*kendraspondence*

Have you ever just not shown up?

For your own life?

Just kind of kept hitting snooze and hoped your own reality would understand?

I do this, often.  I just get all busy about being busy and then I burn out and then I can’t be bothered with my actual LIFE life portion of the program.

In college?  I pretended to be sick for MAKE A DIFFERENCE DAY.  Who skips out on Make a Difference Day?  That’s like saying, “I do not want to make a difference.  I want world hunger to persist and I want my part in remedying it to remain unspoiled.  It is more important for me to catch up on my napping because I am a college student and I do not nap nearly enough three times a day to interrupt naptime for a couple hours of service to my community for which I will receive a free t-shirt and many donut holes.”
I apparently skip out on Make a Difference Day.  I pretended to Not Hear the voicemails from all of my earnest friends telling me they’d wait another 15 minutes for me…maybe I was still in the shower…or maybe I got the meeting place wrong or…

Maybe I just was an epic fail of a person at showing up for her own life.

In my home, you would not believe how often I fail to show up.  Um, hallo. Clearly too busy here watching “House Hunters” and “Design on a Dime” to swiff the floor right now!  Or paint a cream-colored wall covered in finger prints that I ruefully stare at every day wondering why I have lived here 3 years and still expect Kool-Aid man to come bursting through the wall and give me an excuse to give that wall some attention.

***

Not that we’re keeping score, but today is the 10th anniversary of my first Valentine’s Day with Lovey Loverpants in which he was confused by my verbiage and thought that when I said, “We are going out to dinner,” I meant with him and not my roommates. This misunderstanding meant he drove 7 hours to my apartment in DC and was dressed in a BOWTIE awaiting my arrival so that we could go out to dinner.  Only, shoooooot!  I had just eaten!  With my roommates.  Don’t you remember?

So I ordered him a pizza and together we enjoyed it, he eating it, and me enjoying him in a bowtie.

To let the circle go unbroken, we celebrated tonight with a similar circular-shaped pie, only with Baby Girl (and, by extension, Wee En Utero Baby).  We all ate together this year, though, and that was sweet indeed.

***

Prior to that, though, there were CHOCOLATE BUFFETS to orchestrate, and this was perhaps one of my proudest feats in the kitchen to date.  I hosted a little Mary Kay showing of our new products (and still have a few gift bags and one of these gift boxes left if you are in the market, I’ll send it your way with free shipping). To sweeten the deal, I offered my guests a self-guided tour of chocolate.  Somehow we all managed to find our way….

***

Chocolate Pretzel Tart

Homemade strawberry marshmallows

Made with help from Baby Girl

The world’s largest shmallow

A glimpse of the buffet:

A few valentines made by Baby Girl and a gluestick:

A few of my sweethearts

When it comes to how we operate as a couple, how we run our household, and how we exist as a family, the little things are extremely important to us.

A simple post-it note with our code word (what? you don’t have one with your loverpants, too?), a text when I’m standing in line at the post office, a sink of dishes cleaned without supplication –these rule the Loverpants school.

So when I examine the things that I have been especially begrudging lately, this is what I see:

How am I to be faithful in large matters, like raising a child that doesn’t just know it’s wrong to keep turning the dial of the vending machine with all the slime globes in it even though one knows they’re going to keep coming out for free because the machine is BROKEN. I want my kid to know it’s wrong and therefore, to do the right thing. Which is what I should have done in the lobby of Kmart in 1989 when my mother was still checking out her Laura Ashley towels at the register.

How can I be faithful in the big matters when I am so whiney in the little matters? How can I accept and be diligent in the tasks that this world so needs to be done when I am throwing a hissy to match up my own socks?

I think about Proverbs 31 –the chapter I made a part of my vows, my anthem for our marriage, our household, our family. It describes a woman who is so lofty compared to me. She never complains. She gets up early without being a total bearcub about it. She tills her garden. She probably matches up all her socks and those of her kids.

I read this recently and I realized what I was missing.

King Lemuel describes an amazing woman in the last chapter of Proverbs. It would profit every Christian wife to read this chapter often. She is a talented woman. In fact, she even helps with the income.¹⁰¹ It is not wrong for a wife to pursue a career if it does not interfere with her domestic responsibilities. Judging from all that she does for her family, the ideal woman of Proverbs 31 is an industrious, self-disciplined woman who schedules her time carefully. Nothing is too much trouble for her. She even rises before daybreak to prepare breakfast for her family.¹⁰² One word is probably more important than any other in the passage. It is the word that describes her sustaining attitude: “She worketh willingly with her hands.”¹⁰³¹⁰⁴

The literal meaning is “with pleasure.” Her deepest joy and satisfaction is found in making her family happy. You see, the Lord is interested not only in what we do, but also in how we do it. Our attitude matters to Him. When a Christian wife is yielded to Christ she will be able to accept her God-given role joyfully, and her husband’s heart will cry “Amen” when he reads the words, “The man who finds a wife finds a good thing; she is a blessing to him from the Lord!”

I may not find pleasure in the actual work of the little things, but the little things do amount to something much bigger than socks and spilled milk and the total crap job I do of cleaning the bathroom every. single time. But I can find pleasure in knowing that the love I have for my family is manifested in some fractional way by the instance of my refilling the toilet paper, and even if my family doesn’t thank me for it, Someone Upstairs is pleased with me. Nothing says loving.

My friend Stef is putting her condo up for sale which she did not consult me about, rendering me embittered, sulky, and tying a POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS around her building so no one will want to buy her unit and she and her adorable fam will have to be my neighbor forever.

But I’m happy for her, especially because I know she’s moving to a more junior town for all the right reasons. “We’re not saving anything living here,” she said, “And it would be so cool to be able to be saving, to be able to explore Montessori [for her daughter Mbel].”

It really would be cool. Would it be cooler than cool?

As I look around our place with the spiral staircase which Baby Girl is inevitably going to take a skate down since I myself who has mastered steps over 28 years have already skated down…As I consider the attributes of our home’s location: Close to the T, within walking distance to everything you could want, a 10 minute drive to the airport, I begin to consider all those attributes as part of our Cool Urban Life. I love the life we have cultivated here, but the priorities are shifting, sometimes rapidly, sometimes as slow but large glaciers roving over the peninsulas of my twentysomething desires.

We have no plans to move any time soon, but I feel its imminence in a way, and I’m okay with it, I have to be okay with it. I’ve got a cool girl to be providing for, and she’s worth the sacrifice of a spiral staircase.

Even if she is not a genius…

she’s a cute little Easter egg, isn’t she?

I’ve been feeling very satisfied about my roles as desperate housewife and baby wrangler this week. I wish I could tell you it is because I had been reflecting on the call of Titus 2 to be a keeper of my home, or that I’ve retrofitted a jacuzzi into my bathroom, or that Baby Girl is walking all because of my patient lead.

But the real reason is because I was reading the gospel according to Martha while I was in Michigan. And now Martha is all up in my head.

Martha is not someone that I suspect many of us look at and think, “Well, if Martha can do that, then surely so can I!” We all know that she operates with a team of elf people prepping her kitchen and tilling her farm in the Hamptons and making sure she has full bottles of toner to keep her Botoxy forehead looking all smooth and supple. Rather, I imagine that most of you all are like I am and look at her and wonder: If I had what she has, would I still do it like she does?

Or would I sit back in my yoga pants clearing out the DVR while eating Twizzlers for lunch and still have traces of yesterday’s mascara smudged around my eyes?

I’d like to think that I would at least attempt to live upright like Martha, if I had all that help. But since I don’t, I try to steal germs of what I believe to be her lifestyle. At least the life that she purports to live, BECAUSE MAGAZINES DON’T LIE, YOUNG.

I was really inspired by how clean she tries to keep her office(s). So this week I’ve been cleaning up the kitchen before I endeavor to do any other shenanigans. I cleaned out the science experiments in the fridge. I’ve tried to have the kitchen table cleared before Lovey Loverpants get home. I’ve also really tried to live out the “no time like the present” with my other chores. And you know what? I don’t have as much dread about all that I have to do, because I’ve been kissing all the ugly frogs first and then the rest of the details all look like handsome princes.

I know this sounds so fundamental, so big fat DUH to many of you, but I’ve been stuck for a couple months on what I esteem to be my duties and what I feel are things that eventually someone will get to, at some point. When a black guy becomes president. Oh snap that’s NOW!

I’m amazed that something like an article in a magazine for hypermanic domestics could help me to refocus my priorities and realize that it’s not all about me. I want a clean home so that I and everyone else I love that lives in it or visits it will feel at ease. It’s so basic, but yet so hard to realize internally and then to master.

If you’ll excuse me now. I need to see if we have any Twizzlers for lunch.