On Desire

--This one is for Deborah, who earned it.

Sam and I have put my old house back on the market. The real-estate picture here in Washington shows some signs of slight improvement--things are selling, even if at rock-bottom prices. But there are buyers, compared to the last 4 years, during which time there have been only a handful of sales in the whole cluster of towns around us.

Of course, I want badly to sell the house. I loved living there, and in some ways, I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to live in it--to have the key in my hand and know that it was all mine, to paint it the bright colors I chose by myself, to make dinner in the kitchen and read on the couch in the living room until I wanted to go to bed and then to go upstairs to my bedroom and awaken there and walk through the house the next morning. I know this sounds weird, and maybe kind of selfish--it might read like the villain in this Sesame Street movie of Allison Clare's, who's bad because he keeps saying, "Mine! MINE!" But I loved the spaciousness of it, of living alone. I was lonely there, not only in that house, but in that stage of my life, and I will never forget that loneliness or the special anxieties of living as an adult single woman--not because it was scarring, but because it has become part of who I am that I know what that felt like. At the same time, though, there was a sense of possibility, of autonomy and self-determination, of the ability to choose to do what pleased me, that I will likely never have again.

I think that house represents a brief moment for me between being in the suspended state of student life and settling down so quickly and completely with Sam and the girls; that was the space I inhabited when I was most independent in my life, and I liked it. I don't really think about it, and I wouldn't trade my current life for it, but I want to honor it and be thankful for it.

Still, as I said, at this point, I am more than ready to sell the house, especially as the life that Sam and I share already feels like it absorbs us entirely. For a long time, I felt a sense of constant stress about the house and our need/desire to sell it. I worried about the slow hemorrhage of cash that the house represented, I worried about things going wrong, I worried about the fall in home values and the complete absence of buyers on the scene.

Lately, though, that has changed a bit. For one thing, Sam and I both feel like it's time to market the house aggressively for sale, and it feels good to be able to proceed with the plan instead of continuing to wait. But there's more to it. I also feel like I've somehow come to terms with my desire to sell the house. I used to feel almost panicked about it, the way I've felt at other times when my desire somehow outpaced my faith (in fact, that's almost how I would define a certain kind of anxiety: as the feeling that results from an excess of desire and a shortfall of faith). When I've been in that situation before, sometimes intensely and sometimes for years at a time, the advice I've always received in Christian circles is to trust in the Lord, to pray my desires to God and be set free.

I've realized it doesn't always work that way. At least, not for me. Instead, in the two situations that have lasted the longest and been the most stressful (the house being one), the resolution has meant something else entirely. I think that rather than surrendering my desires to God, I've somehow come to a point--and I believe that this too is the operation of grace--of surrendering myself to my desires, of living with the desire rather than being released from it. I feel all the desire without the anxiety, as if I knew that this particular thing were going to happen, and yet, I also know that it might not happen, yet that knowledge does not produce anxiety. (Somewhere, Deborah is reading this and praising the Lord. Thank you for the hundreds of hours that it took me to get here.) I'm not sure how to describe this state, exactly, or what the word is for it, but I am so, so glad to be here, even if only for this moment. I hope I can remember how to get back.

The First Four Years

Laura Ingalls Wilder's book The First Four Years is different from the rest of the Little House series because it's the only book that was first published posthumously. She'd written a draft, but she'd never revised and edited that draft in the way that she had the other books, which have a rather different voice and structure. It's much more expository, less episodic, with fewer distinct scenes and less dialogue. I still like it, though--for one thing, it's more adult. It hasn't been rewritten for an audience of children in quite the same way or refocused on the things young girls would be interested in. It gives the impression that it's more of an unmediated reminiscence.

I realized when I started this post that January and February were the first months since I started this blog that I didn't post anything at all. It's not only that I've had less time to go back and do the kind of revision of my experiences that I like to do, but also that that kind of revision hasn't seemed as urgent as other activities--like trying to get all of us dressed and fed and into and out of baths and out to appointments and fun excursions. Part of me is okay with this shift because I've just settled in my mind that, Socrates notwithstanding, it's okay not to examine life constantly and instead to just live it.

Still, as Allison Clare turns four--and four years does seem like some kind of common reference for the passage of time, with the Olympics and the Presidential elections and leap years--I've been thinking about what I've learned as a parent. I'm no longer surprised when someone addresses me as "Mom," whether that person is my child or not (the first time a pediatric nurse addressed me as "Mom," I looked over to my own mother to see what she was going to reply). I have lots of habits now that I don't even have to think about--pushing the coffee pot way back onto the counter, moving the stool out of the kitchen when Gillian-the-climber is loose there, turning the pot handles to the back of the stove. I used to think about safety when I was in the car or doing something unusual and overtly dangerous--walking down icy stairs in heels (heck, walking in heels at all for me), driving in snow on an unsalted road, swimming way out into the ocean just because it felt really good. Now I think about it all the time--one small part of my brain is waiting to be activated at the sight of objects that might have lead paint/could be wrapped around a neck/are throat-sized in diameter.

In addition to the loss of attention to what might be called higher things (my vocabulary shrinks daily, much less my capacity for metaphor and abstract thought), I've lost a sense of control over my daily life. One of my main survival tactics in life has been my ability to manage my time, to get a lot done by being ruthlessly efficient about certain tasks, especially work. Now I have no idea how long it will take me to get dressed, because someone might be crying outside the bathroom door and someone else might have had a nosebleed/a nightmare/an accident on any given morning. So, I don't have that anymore, and while the typical moral of the story might be "and everything is so much better because I've learned to embrace uncertainty and live in the moment!," the truth is that in some ways, it has introduced a level of stress and anxiety into daily life, like each day is a special challenge, a game that I have to master to move on to the next level (which is simply the next day).

So, I haven't yet learned how to relax into the chaos, especially with both Sam and me having jobs that we do want to be good at and that require a lot of personal investment.

But there is one thing that I've learned that helps me order the thousands of small decisions involved in parenting and balancing parenting with everything else. And I think it's my favorite of the things I've learned in the last four years (at least, my favorite that didn't come from the girls themselves).

I've generally been a person who is very respectful of authority. As a kid, I rarely disobeyed at home or in school; as a student and later an employee, I've cultivated gold stars and good reviews. So as a parent, I wanted to do things in according to the best, most reasonable advice and most persuasive research about parenting. Nerdy, I know. This made for a rather confusing set of principles to navigate by, like trying to steer in the midst of wind coming at me from all different directions. One of the things that vaguely haunted me was that my parents, I think, believe that modern parents are too uptight and worry too much, which meant that on top of making all the right decisions, I wanted to do so without being hyper-protective, anxious, or controlling. Then one day, I felt a thought break into my consciousness in a way that I know, for me, as the way God speaks to me, and it was "You don't have to answer to your parents; you have to answer to your children."

I don't mean that my children are my boss, but that the test of my parenting is whether my children, when they are grown, will have been well served by what I do for and with them. My elder daughter is way more strong-willed than I ever was, and she possesses more confidence at three than I had at thirty. I would have been terrified to defy or argue with my parents the way she does on a daily basis, and I've been embarrassed by her public tantrums more times than I care to remember. Part of me is tempted to believe that her behavior--her performance of the role of respectful child--proves whether I'm a good parent, and that same part of me wants to just enforce her obedience, to win. But I'm learning, I think, that I've been entrusted with her not so that I can break her will, but so that I can teach her to master her will so that she is not mastered by it. When she is a grown woman, I want her to have learned self-control, and that hard, hard lesson might not be best learned by her doing what I want because she's afraid of what I'll do. She might need to learn to love what is right by failing sometimes, and I might have to let her.

And my younger daughter is quite different. I wouldn't say she's fragile, but she's clearly pretty sensitive. One harsh word in her direction (even if not intended for her) and the corners of her mouth are turned down, lower lip out and quivering, big eyes brimming. I could make her behave pretty easily. But as with Allison Clare, what I want most is not for her to prove that I'm a good mother, but for her to become the person she's meant to be. I think for Gillian, that means she needs abundant encouragement. It's almost counterintuitive because she actually doesn't seem like she needs much at all--she'll happily play by herself for long periods of time, rummaging through cabinets and toting bags of rice around and "reading" books by turning the pages and telling herself the stories as she remembers them. It would be easy to just let her go. But she also lights up when you enter into her play, and one of her favorite phrases right now is, ". . . and me too!" You can say anything--"Allison Clare has school tomorrow" or "I need to remember to take out the trash"--and if Gillian is nearby, she'll look up and chirp, ". . . and me too!" She loves to be included. I don't want to overlook her little desires simply because they're mildly expressed, and I want her to have the joy of knowing how much we are honored to be part of the imaginary world she plays in so much of the time.

So that is what I've learned. Pretty much just the one thing. Lots of corollary lessons--such as, I regret nearly every appalled judgment I ever rendered on a parent I'd witnessed in public, and I also believe that much more of personality is unchangeable. But mostly only the one lesson, the instruction that the audience for my parenting is my girls' older selves. Who knows what scenes they'll remember?