Author: kyce

A friend of mine shared this story: She read in a book by a Waldorf early years teacher that whenever the children starting getting too wild or disruptive, the teacher slowly and methodically went about putting the room back together. Folding silks, placing dolls in their cradle, stacking bowls in the kitchen. And the children magically settled, finding their center once again. My friend said that when she read this, she realized that it perfectly described her own state of being–when the house is a mess, she feels impatient and irritable. When it has come back together again, she feels peaceful and easy. I couldn’t agree more!

But where is the Waldorf kindergarten teacher coming to my rescue? Why, up on the fridge in a rainbow colored chart, of course.

That’s right, a housekeeping schedule. For a long time, I was consumed with just the basic daily maintenance of our home: dishes three times a day, sweeping, laundry, tidying up the detritus of an active family. I still do those things day in and day out, but each day there is a little something extra that I focus on.

Monday is kitchen day. Aside from giving extra attention to things that pile up during the week, I set the timer for ten minutes and do a single task like clean the fridge or organize a cupboard. Sometimes I mop, or deal with the mess under the sink.

Tuesday is for the living room and entry way. The special focus of this day is “dust and declutter.” I rove around the house with a wet rag and a box, doing just that. I straighten the bookshelves, tame my knitting baskets, put the cds back into orderly piles. Sometimes I sort the hat bags, sometimes I sweep down the cobwebs.

Wednesday is bedrooms. Usually one needs more attention than the  other, so it gets it. More dusting and decluttering, sweeping the rugs, changing the sheets, putting away any clothes that have been piling up (and getting rid of the excess).

Thursday we do the bathrooms. Sinks, toilet, tubs, mop the floor with a wet rag, mirrors, wash towels. This has been majorly helped by having a spray bottle of vinegar solution and box of baking soda in each bathroom. Duh!  I use old cloth diapers for washing everything down with.

Friday is “studio” day. That would be our huge desk on the north wall of our main living space. I enter receipts into our budget, pay bills, tidy and declutter the mess, straighten the bookshelves and the disaster brewing down below where my fabric and sewing gear is stowed.

Over the weekend we do some version of a home blessing–vacuum, empty trash, do what was forgotten during the week, and often some bigger organizational work that involves everybody.  Or sometimes we just let things go, secure in the knowledge that it’s gonna get done soon enough.

:: I work fast and try to get the daily chore done by ten. If it’s not in the stars, it’ll happen for sure next week.

::My three year old helps me work while sister takes her morning nap.

::I love this routine because it tells me when to stop. If it’s time for the park, I stop myself.

::People before things. I am getting better and better at remembering this, at letting the house be messy and not falling apart myself. Strange to actually be embracing disorder, but sometimes that’s how we choose joy.

::Simplicity and de-cluttering are my secret weapons. If I am grumbling over picking up the same toys all the time, I simply move them out of our home or into storage. If my bookshelves are bursting and unsightly, if there are too many cups to wash, if the pen cup is stuffed so full it’s impossible to get a pen in or out–get them outta here!

Our house is not super clean, ever. It is a lively, creative space, with lots happening. Every day, though, we give extra attention to at least one part of it, and this makes the whole place feel loved. It is such a balancing act–embracing the abundant messes of family life, knowing how much to let slide, and when to get things back on track. It is an ongoing evolution–one of growing children, parents, and the space that contains us and our days together.

Here is our family’s “mission statement.”

What we strive to practice daily, as best we can.

Whenever there is a lot going on, when life is overly full or times are tense, this is how I find my way back to center.

I’m getting ready to share a bunch of stuff on rhythm and housekeeping and the like, and it’s good to pause and breathe, to give thanks, and to stay connected to what spiritual homemaking is really all about:

Love.

And all her many faces.

Has anybody else been following the beautiful series over at the Parenting Passageway of women’s stories of growing into motherhood? They are just filling me up with encouragement and appreciation–sustenance for this incredible journey of raising small children, and being transformed in the process.

I’ve been a mother for a scant three and a half years. My journey has taken me though a harrowing birth and a healing birth, the blissful times  of tending an infant with my heart and arms and breasts, and the confusion and anger and lack of understanding I felt when my sweet baby started having tantrums! biting other kids! shrieking at strangers in the grocery store! It was then that my real growth started happening, when I actually began to grow into a parent, and not just a mother. The birth pangs of that still-emerging parent continue, but I have learned to welcome them, to dive into them with the same gratitude I learned to feel for the contractions that brought my daughter into the world.

In the spirit of this journey, I thought I’d share a little story.

The other day I read this sweet interview about mindful parenting. At the end were 12 really wonderful exercises for mindful parenting. Great! I printed them out, put them up on the fridge, consulted them often, and proceeded to have the worst day of mothering in recent memory. I was yelling and irritable, impatient, and totally out of my center. Or maybe that should be totally self-centered. I knew it and still felt powerless in the face of it. Though I laugh ironically when telling friends the story of my attempt at mindful parenting, I really don’t think of it as a failure. Sometimes we grow the most from the hardest moments, from seeing the worst in ourselves.

My friend Adrie, whose beautiful story of growing into motherhood is at Carrie’s today taught me to think of mothering as practice. “Practice, and all is coming,” she learned as a student of yoga. My job is not to be a perfectly mindful mother, or any of the other ideal standards I might hold myself up to on a given day. It is simply to practice. Practice being mindful, practice speaking gently and holding my center in the midst of a three year old storm, practice keeping my home orderly in a genuinely cheerful way,  practice being kind to my husband instead of always right, practice keeping my heart open and present to the small and large tasks of raising two small children. Practice love.

As I practice, I develop self-discipline. With luck, that practice turns into a striving for self-awareness, then greater empathy, then emotional presence. And on and on as new skills are integrated and adapted as needed.

In the Steiner inspired book Natural Childhood by John Thomson there is a wonderful breakdown of the parent’s journey as we learn to relate to our children. Imagine it as a stairstep, in which we go through these different levels:

Unconsciously unskilled–you don’t know you don’t know.

Consciously unskilled–you know you don’t know. (This is the most frustrating step!)

Consciously skilled–you know you know.

Unconsciously skilled--you don’t know you know.

As you practice these skills, you move up the stairs. But it’s not always linear; on a given day I might be on any of these steps. Sometimes it’s two forward, one back. Ultimately the hard days are the best practice. They ask us to put all of our will and determination and prayer into our mothering. Into our lives. But as we strive, we grow. And that is the gift our children give us.

Practice, friends. All is coming.

::

What have you learned from your time practicing motherhood?

::

ps, no infants were harmed in the above photographs!

So today is the day I spill my biggest secret about Ordering the Stars: Spend more time at home. Spend more time at home, and your home will be taken care of and it will take care of you. That’s it. The foundation of homemaking as far as I can tell.

Of course, as with most simple truths, it took me awhile to figure this out.

There was a time, oh a little over three years ago, when I feared becoming a housebound mama. I recognize the look of panic in the eyes of newly pregnant friends worried about what life could possibly hold without a job and yoga class and afternoons scavenging at thrift stores. I knew I wanted to be a stay at home mother. Just without the staying at home part. Wouldn’t that be…isolating? depressing? a failure of modern expectations of socialization?  Our days would be busy–children’s museum, library, playdates, park. Definitely the thrift store. We would be freewheeling gals, my baby and I, out with the sling.

Sigh. I’ll just glaze over the hard lessons I’ve had along the way and say that I’ve changed my tune.

I’ve come to see that a home-based, rhythmical life is good for my children. To my surprise, I’ve found that it is also really good for me. I learned that if the only thing I had to do in a day was serve dinner by 6, the day flowed easily and inevitably became productive in unexpected ways. If I was in and out all day, on errands or playdates, cooking dinner became a stress. And the house, inevitably, a mess. We’d spend the whole next day recovering—that is, so long as nothing was scheduled for then, too.

I know that for new mothers, it is one of the big transitions of life to go from being out in the world to a more purely domestic life. I think it helps to have some vision of why you are home–I’m the first to admit that I’d get bored quick without my side-line gig of changing the world through Radical Homemaking. I do declare it’s the finest home entertainment system available.

Perhaps something magical has happened over the years and I now reside in the mother’s version of a zen retreat center—simple days are enough for me. They offer me the universe in a grain of sand. Chop wood, carry water. Wipe bums, sweep the floor. That’s right, Dorothy: surrender.

I’m not a recluse. We take walks around the neighborhood almost every day, to parks, and friend’s houses and the market. But somehow, that feels like home to me. If we can walk there, it’s part of our kingdom. The mantle of home is still around us. We do spend about 1/3 of our time out in the world, at playgroups and the like, but I try to balance such days with many more servings of quiet days at home. If we are out one morning, we don’t go out again in the afternoon. If we are out one day, we generally stay home the next.

It’s like breathing: in and out, give and take, busy and quiet. Try it. It feels good. And have you noticed that many of the mothers that seem to have it all together–the ones that seem to get an obscene amount of baking and sewing and storytelling done, not to mention have plants that are watered, are the ones who spend more time at home than away from home. Just saying.

Still need some inspiration to spend more time at home? This blog post from the smart folks at Simplicity Parenting says it all quite simply (as one would expect from them). And this one (and many others like it) from The Parenting Passageway have hugely influenced me. But I’d love to hear from you: How do you keep busy and inspired and content in the home? What do you do when you’re not?

So I took my advice and chilled out. I really needed it. The house did kind of fall apart. My grocery list was once again limited to milk and chocolate. We ate beans all week. We swung in the hammock and I didn’t even try to identify the birds singing overhead in the apple tree. That blurry picture up there? That’s one of Maida asking, “If I grow hair, do you promise to never brush it, either?”

And then this cool thing happened: equilibrium.

I cleaned the house, slowly but very surely. Made the menu plan and re-stocked the pantry. But I was still on the chill track. I took a nap with the girls, read a book in the middle of the day. Left the diapers overnight in the washing machine.

Balance finding its way to the center again. For a moment, at least, on it’s way from here to there and back again.

When I began studying Fertility Awareness, the first thing my mentor taught me was about cycles. You may have noticed that women operate in a wholly cyclical way. There is the really big cycle of our fertility across the lifespan: first infertile as girls, then the fertile, childbearing years, then the post-menopausal infertile years. Then within the childbearing years we have cycles of infertility then fertility and again infertility each month (or so).

In other words, fertile phases follow fallow phases.

Our creativity waxes and wanes, too. We need the quiet, inert times to rest, all the while gestating ideas that will in their turn be manifested by our hands. The seasons guide us in this, as well–candles on the table in winter, flowers in summer. Inward, outward. Doing, resting.

And so it is with all our extreme eco ways, our plastic-free times, our hanging-laundry-on-the-line times, our never-going-to-drive-again times, our never-buy-anything-new times. Have you noticed? They come in fits and starts, forward and back, forward and back. All the while there is momentum. However small or large, whatever direction it is going, each step brings us farther down the road from where we started.

I promise.

We go through phases of inspiration where we DO and exhaustion where we DON’T. And they are neither triumph nor failure. This is simply life, unfolding in the rhythm it was meant to.

Now, for men, fertility is a different game. They hit puberty and Boom! producing 2,000 sperm a second pretty much till death, at which time the rate declines a bit. And it’s that incessant model of fertility that drives our culture. We are taught to be productive pretty much all the time. Write a book? Quick, write another. But you know, other cultures don’t buy into this. They do things like take siestas.

Which is just what I did today after a marathon round of de-cluttering. As I napped I fantasized about putting all my scrawled pages of journal entries and too-big-to-be-a-blog-post ramblings into a free e-book called Manifesto of an Extreme Eco Housewife.

But fortunately I don’t have even a clue what an e-book is, or how to make one. So I went back to sleep.

Keep on keeping on, friends. We’re doing fine.