Expired milk?

So, around here, we rarely have milk go bad anymore.  We drink it like crazy, so I rarely look at the expiration dates when I'm picking up a gallon (more likely two or three).  Unlike my last pregnancy I will not be wondering over the possibility of having a baby before my milk goes bad.  Instead I'll be hoping that she takes her time.

As of yesterday I am officially not working anywhere.  And may I just say: Hallelujah!

I've got to enter grades for my students at OC, but I am not returning to Sonshine School at Edmond, except to drop off the monkey.  I am a woman of leisure.  Heh!  I shouldn't say leisure, because if you could see my to-do list right now you would laugh at me.  You'd probably tell me that I ought to hope this baby doesn't come until August.  

In some ways I'm hoping the time flies (What can I say?  I'm not altogether comfy right now.) But in other ways I'm pretty sure that the next 31 days are some of the most precious time I'm going to have for a while.  

It's not that I don't want to meet Sweet Caroline, but I also think about how much time I spent preparing for Jonah, and I haven't gotten to do that for her.  I'm also thinking about how much less time I'm going to be able to spend with Jonah afterward.  I think about how confused and slighted he might feel.  I feel torn.  

Eh... what else is new?

So I'm looking at my to-do list.  I want to make a place for this child.  I want her to be welcomed into our home and made as much a part of our family as any of the rest of us.  So I need to get her crib together, make sure she has blankets and art on her walls and organized space... Not that she'd know if I didn't, but it seems like the nesting instinct is there for a reason.  

31-ish days and counting.

Saturday morning Socos

There are birds chirping outside.  They are probably fighting around the bird feeder to see who is the top bird.  My guess is that the Jay will win again.
It's only 7:30 but I've already been awake for 45 minutes.  I really would much rather be sleeping in, but it seems like I can't sleep past 6:45 anymore.  That's about the time the birds get hungry, so maybe it's connected.
I'm headed to the Farmer's Market again today.  Last Saturday it was raining and my mother and I got soaked, but I came home with some really good stuff.  I think I'll buy eggs this week.  Maybe more of the bagged spinach, a tomato (probably hothouse, but so good!), some strawberries and asparagus.  I'm curious about their cuts of meat, but I don't know what I'd buy exactly.
Josh mowed most of the yard last night.  Jonah rode along, and amazingly didn't fall asleep.  I'm hoping he'll finish it today because the parts he hasn't mown are looking like a jungle from all the rain we got last week.  I'm assuming he's going to plant the garden today, though, so who knows if he will.
The garden.  I'm starting to think seeds are a bad idea.  We should have planted it a few weeks ago, but it's been so busy with finals coming up and grading and then there was the rain... Josh spent a lot of time getting the beds raised and putting down straw.  I'm really kind of excited about it.
I hear Jonah waking up.  7:40.  I miss when he used to sleep in until 9:00 every morning.  I slept in then, too.  I guess it makes sense that I'm waking up before him.  We'll see if he gets up and comes out of his room, or if he's just talking to himself in his sleep.
I'm almost 35 weeks pregnant.  Last time around I was so reflective, and spent so much time preparing (I also wasn't working at all) and this time I'm looking at my to-do list and wondering if I'll have enough time.  I'm almost wanting Sweet Caroline to decide to come late, just so I can get it all done.  I don't want her to be less prepared-for than Jonah was.  I don't want to spend less time with her, or sit her in her bouncy seat int he corner because I am okay with that now, but I know that's coming.
Having a little girl scares me to death.  So much more complicated.

Jonah is knocking.  He must not be able to get the door open!

Planting Seeds

 Josh has spent a little extra time this spring preparing for our garden.  He's decided to try something new this year that I think might make our soil a little better without the kind of weeding that we haven't really been able to do.  It's called Ruth Stout's method.  The result, so far, is that we haven't been able to plant anything.  We bought plenty of seeds but we may have to go get some plants just to get caught up... except for one area. 

Last fall Josh tossed a pumpkin into the garden when he was pulling up all the dead plants.  Josh figured it was just compost for next year, though why he didn't walk 15 feet and throw it into the actual compost heap, I don't know.  The result?  About three weeks ago, after Josh had tilled the first time, we started to see a patch of plants come up.  Pumpkin plants, in roughly a round shape, like an exploded pumpkin.  

We spend so much of our lives trying to be intentional and we plant our little seeds in neat rows and cultivate our soil with cover crops and compost and fertilizer.  What we forget is that we're scattering seeds when we aren't even intending to.  When things pop up in unexpected places, it's often because we weren't paying attention, but it's also because we have a God who makes the most of even our ham-handed attempts at producing fruit.  

Now, I have to be honest.  The pumpkin came from seeds that were probably genetically modified, which means we aren't likely to actually get anything out of the plants that's really eatable.  Josh was building raised beds, so he sort of just built around the plants.  It's not as neat as the little rows he had planned, but it seemed right to let them stay.  Josh and I thought we might just wait and see what God can do with the plants.      

"...your first naming, your first name,/ your first word."

The title of this post is from my favorite Margaret Atwood Poem, Spelling. The basis for our communication with others (for better or worse) is the words we first learn to use- and what word do we learn first? Our names. The first word we respond to is our name. We quickly learn to recognize that word as our identifier, if not our very identity.

And that makes our relationship with our names one of the most crucial relationships of our lives.

I can personally vouch for the power a name can hold for a person. My relationship with my name has been a kind of on-again/off-again, high school romance type of relationship. One minute I love it, and the next I'm not sure what I ever saw in it. For the most part it isn't that unique, except that it is.

In Margaret Atwood's poem she says, "A word after a word/ after a word is power." She is right. And the beginning of power is to know- really know- your own name.

My name is spelled... differently. My father used the Greek spelling for the word "joy," so it's spelled with a silent "H" which leads most people to mispronounce it. It's kind of a big deal because the sound of it is significantly different than if you use the soft "ch" sound (as in character, or charismatic).

I had a coach in middle school who called me Charlotte because (as she told my mother at a parent-teacher night) she just liked it better. She was just plain strange, so I didn't sweat her opinion too much, but as the years went by, I got pretty tired of having to correct every new person I met on the pronunciation of my name. Sometimes multiple times before they caught on.

I think the biggest offender was my Spanish teacher my junior year of high school. Mr. Hammond was a coach of some kind, and as strange as the previous coach I mentioned, except that he refused to pronounce my name correctly. I corrected him every day for months, but he refused. It got to the point that I felt that it was just a matter of disrespect that he persisted. I spoke to him several times about it, but he ignored me.

I was once walking down a flight of stairs behind him in a deserted stairwell and the though actually crossed my mind that I could easily shove him down the stairs and no one would know. He probably wouldn't even see me. Also, it was a side stairwell that wasn't often used and he might lay there unassisted for quite some time before he was found and helped.

Ultimately, the realization that I would actually consider such a thing really disturbed me (as it probably should have) and I simply gave up on him and the class. I passed Spanish, but without any enthusiasm. I can still only a handful of spanish words, and they would do me little practical good unless I was desperately in need of some peanuts.

For the most part, however, I came to terms with my name a while back. I was asked, recently, how I would planned on explaining to my kids about how I picked their names. I haven't though too much about this, but the best answer I could give was that I really understood the meaning behind my name at a time when I really needed to know it. It was a time when I was honestly at the lowest point of my life that my mother made it clear that they chose my name for a reason. They wanted me to be joyful- to know joy and be characterized by it (pun intended).

It's still a little annoying, but I persist in letting the people around me know what my name is and how to pronounce it. Usually I will tell them that it means "joy" with the hope that they will remember that it is meant to be a little different, but there is a purpose behind it.

All about the guilt?

My dear friend Tasha, told me (just before I gave birth to the Monkey) about her difficulties in breast feeding, and about one particularly difficult day at the pediatrician's office where she just broke down and cried about how guilty she felt about wanting to quit but wanting to do what was best for her sweet baby. The Doctor (a woman, I believe) hugged her and told her that she should get used to it, because feeling guilty was part of the job description for mothers, and that she should do what she had to do. Tasha decided not to give up and things got better.

I keep thinking about what that doctor said. At first glance it seems like a terrible thing to say to a young mother, but I've discovered- she's right. The level of duty that you feel to your child is matched with love, and when you can't seem to give enough, or do the right thing enough, it is next to impossible to feel anything but guilt. I am mostly a stay-at-home Mom with a highly verbal child who is loved and read to, and frequently given vegetables, and never beaten... but I can still find my own shortcomings. Am I spending enough time just playing with him? Brushing his teeth enough? Disciplining him enough? Is what I'm doing enough?

Ugly truth? I will never feel that I have done enough for him.

So where does that leave me? There are certainly things that I want out of my own life that I don't necessarily want to put on hold until he's out of college or married, and some other woman's responsibility. I want to get to tell stories, and connect with other storytellers, and run another 5K and actually go through The Artist's Way and do all sorts of other things that having Jonah and sweet Caroline complicates. Where is the ME part left if I'm spending all my time trying to do and be enough for my babies? It's hard to know.

So we're back at the guilt.

Today I was interviewed for an article in Storytelling Magazine by a storyteller that I deeply respect. My first thought was, WHY would she want to interview me? The article is featuring storytellers in the New Voices category (18-35 year olds) to find out what they are doing with their art. I wanted to tell her that she had called the wrong person. I wasn't really doing anything with my art.

But then we started to talk and it occurred to me that I have been telling my child stories since he was much too small to understand them, and he's highly verbal. Maybe there's a connection? And I'm teaching a communications class, and sometimes even getting to use my storytelling background. And I've done storytelling in schools (a little anyway) and in churches around here since we moved. It's limited, but it's what I can do right now.

I mentioned that I had noticed the age gap in storytellers in my category (young mothers) and she asked if I had any theories, and I told her that I thought it was just a hard time of life to put a lot of effort into a career that requires you to spend a lot of time selling yourself, and being away from your family. And then I said something that I hadn't realized that I had come to believe...

I told her that I was starting to see this part of my life as a "belly of the whale" experience. It's a time for me to learn and evaluate and prepare for what will come later. I told her about reading books about women and the transitions they go through in life and finding that I felt the need to profoundly experience these transitions so I could be able to tell stories about them with the truth of experience, not just the general knowledge of the story and an analysis to go behind it. It's one thing to tell the story of the Seal Wife. It's another to feel that it is sometimes your own skin that has been stolen from you.

I know this topic is generally something that I have generally harped on in the last few years- balance, motherhood vs. personhood, but I suppose that it's part of processing this entire transition to being a mother. I'm not sure it's a transition I will ever fully process. I've been through the beginning where you just can't believe that you actually did something as amazing and miraculous as give birth to another human being, to the mundane part where you talk about poop a lot, and now I guess I'm in that part where I'm comfortable (mostly) with my skills, and I'm trying to figure out how I got here and what really qualifies me to be anyone's Mother.

I guess it's the guilt.

What is going on ??

-Heartburn and getting kicked a lot.

- SPRING!

-Enjoying my last days as a mother of one child.

-Getting ready to give birth using self-hypnosis. This has been really interesting, and is pretty helpful so far.

-Already gearing up for VBS this year. My yet-to-be-born child has already secured the part of the Christ child. I think we'll have to put a mustache on her.