Shifts and Changes: part three, rest

When Matt and I got married we settled into the early marriage meme that he would be the disciplined one who accomplished stuff and kept a regular schedule, and I would be the loosie goosie one who wouldn't be able to wake up in the morning, who would terrifyingly and horrifically procrastinate on all important work, and who would, you know, be “creative” or something. So then we had some kids–I know this comes up a lot on this blog, and then we had some kids, but it does continue to radically preoccupy me, all the children, I'd love to blog about other things, but they keep inserting themselves—and I started to have some personality changes. The biggest one is that I gained a vastly bigger capacity to do more work. With each child, your ability to work grows. You learn that you can push past the point of exhaustion over and over and not die. That's what motherhood is, working a little bit harder than you thought you could the day before. It's like a long, agonizingly slow boot camp where you are broken down and put back together. Instead of a drill sargeant, you have a screaming hysterical infant. The similarities are unnerving.

So I'm not a procrastinator any more. I just do work without being anxious about whether or not I will fail. I know I will fail, so I just go ahead and do it and then the failure seems somewhat smaller. I schedule stuff. Everything I have to do gets written down at the time I'm going to do it. And, most shockingly and tragically, I am more and more like Matt in my fixed discipline and productivity. If I plan to spend an hour writing, I just sit down and do it. I don't really stare at the page as before and weep, I sit there and shove words on it.

But there is one big huge problem with this personality shift for me. And that is that I cannot climb down any more from the belief that I need to be working every moment of every day. For whatever reason, I cannot seem to Rest, neither in the practical sense of sitting down to read a book, nor in the spiritusl sense of coming down from high alert. Not to be melodramatic. I mean, I sleep really gorgeously well in my big warm bed. And at the end of a long school day I collapse in a chair and read the Internet. It's not like I work All the time. But at moments, like on a family vacation, when I should be lolling about by the pool, I'm more often found cleaning the hotel room and being angry about it. Maybe it's that I've been morphed into Martha and I'm standing there, jealous at all the nice Marys sitting around Jesus, waving my wooden spoon and muttering bitterly. Maybe it's just that I'm caught in a bad habit.

So, I've been trying to figure out how to rest, how to take a day off (does anyone know even how to do this?) how to come down from the sense of doom that if I stop moving all of reality will come crashing down. Its not that I think I'm Jesus, holding it all together. It's that when I do stop moving, the house completely vomits on itself and I have start over from zero. The doom is real, but it's starting to be exhausting.

Matt thought, since this seems to be the biggest thing clouding over me right now, that I ought to turn it into a Lenten discipline. For Lent I should take a day off, or something. This just seems like the hardest thing he could suggest. I'd much rather give up chocolate, cept I don't love chocolate that much. In the two intervening weeks I'm trying to read a snatch of a book every day. How is it working? Come over and see the pile of perfectly uncreased, unmarred tomes on my desk and say a prayer for me.