Since my daughter has started kindergarten, my son has started preschool, my husband is back to working and taking classes and my own work schedule has shifted, I've had to play fast and loose with some so-called "necessities."
This isn't Maslow level stuff, thankfully. Everyone is being clothed and fed and sheltered. The detritus and residue of the clothing and the feeding are making the shelter unpleasant, however. And the self-righteous remark I once made to a friend about shunning Happy Meal toys? We have, in the parlance of crap consumerism, "collected all four" about three times over at this point.
This kind of thing used to give me minor heart attacks. I'm not exactly a neatnik, but I need to feel I at least have the option to clean, should I feel like it. If time post-dinner, post-bedtime routine were measured in little boxes, I like one for myself, one to hang out with my husband, and one to make the house at least semi-livable. However, since Labor Day, the amount of real estate being consumed in my brain is such that all I want to do once the kids are in bed is watch Youtube videos and eat butterscotch chips. Out of a bag. From under the sofa. Left open, and accessible to the cat.
As for couple's time? Yesterday I shared the chips, and someone took them.
It was my husband.
Probably.
It's a mark of one prone to anxiety that when things get bad, it's impossible to let them stay that way for long. I am launched not into languorous passivity but fevered spurts of strategic attack. What can I reorganize? What can I prune? What absolutely needs to get done, and what can I forget about?
Though not dyed in the wool, I tend towards perfectionism, so prioritizing is a learned skill. The rigors of college and graduate school helped with this a bit, but being launched into parenthood was the real warhead incentive. Happily and perhaps not surprisingly, this was a watershed moment in terms of my growth in religious faith. There's nothing like being the only thing standing between your newborn and the grasping, freezing badlands to make you realize that not only do you believe in God, you need and are grateful for his love and protection. And thankfully, his own example is just human enough to convince.
When I was little, much was made about the perfectionism of Jesus. I may be treading the coattails of a thousand heresies to suggest this, but if Jesus' divine nature really did emanate from an actual, physical body, was everything about him as flawless as some of us grew up hearing? What about that story, from Mark 8:22-26, when Jesus spits in the dirt to cure a blind man, rubs his eyes, and the guys says "Well, I can sort of see people...and they look like trees walking around." At which point Jesus takes a do-over, and gets it the second time around.
I know this is a puzzling story. I understand that its likely inclusion in the Gospel is to paint a portrait of Jesus' followers, which is really a self-portrait of all of us: recognizing what he was about, but only dimly. An imperfect understanding of God's perfect gift.
And yet-- I take immense comfort in the fact that Jesus tried again. That in this moment, this God/man's humanity seems to take center stage, and an attempt requires an adjustment. And that it is a miracle taking shape literally down in the dirt brings sharply into focus God's divine providence over our exhausted, gritty strivings.
Perhaps this moment is not so much a do-over as it is a renewal. An re-intensification of love and grace and mercy, a triple whammy God gives all of us in spades and which it might be appropriate to extend to ourselves.
Especially when reduced to eating snacks left under the couch.
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