help her before, during, and after the birth of her child."

Candles were a special part in the ritual of this particular Blessing: Although I will only be talking about Caitlin's Mother Blessing in this post, keep in mind that every Mother's Blessing can be unique and special, depending on tastes or desires. For more information, please look up the following book, which has more suggestions on ways to celebrate a Mother Blessing:

All the women invited were asked to bring a bead that reminded them of Caitlin or that represented something special to them. The beads will be made into a necklace that Caitlin can wear before, during and/or after her labor:

We opened up our Mother Blessing by saying some prayers. We invited both God and Goddess to be present with us during this celebration, but especially to be present with Caitlin during her important transition. In our prayer to God we asked that our gathering might "bring Caitlin a wealth of strength, peace, and joy to bless her way as she labors and mothers her children." We also prayed that Goddess might "join us today. She is earth herself, her body reflecting mountains and valleys, fields and rivers. Her palpable sensuality is a celebration of physical existence. She represents the waves of primordial waters from which all life and consciousness arise. . .She is peaceful in her body and her truly miraculous power--as woman, as earth--to create life."

Isn't food a special part of any celebration?:

After a symbolic salt-water cleansing, everyone was invited to dispel negative energy. We did this by passing around ritual herbs and taking turns expressing our fears out loud while we flung some of these herbs into a fire. Some of my fears included having a second child, paying for grad school, and not finding a job after grad school. Phew. What a load off.


After this, we focused entirely on Caitlin. Everyone took turns pampering her and making her more comfortable. This included hand, foot and shoulder massages and brushing her hair. Doesn't she look so queenly?:

I volunteered to "put her hair up", a historic symbol of exiting girlhood into womanhood:

A beautiful woman:

We then presented Caitlin with a few simple gifts. Suggested gifts included a promise to deliver a homecooked meal to the family after the labor, a special snack for during the labor, or flowers for Caitlin after the delivery. Thinking of my anxiety about caring for a newborn in addition to Lissie, I bought some toys for Caitlin's first child that she can have in her arsenal should she need a rest with her recent newborn.

After presenting our gifts, yarn was passed around to create a literal web of support for Caitlin. As we wrapped the yarn around our wrists, we invoked our individual blessings on Caitlin and our desires for her labor. My wish was that by going through her labor well, she would have the energy and confidence to push on through her upcoming Ph.D. program (as in, wow, I did that? I can do anything!).

"We are the flow, we are the ebb, we are the weavers, we are the web."

We then cut and tied our own strands of yarn and will wear them until Caitlin has passed through her labor. A phone tree was also created so that all guests can be notified when Caitlin has gone into labor at which time each guest will light a red candle given at the Mother Blessing.
With the red candle, each guest was also offered a free henna tattoo by Caitlin's cousin-by-marriage, Nessa. Awesome!:
Caitlin's, appropriately, was the most elaborate:

Didn't Nessa do a remarkable job?:

And with that, I think this woman is ready to do just about anything:

"Today we have succeeded in forming a beautiful, sacred space for Caitlin's blessing. The power of the feminine spirit has been unveiled in each of us today. Let us stay connected to Caitlin, creating a cradle of support, as she awaits her birthing day and beyond, as she learns to mother her new baby. This has been a powerful day." Amen.

Thanks to Austin for organizing this even and inviting me to it.
And thanks to Charla for granting me permission to use these lovely pictures in this post.

Flesh and Blood

Today I was overwhelmed with gratitude for my kid--my daughter. My flesh and blood, as the saying goes. Lissie. People talk about "babies raising babies", and in a lot of ways, I was very young when I gave birth to my baby girl. Young is a relative term--I was 24--which in Mormon years is a perfectly appropriate age to have one or several children. But I was still young and very much in the process of figuring myself out. As I look back on it, I'm grateful that, for whatever reason, I felt at peace with having a baby so soon; For many reasons, but Lissie has played such an important role in my own self-definition.

Every parent should take pride in their child, and I do take pride in mine. I honestly feel that Lissie has the most engaging and generally delightful personality of any child on this earth. It's only appropriate that other parents feel that way about their children too.

I love that she is such a sensitive child, and so intent on her relationships with other people. The fact that she loves spending so much time outside or trying new things floods me with relief on an almost-daily basis. I recognize that as she ages restlessness might grip her, as it does me, and she might get bored with the status quo. I couldn't be happier about this.

In many ways I feel like she's the sleeping Aurora babe in Sleeping Beauty--that somehow, when I was pregnant, or when she was newly born, a queue of good fairies dropped by and sprinkled Lissie (and yes, with that effervescent glitter emerging from their wands) with gifts that would only bless her future life. Beauty and song might have made the list somewhere, but more than that I feel that Lissie's gifts lie in her humor, intelligence, enthusiasm and her ability to invite and welcome others into her love; to have fun and go with the flow, and her precocious ability to act appropriately, wherever we are, the majority of the time (she is still two, after all).

The funny thing about Sleeping Beauty is that the parents didn't do a darned thing to deserve such lovely magical benefactors. But that's beside the point. Even if, as she grows, Lissie's gifts alter, or she grows in unexpected ways, she will always be my flesh and blood. A part of me. And in ways I don't think I understand yet, Lissie has performed the work of the good fairy on me, sprinkling me with that effervescent dust, bestowing me with gifts that will only bless my future life too.

Mommies Dream Too

We encourage our children to dream, and to dream BIG. We teach our children they can do and have everything. But when we become adults, and mommies in particular, is this just another fantasy we shuck off while passing it down to our kids, kind of like Santa or the Easter Bunny?

Derrick and I lived in Boston for a regrettably short amount of time (9 months) while he completed a Master's program. I was expecting and working as a Nanny without any real idea when I would be able to finish my bachelor's degree. It was a special time for us as a married couple and a fun time since we were living in such a neat area, but personally, I felt a little discouraged with my life trajectory. Even more so after the following story:

Setting: Our Ward Halloween Party -

We were meeting couples and young families in our ward. One couple had been in Boston for a while and we asked them for tips about how to explore the area. The wife, with clearly no intention of making me feel awkward, asked: "Well, what do you like to do?" The question caught me off guard. I wasn't really sure what to say. So I started mumbling answers not disimiliar to the cliche descriptions found in the "looking" classifieds: reading, long walks on the beach, etcetera, etcetera. She looked at me and said, "Oh, well, I'm really into art. There are a lot of really great museums in the area." I felt so boring.

I walked away from that encounter more discouraged than ever. I was boring. I felt like a blank slate that had no writing on it. Perhaps I was a bit melodramatic. After all, in my defense, I had terrible pregnancy brain; plus, I'd just come home from a Mormon mission, where my personal identity was essentially a name badge and my own interests had definitely taken a backseat.

That being said, I had a lot of work to do and I've been doing it determinedly ever since.

One of my favorite books, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, makes the point that so-called "well-behaved" women are the ones who are forgotten easily, mainly because they don't take themselves or their interests seriously. The author writes, "Most well-behaved women are too busy living their lives to think about recording what they do and too modest about their own achievements to think anybody else will care." So what does the author argue makes "misbehaved women"? Those naughty women who dare to take their interests and passions seriously, regardless of the interest.

Gretchen Rubin, in her book The Happiness Project, describes a serious turn in her own personal development. Always recognizing but being ashamed of her interest in children's literature, she decided to stop categorizing her personal hobbies and interests as, well, illegitimate. She "came out of the closet", as it were, and formed a group of adults equally interested in kidlit. One of her main "Commandments" of happiness was one I instantly admired: "Be Gretchen". Of course, for me this means, "Be Jen", or "Be ___" for whoever you are. This simply means: stop thinking of your own interests as unworthy of note.

To take my interests really seriously I had to return to school. And it likely means that I will be in school for a while. This might be true for other women too. Other women, however, might find that school isn't required to take their passion seriously. It might mean forming a group of people who have a similiar interest, as it did for Rubin. Or it might mean simply allocating some money to a specific hobby. It might mean working, or it might mean devoting a bit more time to something: like a photography class, or a private reading hour. Or it might mean blogging, or keeping a journal, or scrapbooking. The bottom line? It doesn't matter what "it" is, as long as you treat it with the respect it deserves!

A few months ago, to get a better, more visual idea of what our "its" were, my sister-in-law and I bought a few supplies, cut up some magazines and worked at creating our own Dreamboard. Now, this task might seem juvenile, or high-schoolish. And yes, it's even recommended, so I hear, in a book called The Secret, a book whose ideas I definitely don't subscribe to. However, I found the task enjoyable and it reaffirmed the importance of dreaming regardless of where we are in life, or our family status. It also helped me realize the importance of alligning my life goals with my interests so I can look back on my life and feel content.

So, here's to dreaming big!

What are some of your dreams? What interests do you want to take more seriously?

Thank you, Dr. Morrison

photo courtesy of blackoncampus.com

Dear Toni (I hope you don't mind if I call you Toni?),

Thank you for your wisdom. strength. clarity. intellect. honesty.
Thanks for becoming a writer. Thanks for everything you've taught me. I've lived vicariously through your characters and learned awful things about myself, but wonderful things too, about life and what it means to be me and a woman and a mother.
Thanks for stretching my mind. and even though so many of your books and literary devices acted like splinters in my brain, I think the mental scarring they've left and continue to leave have made me a better person and a more capable reader.
I admire you.

Sincerely,
Jen

P.S. Thanks, also, for this wonderful statement you made years ago where you described motherhood as

the most liberating thing that ever happened to me. . . .Liberating because the demands that children make are not the demands of a normal "other." The children's demands on me were things that nobody ever asked me to do. To be a good manager. To have a sense of humor. To deliver something that somebody could use. And they were not interested in all the things that other people were interested in, like what I was wearing or if I were sensual. All that went by. You've seen the eyes of your children. They don't want to hear it. They want to know what you are going to do now-today. Somehow all the baggage that I had accumulated as a person about what was valuable just fell away. I could not only be me-whatever that was-but somebody actually needed me to be that. It's different from being a daughter. It's different from being a sister. If you listen to your children and look at them, they make demands that you can live up to. They don't need all that overwhelming love either. I mean, that's just you being vain about it. If you listen to them, somehow you are able to free yourself from baggage and vanity and all sorts of things, and deliver a better self, one that you like. The person that was in me that I liked best was the one my children seemed to want. . . . I found that extraordinary.

From an interview with Bill Moyers, 1989.

O'Reilly, Andrea. Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart. State University of New York, 2004.