bearing blog

The extraordinary ordinary.

Jen's got a post with an excellent insight, one I hope I'll remember. 

I try to "pray without ceasing," turning to God regularly as I go about my days, but lately I'd been increasingly apathetic about having any kind of set prayer time where I give God 100% of my attention. Even though I recognized that when I pray the Liturgy of the Hours it helps me on every level, even when I tried setting simpler goals like just focusing on freeform prayer for five minutes per day, it still wasn't happening. 

I have a very similar problem.  I love the LOTH.  Every time I pick up the breviary and begin to pray an office, I am instantly happy and thankful that I am doing it.  It's like discovering thirst only at the moment that you begin to drink.  The reward is immediate.  But I seem to forget, in between, how much I enjoy it and am glad for it.  I put it off and put it off and never get around to it.  And my goal is only to pray one office -- any office, whichever one is appropriate for the time I pick up the breviary -- per DAY.  

You pray before battle....

If I were going into battle tomorrow -- a real battle, facing bloodshed and mortal danger -- I would pray. I wouldn't have to remind myself why it's important. I wouldn't whine about it. I wouldn't drag my feet. And I dang sure wouldn't forget.

In fact, if I were doing anything of great importance, I would naturally turn to prayer. 

This is a good insight, and something I have noticed before in myself. Anecdotally, I have heard many people who are not particularly religious or even some nonbelievers tell of impulses to pray that have bubbled up in times of great fear or stress. We look for help from anywhere, I suppose, at such times. It's the source of that old saying "There are no atheists in foxholes."

But the key insight Jen went on to point out is, I think:

A big problem with my prayer life is that I'd stopped feeling like I do anything important on a day-to-day basis. Now, I've always known that my job is the most important job in the world; I've never doubted that my role as a mother is critical in the grand scheme of things. But on the average day? Hmm. Not so much.

Somewhere along the way my attitude had become saturated with ennui, and I came to see my days as consisting of "make breakfast," "clean up after breakfast," "try to keep the house from getting destroyed between breakfast and lunch," "make lunch," and so on. Not very exciting. I'd made the dangerous mistake of forgetting that every day is a battle, a war of good against evil, that every time I choose love instead of sin it's a victory on a cosmic level that I can't imagine.

This is a theme I keep coming back to again and again: Respecting the work you do -- the work others do -- in service of our vocations. And by "respect" I don't just mean "remembering not to look down on the menial tasks of our livelihoods." I mean standing in awe of these tasks, for what they accomplish, at least a little bit, all the time.

 There are plenty of other consequences of failing to appreciate the true nature of things like work, including misplaced shame and disrespect for other humans engaged in dignified labor, and societal problems too.  But what Jen's pointed out is something I hadn't noticed before, that it can lead directly to neglect of prayer life.

Freezing.

I've been trying to cook double portions and set them aside, once or twice each week, for a while now.  A month to go, and I already have 18 Meal Nuclei in the freezer.  That's three weeks' worth and then some!  

Meal Nuclei?  Well, I'd be lying if I said I had that many "meals" laid up.  In my mind, to have a "meal" means all the side dishes and trimmings ready to go, or at least what's made is a complete meal-in-a-pot.  A Meal Nucleus needs more stuff to make it a meal ... but crucially, the added stuff is either not cooked or not complicated to add.

This is what I have so far:

• Cock-a-leekie soup kit for the crockpot (minus the water and the potatoes, which don't freeze well)
• 9 calzones -- which counts for two meal nuclei.  Just add sauce and salad.
• Chicken piccata CORRECTION:  piccadillo [can't believe I made that mistake!] enchiladas (in a kit -- thaw and assemble).  Just add some veg or a fruit salad
• Two raw meatloaves with ketchup-(brown sugar)-(cider vinegar) glaze
• Two spinach ricotta pies (kits again -- thaw and assemble)
• Two quarts veggie-rich spaghetti sauce
• Unbaked spinach-cheese-red pepper-salami lasagna
• Red-cooked beef, ready to be part of fried rice or possibly an Asian pizza topping
• Two five-and-a-half-cup portions of homemade tomato soup (add grilled cheese sandwiches)
• Italian pot roast kit for the crockpot (just add polenta or pasta and some salad)
• Two quarts sloppy-joe filling (just add buns and cole slaw)
• One par-baked sausage lasagna

Tomorrow I plan to brown five pounds of ground beef with onion and freeze it in quantities appropriate for individual pots of Emergency Chili or Judy's Taco Soup.    Maybe next week I'll do it again with another five pounds.  That, plus a few key pantry staples, turns said chili and soup into twenty-minute one-pot meals.

I also need to re-train my sons in the arts of coffee, bread-machine bread, pizza dough, biscuits, scrambled eggs, oatmeal, and cheese enchiladas.   A few of those skills, plus a giant bag of baby carrots and a well-stocked fruit bowl, can go a long way toward making sure that somebody gets some kind of breakfast or lunch even if Mom is nursing in a rocking chair all morning.

On driving past the Home Depot on the way to Target this morning.

"Darn it!  If only I'd realized we'd be passing the hardware store today..."

"Why?"

"Because I need a small metric screw."

"What, I'm not good enough for you?"

"You're standard."

Laid off.

The limited number of Saturdays left before giving birth decreed that yesterday I needed to go to the Mall of America, because Nordstrom is there, to be measured for new nursing bras.  One of the sizes I needed wasn't in stock in underwire-free form, so I went to the maternity store down the way to buy one.

The mall was crowded but the maternity store was fairly quiet.  I asked the saleslady if, being a maternity store, they were fairly insulated from Christmas rush.  

"Well, it's normally pretty steady," she said, "but I think we're in the middle of a baby boom right now, with the economy like it is."

"Oh?"

"My theory," she explained, "is when there isn't enough work, people stay home more, and when they stay home they get pregnant."

Problem (!): Overabundance of sourdough bread.

Yeah, yeah, I know, some problem.

Seriously, though, it IS a problem, because I am terribly prone to the "It's just going to go stale, so why don't I slather it in butter and sit hear and eat it while I read blogs" fallacy.

Here's the deal.  I have finally figured out how to produce traditional sourdough sandwich bread (if not beautiful sourdough boules and baguettes) fairly reliably using my bread machine.  I love sourdough bread and want to always have some around for my own personal bread consumption.  But nobody else in the family wants to eat it, except that for some reason Milo periodically decides to gobble half a loaf plain.  (The rest of the time he claims not to like it, probably because it tastes weird with jelly.)

So, who's got a great dinner recipe with sandwich-loaf-shaped sourdough bread (of the dense, rye or wheat variety) as an ingredient?  Stratas, bruschettas, and the like?  I already thought of "grilled cheese sandwiches."  I wonder if maybe I could do one of those spinach-dip things, only on a smaller scale.

Anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?  Christy?

UPDATE:  Several suggestions in the comments, including this strata from Smitten Kitchen suggested by Jamie.  

Somersaults.

When Milo was little -- less and less often as he grew up -- he used to substitute words to amusing effect.  Milopropisms, we called them (apologies to R. B. Sheridan).  Once he turned a somersault for the first time, popped up and declared proudly, "I did a spring roll!"

Spring rolls or somersaults, there are a lot of them going on around here.  Mostly in my lower abdomen.  I remember Hannah telling me that one of the weirdest sensations she ever felt was her second son, Silas, doing a front somersault turning from breech to vertex in very late pregnancy.  I couldn't even imagine that.  But after a couple of days of on-and-off, irregular, painless, but very noticeable and tiring contractions, I woke up in the middle of the night and went "GAAAAHHH!" I had the mental image of the baby standing up inside me and tenting my abdomen with his HEAD.  I put my hand on my belly and felt something with corners poking up, and then it slid away downward under my hand and sort of went plop.

My heart was kind of pounding when it was done, it was such a horribly fascinatingly weird sensation.  

And then about forty-five minutes later it happened AGAIN.

And again not long after I woke up.

And a few more not-quite-so-amazingly-huge rolling movements since I've been up and around.

I have no idea which end of the baby is up now.  I've never been very good at figuring that out.  Clearly there's still some room for that to change.  (35 weeks today)

Impressive.  The two days of contractions were starting to get on my nerves, and I had already started pounding the glasses of water just in case they were due to dehydration or something, although I had the distinct feeling that they were normal sort of preparatory practice contractions.  Whatever -- I realize that proximity doesn't necessarily imply causation here, but it's hard not to conclude that they had something to do with a major repositioning that appears not to be quite complete.  My belly had felt compact and firm and stuffed full; now, everything feels very soft and loose and yielding, as if my uterus has softened and stretched and made a little more room for the baby to move.  Maybe he's dropped a bit.

Before the storm.

Last evening while I was driving to our midwife's house for my prenatal, my cell phone rang.  Mark, in the passenger seat, dug it out of my purse and answered; it was J., the midwife, calling from a birth.  No, we hadn't gotten her message -- no, of course it was fine, we'd reschedule the appointment.  Babies take precedence.

"Ask her if I should just meet with V. [the other midwife] this week, what with the snow and stuff," I interrupted Mark, as I checked blind spots and changed lanes to try to get off at the next exit.

"How about we just meet with V.?  She's a lot closer," Mark said into the phone.  Then:  "Oh -- oh, dear -- okay, well, give us a call when you're home and rested, and we'll schedule.  Okay.  Bye.  Good luck."  He set my phone down on the console. 

"What's wrong with V.?"  We have hired two midwives this time, for peace of mind, as the first one lives some distance away and Minnesota Januaries are unpredictable and I really don't wish to have an unintentionally unassisted birth.

"Some kind of infection that's not responding well to antibiotics."

"Oh -- yuck.  I hope she's doing better soon.  I guess I really don't want to be anywhere near that..."

So we turned around, and went out for pizza with the family instead, and headed back to Mark's office to pick up his car.  Mark took Oscar home to get ready for the next morning's outing to the ski slope, and MJ went with them; I took Milo to the grocery store to pick up a few things to tide us through the coming snowstorm, fruit and lettuce and cereal and cheese.  When I got home I checked the weather online:  it looks like there's potential to be a big one, maybe 20 inches that will start falling this afternoon and continue off and on through Christmas and into the next day.

The pre-empted appointment with J. -- V. sick and unable to fill in -- the threatened Christmas blizzard -- all of that reminded me last night that the unexpected can crop up and change your plans.  I was uneasy the rest of the evening, thinking about my late-January due date.  A snowstorm could come in late January too.  Even though we hired two midwives, they theoretically could both get sick, couldn't they?  And my friends might not be able to come over either?  I fretted aloud to Mark. 

(Truth is, anytime my plans get changed for me I fret about SOMETHING.  Oh sweet rigidity, never depart from me.)

"I'm worried.  I hate waiting for labor.  Oh, it'll be better when I get closer," I added, "because by then I'll really WANT to go into labor, I'll be so tired of pregnancy.  But right now when it isn't quite intolerable yet, it just scares me."

I added to Mark,  "Sorry to keep going on about this -- it's not like you can do anything about it.  Except maybe remind me of more rational modes of thinking."

"Like this:" said Mark, "'Just keep on distracting yourself and put it out of your mind.'"

"Don't you think I should try to work through my fears?  You know, so I can make that jump when it's time?"

He laughed at me.  "You don't have to jump," he said, "you're going to be dropped.   This thing is going to happen whether you're ready or not.  It's one thing to view yourself as the paratrooper.  It's quite another to be the bomb."  He chuckled again.  "You da bomb, honey," he said.  Clearly amused.

Yippee-yi-yay.

Double helix cable-knit.

GeekLady knitted a DNA scarf.   Isn't it cool?

(Looks like there's a link to the pattern, for anyone who wants the perfect gift for a stylish geneticist.)

"Becoming atheists to their gospels is a necessary step..."

A neat post at Mere Comments by S. M. Hutchens.

Every year I enjoy receiving Christmas greetings in the mail, but this year an atheist friend sent me something new: an Anti-Christmas card in which he gave us felicitations of the winter solstice, inviting us to join our pre-Christian forebears in celebrating its prospects.  He takes a Nietzschean view of Christianity: it is a myth in which the spiritually and mentally weak take refuge, a platform from which to make cowardly and self-righteous assaults on those who have the courage to deny the truth of these fairy-stories and live in a demystified reality.

I am sympathetic to his charges, since I find them true from a perspective I understand, and do not find unreasonable, but have chosen not to adopt because I do not myself wish to be judged on my worst points.  It is by no means difficult, however, to find representatives of Christianity against whom they are perfectly plausible.  If someone concentrates his sight on these, defining the faith by its worst professors--who loom exceedingly large in the view of many through no fault of their own--then it is indeed every bad thing that so many wounded freethinkers accuse it of being.  

I rarely find these people unlovely--in fact, the contrary has usually been true.  Many of them seem full of love, not only for people, but for God’s other handiwork--and they are lovers of truth so far as they are able to perceive it as unconnected to orthodox religion.  Are they really atheists?  God knows, but I am not willing to affirm it. 

The post comes up for some thoughtful criticism in the comments, and thoughtful defense too -- the whole thread is worth reading. 

Anti-aging.

Christy P asked me in a comment to my post about this our first Christmas in our own home:  "Do you feel like a grownup yet?   I am starting to."

Funny.  Here I am, 35 years old and the mother of four, and you would think I would feel like a grownup by now.  Truth is, I am also just starting to.  I have felt like an impostor of a grown-up most of my technically-adult life, assuming that all my peers are really grownups and I am not.

Interesting that Christy's comment came up in the context of celebrating holidays at home, leading one's own family, and not some other context.  I assumed for years that the biggest reason I didn't feel like a grownup was because I didn't have a so-called "real job."  First I was in school, and then I was in school some more, and then I was in school SOME MORE, and then I became a mother (while I was still in school), and then I was a mother at home with small children, um, running their schooling.  I am, it seems, still in school.    The fact that I rather enjoy the situation has seemed almost to confirm my non-grownup status.  

For a long time I thought that another source of my feeling as if I were impersonating a grownup was a sense of a stunted appearance.  I think this is a vestige from childhood, as I was a very short child, slow to mature and socially backward, who perpetually looked (and sometimes behaved) at least two years younger than my peers, never quite able to catch up.  Until quite recently the face in the mirror always looked "too young" -- I don't mean that in a good way, like "youthfully attractive," but rather "childish."    Losing a third of my body weight last year did away with that -- as everything deflated and dropped and relaxed over that year, I saw something new in the mirror, lines that had been slowly forming over the past years, but masked and camouflaged by that infantilizing plumpness that has dominated.   I like looking my age, and feel I've put on a much more convincing disguise.

Family life hasn't done it either, and I shouldn't have been surprised by that either.  Look around:  there's plenty of evidence that adulthood is neither a prerequisite for, nor a result of, making babies.   Nor does getting married automatically signify a transition in responsibility.  Once it might have, but it's well obscured now.  I concede that I haven't had to endure much hardship, and that perhaps it's an easy, happy adulthood that has given me the impression of no adulthood at all.   Or perhaps it's that I was free and clear for such a relatively short period, so that I've had a sense of being cared for for most of my life; sometimes, when Mark's doing the taxes or putting snow tires on the van, or sometimes when I'm awake in bed doing crossword puzzles and glance over to see him fallen asleep with the light on, curled around a sleeping child who asked for Daddy at bedtime, I am startled to realize that I am married to a 36-year-old man.  I'm pretty sure I am technically of marriageable age, so this ought not to shock me, but nevertheless it still does.

Perhaps the feeling of masquerade is a quirk of my probably disordered personality.  Perhaps it is  just one long dress rehearsal for age-related dementia ("No, Mrs. A., I'm not your mass transport TA, I'm just here to change your bedpan.")  Or maybe it's more common than I think, this disguise, and I am no more or less special, no younger or older inside than anyone else.