On the T, Red Line, Massachusetts
My problem is that I don't know how to desire something good without desiring it wrongly.
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At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
I worked a lot on my thesis today. First day working on it! I finished the sections of Ann Judson's memoir I need to read and then got about halfway through Harriet Newell's. I think Harriet is my new hero. There is so much about her that is ridiculous, but only in the most human of ways. I feel like her type of ridiculousness is so much of my ridiculousness - over seriousness about things that do truly matter, but that maybe in the light of eternity could become a little more flippant. It does amaze me though how much studying the saints throughout the broad swath of time my degree covers has shown me the degree to which all people who love the Lord reflect similar traits. They all seem to have very deep longings in life. Studying these women, and studying in general, makes my soul happy. It is hard - truly the work is difficult. But I like it. I feel very open to whatever the Lord has for me. If he gives me children, I excitedly look forward to it. If he withholds children from me, I think there are enough things I believe in doing to give me a full life. At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
Just finished this month's pack. Only three more months of birth control. At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
My body feels horrible. I started working out again when we got back from Chattanooga and this is the first I have worked out every day. I even worked out at the hotel in San Diego during the CP conference. My body is so unhappy - my lungs and my digestion are pretty shot. It's horrifying how much I'm in rough shape. I know this is just while my body readjusts to being worked, but it does not feel good. This semester, this year is my last chance to set healthy habits before we start trying to have kids. And I know once kids are around, it'll probably only go downhill. But I want to take care of myself. I look at my grandparents and I look at my parents, and I want to be a good steward of the body I've been given. I live in a culture that has all but stripped humanity of physical movement and unless I once and for all get it into my head that it's now or never, that my body belongs to God, and as such, I am responsible for maintaining it, I will only set myself up for the sedentary life of those around me. But I want to move and have life as long as God keeps me here. I want to be in charge of my body, not it in charge of me. I know that many people take that desire and twist it into unhealthy obsessions. But I am so far from that. I would literally sit on my ass and eat ice cream every day if I could. I hate discomfort. I hate anything that makes my body feel uncomfortable. But really, it's just selfishness and laziness. I want all of the benefits of health with none of the discipline and work. I am a total American. But I don't want to pass that on to my children and I don't want to set that example for my children. It's not about beauty or vanity, but it's truly about stewarding something I hate to steward and loving something I have always despised – my body. At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
"'But, Sister, you will follow me soon. You don't think any mortal life seems a long thing to me tonight? And how would it be better if I had lived? I suppose I should have been given to some king in the end - perhaps another as our father. And there you can see again how little difference there is between dying and being married. To leave your home - to lose you, Maia, and the Fox - to lose one's maidenhead - to bear a child - they are all deaths. Indeed, indeed, Orual, I am not sure that this which I go to is not the best.' 'This!' 'Yes. What had I look for if I lived? Is the world - this palace, this father - so much to lose? We have already had what would have been the best of our time. I must tell you something, Orual, which I never told to anyone, not even you...' 'What is it?' said I, looking down at her lap where our four hands were joined. 'This,' she said, 'I have always - at least, ever since I can remember - had a kind of longing for death.' 'Ah, Psyche,' I said, 'have I made you so little happy as that?' 'No, no, no,' she said. 'You don't understand. Not that kind of longing. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine... Where you couldn't see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking across at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn't (not yet) come and I didn't know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home. '...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing - to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from... '- my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me... I am going to my lover. Do you not see now-?'" ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I am rereading C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces and I've just read the above passage. There are probably no words out there that better describe how I have felt about my life for as long as I can remember. It's not morbid and it's not dark, but I've longed for what Psyche describes for so many years, and it has always been when I am happiest. When I am sad or depressed, I become controlling and feel the need to try to make everything right. But when I am happy, I am ready to be away. Ready to be home. It is the beautiful things in life that often feel the most unbearable. They are all shadows. Last night Trey and I had the most perfect sex we've yet experienced. It was everything I could have ever imagined sexual intimacy being. But if I was given the opportunity to leave now and enter into eternity, I would take it. The beauty of last night makes me ready because I know last night can't be repeated. It was good and whole and perfect – it was release from desiring something better. Now that I've tasted it, I feel satisfied and satisfaction is the end of things, not the beginning. In the above passage, Lewis states a truth that he seems afraid to understand, or at least to state in his other writings on the topic. Sehnsucht is in reality a longing for death. It is a desire for what cannot be obtained in this world when we are confronted with what the world has to offer. Lewis is indeed right when he says that our desires are too small. But if we desire aright, how can that desire be contained by this world? To desire what this world cannot offer is to desire that which requires my departure from this world. I am crying as I write this, but I am not sad. I simply am longing. And that longing aches so greatly. God, I know that, I, as a child of the promise, have you now, here. But I do not have the redeemed world yet. I do not have heaven – complete unity with you. I am still tied down by all of these things around me and when they are good, when they are everything I could ever want them to be, they only make the ache worse, because they only refresh the longing for everything else to be as right as they are in that moment. When Lewis says that marriage, and the loss of virginity, and the bearing of children are all a certain kind of death, I wonder how much he knew he was right on the subject. Did he accidentally stumble upon a truth all women known within their souls? Or did he understand the depths of this statement? Death involves the taking away of life, and for a woman much about the experience of creating life comes through ending some part of her own life. She does not become a wife without giving up independence. She does not become sexually active without being invaded. She does not become a mother without physical destruction in her body. But these all offer life, living, being alive as a result. I have now experienced two of these three things, and I hope soon to enter into the final and third. Might I see in these the same longing for death that Lewis describes with sehnsucht? In each of these experiences, am I not entering into a greater good, a better reality through that which is a kind of death? God, have you created woman so that what she longs for now requires in some parts her negation? Is the pattern of this fallen world so much replicated in my lived reality? When I receive the most good, I long the most for heaven. When I receive the most good, I am the most ready to bear children. But ultimately, to attain both requires a death within me. (Image by Surian Soosay, "Alternate Mother Nature, Internatal Internet.") At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
My life is so boring when it's about me. It's so much better when it touches something bigger, something eternal. H. and D.'s House, Chattanooga, Tennessee Parents are made for leaving behind. This is what I've been thinking about since Thanksgiving. It's been rolling around the back of my mind, but it's a thought that I've had a hard time giving traction to. During our visit to Pittsburgh, it really struck me again that I don't have to be my parents, that I can be different from them. I can be free without loving my parents any less. Connected to this realization, I thought about my own future children and how one day they will feel the same way towards me. I will never give them a perfect enough home that they should want to stay under me. They will feel as frustrated with me as I have felt at times toward my own parents. Frustration isn't even the right word, though. It's more the basic human need to differentiate oneself from those who have come before. I am not my parents, they are not me. I can't seem to find a way to express myself adequately here. My families all love each other deeply and we all want to be with each other. But there is still the issue of how the generations relate to each other. We get in each other's ways and often can't seem to understand what is truly service and blessing for the other. Parent and the child waltz around one another trying to figure out how best to love. It seems to me that at stake in so much of the parent-child dynamic is what must or should be done to maintain closeness. I want to feel closer to my parents who live far away, so I feel pressure to replicate their choices and selves in my life. We are all afraid of not feeling close to each other, because in fact we aren't "close" but live thousands of miles apart. In the end, I think more and more that what we have to accept is that parents are made to be left. Marriage is the most important relationship in a person's life – it is the only relationship where there might be some expectation of lifelong companionship. Parenting is a short-lived endeavor. It is in incubator – short, intense, and hot – and then it must be turned off. For me, I need to turn off my desire for my parents to parent me. I want to stay in the incubator, but the time to turn off the lights has long passed. That time has passed and is gone and we are no longer sharers of the same space. As I think about having children of my own, I do not need to contemplate how to keep them for the entirety of the rest of my life. I will give them life and then it will be their own. I will have Trey afterwards. Every family is nothing more than a succession of incubators, maintained and cared for by a pair of life-long friends. This should be a relief. I am not my parents; I am not my children. I am only myself. At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
Would you rather... Have children who rebelled, made life a hardship, and you never really knew either way if they loved the Lord, or never have children but live out your life in meaningful ways and joyfully with your spouse? This was the question I asked the car for “peel the onion” on the drive back to Boston from Thanksgiving. Everyone else in the car (R., J., and Trey) chose the second option. I chose the first. And though I couldn't say I would definitely be committed to the choice, I think that choosing it demonstrates growth in my life. I don't think either answer is ultimately right or wrong, but I'm glad that I felt compelled enough by the first answer to go with it in a silly game. Perhaps even if one could never really know about the eternal state of your children, producing life is good in and of itself. At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts It's 11:30 at night and instead of writing I should be putting in another solid hour of homework before going to bed. But I've had so many thoughts about babies swirling around my head for the last two weeks, and since I haven't given myself time to put words down so far, I figure I'm just going to have to take time away from my C.S. Lewis paper if I'm going to write before these thoughts have faded completely. Where to start... I guess I'll work backwards. Since coming home from Thanksgiving, I've had the happy realization that with the arrival of December I'm now about six months away from going off of birth control and starting what seems like the daunting process of "trying to get pregnant." It's kind of heady to think about it. It's adventurous sounding, and kind of crazy sounding. Which is sad, because shouldn't it just feel natural? It is what our bodies are naturally supposed to do. But then again, maybe God created our bodies to involve a sense of adventure. It also sounds steamy. I couldn't possibly say why, but sex to get pregnant just sounds hot. I know it could start to feel like a task, but I hope it stays exciting. Fingers crossed it's going to be fun. I am really starting to feel ready for this. I'm not ready for parenting, and I sometimes still feel like it will be the end of all I know to be good under heaven, but I'm ready for this next thing. I don't feel baby gaga, but I do feel hopeful. I don't need to be completed, and I'm not bored, but there's a sweetness to it that I'm ready to invite in and take on. While we were home in Pittsburgh, K. came to our party and brought her seven-week old daughter with her. I held her for a long time. I didn't melt and I honestly could have been just as happy talking on the other side of the room, but it was good to be there, holding her. I wish I could come up with some other word to describe it, but I can't think of anything other than "sweetness." It wasn't warm, it wasn't satisfying, it wasn't tender, it wasn’t ovary-provoking, it wasn't holy. It was just sweet. And it was happy. At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
It dawned on me just now that I don't have much of a tendency to see children as my pride. I was thinking about past societies and how even men in those days saw offspring as a mark of their place in their world, a proud mark of their manhood. Creating children was the primary task of creation. I was thinking about these days and how much that perspective has vanished. Children are a sacrifice rather than a badge of honor. And then it occurred to me that I also operate under this assumption. But I can't figure out why. I was homeschooled, a culture in which most people at least talk as if children are the primary source of pride. I think my parents talk as if their children are their biggest accomplishments. But it's not in me somehow. Underneath it all, I didn't inherit this view of offspring and I can't figure out why. |
About the ProjectThis is a very personal project. It tracks my growth and development as I journeyed toward motherhood over the recent years. It doesn't document every experience I had, and probably neglects my more joyful and peaceful moments in the frenzy of trying to communicate my fears, anxieties, and doubts. If you are a friend or loved one, please do not let anything you read here overshadow what you know of me personally. If you are a stranger, please remember that a living and flawed person stands behind these words. To all my guests here, please understand these are not political statements and try to extend me grace, even as I share my failures and foibles - I have repented of much of what I share. I don't share this journal as an exemplar, but rather out of the desire to share my hope that entrance to motherhood does not need to be a fearful thing - despite the very real fears I have fought against. Motherhood is simply a part of life and one through which I am discovering more of myself and my God. Archives
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