Category Archives: Motherhood

You Only Go Around Twice

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 toolbox

I’ve heard of couch potato husbands, easy chair husbands, procrastinating, junk-eating, ball-cap-wearing dumbos who sloth from bed to couch to chair to bed and moan about working for the man.

But I’ve never met one.

The husband I live with, the preacher, is never still, never without an odd little project going.  At 8:30 in the evening, when I am curled in a cold ball on the couch, incoherent and done contributing anything of worth to the world, he will walk through with electricians tape and a power drill.  I don’t ask.

“Why not now?” is his motto.  The whir of the coffee roasting equipment – a hot-air popcorn popper he got at the thrift store for a dollar and tricked out with a soup can chimney – assails my nodding off under a quilt.  10 minute down time?  He thinks he can re-wire a lamp, hang a shelf, felt-tab the chair legs, or, like last night, clean out the hall closet that has been headquarters for supplies for one of his hobbies that he decided to move in its entirety to the garage attic and take a break from.  Many a door slamming in and out to the garage that task took.  Door-slamming is part of the satisfaction of a project well engaged in for him.  But soon enough the closet was emptied and the contents of the top shelf was now my project.

26 years of pictures:  loose pictures, albums both chronological or made for specific events, albums still in good shape, albums falling apart and gappy, framed pictures, weddings, births, baptisms, teeth, bikes, birthdays, vacations, grandparents and babies and friends and all the years piled out of order.

Ok.  Plan of attack.  What would Pinterest do?  Alright, never mind that.  What would Julie Kinworthy do?  Stacks? Yes, I hear you. By year? . . .but look at this picture!  It is Will in a southern boy’s required infant lace get-up, except he’s holding a football and pointing.   I had forgotten about the football.

And here is the castle we built out of refrigerator boxes for Adrienne’s 7th birthday and named Tintagel after King Arthur’s birthplace.  I feel the temperature of that cold October day, and remember that I had had to take Eliza to the doctor earlier and she was lying inside sick. So I was back and forth between castle and sick child, but didn’t the castle look great?  We painted it and hung real ivy over its crenellated walls.  Wow.  When did we do that?

Here is Eliza in a plastic swing in her bathing suit, hunched sound asleep and with a band aid on her right foot.  The band aid!  It is taut over her foot chub.  I want to kiss it.

Here is a table set for a holiday.  The dishes are a set I had forgotten, a set given to me by my grandmother when I moved into my first apartment.  Seeing them calls up that odd twinge in owning my own dishes.  Red table cloth, Cornish hens and wild rice.  It worked!

Here is Baby Will on the hardwood floor in the hallway, yes the very hallway I can see from the chair I am sitting in.  Why does it seem like another house?  How can the 6’ 3” whiskered teenager loping in just now from basketball practice like a happy Golden Retriever be the same person as this pictured dumpling with moist lips and dewy eyes and silk hair?

And yet, at the same time that I am immersed in hyper-detailed memory, I have this feeling that I am seeing it all for the first time. Actually paying attention this time.  I was in the picture, smiling on that day, but I wasn’t kicking back admiring our triumph of a homemade castle. I was thinking ahead to the clean-up, to the next and the next and the next.  Did I live all those years with my head in tomorrow? Looks like it.

And, worse, I was constantly thinking about how I looked, placing myself at the low end of the ‘beautiful and skinny’ spectrum.

The bad news is that I spent too much of the first time around feeling fat, ugly, tired, and worried.  But the good news is the handy-man husband saved the day and pulled it all down so I could live it again.

In the end the only plan of attack that emerged was this gem:  Just put it all back up there.  Neatly.  So that’s what I did.  Actually that’s what the preacher did.  The project was mine, but as I mentioned, he relishes a project and with such a juicy, desperate, and available one, he jumped in with vigor.

I sat on the couch and enjoyed the life of the pictures – the food on the holiday plates, the ivy covered castle, the fat baby hand pointing – free of the worry I had the first time around.  It was great.

“I will restore to you the years the locust has eaten.”  Joel 2:25  

A Time for Aprons

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If you are a man don’t waste your time reading this.  It will mean nothing to you.

Just go about your blessedly even-keeled day changing the oil in your truck, or removing someone’s inflamed appendix, or running a half-marathon on a whim.  You’ve been warned.

Now that it’s just the rest of us, I have a question. Can someone diagnose an ailment for me?

Let me first clarify that I am not complaining.  I am happy.  I am content.  I am blessed beyond anything I deserve.  I have heaven ahead of me, and a world of good things now.  However.  I am also alternately a brooding misanthrope or a fanged monster.  You wouldn’t know it to look at me.  But trust me.  Behind my eyes sometimes shrieks the sentence “What if I told you what I was really thinking???”

Here’s an example.  This evening after a dinner of braised chicken (I just looked up ‘braised’ and I was in the ballpark), herb and mushroom risotto, green beans picked and snapped by me, and a sassy little French baguette, child number three whistles out the back door with an “I’ll be back.”  A few minutes later, child number two, a girl, also whistles out the back door with an “I’ll be back.”  Now, let me describe the kitchen.  If I squinted, it was an impressionist painting, all oozing colors and splotches and shapes.  If I focused, it was a tall sculpture in stainless steel and ceramic, avant-garde in its inclusion of viscous, dripping substances, even addressing olfactory senses like art rarely does.  I leaned on the sink (allow me to be dramatic here) and thought dark thoughts about that movie, “12 Years a Slave.”  I wondered what would happen if I just took off my floral flour-sack apron, and left it all tilted and teetering and crusted and greasy.  What if I just didn’t do the dishes?  Would the sun rise in the west tomorrow, if it rose at all?  Would rivers flow uphill?

Some of you, like my mother for instance, are asking the obvious, “Why don’t you get the kids to help before they leave?”  While seemingly self-evident, that question reveals inexperience with teenagers and college students.  The 16 – 22 year old has two modes:  Gone or Sick.  They are only not gone if they are sick.  They aren’t faking it either.  They really are sick.  They get sick because they are always gone.  They leave for college and don’t sleep for an entire semester.  Then they come home and die for two weeks.  Then it’s time to go back for round two.  Or they arrive home smelly and sunburned from youth beach conference, drop their laundry and explain that they need to leave immediately because . . .  I phase out on their life-or-death reasons, but they usually end with, ‘We may never see him again, Mom.’  So, no, they literally can’t do the dishes.

I digress.  I decided it was probably time for my regular – every other decade – appointment with the stirrups (you were warned!).  The soonest appointment is two months from now.  Not bad relatively speaking, and yes, I have read the recently circulating article about a doctor’s daily life of hunger, thirst, stress, and worry, and I believe it.  I go to church with many doctors.  They do have my sympathy.  I realize that there is one of them per several thousand of us.  But flip that around.  They may have thousands of me, but I only have one of them.  One.  And, doc, when I need you, I need you!  Look at my record.  I only call every other decade.  And do you really want me loose on the world for two more months like this, with your name on my “who is your attending physician” line?  I can spell your name down to apostrophes, hyphens, and umlauts.

Ahhh.  Well.  Maybe this is the ‘m-word.’  I asked a friend if she thought it was and she shushed me roundly, saying she wasn’t going there.  Shush away, but I don’t think we get to choose.  Time and gravity and chemistry force us there, ready or not.  “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven,” says the preacher.  How pragmatic and man-like.  No angst, no kicking at the goads, no keening sentimentality, just peaceful acceptance: “Oh, the m-word.  Yes, I suppose it is time for that.”

May that same peace breathe through the back door, down the halls into the bedrooms of the sleeping children, past the couch and the reading husband, and all over me – m-word or not – happy and aproned in the impressionist kitchen.