Resolution Revolution~ Jen

It’s January and the TV and radio are full of ads for gyms and diets. I know that’s normal, but it’s grinding on me this year. Because even though Dana and I have been in the gym for almost a year, I have gained 15 lbs.

I know, I know, we’re not supposed to talk about actual lbs. We’re supposed to use euphemisms like “I ate a few too many Christmas cookies” or “It’s true what they say, eggnog goes right to your waist!”

But there’s no euphemism for “My synthetic thyroid hormone meds are jacked up.”

In case you didn’t know what your thyroid does, it regulates things like metabolism. Synthetic hormones have come a long way, but they can’t replace an organ. For whatever reason, my “normal” dose of hormones, which had done the job for over a year, stopped about six months ago and sent me into hypothyroid territory. My hair started to thin and I gained a fast nine pounds. My doctor upped my meds, which lowered my levels a bit, and made my hair thicken up, but I added another six pounds. So he upped them again. I’ve been at this level for three weeks now, and while my head is full of little tufts of baby hair when I pull it all back into a ponytail, the scale has not budged.

I am trying not to freak out. I keep hitting the gym and tracking what I eat on My Fitness Pal. But I have never weighed this much in my life. After Kate was born I worked really hard to lose an extra 15 pounds and I stayed there in the years between her and Annie. Now my clothes either don’t fit or don’t look right. I don’t look in the mirror. I don’t want to take pictures.

It’s enough to derail my determination to celebrate the wins.

Then yesterday I was driving along, listening to Air1.com on the radio and Brenda was talking about why so many New Year’s resolutions fail. She had read somewhere that it’s because most of our resolutions are about ourselves. Losing weight, climbing a mountain, traveling somewhere exotic, eating better food, exercising—while none of these resolutions are bad, they are all self-serving. And since most of us drop them within days or weeks, they aren’t making us any happier, either.

But resolutions to serve others? Could be we’re much better at keeping those.

It got me thinking—I could fixate on the scale and my weight. I could live or die by the numbers every morning and let my days and sense of self-worth be dictated by whether the numbers go up or down.

Or. I could let it go. I could accept that my meds are off right now, and may never get right. I can feel thankful that this weight gain means I am alive and beat my cancer. I can stay on my eating plan and stay in the gym and be the healthiest heavy version of myself that I can be.

And. I can make a different kind of resolution this year, one that doesn’t serve myself. I will volunteer or donate or advocate for others. I have to look around, because this idea just came to me yesterday, but I already know there’s no downside. Think of others before myself? Give some of my time, treasure or talent to help? Show my kids how to walk the talk? Yes, yes and yes.

I think this is part of learning to Be, too. Do less. But be grateful. Be giving. Be humble.

Be ~ Jen

Multi-tasking is bad for us, right? Big bad. Stress-us-out-and-give-us-cancer bad.

We try to make multi-tasking into a badge of honor, but that’s crap. All it does is place our need for validation in one 90 mile an hour basket.

This used to be my life, when I was a teaching, mothering, wifeing, friending, volunteering fool. I could teach the children, answer email, shop for shoes, plan vacation, grade papers and mentor colleagues all before lunch. Then I came home and worked out, answered texts, baked cookies for the bake sale, helped the kids with homework, did the laundry and cooked dinner. My life looked like this:

Check me out. Man, you either got on board my crazy train or got run over. C’est la vie.

Then I one day I told Shea “Sure, I’ll have another baby, if I can stay home.” He called my bluff and two years later, I was a stay at home mom with a newborn. I hadn’t quite considered all the consequences:

Some people may see those gaps as an opportunity for rest. But the Master Multi-Tasker has no idea what rest is. To me, those huge gaps look like wasted space. Just having a newborn was for rookies. I would have a newborn and serve on the PTL and a corporate board and turn laundry into an insane art form. I would blog and post on Facebook three times a day and monitor the weather and traffic for all my close friends and family.

Do I have to say that this level of go is not sustainable? For anyone? Something will give. In my case, two somethings before I paid attention.

I was doing too much. Way, way too much. I was trying to be all things to all people. I didn’t want to let anyone down—not my husband, not my kids, not my students, not my colleagues, not my bosses, not my neighbors, not my family, not my kid’s school, not my church, not anyone.

You think that list is crazy?

What does yours look like?

We do too much. And in order to do too much, we multi-task. That means we do none of it well, because we’re moving too fast to really have a care. There’s no time for care! We say yes to everyone on that list, and then we short change them all, because that’s the only way to do it. We train ourselves to believe that rest is sloth, and we forget how to be. Still.

Then we are diagnosed with anxiety disorders and get cancer and divorces and we turn around one day and our kids are grown and we cannot for the life of us account for the years.

What if we just didn’t. Didn’t try to be all things to all people. Didn’t say yes. Didn’t try to balance our lives so that all things are equal. Yeah, that’s right. All the things in our life are not equal. The boss does not deserve the same time and attention as the spouse or the kids.

And what if we just be. Be the one who learned to say no. Be the one who cut some things out, like team parent or coaching or that committee at work. Be the one who made room for rest who took our charts, cleared them out and made some space. And then, instead of filling the space right back up, did this:

We can do less, but do it wider, slower, better. We can take only the things we need, the things that make our lives lovely and amazing, and fill them up and out. Maybe–probably–we would feel less hollow, guilty and not enough. Instead, we could have more space and feel more fulfilled.

The thing I loved the most about this Christmas season was the ground swell of voices talking about less and slower. We can carry that momentum into 2014 and into all parts of our lives.

Do less. Be more. Happy New Year!

Joy to the World!

Lord, in this holy season of prayer and song and laughter, we praise you for the great wonders you have sent us: for shining star and angel’s song, for infant’s cry in lowly manger. We praise you for the Word made flesh in a little Child. We behold his glory, and are bathed in its radiance.

Be with us as we sing the ironies of Christmas, the incomprehensible comprehended, the poetry made hard fact, the helpless Babe who cracks the world asunder. We kneel before you shepherds, innkeepers, wisemen. Help us to rise bigger than we are.

Amen.

(from www.catholiconline.com)

After weeks of sacred waiting, the day has come. The promise is fulfilled. The Savior is born. Joy to the world!

Dana and I wish you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas. May peace and blessings fill your Christmas season.

We’re going to take a Christmas break. We’ll probably still be popping off on Twitter and Facebook, and we’ll be back on the blog January 3. So Happy, healthy New year, too! And thanks for everything.

Dana and Jen

Drummer Boy ~ Jen

This post originally ran on Christmas Eve last year on another blog. We bring it back because we love this song and the message it has for parents.

“The Little Drummer Boy” is my favorite Christmas song. It makes me cry every year, this song about two little poor boys and their gifts. One, with his drum; One, with His endless capacity for love and acceptance. I saw this quote from Leo Buscaglia on a California Baptist University billboard the other day: “Your talents are a gift from God. What you do with them is your gift to Him.” Amen.

Here’s the thing about gifts, though: we don’t always get what we want. And when it comes to gifts from the Big Guy, if your heart and soul are not paying close attention, you may not know a gift for what it is.

In my years as a teacher, I saw this again and again. Not from my 16 year old students. Teenagers have a special and innate ability to dream BIG. Why not? They are at the beginning of their journeys; the highway is long and uncharted in front of them. It is a time of life when the possibilities truly are endless.

But their parents.

I sat in my share of parent meetings. I cannot count how many times I heard some variation on this theme: “Look at him. He doesn’t care about anything. He’s throwing away his future! He’ll never get into college! He’s going to grow up to be nothing.”

Wow, right? Except, in parent speak, what that really means is this: “Look at my beautiful child. I am terrified that he is growing up. He doesn’t understand that I want the very best for him. I love him so much and I cannot bear for him to struggle. I want the best for him.”

You can’t teach a child for 180 days not get to know him. Not on the same level as a parent, but teachers know your kids in ways you don’t. And I would think, Don’t you know what I know? He looks like a hot mess, but have you seen how he draws? Have you heard him play his guitar? Have you read his poetry? Seen him ride his bike? Do you know he can fix my computer? With a paperclip????

A child who has a passion for something, even if that passion interferes with their grades and their college future, is not going to be nothing. The child who draws anime on standardized test forms, who stays out late playing in his band, who breaks his leg trying to skate down the staircase, who skips school to go surfing—that child is a Drummer Boy.

I have known tons of Drummer Boys and Girls. They can be kind of angry. Or they can be really quiet, which is not normal for high school students. Or they grow their hair down to hide their faces. Or they are “that kid” in class who seems like the agent of the devil. I tried to see beyond the front. All that obnoxious noise hiding an artist, a poet, a dancer. I tried to see their gift, to have them play their music, whatever it was, for me.

But like the boy in the song, Drummer Boys and Girls approach their own gift tentatively. It’s all they have to give, and they aren’t sure it’s good enough. It’s the thing that makes them happiest in the world, and for that very reason, they aren’t sure they can trust it. They are surrounded by us, too many grown-ups who hate their jobs, their choices, their lives. These kids, they’re scared that’s what being a grown-up means. They’re scared that their heroes, the ones who do what they love and love doing it, were just lucky. These Drummer Boys worry they won’t ever be that lucky.

They think they have to fall in line. They know that when their mamas tell them that they “can be anything you want, sweetie”, there’s a giant, silent asterisk. Except that thing they really want to be. And society, all of us, are just as guilty. We show them, or we allow the message to be that success equals money.

Some of you are Drummer Boys from way back. You know what I’m talking about: that moment you gave up your dream to fall in line with someone else’s definition of happy, wealthy, successful.

My Drummer Boy wants to be a chef. He has said this since he was two. We bought him a play kitchen and caught some flak for it. But he has never wavered. He watches the Food Network. He cooks Sunday meals with my husband. He’s serious about this.

Once I told him he could be a chef after he went to college. My husband said “College is not going to help him be a chef”. I rolled that idea around in my head for a minute. I envisioned my son living in a dive studio apartment while he earns his chops as a line cook in NYC. I saw myself as the mom whose son did not go to college, after three generations of college graduates. I’ll admit it. I cringed.

Then I got my feet under me. I tell him he can be anything he wants, and I stifle the asterisk. I take the “But” and lock it up in the basement of my mother’s heart and forget about it. We will scrape up the money to send him to cooking school (only the best, of course; which costs the same as Stanford, who knew?). I will save the laundry dollars and quarters and send them off to help pay his rent. In Paris, hopefully.

We will do it because of what happens at the end of the song. The Baby smiled at the Drummer Boy. If my son has a gift and passion for cooking, it did not come from me. It truly is a gift from God. And in this house, we don’t second guess God.

I know we dream big for our kids. We tell our teenagers “No!” when what we mean is “Be safe, be wonderful, be happy”. But if you have a Drummer Boy or Girl at home right now, I want you to think of who else was in that manger that night. Mary. The ultimate example of being guided by God’s hand. If she could say yes and trust the Greatest Plan of all, if she could take it and hold it in her heart, then so can we.

Advent is a time when Christians eagerly await the birth of the Son of God. He was the fulfillment of a promise between God and His people. If you have a Drummer Boy or Girl in your home and your heart, put your fears away. Take a good hard look at the drum your child is playing. Listen to the music. Think of all the Drummer Boys and Girls who have changed the history of the world with their music. Think how brave that Drummer Boy was to stand there in the light of God and make the Baby smile.

Maybe your Drummer Boy or Girl will change the world too.

But first you have to let them play.

A Time of Sacred Leisure ~ Jen

Did you know that the four weeks of Advent were originally known as the “little Lent”? And that the season was marked in the same ways: prayer, fasting and preparation? It was a joyful time, but quietly joyful. No parties, no feasts, no overindulgence. The Christmas tree wasn’t even decorated until December 24.

And let me introduce you to this little gem: Sacred Leisure—“According to an ancient (and practical) tradition, by Christmas Eve the house is to be thoroughly cleaned, all tasks finished or removed from sight, all borrowed items returned, and no task allowed to be begun that cannot be finished by nightfall” (www.holytrinitygerman.org)

Friends, Sacred Leisure is God sanctioned quiet time.

Why did we ever give that up for what we have now? A holiday season that starts October 1 and marches on through the New Year, fueled by cleverly manufactured stress and anxiety. Here’s what I have already noticed this year: if you ain’t got Elf on the shelf, you ain’t got Christmas. At $24 a pop, that’s pretty brilliant marketing.

It aims right at the desire of lots of moms to “make” perfect Christmas memories for their kids. So we don’t go to Lowe’s and buy a tree. We drive everyone an hour down the highway to cut one down. We don’t take pictures with the Santa at the neighborhood party. We dress everyone up in matching sweaters and pay way too much money for the same picture at the mall. We haul our kids to every single Christmas parade in a 20 mile radius, book into every single Santa breakfast and accept invitations to an endless number of cocktail parties, gift exchanges, cookie parties and Secret Santa extravaganzas. And we Facebook and Pin it all to keep up with our other mom friends who are furiously Facebooking and Pinning their own made-up perfect Christmas memories.

What in the world are we doing?

Christmas has gotten loud. Bright. Expensive. But it’s not holy. I know I am not the only Christian mama who wants to turn the children’s faces away from the man in the red suit and towards the humble manger. And I know I am not the only mama who’s ready to throw in the towel on the Christmas mompetition.

A few years ago, Shea and I decided to make a change. We need our kids to understand what this season is really about. I’m sharing how we do it, not to increase the mompetition or make anyone feel like they are doing it “wrong”. But sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to get off the merry-go-round. So take it or leave it, for what it’s worth.

First, we under-schedule December, which means we don’t commit to much. If we wake up and decide we want to spend the day at Disneyland or ice skating in Old Town, then off we go. But we aren’t obligated to be many places.

Then I finish shopping before Advent begins. This year I finished before the Thanksgiving week sale juggernaut. I still got everything on sale. Shopping is fairly easy for us. The kids pick two presents from us and one from Santa. Only the grandkids and the grandparents get gifts, so the list is fairly small and has a dollar amount attached to it. Mostly. Sometimes grandmothers and great aunties are hard to control.

We have an Advent calendar. A real one, not those Santa countdowns they sell in the stores that have nothing to do with Advent. We have a wreath that lives on the dining room table for the season. Every Sunday we sit down to a small but formal meal with a group of friends and the Advent candles. We have a scripture reading, say a blessing and sing “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”.

As we get closer to Christmas, we focus on the giving. We shop together for our Giving Tree family. I take the older ones out alone so they can purchase gifts for their siblings with their allowance money. And the week before Christmas, we clean out our stuff, making three piles: trash, recycle, donate.

In between these things, we bake and make home-made gifts for our friends and listen to Christmas music and drink hot chocolate. We get our tree from Lowe’s. We do a Santa picture, but on a whim, and in casual clothes. We already did it this year, for free at Disneyland.

This will be our fourth year of really focusing on Advent and these years have been some of the most calm, reflective, loving celebrations in our home. I’ll be honest, the first year I felt like maybe I was missing something as I watched our neighbors and friends Facebook about performances and cocktail parties and parades and Santa breakfasts. That’s because we’ve been programmed to believe that we have to go-go-go from Halloween to January 1.

But we don’t. The only thing we have to do is prepare our hearts and gather round the candles to wait for God to send the Light into the world.

Prayerful quiet. Joyful anticipation. Sacred Leisure.

Advent resources:

About Advent: http://www.holytrinitygerman.org/adventcustoms.html

Manger Advent Calendar: http://www.holydepot.com/kurt-adler-wooden-nativity-advent-calendar-with-24-magnetic-figures/

Advent wreaths: http://www.catholiccompany.com/traditional-holly-berry-wreath-12-p3001243/

Advent prayers: http://www.churchyear.net/adventwreath.html

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