Coffee and Choices

I'm typing on my new iphone while drinking terrible coffee at the Chevrolet dealer waiting for an oil change. Can I admit how much I'm enjoying this hour? Guilt-free reading and internet while drinking free 6 oz. cups of coffee from a machine that makes cafe latte, cappuccino, mocha, and espresso all taste the same. (I tried them all.) There is nothing else I can be doing while waiting for the car to be ready.

The first part of the day was spent floundering about for purpose.  Looked for online teaching jobs. Tried to figure out a way to maneuver pick up and drop off if I sign up to sub in the public schools. Talked to our insurance agent, a friend from college who married a friend from college, about downgrading our life insurance to save money for tuition. These friends have 2 kids. I made a comment about paying tuition for 6 to which he responded, "Well, that's what you wanted when you had them."

I guess so. I didn't mention that we have another on the way. No need to spread the word until the baby is born, when its cuteness and the siblings' joy will win over the naysayers.

At least, that's my hope.

Meanwhile, I've been struggling to recapture the vision of our family that we married with, idealistic youth that we were. I was fresh from reading the classics, discussing what is good and true and beautiful, and inspired by a professor's family, literate, musical, European, more than slightly out of step with popular culture. I had read the papal encyclicals on family. My husband was indoctrinated by the humane vision of his education in neoclassical architecture: a vision of a sustainable life where you work, live, and play in a community liberated from the automobile. We would have a houseful of children whom we would raise in the faith, surrounded by loveliness, and all happy in each other's presence. Money would mean nothing to us. We would live on love and homemade bread. A hazy, rosy dream of which bits and pieces have come true; other pieces failed to match reality.

Now here we are redefining our lives again. I keep searching for employment, even though supposedly money means nothing to me, and in six months, I'll have a baby attached at the breast.  Will I be able to recapture that youthful idealism about the power of positive parenting? Of course not. What to do with just one baby? How do I avoid wasting time on the internet if I don't have something now to keep me busy? More volunteer work? Take classes? Discover a new career that can be done at home with a baby on my lap?

Choices, choices.

Sometimes place dictates our choices; sometimes we have more choices than we can manage.  In Guam, the limitation of choices was liberating. Now, in Southern California, we have more choices than we know what to do with as we decide how to shape our days.  First we chose the school, which limited our scope somewhat. Then the place to live. Now the structure of our daily lives. So many options: what sports, what volunteer possibilities, what extra-curriculars, what church activities. This or that or that or that... Now that a baby is on the way, I'm having a harder time deciding to commit. In six months, I won't want to do anything. But right now I'm bored at the car dealership.

What's not helping with this situation: Reading fashion and dwelling place magazines at the car dealership. Reading articles about women and work (cautionary see This and this  links) and talking to acquaintances who accept the majority view of what makes a family: two working parents, two kids involved in a variety of activities, who eat plenty of farmers market produce, take vacations, get their hair and nails done, and keep up with popular culture - movies, fashion, technology, etc.

And listening to another piece on the radio (NPR, of course) - an interview with a social scientist about what the future might look like- greater income inequality, fewer service and entry level jobs because of technological advancements, more opportunity for creative ingenuity. But he pointed out that the happiness quotient may not be so unequal because services like health care and education will be cheaper and more available.

What does make people happy?  A big income was never a part of my youthful vision. Simple, simple, simple. But with enough spare change for European vacations, perhaps...

What is helping: reading Thomas Merton; he's completely off kilter with the message of these women's empowerment organizations. Love. Pray. Do God's will. Seek silence and sacrifice.

Another solace: "wasting" time looking at old photo albums while supposedly putting things away. Look at those happy babies. Our days were quiet but full. Do I wish I had worn myself thin working? I'm not sorry I filled our house up with babies back then. I loved our quirky apartments sans air conditioning, with rolling floors, close to neighborhood parks and the library.  I loved the friends we made and still hear from. I loved the little gardens I planted and left behind. I loved the places we discovered or rediscovered from toddler vantagepoints.  I'm still not exactly happy about the thought of going back to midnight wakefulness and changing diapers and don't plan to join a playgroup, but the bitterness of "starting over" is fading.

And I look around us now. We have souvenirs to remind us of our adventures in Guam and living in the midst of great natural beauty. The beauty of the tierra rejada - the scorched earth (translation of a roadname we looked up) - is beginning to grow on me. We are on the go here in a way that we weren't in Guam, but my kids are still happy, and we are starting to make friends with nice people. I like that the kids don't mind spending a Saturday sorting canned food at Foodshare and then picking vegetables at an "amusement farm" or taking a hike to a dried up waterfall. I like my kids. We don't have any corner on perfect domestic bliss, but we have crafted a life that is deeply satisfying, as long as I don't listen to the champions of ambition about joining my fellow women in their grapple to the top of their careers, or on the other hand, the champions of domestic perfection who craft and bake and raise prodigies.

So here's Thomas M. on a few things:

The fruitfulness of our lives depends in large measure in our ability to doubt our own words and to question the value of our own work. The man who completely trusts his own estimate of himself is doomed to sterility.” 
― Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation

Am I sure that the meaning of my life is the meaning God intends for it? Does God impose a meaning on my life from the outside, through event, custom, routine, law, system, impact with others in society? Or am I called to create from within, with him, with his grace, a meaning which reflects his truth and makes me his “word” spoken freely in my personal situation? My true identity lies hidden in God’s call to my freedom and my response to him. This means I must use my freedom in order to love, with full responsibility and authenticity, not merely receiving a form imposed on me by external forces, or forming my own life according to an approved social pattern, but directing my love to the personal reality of my brother, and embracing God’s will in its naked, often impenetrable mystery.
-Seeds of Contemplation

One of the most important -- and most neglected -- elements in the beginnings of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendor that is all around us in the creatures of God.
-  No Man is an Island

It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.
-No Man is an Island

The lives of all the men we meet and know are woven into our own destiny, together with the lives of many we shall never know on earth. But certain ones, very few, are our close friends. Because we have more in common with them, we are able to love them with a special selfless perfection, since we have more to share. They are inseparable from our own destiny, and, therefore, our love for them is especially holy: it is a manifestation of God in our lives.
-No Man is an Island

There is a dark force for destruction within us, which someone has called the "death instinct." It is a terribly powerful thing, this force generated by our own frustrated self-love battling with itself. It is the power of a self-love that has turned into self-hatred and which, in adoring itself, adores the monster by which it is consumed. It is therefore of supreme importance that we consent to live not for ourselves but for others.
-No Man is an Island

Genius. Beautiful. He makes it all sound so easy, so clear. But it can be so hard.