Old Recipe for a New World

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.

I’ve been thinking a lot about homemaking, these days. About being a woman and a caregiver and a creative soul. To be doing this fabulous, lively, engaging, and yes, tiresome, never-ending, unpaid work. I’ve been thinking, in particular, about how fulfilling it can be, how much of a chance there is for personal growth–what some call inner work. I was thinking about how conducive it can be to living ecologically, to learning new skills, to discovering new passions. And also reflecting on the sacrifices involved in it. There is much that I have had to let go of in order to be fully present for my family (For example, among things on hold for me are a half-written novel about a tree-pruner in 19th century New Mexico). There are days when I struggle with this sacrifice, and days when I celebrate all I have gained in its stead.

And yes, I was also thinking about what makes it work for me, the nitty gritty everyday sorts of things that help our family thrive. I started working on this little series of posts I have planned called Ordering the Stars. And then, boom, I was struck by this lightning bolt.

My housekeeping prowess that I was bragging a bit about?  It’s not my de-cluttering, or personal growth, or menu plans, or some profound philosophy that I can credit. Okay, it is all those things, a little bit. But here’s my real secret, for better of for worse: It’s that I’m, um, driven. A doer, a manifester, a highly enthusiastic, more than a bit competitive, rising star in the type-A Uber Mother universe.

Sigh.

In other words, motherhood had become yet another product-oriented job. As in, how productive can I be? How clean can I get my house, how beautifully can I celebrate festivals, how strictly can I stick to the all-important rhythm, how gently can I parent (a wild banshee), how little plastic can I use, how well can I keep to a tiny budget while still shopping at the most expensive market, how quickly can I lose the baby weight, how fully can I keep my old hobbies and passions alive while doing all the rest of this?

Now, these are all worthy things, wonderful things to guide ones work as a mother. I think in some ways we need to have high expectations of ourselves, to have a vision and to strive towards it. And yet in motherhood perhaps more than any other undertaking, it is possible to strive and strive towards an impossible ideal. To never be quite as good as we think we should be. I could go on and on about how much I enjoy this season of Motherhood–it is challenging and provocative and engaging work. But it’s not a job. It’s life. I’d prefer to just be living it.

I keep wondering how to slip the word “surrender” into this post, so I’ll just say it here. Surrender, Mama! Chill out! Have Fun! Do it cause you love it, not because you saw it on someone else’s blog. It’s okay!

If we need to strive, how about giving ourselves goals that are nurturing and real? To shift it from a How Much kind of quest to a How To kind–from a product to a process. To be guided by questions like, How can I be present in this moment? How can I show love  to myself, my children, my partner? Or, What does it feel like to soften into this journey, letting it take me where it will? Or, would it really be the end of the world if I just chilled out?

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PS–You know what’s cool about all us type-A mothers out there? We have this great safety valve built in that keeps us from being perfectionists: our kids! Three cheers for quirky little beings not interested in conforming to our agendas.

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Happy Mother’s Day!

Sometimes, my little daughter Cora seems to want to order the stars where to sit in the sky. Move over! She’ll shout at them (in this metaphor). No, There! It’s something to behold. At first this troubled me. Lately, it inspires me. No, we can’t always get Mars to move closer to Cancer (though if we are patient, it eventually will), or get a little friend to share her stroller. But we can shape our homes, and ultimately our lives, to reflect the beautiful order of the world.

Since Maida was born, I’ve had the odd experience of becoming the best housekeeper I have ever been in my life (which, admittedly, isn’t saying much). Odd, because I always expected the opposite to happen once the number of children in our home doubled, which we all know really means quadrupled, in that weird exponential way–2 to the power of Baby. Some days things are the mess you might expect, but it’s not as often as I ever expected. (In case I sound heroic, let me disclose that Baby Mae sleeps a lot, making it possible to get all sorts of things done.) But I’ve found that in order to be a peaceful mother, I need an ordered home. One that “runs itself” and takes care of us while we take care of it. For me, having a home that takes care of me means that it needs to be a creative home. A tidy home. A frugal home. A low-impact on the earth home. A simple, uncluttered home, based on simple, uncluttered systems.

I realize that I am at a point in my life in which I am Wholly Mother. My body is softer. My mind a little slower. My arms or lap often occupied, my hands always busy. It is strange and wonderful, and I am quite surrendered to it. That is partly why, I think, our home is running so smoothly these days. I have been guided to this place by many examples–from my childhood, my mother friends, and also lots of wise voices from blogland. I want to add my voice to that chorus now. For the next few weeks I’ll be sharing my fabulous! revolutionary! Simple! Secrets to Being a Super-Organized Extreme Eco Housewife (Now that You Have Two Kids). This is kind of a re-take on my first Extreme Eco Housewife post–which has some great ideas, by the way. But I have been through a year of serious growth since then, and want to share some of my discoveries about some of the more internal parts of keeping house–the subtle, unseen things as well as the functional, menu-planny type things.

Please come along, and please oh please, share your secrets along the way.

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ps, if you are wondering what’s up with my blog header, that’s secret #1–getting a head start on the fall decorating! Our Christmas tree is still up, too. Just kidding.