c l i m b i n g i v o r y
A little blog of Catholic wifehood, motherhood & dreams
I see you sit in patchwork sun
From clouds that mute the earth Wind spilling on the rippling grass To tease your chin with mirth I see you in the furrowed frown Of earth's abundant beds Your fingers sifting diligent For tiny acorn heads I see you planted, lioness, Among the weeds and woods Red-cheeked, somber, pondering Our house, our gold, our goods All with a quiet innocent stare Of fawn amid the trees All with the solemnly hushed air Of female reveries All with the smallness of a bird With dirt-stained hands and feet Squatting silent in our lawn Watching your brother eat.
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Here I am, returning punctually as promised, for better or worse . . .
Once I made my commitment last week to write something here every Wednesday, I immediately started wondering . . . well, what exactly am I going to write about? Not in the sense of someone gleefully cracking their fingers over a keyboard about to receive fevered pulses of genius. Rather, in the sense of blankness. And so I started scrolling my old blogs. My eyes skimmed over so many posts from a lifetime ago. Entries written by a single girl, a young engaged girl, a young woman pregnant with her first baby. Words really poured out of me then. Words upon words. (Probably too many words. Ay yi yi.) So passionate about everything, amply loquacious, always bent on humor, and fertilized by nearly unlimited uninterrupted time. (. . .intermission while I settle my darling male offspring for the fifth time in bed…) And it’s really been so long since I’ve written consistently about anything–years, literally–that this (the relationship to my writing, I suppose) all feels like a rusty tool in my hands from which I’m blowing off dust and tapping away the cobwebs. Of course I’m the same person. But I’m also absolutely not the same. Perhaps this year above all others, I exited the chapter of being a youngster passionate about the head-knowledge of life and how it should be lived faithfully, and was thrown headlong into the living of it, which honestly has been peppered (doused) with things like stagnation, slow growth, intense suffering, conversion, repeated ad infinitum. And that just changes you. Everything I knew and was comfortable in had to be soundly rocked, shattered even, by the trials and purifications of marriage, motherhood, spiritual journeying–and the pieces put together by Jesus alone. I was taught what I had always “known” - everything is for Him. All things are sustained only by Him. In Him alone does suffering make sense - it is through Him, with Him, in Him. So how do you even start writing anything again, when you’ve been awed, humbled, broken, and silenced before the Renewer? Well, you start by writing about housekeeping, naturally. (So see, I haven’t really changed much at all!) We’ve been in a good little spurt of orderliness this week, I’m happy to say. It always helps when things aren’t chaotic and I’m not flying around outside the home (in fact, I’m realizing it’s vital, or at least that in a busy season I can’t have both, or at the very least that I have more things to learn in order to narrow the gap between tidy-quiet-week-life and busy-messy-week-laundry-standstill-life). So I’m already prepared for things to hit the fan with next week being Thanksgiving. Both our families are local and Thanksgiving for us (thanks to some really wonderful traditions that I genuinely love) means four solid days of festivities which include sleepovers. The kids will have a blast and we’ll return to our (hopefully tidy…) domain deliriously exhausted but happy. (And is anyone else deeply, abysmally, profoundly relieved there is an extra week between Thanksgiving and the start of Advent this year? I can barely keep up and this week will be my saving grace to hopefully accomplish our yearly goal of completing all Christmas shopping and Advent preparations before the First Sunday.) But I digress. The whole point of embarking on this topic was to give myself a chance to write down some habits that have been really working for me in the hopes that I’ll kind of figure out which ones to prioritize during the busier upcoming season . . .
Until next Wednesday! Popping on here to post an impulsive resolution I made a few hours ago to write something here every Wednesday! Because the bleak alternative is to post here every six months and feel totally incapable of writing anything coherent because too much life has gone by, where to begin, and all that.
So here I am! Of course I am experiencing the aforementioned thoughts and feelings of having too many events and nebulous memories and thoughts to put down . . . hmm . . . JA and I were on marriage retreat from Friday to Sunday, and it sounds very pat to say God used it to radically transform everything about our lives, but . . . it's basically true. Praise the Lord for His abundant mercies on both of us and our marriage! One of my favorite changes we came back home and made as soon as we could was our own little prayer corners for mental prayer first thing in the morning and for our examen and night prayers before bed. (It makes us sound so devout to write this down . . . nothing could be further from the truth and we are fumbling around but we know it's the right thing to do so we press on!) His is in the walk-in closet and mine is in a corner by one of the windows. It honestly takes me back to being a girl in my parent's house with my own little altar in my room that I could go to any time, with my books and holy cards arranged just how I liked them. Having it there now makes me want to go pray more in the little moments snatched out of the screechy smelly toddler-filled moments of my day . . . funny how that works. I'm so thankful though. The retreat as a whole was and is too precious to really write in depth about (as it relates to our marriage, anyway,), but it was overflowing with power, grace, healing, abundant tools, clarity, a growth in mutual tenderness, affection, love . . . what more can two lovebirds four years and two toddlers in ask for, anyway? ;) I still can't believe God gave us this gift and I don't want to waste the smallest part of it. Coming back from 2.5 days away to the lovely chaos of our children and their constant interruptions was a wee bit of a challenge for me as I tried to catch up on our calendar, to-do lists, upcoming events, grocery orders, etc. but the transition has gentled now and I feel more anchored in God's loving presence during my day. The kids have mild colds and we're still getting our heads above the surface of laundry but everything else is settling. I need to buy a new autumn-scented candle to mask the perpetual vague scent of dirty diapers and vacuum a few places but other than that, I'm satisfied. So much more to write but I'll let that be enough for tonight! Bye! |
MaryWife to my best friend. Mama to a gregarious 3yo boy, a determined 18mo daughter, a darling baby boy due in late July, and a miscarried child we gave back to God. (photos are from Unsplash unless I note they're mine :)
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