Coming Home
Each part of my new day could feel insignificant and also, in a sudden and shocking way, wildly important. I had outsourced every possible domestic chore and depleted my tank for anything but work and kids. I needed to notice the holes in the socks. I needed to snuggle during the cartoons instead of being on my laptop. I needed to be able to forget where my phone was because the only people who really needed me were already in the house. I needed to drink coffee in the quiet with my husband on Saturday mornings instead of working. And I needed to fully know this place I called my home.
Once you start writing a story, really peeling back the layers of your own narrative, you see how Legacy has been holding hands with Future for a long time. I’m a homebody. I worked from home most of my career and appreciated the way I’d flow in and out of the office and the playroom and the laundry room and the kitchen. Life and work may be complicated by an at home business with small children - there are conference calls in the closet while the sitter tries to get the baby down for her nap, the dogs bark and the doorbell still rings while you frantically search for the mute button on your phone, new employee interviews prove a little humbling with dirty laundry on the couch - but alternately being at home throughout the day reminded me of something absolutely true of me - I'm a homemaker.
I care about creating sacred spaces: drawers for sippy cups, a bottom shelf in the fridge invisibly marked “No Adults Allowed” filled with Gogurt and Apple Sauce and String Cheese, paired chairs for quiet conversations, stacks of books for learning and for imagining, wide open spaces for gathering. I was raised by a homemaker, though not in the traditional and modern sense of the word. My mother is part Martha Stewart, part Mother Teresa, with a dash of Alice in Wonderland. She is a beautiful woman, breath-taking really. She will catch you by surprise when you see her face and make assumptions about what a woman who looks like her must be like in real life. Some people miss her because they cannot stand for someone so lovely on the outside to be even more stunning on the inside. But if you make space for her, even take a glimpse into the beautiful brown eyed girl, you open the door to a complicated, creative, intelligent, thoughtful, caring and compassionate woman. Few people truly create a legacy, one that isn’t about achievement, but a real reflection of true others-ness. She is unencumbered by other people's expectations. She is free. She's a whimsical woman who never once dawned a PTA meeting or rode the bus for a field trip. She was busy living her robust life. Her presence and her With are unparalleled. She creates sacred spaces for people; an aesthetic invitation into her life and her heart. She nourishes people with good food, cold iced tea, a glass of wine, and her open spirit of generosity, humor and hospitality. People want to be near her. And her home, as it were, is her sanctuary of invitation.
I’ve emulated her and her mentor, Sally, over the years in attempting to create my own sanctuary. We buy every old wooden spoon we can find at flea markets. New wooden spoons don’t tell the same stories stirring your sauces as old ones. I visited Sally’s house a handful of years back. I had not been there since I was a small child but the rush of the smell through my nostrils took me back to sitting on her kitchen counter while she worked around me. I walked through every room letting my hands touch each small trinket: old books, groupings of framed family photographs, little Toby collectibles, art - some personally significant and others materially valuable. You got a sense in Sally’s home that she was curating more than things, she’s collecting memories, beliefs and ideals. Each artifact is either full of meaning, utterly practical or magically both. There is nothing insignificant in her space. And the same is true of my Mother's home. Every relic thumps with a heartbeat of who she was and the life she was designing for herself and her family. To look across the landscape of her curation is to see straight into the center of her heart.
I was wandering through the house looking for my heart. The walls were still bare. The new couch was lovely and sophisticated but uncomfortable and high-maintenance. The landscape on the lawn was someone else’s brain child, filled with things I didn't know the names of much less how to care for. I wanted to breath in unison with my home. I wanted my heartbeat to be heard by anyone who crossed the threshold.
I realize the short sighted narrative of my professional resignation may strike a note of unfairness in more than a few hearts; it did mine. The sound of a woman slowing down professionally and in exchange picking up the dry cleaning, focusing on the laundry and patting her husband on the back as he climbs the corporate ladder pricks the ears.
But this was one of the squares I landed on in my game of Life, one of the truths I had to own. Some women do not have this luxury and I count myself privileged, as I should, to have made this hard call for myself and my family. I was initially humiliated to say I was choosing to be a stay at home mom because I didn't know what else to say. After that, I was humiliated that I was humiliated to say it. There is nothing I hold in higher esteem than my own mother and her contribution, her gifts, her glorious legacy of love and belonging, nothing more important to me than the care-taking of my kids. My vision was skewed. I was compartmentalizing my life and work in a way that wasn't true of me. Yes, I knew the other way, the way I was going, waved its last warning sign for me to pull over. There was no going back. It was time to move forward.
In the confusion, we have to hunker down with the truth. I started keeping track of what I could say for sure. The list was short.
No path is perfect. Trying to figure out what to do next, the yes’s to give away and the no’s to hold onto frightened me. Each day's’ decisions felt weighed down by the possibility of failure, another potential season of fragmentation and compartmentalization. Every commitment held this false idea that I was making a choice with finality on who I would become next. I felt paralyzed with indecisiveness.
I was trying to reclaim what I thought I already knew: the process is the thing. Building the life you were created for (resources and restraints, talents and limitations considered) was my job. Parker Palmer says it this way:
“It takes time and hard experience to sense the difference between the two
(the ego and the true self) - to sense that running beneath the surface of the experience I call my life,
there is a deeper and truer life waiting to be acknowledged.”
Some habits die hard. I was still unnecessarily checking my phone and my email, rummaging through Facebook and Twitter all day like there was a client post to review or an article I was going to miss. I had lost a piece of my belonging - my work crew. My ego was dying to feel needed. Someone email me please. Give me a deadline. I wanted that rush of walking into a board room, stilettos holding me up.
I still had an edge about the timing of the day. Frantic was following me and I had to turn around all the time and tell him to just calm the fuck down. We weren’t actually in a hurry.
There is a reason they call it “taking” your time, you know? When we take our time we grab hold of the minutes and the moments and claim them as our own. We are present to them. Now with this time in front of me, what would I take it for? What was this all for, I kept asking myself over and over again.
I was slowly remembering too; remembering to sit down at the table when my daughter did her homework, not because she needs me to help her (I dare not even suggest it) but because I can be with her. We are Together and our togetherness over the paper and words and numbers whispers, “This matters. I care about it and I’m in it with you.” I can’t do this every day. And for the last two years I could hardly do it at all. But on those slower days I claimed that gift. The simple gift of With.
In the afternoon, the cul-de-sac kids would make their way into my living room and my kitchen peeling through the sacred drawer for their favorite cups and snacks. For one young suitor, I filled his cup with chocolate milk and turned on "Cars Toons" (Cars 2). Sometimes, he would sneak over. I can admit, this subtle naughtiness made me love him slightly more. I get him.
That was the beginning of my unwinding, my rebellion against the fury of Frantic and burden of Busy. Slow, small days I got to be with my home, with God, with my kids, with my husband, with my neighbors, with the people standing right in front of me. Presence. With. In spite of the pain and the unknown and the search for my words, I saw the significance of with. My presence wasn’t just about my body in the room; but about my mind attuned to the people in this place. Silence and Loneliness had not left me alone. But With and Together turned my thoughts towards Hope. Maybe this wasn’t the end.
