When I saw Getting Past Perfectby Kate Wicker advertised via Catholic Mom as their next book club book, I ordered it right away. Once I started reading it, I realized that I couldn't stop to read along chapter by chapter according to schedule and instead, read through the book quickly.
After a foreword and introduction to set the stage for the book, there are 8 chapters that follow a similar format, followed by a conclusion. Each chapter has a title accompanied by an evil earworm and an unvarnished truth. For example, Chapter 1 - Queen Mommy: Motherhood is Not the Most Important Job a Woman Has. Evil Earworm: Being a mother is the most important thing a Catholic woman can do. Unvarnished Truth: Motherhood is actually not your highest calling. Being a daughter of God is (p. 1). Chapter 6 - I am Mother! Hear Me Roar!: Your Child's Success is Not a Measure of You. Evil Earworm: My kids are my sole custody, and their happiness is a reflection of my success as a parent. Unvarnished Truth: You do not own your children, you are stewards of them. They belong to God, not you, and they are here to fulfill his will--not yours or theirs (p. 69). I found that I enjoyed even just skimming through the introduction pages to each chapters and that this information alone provided a lot for me to ponder.
Then, jumping into the chapters, I appreciated being able to see how her thinking developed these concepts through her personal experiences over time. She writes with humility, not afraid to show what could be perceived as weaknesses (especially through the lens of those evil earworms) in order to share an authentic look at motherhood and the power of seeing it through the lens of the more realistic and healthy unvarnished truths.
She concluded each chapter with a Mom's Time-Out, a prayer followed by a wrapping up reflection with a call to action, an encouraging way to ponder the concepts of the chapter or to make a step toward aligning our lives to them.
Around the same time someone recommended Present Over Perfect. Though I have not bought it yet, it seems like they would be good companion texts. Wicker mentions Brené Brown's work in her book and Brown wrote the foreword of Present Over Perfect.
Last fall I talked to my priest about how approaching another labor in the spring, I knew that I would need to conscientiously focus on trust, rather than anxiety. I knew as the months and days passed and I approached my due date that I would start to worry and wonder. However, I was starting to get a better sense of suffering and the concept of uniting suffering with Jesus's thanks to the influence of different layers of faith formation.
Thinking of the concept of Jesus' suffering was present while preparing for my first labor 13 years ago; however, I was much further from the concept sinking in. This April as I laid in my hospital bed with so many emotions, one of the salient thoughts was those four different labors making sense in teaching me about strength and suffering.
Today as my priest talked about St. Alphonsa in his homily on her feast day with words such as, "The wealth of the bride is the wealth of the bridegroom, and the wealth of my bridegroom is suffering" and her requests to "Give me more" when referring to suffering, I was reminded once again of my labors, what I have learned about suffering, and how far I can still grow in the area. Over a series of posts, I will share glimpses into my journey.
I haven't been posting on my blog as much as I would like to, swept up in a swirl of everyday life. I always love Thanksgiving break during fall term, knowing that we have a little time and space to breathe before shifting into the last week of the term and finals week, followed by a 3 week break before the start of winter term.
One of the things I look forward to during the break is a chance to step back and consider how the term went. I know that I was able to continue with certain aspects of my life that I wanted to (starting the day with daily readings, attending daily Mass unless I had a meeting that couldn't be avoided, weekly Adoration), but other aspects slipped (occasional instead of daily Rosary, not as regular with reading Catholic books, little to no journaling).
I need to reconsider the rhythms and routines of my life during academic terms and think about implications for my vision for the transition to winter term. I also need to be proactive in envisioning how my life will shift once again in the spring of 2015 when we welcome baby #4 into our family. Two days after I published this post where I was finally getting a greater sense of peace and a better ability to let go and trust, I realized that I was pregnant! Once again, I was amazed at God's plan for my life. The delayed answer. His time table. The lesson I needed to learn, the way I needed to grow before getting my answer.
Here I am in the mix of my mid-30s thinking, reflecting, and living. Thy will be done! Help me to live my life according to Your will and to navigate the different options and possibilities. Where there is a clear-cut choice, let me choose You.
I couldn't sleep. Eyes shut, I shifted stomach to back and side to side. I had woken up with Camila. While she was only awake very briefly, I could not fall back to sleep. Instead, I thought and processed, ideas taking shape.
As an educator, this isn't new to me. In my dissertation I included a narrative about not being able to sleep in my hotel room following a career fair when I was in my teacher preparation program:
The gears in my brain churned away, screaming at me to get out of bed and start documenting the flow of ideas. I tiptoed to my backpack to grab paper and a pen and sat on the floor next to the hotel window, not wanting to wake my master colleagues. A bit of sunlight was streaming through the crack in the blinds, just barely enough to see. My hand flew across the paper, and I felt the great feeling that comes with writing thoughts onto the page.
At the education fair I had eased into a free-flowing conversation with a co-principal about how I would teach reading to high school students who were still struggling. I felt an instant connection, and though I did not even know when the interview process would begin or if I would get the job, on the inside I was already buzzing with excitement about the possibility. I relived the chance meeting the day before as my ideas spilled out.
Once I could not think of anything else to write, I tucked my notebook back into my bag. Later I would add to the list, revise it, and eventually shape my first units. A few weeks after the education fair, I had accepted a position for the district that ignited so much passion from a single conversation. (pp. 74-75)
Now alongside my career passions, I have another fueled by a purpose that has emerged as part of my One Little Word 2015: Core. At the start of the year, I wrote the following as an intention, "Begin to live with this mission in mind: Strive to live life according to God's will by nourishing spiritual life and nurturing connections. Conscientiously focus on showing family is important, value self care, and work with joy."
If you would have asked me not too long ago what my vocation is, I would have stated being an educator. This year part of my personal development has included me being able to see the bigger picture, recognizing that my vocation from a Catholic lens is married life, which in my context includes being a wife and a mother. Being an educator is still a huge part of who I am, but I am now seeing beyond wrapping so much of my identity into being an educator alone and instead am seeing the bigger picture of my life's purpose.
One part of my journey this year that helped position me well for this shift was Tsh Oxenreider's course Upstream Fieldguide. Back at the start of the year, as I went through the process of the sessions, I drafted a purpose statement based on my intention, revised to say, "My life's purpose is to live life according to God's will, which includes courageously prioritizing breathing room in order to nourish spiritual life, nurture connections, empower others, and live with joy." Tsh prompted me to consider the larger context of my life - not just the phase in which I find myself right now, which made all the difference.
I found that at the start of the year I was not really sure what shifting my focus to living according to God's will would mean in a specific way. I began to pray, reflect, and focus on investing in further developing my faith formation. In recent days, I have been realizing that living according to God's will is more concrete in my mind - my purpose is evangelization. Through different resources, again and again the concept of the purpose of my marriage being to help my husband get to heaven/aid in his journey to live a holy life and the concept of leading my girls to heaven as my most important role as a mother have been coming up. Stewardship beyond my immediate family also entails impacting others around me in a positive way, just as they can support my faith development in a collaborative community. Before this year, I did not view evangelization as part of my role, and it is definitely not a part of my comfort zone. However, a range of resources, including those from Dynamic Catholic, Chris Stefanick, and Redeemed Online helped me to recognize just how integral this purpose should be in my life.
Yet, the question is still there - how can I best accomplish this at different levels in my life? With all the ideas swirling around, I know that I have personal limitations based on time, resources, and the different roles that I fill. This morning one idea emerged as a starting point, something that would be relatively small but that would push me out of my comfort zone, help me to build confidence with my emerging purpose, and hopefully set some positive change in action. I'm ready to develop that idea with the intent to implement it in September (and will provide an update with more details at that point).
I had heard the song on the radio or Pandora before, but it wasn't until I opened a link from Chris Stefanick's newsletter around Father's Day with his words, "This song cuts me to the heart," that I saw Sanctus Real's video for Lead Me for the first time. As I watched it in the quiet of the morning before waking up the rest of the family to leave on vacation, the words really sunk in and resonated with me. I could relate to Stefanick's words related to the song "[cutting] me to the heart."
Though written from the perspective of a father, I could easily see myself in it as a busy working mom and wife. The first decade of our marriage was a swirl of events - college degrees, careers, having children, moving, buying houses, my husband's residency and citizenship. As our tenth anniversary approached, my husband pointed out many of these events and then asked a question that caused me to pause and reflect, "What will we be looking back on in another ten years?"
I realized that more than anything, I wanted to be able to say 10 years down the road that I was able to focus on my family. More important than other milestones or accolades, I wanted to be able to say that I was able to reel in my career and align my life to showing that my family was a top priority.
As a result, August 2012 - August 2022 is a time frame in which I want to continually ask myself what progress I have made, which moments felt the most significant in order to prioritize similar scenarios, and to to consider how to problem solve challenges. Inspired by Ali Edwards' One Little Word, I have been doing Focus of a Decade: Family alongside my yearly words.
Almost 3 years in it is easy to see that I made some attempts in the right direction but was still frequently feeling overwhelmed. This year my focus on family collided with my One Little Word: core. All of my other attempts set me up to see that while I was making some overall progress, something bigger was needed. I needed deep honest reflections about the underlying issues behind my career/family challenges. I needed to make myself realize that being a wife and a mother couldn't always be coming in second and third to my career. I needed to realize that I had wrapped so much of my identity into being an educator that I often had a sense of too many "have tos" that I was working toward an unrealistic moving target of all that I wanted to do, which was counter-productive to feeling enough in any of my roles. It was about recognizing the vocation I chose - married life and that being a wife and mom can't always be when I finish my other to-dos.
So I began my journey to focus on the core - to determine what was most important in my different roles in life and then consider how to accommodate, shift, and eliminate as needed in order to align my life with the core.
Surprisingly, though I had appreciated moments in my life where I had a stronger prayer life and more active involvement in my church community, it was often lost in the shuffle of the career/family juggle. I had not intended that this year would point me again and again to my faith. It was counter-intuitive to add another big component into a juggle that had already felt overwhelming as a dichotomy; yet, I should have recognized all those years that what I really needed to make significant progress with that career/family struggle was to prioritize faith and the rest would fall into place. Ironically, I have even had a Faith, Family, Friends image on my wall for years, and of course, there are frequent reminders at church to put God first. For whatever reason, I still just didn't get it.
That's why lines like these from the song hit me at the core:
So Father, give me the strength
To be everything I'm called to be
Oh, Father, show me the way
To lead them
Won't You lead me?
To lead them with strong hands
To stand up when they can't
Don't want to leave them hungry for love,
Chasing things that I could give up
I'll show them I'm willing to fight
And give them the best of my life
So we can call this our home
Lead me, 'cause I can't do this alone
Father, lead me, 'cause I can't do this alone
*Note: When I went to get the link to the Sanctus Real website, I noticed Matt Hammitt's statement about leaving the band. I got goosebumps as I read, "'I've been traveling far and wide singing the song 'Lead Me', but now I want to sing it less and live it more.' [...] I've always struggled to reconcile my life on the road away from Sarah and the kids, but after all these years I'm confident that my calling is to be at home more, consistently making God and family my ultimate priority." I am feeling even more inspired by the song now and look forward to listening to Matt Hammitt's podcasts.
