time well spent

I was up early – too hot, couldn’t sleep – so I finally got up to get a head start while everyone else was still in bed. I threw the office windows open and watched commuters pour down the highway from Houston, Big Lake, and Willow.

I’m never up this early, and I immediately questioned my judgment when the cats assumed my sole purpose in getting up was to feed them, howling for food loud enough to wake the neighbors. I hobbled downstairs, got their dishes, put old Gusser in the bathroom with his food and gave the other cats their food, went back upstairs, and turned on the computer.

time well spent

The summary of my productivity went like this: Open the document, change several sentences, consult the thesaurus for five different words, and say encouraging things to myself like, Wow, that’s a crappy segue.

Probably, I should’ve just stayed in bed.

It doesn’t help that I now have to wear house shoes, because I am fortier than I used to be. My arches started to fall during my pregnancy with Kavanagh, which aggravated a nerve injury in my foot and had me limping and occasionally losing balance. So now I clomp-clomp though the house in old, scrubbed tennis shoes and we call them my “house shoes” – a phrase I can’t even hear in my head without giving it a southern accent and picturing a polyester duster from the 70s.

You might know already that Alaskans don’t wear shoes in houses. Shoes are only worn in the house in those brief intervals of trying to run out the door, or having to deal with something urgent before even getting our shoes off when we get home. Or, as Iree pointed out, when we’re walking through glass and other debris from a 7.1 earthquake. So wearing shoes in the house feels inherently stressful, and I’m not used to it yet.

The week started rough, like we held time in a sieve and it poured out faster as the to-do list got longer. By the end of the day I was sucking wind and at six minutes after the hard-and-fast time we’d agreed upon for clocking out, I finally hit the shutdown button and closed the laptop.

It has to be enough, I thought. But it didn’t feel like it was. Does it ever?

On Tuesday I tried to make up for Monday. Here’s an example of how that went:

Go to Paypal to update account. Get error message with instructions to call Paypal.

Call Paypal, attempt to update over the phone’s automated system, which almost never works.

It doesn’t. Wait to speak to representative. Estimated wait time is 27-33 minutes. No problem, finding busywork for half an hour while listening to muzak is one of my very favorite things, like jury duty.

At 31 minutes of waiting, the call disconnects. YOU ARE KIDDING ME.

Call back. Estimated wait time is now only 17-22 minutes. This remarkable improvement is brought to us by a propensity to hang up on customers.

Someone picks up, hallelujah.

The representative’s ability to speak English is matched by her listening skills. I wish that was a compliment, but after interrupting me four times while asking what the problem is, it’s not.

Finally she reads from the same script I’ve heard from three other companies over the last month: “I have good news for you today, I can fix this for you.” But she can’t, because after putting me on hold two more times she informs me that my account is now under review and inaccessible by either of us. (Apparently Paypal’s security is so penetrative, it no longer recognizes you if you start wearing house shoes.)

“No worries,” she reassures me from her script. “You can access your account and try again in 48 hours.” Well, yippee. I have good news for you. I can fix this for you. No worries. I don’t think those things mean what she thinks those things mean.

“Can I help you with anything else?” she asks. Um, no thank you, I don’t think I can stand any more help today, I’m good, thankyouverymuch.

That was Tuesday.

Wednesday, five kids and I pile into the Stagecoach and drive over the river and through the Butte, to Grandma’s house we go. After the last two days it seemed like the wrong time to take the day off, but we’d already scheduled this and wouldn’t miss it for anything.

It was Kavanagh’s first trip there, probably his longest car ride so far. The wind was flying and whipping up waves of dirt and river silt in the intersections, and tiny tornadoes eddied along the road in front of us.

Two pictures of Grandpa sit on a shelf by her couch. One was taken a few years before he died; the other was black and white and faded, and he was young and handsome, six-foot-four, the guy Grandma fell in love with – sitting on a tree stump, filling his pipe, legs stretched out in front of him.

They’d known each other for about a week when it was taken. Grandma said he came by her mother’s store and she and all her younger siblings were there, probably driving her mother crazy. So they decided to take the kids all out for a walk to get them out of her hair. They went to a nearby pasture and he sat on that stump and filled his pipe, and she snapped his picture with the camera she took pretty much everywhere.

I asked her how old she was then. Now, she’s 87, though you wouldn’t know it from looking at her or hearing her voice. I grew up with her singing hymns around the house and leading worship at church, and her voice is usually still strong and beautiful – but it wasn’t when she answered my question.

“Twenty,” she said.

She was quiet for a minute, and then added, “I’d give anything to go back in time to that week.” Another pause. “Precious individual,” she said. “I miss him.”

They were married less than a year later, shortly before her twenty-first birthday. Had five boys: my uncle, my dad, and my other uncle within five years of each other, and thought they were done. But we’ve both had two surprises. We were both in our forties for the last one.

And Grandma wears house shoes, too.

work in progress: what happens when we fill the lake

Reagan is next to me, reviewing letter sounds. And not just that, but she’s also reviewing other important things, like how to pronounce “the” like thuh, not duh – and she plods through all of them in order: Thuh…E…says…ehh. Thuh…F…says…fff, and so on. It may be the first time in my life I’ve ever wished the English alphabet had less than 26 letters.

work in progress, part 1: what happens when we fill the lake

People often ask how we homeschool all these kids (“all these kids,” they say, as though we’ve collected them like so many postage stamps) and I hate to disappoint them, but the answer is pretty boring:

We don’t, really.

At least, not anymore. We put in our time with the older ones when they were younger, and now they mostly homeschool themselves; we just check and discuss their assignments and read with them a little. Life is all learning, of course, but as far as school goes, they’re pretty independent now.

So school-wise we direct our efforts to working with the Littles, as far as they will cooperate, which is…ah, how do I put this…extremely variable. And if you know us, you know that the category of “Littles” has less to do with age and more to do with ability and maturity. Our big kids are 18, 15, almost 13, and 9; our Littles are 13, 13, 3, and 2 months. Our 18-year-old recently moved out, and our little Kavanagh is just learning to take the world in. He’s growing like a weed; he smiles and laughs. Which might all be the same thing.

Last month I made filling the lake a priority again, and it’s working. I’m remembering that this is why we chose to write from home full time: I feel alive again when that’s what I’m actually doing, as opposed to the administrative, publishing parts that consume certain phases of it.

When we like what we’re doing, we forget that we’re working.

I like the movement of standing up to reach over the back of my laptop to grab a favorite style guide from my stack of writing books on the back of my desk. And I like having a row of finished works next to them, and different notebooks and journals scattered all over the place.

I like that one of the works-in-progress is not just a digital file like the one I’m currently typing on, but it’s a stack of research materials, a notebook, and Oh My Soul and its companion journal. Eric Liddell said he felt God’s pleasure when he ran; I feel God’s pleasure when I am in full nerd-mode with a pencil behind my ear, going through familiar books, rifling through pages and marking up passages, and typing as the words flow easy, fast, and furious.

And I even kind of like it – in a perverse, self-flagellating way – when I am in front of the laptop with no words, frustrated with the wrong words, and aggravated as all get out trying to pull a piece together before a deadline when the clock is ticking down (like right now, she thought nervously), because I know the thrill of accomplishment and relief when it’s done.

I don’t love it so much that I forget that I’m working, but I know that it’s worthwhile because whatever I’m doing is working. Purpose comes easier when we see the headway we’re making.

Like when Reagan pushes through and makes it to Thuh Z says zzz – it’s progress, and she is gaining. In the effort and aggravation, we see achievement and increase, and it’s worth it. You know, sort of like childbirth: Ta da, look, we did it. We made this.

The other day one of my kids asked me for harder books, but she didn’t say it that way. She said she wanted “books that would take longer than a day to read” and I had the happy task of going through the library with her to find a new stack that would keep her occupied. She didn’t want The Hunger Games, she wanted the challenge: The Scarlet Pimpernel, Mother Mason, My Antonía.

And this is when I love homeschooling and forget that it, too, is work: Learning, like teaching or writing or any other job, ceases to be work when we get lost in it.

Along those lines, this month I got to dig into the first chapters of Bleak House with my writing student. I almost wrote “dive” into it, but no, one does not dive into anything of Dickens. You wade in cautiously, stir a foot around the water to check for sharp objects, and, finding none, keep going deeper and deeper until you’re surrounded by 43 characters swimming around and splashing you in the face and pulling you under, and you like it. At least, I do.

And I might as well confess up front that I’m already reading Pickwick Papers with Iree and Nicholas Nickleby (one of my favorites) with the family as a read aloud. So, no, I didn’t pick Bleak House, but I’ve read it before and was thrilled that my student chose it.

Each of us read from our own copies. I leaned over to see where she was at, and she was a full page ahead of me, because I had gotten lost in sentences like,

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

And I forgot I was supposed to be working.

So now I find myself in the middle of three, count ‘em, three Dickens novels, and perfectly happy about it. Vin thinks I might have issues. I think I might want to be a Dickens scholar when I grow up…and that, too, might be the same thing.

order of business: what we do to win the day

Somehow I forgot about this phase of parenting toddlers. The floor is covered in abandoned puzzles and piles of blocks, the couch is drowning in buttons he dumped all over, and throw pillows are arranged like so many lily pads across the living room. You can barely walk through here. The Floor is Lava was obviously invented as a way to avoid picking up toys while still navigating through a room without stabbing your foot on an action figure.

order of business: what we do to win the day

But instead of cleaning up, Finn is distracted by improvising new forms of gymnastics. Three-year-olds are geniuses; leave it to them to discover that a large couch cushion can be used successfully as both a slide and a pole vault.

And let me just confess that I’m not the cool, laid-back mom-of-many that some of you might give me credit for. No matter how simple or minimalist we endeavor to be, there’s no getting around the fact that nine people and four cats create a ton of noise, clutter, and movement. Multiplied by physical pain from nursing, and magnified by looming deadlines and not enough time or quiet space to meet them…all this at once makes fire shoot out my ears.

Or lava, whatever.

It’s a quiet, cold evening when the blood moon is eclipsing, and we get Finn to clean up all his messes without resorting to too much bribery, manipulation, threats, and gimmicks. The kids play outside in the dark, candles are lit inside, and this is the kind of atmosphere that fits us, that we long for: Dinner’s frying, the baby is burping, Crowder’s singing the whole world’s about to change and you can’t help believing him, but you’re also praying the change will be good. We resist fear and choose to walk in boldness to the future He holds.

And I need some good change. Because it turns out, part of living the dream of writing full time includes the nightmare of technical and administrative work. It’s been consuming my weeks lately and I’ve been so frustrated, feeling thwarted as a writer who almost never has time to write.

People talk about love languages all the time but, just for a second, can we acknowledge that there might also be such a thing as Hate Languages? Because if they’re real, red tape and techy stuff are mine. Hates them we does. The urgent tasks suck up the day and there’s no time left to create, and deadlines loom without content to draw from. Toward the end of the month, it’s Cutthroat Kitchen for writers – I’m trying to make a gourmet meal with only leftovers in a mostly empty fridge.

So the Lord keeps bringing me back to this concept of Quadrant 2, or what I’ve often called filling the lake: doing those beautiful things that fill us before we need to pour out, like reading, writing, studying, brainstorming, and investing in relationships.

And maybe it sounds dumb, but I needed permission to prioritize those essentials, simply because many of them are what I most want to do. I tend to put them off until the end of the day, and often there’s not enough of the day left to do them.

Quadrant 2 encompasses activities that are important but not urgent, and easily put off because of their lack of urgency. When put off for too long, though, they become urgent Quadrant 1 activities, messes that need cleaned up and fires that need to be put out (or lava, whatever).

Breakdown results from avoiding that kind of routine maintenance, and by then we have a situation that is more expensive, more painful, and more time-consuming. The work isn’t always performed as well because of its frantic nature. It’s the difference between reading books for fun because we want to learn (Quadrant 2) versus cramming for a test because we just want to pass it (Quadrant 1). Or the difference between picking up your toys when you’re done with them versus waiting until you’ve destroyed the living room and your mama has lost her ever-loving mind.

Urgent matters are usually visible. They press on us; they insist on action….Importance, on the other hand, has to do with results. If something is important, it contributes to your mission, your values, your high priority goals.

– Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

You can do it early or you can do it in haste, and we’re living it out both ways. There are so many things I’m glad I learned years ago so I don’t have to figure them out now (hat tip to my friends Microsoft Word, WordPress, and Mailchimp). But there are a million other things I still need to learn, and I wish I knew them yesterday. And to be honest, there are plenty of things I don’t even want to learn. Here’s looking at you, Photoshop.

But when I fill the lake and work with His priorities and my own giftings instead of against them, I do better work. I do it with joy. I’m a happier wife and mama, a better friend, and a more effective leader. It creates the atmosphere that fits me and fills me.

It is the difference between getting up early and pulling a 12-hour shift to get it all done, or getting up on time to spend the first hour in study and prayer, and finding that the work is finished an hour early.

And I’m pulling overtime on a Saturday, but if there’s an easy way to do it, it’s this: Sitting on the couch with a sleepy Kavanagh, with the same music playing that he heard so much in utero, and the biggest distraction I face is his occasional eruption of spitup. This quiet time is sponsored by Vince working through his own hate language – he has the rest of the kids downstairs, painting.

I can hear the paint rollers running back and forth and it’s a liberating comfort to know that progress is happening downstairs without me. It will be beautiful when they’re done. I am up here doing my part of the work, they are down there doing their part of the work, and we all enjoy the fruit of everyone’s efforts.

And looking back, I can see how He’s been telling me this for a long time. We had a worship night at church last weekend, and I heard a song I’ve only heard once or twice before, and wondered where it’s been all my life.

You go before I know
That You’ve even gone to win my war
Your love becomes my greatest defense
It leads me from the dry wilderness

And all I did was praise
All I did was worship
All I did was bow down
All I did was stay still

– Rita Springer, Defender

And I needed to hear it because even though there’s work that I can do, most of the big work is out of my hands. There’s breakthrough we need that only He can do. Just like last year, when we knew He was moving us but we didn’t know where or how He was going to do it. We never would’ve guessed the outcome. No amount of bribery, manipulation, threats, and gimmicks could have brought that kind of resolution, and it won’t now, either. We win through surrender, just like always.

On New Year’s Eve I was nursing Kavanagh on the couch, and suddenly the fireworks that had been sporadic for two days went off all at once, all around us, and I realized it must be midnight. I looked up and there they were, out every window; you could see them all the way from Houston and Big Lake in the east to downtown Wasilla in the west, and there were more than a dozen eruptions between – around the highway, up Vine, along Knik Goose Bay, Fairview Loop, all across the valley.

I had never thought of what fireworks would look like from this bluff overlooking the valley. It was magical and marvelous and riotous, and wholly unexpected. It was like the whole world was about to change. And God leaned in close and said, See? I’m not done surprising you yet.