Emerging Women

By Sarah Bessey

My hope -
my earnest expectation, my joy and my anchor in the midst of a storm -
is that even
my life matters.

It isn’t all meaningless. There is a reason, a purpose, a plan.

Because, you see, I am changing the world today.

My life can feel small sometimes.
Compared to what I dreamed about.
Where is my Great Canadian Novel?
Where is my money?
(Seriously. Where is it?)
Where is my fame?
Where are the thousands of people
that I am impacting?

Instead, here is what I do:
(and the doing of it will not make me famous)

I get up three times during the night,
stepping over a small girl sleeping on a toddler mattress in the corner of our bedroom,
to reach for the crying baby boy.
I hold him in the pitch-dark, letting his mouth find my breast,
his instincts in the dark are better than mine.

Sometimes I fall asleep in the chair.

Then I lay him back in his bed, stumble back to my bed,
checking to make sure that the wee girl is properly covered and warm before
sliding into the covers, pressing up against my husband’s back.
And two hours later, I do it all over again.

I lay in bed every morning for an extra thirty minutes
while Brian gets ready and the tinies dance around him in the washroom.
This is my gift in return for being up all night – 3o minutes in bed by myself.
It’s my time to pray, to breathe, to meditate.
Then I crawl out from the duvet,
kiss my husband with my lips shut tight against morning breath,
and make our beds.

My daughter runs a commentary all morning long
(evidently not speaking all night long has resulted in a burst dam of conversation),
words spilling behind her as she follows us about the house.
Joseph sits at my feet and reaches up with his dimpled arms,
calling “MumMumMumMumMum”
until I reach down and lift him up.
He burrows his runny nose into my hair,
clutches my neck and burrows.

I get frustrated trying to get everyone dressed and clean for the day.
I sometimes forget to make sure everyone’s teeth are brushed.
I am responsible for clipping 60 fingernails.
I notice that Anne only likes colourless food these days…
things that are yellow, brown or a dull orange….
foods like macaroni, grilled cheese, bread, crackers, cereal, cream of wheat.
I make a pot of tea every morning and it’s usually gone by 10 AM.
I sit on the floor and build puzzles.
We read books.
I don’t eat breakfast until nearly lunchtime.
They squabble over toys and territory.
I longingly think of wearing high heels and being in my office again.
We read books.
We make up a song about a new letter every day.

This week we are singing about the letter W.
W W W W W W is for WATER.
W is for WATERMELON.
W is for WET.
W is for (dum dum ba dah dah dum) WIGGLE!
And then we wiggle all over the house.
Neither one of us can sing (Anne is shockingly off-key)
but we just keep trying to come up with W words and
then when we can’t think of anymore,
we holler WIGGLE and wiggle all over again.
Joseph quite enjoys wiggling, we’ve discovered.

I laugh until I nearly cry.
I see their little heads, bent close together,
working away on something and I feel full.
We go for walks. We go to Starbucks.
We chat with our neighbours. We go the bank.
We come home for lunch. The tinies go to bed for a nap.

And I go to work.
I write press releases. I research.
I read stories of women that are caught fast in nets of despair,
depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, physical and sexual abuse,
self-harm, anorexia and bulimia.
I am their advocate.
I am advocating for their freedom and
their release from the prison of hopelessness.
I write a marketing strategy.
I think long and hard about what our key performance drivers should be.
I pray for more money to come in.
I write web pages.
I pray that the tinies will stay asleep so I can finish more work.
I feel small, David against Goliath sometimes.
But full of faith and hope and love,
knowing that we are doing a great thing in small steps.
Then they wake up.

And I’m exhausted, my sleepless night catching me again.
But we do our chores now.
We clean, we do laundry, we bake, we get supper ready.
And what’s that sound?
Is that a key in the door?
It is.
It’s Papa Bear, Mumma! Papa Bear is home!

Brian walks in the door and Anne promptly informs him that he is STINKY.
But he kisses all of us.
And he goes to have a shower after a day spent
laying hardwood floors or building decks or repairing walls.
We eat our supper, we talk about our days,
he wants the details of everything Joseph learned.
And Anne never stops talking. Joseph never stops eating.

Brian wraps his arms around me
while I step around the dishwasher door open in the kitchen.
I squirm away,
too busy to stop for a hug sometimes.

We bath the tinies, at the end letting Anne have deep water
and bubbles with her Noah’s Ark toys for a half hour.
That’s our time with Joseph, to get him ready for bed,
for Brian to play with him one-on-one.
Now it’s seven o’clock already so everyone has to head to bed.
I am nursing Joseph, holding him close to my body,
his blonde hair curling against me while I am reading emails.
Brian is in our bed, reading
The Sneetches or Amelia Bedelia or “Curious AND George, Daddy.”
We say prayers, we tuck babies into their beds,
we remember we need to brush their teeth,
we decide it can wait until tomorrow morning.

We meet in the living room at 7:30, both exhausted from our days.
We talk. We laugh. We lay on the floor and complain.
Brian checks football and hockey scores. I write a blog.
We watch The Daily Show online.
I knit Christmas presents, a long list in my mind of projects to complete.
We read books. We kiss on the floor for a while.
He goes to bed.

The house is quiet at last.
I clean up the kitchen, tuck away the last of the toys.
I sit on the couch and wind yarn in the silence, just enjoying a still house after
the tornado of activity all day.
I know I should go to bed – a long night is ahead -
but I can’t surrender the quiet.

And yet this frees me to hopeful instead of despairing.
Some people find the daily work a distraction.
A barrier between them and their real self.

This is my real self.
This is my real life.

I am changing the world today by changing one life at a time.
By being fully present, by making space for God wherever I walk,
by being open and full of invitation to the Holy Spirit.
I am changing the world and I am starting with myself.

So I find hope here.
I find hope in the corners of my daily life.
I am finding hope because I am surrounded by love.

This is it.
No do-overs.
My hope is that what I am doing now,
today,
matters.

Sarah Bessey lives in Vancouver, B.C. with her husband and two tinies. Her blog can be found at www.emergingmummy.com.

By Deb Falank

I just came across an article promoting the legal institution of marriage. The excerpt below is from the section titled “Evidence From the Social and Biological Sciences”.

Fathers excel when it comes to providing discipline, ensuring safety, and challenging their children to embrace life’s opportunities and confront life’s difficulties. The greater physical size and strength of most fathers, along with the pitch and inflection of their voice and the directive character of their speaking, give them an advantage when it comes to discipline, an advantage that is particularly evident with boys, who are more likely to comply with their fathers’ than their mothers’ discipline. Likewise, fathers are more likely than mothers to encourage their children to tackle difficult tasks, endure hardship without yielding, and seek out novel experiences. These paternal strengths also have deep biological underpinnings: Fathers typically have higher levels of testosterone—a hormone associated with dominance and assertiveness—than do mothers. Although the link between nature, nurture, and sex-specific parenting talents is undoubtedly complex, one cannot ignore the overwhelming evidence of sex differences in parenting—differences that marriage builds on to the advantage of children.

I’m all about marriage and stable families and agree with much of the broader outlines of the article. However, I find the particular stance in this paragraph to be a little disconcerting on two points, the idea that effective discipline requires particular physical characteristics, and that men are more likely than women to instill perseverance and inquisitiveness. What do you think of these premises? Is effective parenting really defined by gender in this specific way?

Deb Falank writes about women, animality, violence and Christianity at the soulful eye.