Category Archives: Observations

Waiting

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It’s interesting hearing about how devoted our generation/culture is to “instant gratification.”

I can’t deny it, but today I’m recognizing a type of… affinity with previous generations: With the type that hovered over the Sears catalogue, looking for that perfect something, then waiting impatiently for the mail to bring the desired item.

I don’t know why it should feel like Christmas– after all, I paid for it myself, and I know it’s coming– but somehow checking the mail each day brings a tiny thrill of hope. Will there be something *extra* today?

This wondering (though not the anticipation) is slightly diminished with the packages that have tracking numbers, but many of the books I buy come media mail, and truly could come anytime in a 3-week span. The tracking numbers are great though– I’ve only got two more days until my computer shows up. This according to Fed Ex, and ahead of schedule.

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I ordered several things today, and maybe buying “so much” has got my blood up. I feel myself wanting to go out an buy something “for real.” Something I can hold (not groceries, that’s boring). I keep thinking of the collection of journals (blank books) I saw at B&N last week. There were some nice ones there…

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I had this feeling a lot when Jay was in Antarctica last November. I kept warning him that I was going to go out and buy something totally unnecessary, just ’cause I was dying to buy something. And the bigger the better

“I need socks,” he’d e-mail back. “Why don’t you get me some socks? Or groceries. You’re probably getting low on something…” This, I informed him, is not the type of shopping/buying I’m talking about. I wanted to buy… yet another journal, the perfect pen, some book I’ve been meaning to read, or a reference volume for my storytelling or FAM work. Something useless and fun.

Socks are neither.

Never got anything big, though. Closest I got was a couple tubes of bath salts.

Don’t remember if I even got to finish them both before Jay came home. Something about running water seems to draw my children from sleep…

I eventually gave-up.

Oh, I did buy a new palm pilot (PDA), but returned it before the trial week was up. Can’t remember now if that got the bug out of my system…

Answers to prayer, and a curious difference.

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Jay found my Palm (PDA) yesterday. Thank you Jesus! It’s been missing for several weeks. I had assumed it was only buried somewhere, but we’ve cleaned the house a few times since it was lost and never found it. It was in the car. *sigh*

My “currently reading” is the other answer to prayer. I’ve been needing a new book/topic for H.S. Sunday School, and this (Fearfully and Wonderfully Made by Brand and Yancy) looks like it’s going to be our choice. I’ll be reading ahead to pick and choose, but I’m enjoying it for me too. I might say more about it later.

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Jay and I learned a new difference between us we hadn’t noticed before:

  • I’m ready for action when I plan the details– since I do most of my thinking and weighing of options (pro and con comparisons) before I get to absolute details.
  • Jay begins to do his thinking and weighing after he has the details in front of him.

The reason we noticed this is that we spec.ed-out a laptop together last Wednesday. We spent more than an hour looking and discussing specifics, and ended up with a machine we both liked (though part of the point of this is to have a machine of my own…). I felt excited, and asked (I thought rhetorically), whether he was ready to get it.

To my surprise he said no. And that’s when we had our little revelation.

By now I think we’re both planning to do it, we’re just waiting on the timing.

Expectations

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(Originally posted on Xanga)

My husband is amazing. He has always had the type of maturity (I seem to lack) that sees something needing to be done, and does it. But especially lately, as I’ve been getting more and more run-down by this third pregnancy, he’s been stepping up to the plate and batting for both of us.I am so thankful for him. And proud of him too.

My mom thinks pretty highly of him also, and he recently told me about an e-mail she sent him listing all these great qualities she saw in him. He was having a crummy day, and when he read it he felt hugely ambivalent.

Naturally it’s encouraging to have your positive traits noticed and commended (I would think this is especially true if it’s your mother-in-law doing the noticing), but the big “drainer” (to him) was that he suddenly felt he had this standard he had to measure up to. (He seems to frequently react this way if he is complemented while down.) Naturally this is a tough place for me to fall into, b/c it sets me in the spot of trying to build him up without digging him deeper. Touchy job.

But fortunately I had been thinking about a similar situation earlier that day. Or maybe you could call it an idea that relates. If only in my own mind: I’m a good mom. I’m good at what I do.

There. I said it.

Have you ever looked at the over-all picture of your work and said that? I think there’s a lot more people who could than do.

Recently I switched from my OB/GYN doctor back to the midwife/birth clinic where both my girls were born (another story).

The midwife meeting with me asked why we were having this third. Laughing, because I didn’t have a concrete answer for her (“noyb”), I said, “I’m such a good mom I knew I needed another one.”

I immediately felt the blush from my neck to my forehead, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Well of course you are!” she replied sincerely. And I instantly remembered two other people who used the phrase to describe me (and, I think, to encourage me), when I told them I was pregnant with my third.

Now I have to be the first to say I’m not perfect (otherwise someone else will doubtless point that out), but who ever said that good has to be perfect?

This was the concept I shared with my husband that night. No one (least of all my mother) is holding the illusion that he is perfect. There is not going to be some sudden crash of scenery that reveals him as *gasp* human to an unsuspecting public.

And there won’t be for me either…

How busy do we have to be as Christians?

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Currently Reading
The Overload Syndrome: Learning to Live Within Your Limits
By Richard A. Swenson, Richard A. Swenson M.D.
see related

I found a good reminder today in a book called The Overload Syndrome.  It’s a book that asks readers first to recognize they have limits then encourages them to live inside those limits, despite all they could be doing, in order to remain healthy and (even) best available to God.

“God does not have to depend on human exhaustion to get His work done.  God is not so desperate for resources to accomplish His purposes that we have to abandon the raising of our children in order to accommodate Him.  God is not so despairing of where to turn next that He has to ask us to go without sleep for five nights in a row.  Chronic overloading is not a prerequisite for authentic Christianity.  Quite the contrary, overloading is often what we do when we forget who God is.

“Someone has said, ‘God can do in twenty minutes what it takes us twenty years to do.’  Let’s trust more and do less.  Is it busyness that moves mountains…or faith?”  (pp. 36, 72).

I have a remarkably empty calendar right now.  Perhaps the emptiest it’s been since I could set my own schedule: all I have in stone is church/Sunday school on Sunday and ToastMasters for an hour on Mondays.

And I have rarely felt this tired.  Granted, that has everything to do with being pregnant, sick, and corralling a house with 2 toddlers.

But, the best thing about being tired (and I like this) is that it makes me ruthlessly evaluate every new (or old) opportunity that comes my way.

It makes me look at what need is being met in this activity– either by me or for me– and if it’s not important (enough), it is very easy to let it go.  This awareness also makes it relatively easy to occasionally pick-up new things w/o feeling guilty.  The cost/benefits ratio is the easiest to see it’s been in years.

Muscle-memory

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Do we consider (I wonder) the way we’re training our mind/will/emotions in our daily responses to things?

Earlier this week a friend my mom’s age was mentioning to me how her mother’s dementia was worsening. This friend described how hard it was getting to shift her mother’s focus off the negative (real and imagined) of her own world.

I said that, since we all have to choose to be positive anyway (negative seems to come so naturally), perhaps her mother was just past that place of being able to make that choice. The daughter looked me in the eye and said, “It’s a muscle-memory thing.”

I’ve been thinking about that since Tuesday– Apparently this woman used to find the negative, even when she had the choice, and now that she has less and less capacity to choose, she’s paying for it.

That phrase my friend used seems so spot-on: “Muscle memory.”

It makes me think of my guitar practice, and how exciting it is when my fingers just go where they need to be, without my having to think about it. They’re beginning to be trained, but only because I made it happen at first, by doing and thinking about it, over and over.