Hope #2

And in despair I bowed my head:
"There is no peace on earth," I said,
"For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men."

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men."

Hope

Love wins. I know that, in my head. If I look around, there is more good than evil, and more love than hate. But on days like today, on days when I hear tragic news, on days when I really think about how our loved ones can be taken from us, even our littlest loved ones, by senseless acts of violence, I don't see any of that. I don't see the good and the love, all I see is that we live in a broken world and I wonder where we're supposed to find hope.

If it was me, if my little girl that I love so much was taken from me today, without any warning whatsoever, where would I find hope? Would I find hope in the God that allowed her to die? Would I find hope in an afterlife that I can't see and where, for now, I'm still separated from her? Would I find hope in humanity, which includes the person who pulled the trigger? No, I don't think I would see hope in those places. My deepest desire, my absolute prayer, would be that eventually, after a very long while in which hopefully I would still be alive, I would start to see hope in the things around me - in other people that I love, in my own ability to love others well. That I would find redemption in the gift of life that is given to so many of us. But on a day like today, Lord forgive me, I don't think I could do it.

Friends

Over the last few days, I've been reading Rachel Bertsche's MWF Seeking BFF. The author is a married gal in her late 20's who, after two years in Chicago, still doesn't have any close friends in the city. So, naturally, she embarks on a one year quest to find a BFF.*

I don't relate to everything the author writes about - while we're the same age, I have a few years of marriage and a kid on her, so while carving more time out for friendships seems fun, the idea of going out to dinner at city hotspots multiple times a week is simply not in the cards for this mama. She herself ponders whether she is trying too hard to hold on to her post-grad days, while for me, that ship has sailed long ago.

Still, she brings up some good points, and the more I read, the more her search is hitting home for me. While I still have a couple close friend in town, work and babies usurp the majority of our time, so getting together isn't a regular thing. Getting together as a group of girls happens even less frequently. I don't think I knew how much I was craving friendship until last week. At a mom's group in the morning I found out one of the women at my table lives around the corner from me - we talked at length about our houses - the horrible condition they were both in when we bought them, how the floor plans had been changed from the original, the current housing market, etc. And while that doesn't sound like a soulful exchange, I definitely felt a twinge of happiness, or maybe relief, knowing a mom I could potentially get to know was just around the corner from me. Later the same day, I took Brooklyn on a play date, and the mom and I had an hour-long, engaging conversation where we both admitted not feeling at home among Santa Barbara moms (they often feel a little too hippy for us), and realized both of us felt like maybe we belonged in Texas. These are commonalities that even my best friends and I do not share, and going home that evening, I realized that getting to know new people is something I have been sorely missing in my life. That while with my close friends, the depth of friendship is still there, since graduating from college, and certainly since having kids, the width of my relationships has narrowed to a virtual thread. Being a stay-at-home mom makes it hard - so many potential hang-out pals work while I play with B, and play while I am trying to get some valuable shut-eye. But I have not made good on my promise to become a regular at my pilates class, or been my outgoing self at the book club I'm a a part of. Sticking to what (or who) you know is so much easier, but happiness, as we've all been told, can only come from stretching outside the comfort zone. And if you are one of my friends, let this be a reminder for you to CALL ME.

In the meantime, I cannot tell you how much I'm looking forward to this Saturday. It's girl time at a friends house, complete with wine and massages, and one of my dearest friends and I are making the hour-drive to and from solo - we won't even have the babies to worry about. Just good music and adult conversation. Lovely.


To Friendship,
Meg


*Is it just me, or is the one-year quest a guaranteed way to become a NYT Bestseller? Gretchin Rubin and The Happiness Project, Elizabeth Gilbert and Eat, Pray, Love... I've read these books and enjoyed them, but the formula seems to be getting a little trite. On that note, if you have any stellar one-year quest ideas, I am totally down to snag a book deal so any recommendations are welcome.

I just want a Victory

That's Victory with a capital V. So much of our lives are made up of all those gray shades - raising kids, being good spouses, doing well at our jobs. They are things that we do better at some days, and worse on others. It's hard to point to them and say look, I succeeded. Because how do you measure success with those things? And I understand that this is what being an adult is - it's simply trying to do the best you can and learning from the things you don't do so well at, but damnit if I don't miss the days of black and white.

As a kid, it's easy. You get a definitive letter grade on your assignments. You get an exact time when you run the mile. You spell a word correctly or incorrectly.  When you move to 5th grade, it means you will never have to go back to 4th grade ever again. But now? If you become a manager at your job, you might get fired and have to start from the bottom somewhere else. If I am a wonderful wife one day, I might still totally tick off my husband the next. And parenting, don't get me started on parenting. I think that's the grayest area in life I've ever encountered.

So I know all this is necessary and might even make us mature and wise as we try to navigate it all, but every now and then, I need a Victory - black and white, easy to read, easy to define. I think it's probably good for all our ego's to have one once in a while. I googled "how to get more victories in life" and came up mainly with hits abouts fitness, pro-life websites, and op-eds about "the little victories in life." Eh, not exactly what I'm looking for, but the most interesting article I found was in the Guardian and it was talking about small victories, but from the standpoint of what psychological research has to say about them. Turns out, problems that seem to big for us to solve become exactly that - problems that we think are unsolvable. The article hit on something I struggle with all the time - "perceiving challenges as huge made people seize up" - exactly! Changing my life, or heck even tackling the jungle that is our backyard - seems daunting, and therefore paralyzes me from taking action. "Want to change the world? Stop trying to change the world." If we just do one thing at a time, only think of one thing at a time, it empowers you with the quick win you need to keep going. 

That's an exciting thought to me - just one thing helps keep me going? That's what counts? Well shoot, I weeded the backyard today. I wrote this blog post. I honestly can't say if there is a single other thing I will get done, but hey, maybe it's enough? Maybe not - I still want something I can point to that's a win or lose situation. Finishing another half marathon? Writing a novel in the spirit of nanowrimo? Or do I need to go back to school where I am doled out a letter grade at the end of each semester. Yikes, if I need that than I am in big trouble. 

Burn Baby Burn

Are you ever wasting away your minutes hours on the interwebs (aka pinterest) and then have a moment of clarity and think, what in the heck am I doing with my life? Stop, put the computer down, and go live. I have had that moment many times, but recently it's been less of a moment and more of a constant wondering of what am I doing with my life. They say how your spend your days is how you spend your life. If that's true, my life is going to be spent wasting time on the internet, enjoying some hilarious television, laughing lots with my crazy daughter and loving husband, and cleaning. Lots and lots of cleaning. And even though every day I do cleaning-type things around my house, it's never enough. It is always dirty. Make no mistake, when I say always, I really mean it. I'm not trying to be modest or anything, and I have both a husband and a roommate who will attest to the fact that this chick is no clean freak. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother? When I get to heaven, will God really be happy I spent so much time trying to keep a tidy house? I don't know.

So I've been thinking about purpose and calling and all those other Christian-y words that people use when they're talking about what they should be doing with their life. And I know being a mom is what I'm supposed to be doing, but I also know there is supposed to be something MORE I am doing. And I don't mean that in a glamorous way, what I mean is that only one person in the entire world knows whether or not you are living up to your potential or not, and it's you. No one else can be the judge of that. And I'm telling you, this stay-at-home mom gig is not all that I have in me. I have more. And I don't know exactly what it is or how I'm supposed to share it, but I'm working on it.

I have a firm belief that the more your focus on you, you, you, the more miserable you will become. Obviously self-reflection is great and healthy and can lead to some real wisdom, but when you focus only on what you think will make you happy, it can be a little, well, selfish. Sometimes you need that, but a lot of the time I think we would all be a lot happier if we just focused on helping others. So I started volunteering at my church to help with Sunday school for the 3 and 4 year olds. Not because I was dying to do it, but because there was a need I knew I could help fill. And when friends or family need a babysitter for their little ones, I say yes, because man alive, us mama's need a babysitter every now and again.

And I'm trying to write. Not here, obviously, because you have not been seeing any posts coming out of this here blog, but I have been journaling. And kicking around some ideas for a novel. I'm not so sure about this blogging thing. I don't think I'm very good at it and I don't think it's the best medium for my writing, but maybe I need to try a little harder. I have so many half-finished posts that I never thought were good enough to put up, so I didn't. I am really bad at taking criticism (just ask Nick), so maybe blogging is something I need to do for a while so I get used to opening myself up in a public place?

I just want to live better, you know? Live out loud. Live with purpose. There are two quotes that come to mind, the first from Mrs. June Carter Cash, "I'm just trying to matter." And the second, this second one I love. "When there's nothing left to burn you have to set yourself on fire." Don't you want that to be true some days. Don't you just want to LIGHT UP. Burn with a fire so wild that when it's out there's nothing left - just a wide open space for lots of new things to grow.

Here's hoping.