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

Posted on by February 28, 2024

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

Posted on by January 26, 2019

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.

rattle my cage: learning what we’re made of when our safe places are shaken

Posted on by December 13, 2024

Snowy gloves pounded the window while the kids played outside. I overheard Vince yell, “We don’t hit windows!” and someone’s answering protest, “I wasn’t hitting, I was knocking!”

And here, friends, is the irony: We survived a 7.2 earthquake with no major structural damage, only to almost lose windows to children beating on them with Gortex mittens.

rattle my cage: learning what we're made of when our safe places are shaken

Local schools shut down for a while from all the damage, but the earthquake happened on a Friday morning and our homeschooled kids fretted all day about finishing their assignments for the week. I tried to talk to them about priorities – we were all alive, people were working to get the power back on, and everyone we knew was safe. As we waded through debris I kept telling them, for crying out loud, earthquakes are educational – you might forget half the stuff you read last week, but you’ll never forget living through this. You never forget learning that your shelters and safe places can be shaken.

I’ll never forget the feeling of being sifted as the house shook east-west, hearing the ground rumble and the walls rattle and glass and pottery shattering everywhere. I’ll never forget jumping out of bed, racing upstairs to find five of the kids on their beds, then running back down two flights of stairs to check on the other two kids, only one of whom was there. I have no idea how I made it up and down all the stairs while nine months pregnant and the house was still shaking. I’ll never forget seeing the entire west wall of library shelving slanted across the room, books smeared knee-high and spilling across stairs and entryway, and wondering if a cat was buried underneath.

We found the cats, all safe, all hiding under the kids’ beds. We found the kid who was missing; he ran outside when the shaking started. And we found the toilet upstairs, our only significant damage, cracked off its bolts on the tile floor — though the antique mirror and framed prints in the same bathroom were still hanging on the walls, just fine.

Early labor (which can last for weeks) started here around the same time as the earthquake. And it’s weird going into labor as aftershocks diminish; it’s like the earthquake in reverse. Contractions increase in intensity to the final, long-expected big event, while the earthquake shocked us in its suddenness and then decrescendoed to these little shakers that we mostly don’t even feel anymore.

Just in time, we officially decided on spelling Kavanagh with no U, in spite of the overwhelming results in our highly scientific polls on social media.  I almost had it – with a U, I mean – arguing with Vince that this isn’t the first baby we’ve given a last name as a first name to, and we didn’t arbitrarily remove vowels for Chamberlain or Reagan just because they seemed extraneous. And since the man is already familiar with Google, Wiki, and Justice Kavanaugh, I went to the next highest authority on the name I could think of: The Mitford series.

It’s the main character’s last name, and I thought, This will prove the spelling without a doubt, no contest. I’ve read this series all the way through twice – once when Vincent was a baby and again when I was pregnant with Afton – and then blew through some of the books again this year as comfort reading during the gruesome months of morning sickness. I know these stories and characters; this series remains the only modern fiction that I truly love.

So I grabbed one of the books off the shelf, confident of winning my case. Turned the pages. Skimmed the lines. Looked for it…hold on just a minute…lo and behold:

Kavanagh. No U.

WHAT.

Well, I’ll be et fer a tater.

I wanted to put more effort into walking him out in those weeks of early labor but a round-ligament-snappy-action prevented it, in league with a hip socket on strike that kept sending me in a slow melt to the floor without warning. (Yay forties!) So instead of causing alarming scenes in public, I made myself useful by staying home for two weeks and making pitiful requests to people around me: Can you bring me water? Can I have the orange yarn and the blue tape measure? Can you put on my socks?

Vin came over, picked up the pair of socks I brought with me, and briefly inspected them before he threw one of them back on the couch and started putting the other one on my foot.

“What, you don’t like that other sock?” I asked him.

“It’s the wrong one,” he answered, wrestling this one up my ankle, angling the heel just right and straightening the toes.

I know where he’s going with this; it’s one of our oldest arguments. For 22 years, since our college days when we first shacked up in Anchorage, he’s tried to convince me that Socks Are Not Interchangeable. Socks, he says, go on certain feet.

“See?” He holds the other one up. “The big toe is longer on this one, so it goes on this foot.” He commences wrestling that one, too, and I can see that he’s sort of, kind of, maybe a little bit right, though I’d never admit it to his face.

But this neediness and confinement also shook my safe places. I know labor and birth; this is our sixth delivery. We like to think that experience prepares us for what to expect. And sometimes it does.

But other times, it deceives us – not because our expectations are wrong, but because, however much it is, our experience still isn’t enough. Our expectations might not be big enough. Our endeavors might be too safe, or our safe places might be too small. Our priorities might be too narrow, focused on marking tasks off our lists and missing the fact that we can do truly hard things; we can live through and thrive in far more than we give ourselves credit for.

God has been preparing us for familiarity to take a flying leap for a long time. Last Christmas, when we didn’t know where He was sending us, He said, When you find yourself where you never thought you’d be, I’m positioning you for something you never could have planned. He kept saying, It’s a surprise, Love. Sometimes the surprise starts off with a shaking.

And then in April when we knew big changes were ahead but didn’t know Kavanagh was one of them, He said, You know how to do this, you’ve done it before. You’ve just never seen it like this. And we’ve been trying to roll with all of the surprises ever since.

So at 3am one morning, when early labor suddenly looked less like aftershocks and more like the big event, and the prospect of waking seven kids up to go to two different places in the middle of the night seemed so much harder than just having a friend come over and letting everyone else sleep, we rolled with that, too. After months of planning on a homebirth at the lighthouse, we threw out that plan and drove to the birth center in the wee hours of the morning. Just like we did for our last two babies.

The highway was snowy, the sky was dark; the midwives had the tub running when we got there because they knew how fast it went last time. And they knew the story of the one kid who was supposed to be a waterbirth but ended up being delivered on the bed while the tub was still filling, before the assistant arrived.

That, too, was the end of familiarity, because no matter how many times you’ve done this or what patterns you’ve come to expect, there’s no guarantee you won’t get your cage rattled. And I did. All our birth experiences have gotten easier and faster, except this one.

And “labor” doesn’t come close to expressing the amount of work and travail put into birthing a human…or anything else. We use the word so much that it has lost its impact as we gloss over the clawing, writhing pain of turning yourself inside out to do the work of bringing something (or someone) into the world.

The heat was terrible. She felt scorched to the bone, but it did not touch her strength. It grew hotter and hotter. She said, “I can bear it no longer.” Yet she went on.

– George MacDonald, The Golden Key

He is our stability, with us, among us, upon us in the heat and the friction and the shaking, regardless of what everything looks like around us or feels like within us.

After twenty-three hours of off-and-on that eventually progressed to hours of hard labor, we met the one we’ve been waiting for. And he is so worth it.

So often we give up on opportunity or calling because we think, I could never do that. That is for other people, stronger people, bigger people, people who are different from me. But what we really mean is, I don’t want my world to be shaken. Our excuse is our inadequacy but what really stops us is fear, or laziness, or a combination of the two.

Because labor is work, and shaking, and life-changing. We pooh-pooh ourselves while putting those who do bigger, harder things on a pedestal, while God wants us to see what we are really made of. We want a simple to-do list, a school chart of basic assignments to check off. But God calls many of us to the earthquake and the aftermath, saying, Hey Love, you have no idea what you’re capable of.

You’ll never forget living through this.

______

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