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April 4, 2013
by Serena Gideon Rice 2 Comments

Deadlines and Lifelines

Although my relative blog silence may not indicate it to most of my readers, the past two months have been very busy for me. Much of this business has involved very prosaic activities (laundry, errands, carnevale & Easter goody bags for the kids’ classes). Of course, the unique context of my current sojourn in Italy colors even these day-to-day activities with unusual challenges and rewards, and it also offers amazing opportunities to otherwise fill my time (ski weekends in the Alps, school field trip to the Triennale Design Museum, shopping day-trip to Venice — I’ll stop before you all stop reading out of pique!)

The particular business of the last two months, however, has involved a few longer-term commitments that have combined into a lesson I didn’t realize I needed to learn. The first part of that lesson is just a reminder of something I already knew about myself: I am the kind of person who likes clear, concrete, defined goals, especially when said goals offer specific deadlines against which I can track my progress. Aficionados of psychological testing will nod their heads sagely when I reveal that my dominant personality trait all three times I have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test has been “judging.” This doesn’t mean that I am judgmental (I hasten to explain, since we “Js” highly dislike both ineffective communication and mis-categorization). What it does mean is this: while at different points of my life my score for my source of energy has slid across the line between introversion and extraversion, and my preference for making decisions has tended to balance nearly equally between thinking and feeling, there is no doubt that my lifestyle is governed by a preference for structure and organization.

This controlling preference has expressed itself directly, as I said, in a few longer-term commitments that have been dominating much of my time in recent months. The first such commitment is my writing. No, not my blog, I know. This particular medium of expression has been consistent only for its infrequency and its failure to meet even my modest self-imposed deadline of one entry per month. I’m referring instead to my commitment that before I leave Italy I will complete a long-term dream: to write a novel. I first dreamed this dream when I was 8 or 9 years old and tried my hand at penning a fantasy adventure story (that particular effort petered out after three or four chapters and is now lying in repose in my mom’s garage, if it hasn’t ended its sad little life in the recycle bin). My more mature effort, however, has been germinating for over a year and a half, and is the proud owner of an entire notebook filled with plot outline and character sketches, snatches of dialogue and random draft scenes. Until January of this year, however, the translation of all this planning into sequential written prose was going very slowly. While I love to write, there always seemed to be dishes to wash, or groceries to buy, or friends to meet for coffee, or blog entries to write, and I found it very difficult to carve out the time demanded by this serious ambition.

Then, one of those cappuccino-loving friends challenged me to start setting deadlines for myself. Not the vague, future goal of “finish before I leave Italy,” but a week-by-week schedule of chapter completion that would get me to my goal with a little room to spare. What a difference a deadline makes! The novel has transformed from an idea to an actual story, with nearly eighty pages and 8 1/2 chapters of substance stored on my hard drive. Granted, the schedule of completion charted in the margins of my calendar had me completing chapter 10 by April 5, but considering that I was only part way through chapter 2 in late-January (after 6 months of work) I will celebrate this page-count as a practical victory.

I am all the more inclined to revel in this progress because of the other goal that absorbed a lot of my time in the last two months – training for my first 10K race. Unlike the novel, this achievement had never been a long-cherished desire. Before February of this year I had never even run 5 kilometers at a go in my life and I have never considered myself an athlete. At another January coffee date, however, another friend suggested that I try to run the Stramilano of the 50,000 with her in March. That evening, just to see if it was even plausible, I went surfing the internet for a 10K training schedule for first-time racers. Of course, once I had that clear, beautiful schedule beaming off my computer screen, with the first two training runs fatefully set at the exact distance I was already running twice a week, I was hooked. This wasn’t just the gratifying structure of regular deadlines. This was a professionally constructed schedule of deadlines specifically prepared for runners in my exact situation. I organized my daily routine around that schedule — never scheduling coffee for Tuesdays or Thursday so that I could do my runs; trading my vacation morning of watching the kids (so that Tyler could ski) for an hour to run on the hotel treadmill; scheduling a babysitter on the weekend that Tyler was away so that I wouldn’t miss my first 3 mile training run. As the race day approached and my fitness improved I added a bonus incentive: the measurable goal of a run time. This system of deadlines, goals, and measurable results was magic. On the 24th of March even a sudden bout of vomiting minutes before the race did not dissuade me (note to other novice runners – don’t add an orange to your breakfast on race day, too much acid). When the loudspeaker boomed our “Via” and the hundreds of red balloons released into the sky above the Duomo, I was off: dodging race walkers (it’s a very non-competitive race), puddles (it rained the entire morning), and real runners coming up from the rear (a few of whom I gratifyingly re-passed later on once they ran out of steam). I certainly didn’t set any records, but at 68 minutes I beat my goal time by 2 minutes and felt the rush of a goal achieved.

So much for the affirmation of a character trait that 36 years has firmly established in the understanding of anyone who knows me at all well. The real point of this entry in the caveat that I must now add to my assertion that my soul yearns for structure, and organization, and deadlines: deadlines don’t work for lifelines. You see, the last two months have also contained the season of the Christian church year termed lent, and this year I tried to impose a deadline schedule on my spiritual practice for observing this season. Although the practice of “giving up” something for lent is relatively unusual in the generally evangelical branch of Christianity to which I belong, I have come to deeply appreciate this discipline in the past 7 or 8 years. It provides a chance to temporarily eliminate some small thing from my daily life that it not intrinsically bad, but that can be more fruitfully replaced with prayer or meditation. So, for example, when I gave up chocolate for the span between Ash Wednesday and Easter, my predictable daily yearnings for that sweet, rich confection provided a dependable reminder to re-center my awareness on gratitude to the God who gave up so very much more to reestablish a bridge for direct relationship with human beings, myself included.

So, this year my spiritual “fast” was from Facebook. I don’t think there is anything wrong with Facebook. To the contrary, since my move to Italy it has become a valued point of contact with “home” that allows me to know what is happening in the lives of my friends and to keep them informed about my European adventures without spending hours on the phone or e-mail, or composing generic mass letters. All the same, this useful tool can be a wasteful time drain and a distraction from precious moments with my children and husband. So, I committed to abstain from the little blue app on my phone for 46 days. The negative side of fasting, however, the “giving up” is not the full purpose of lent. Rather, the Lenten practice is aimed at replacing the denied pleasure with one that is spiritual in nature. And so, before signing off from Facebook on February 13 I made a list of all my Facebook “friends” and committed to pray for each of them at least twice during lent. Thus was born my Lenten schedule of deadlines. What a wonderful plan for my organizer’s soul. I could stay indirectly connected to all those distant friends and family in a spiritually vital way, and redeem some of that lost time I had been wasting clicking on electronic posters proclaiming familiar truisms as though they were the newest idea since the iphone5. This might be my best Lenten practice ever!

Well, yes and no. It was certainly good to pray for my friends and extended family, although this practice brought with it the uncomfortable realization of just how infrequently I do this except when I am aware of moments of crisis in their lives. It was also both good and uncomfortable to shine a spotlight on my inconsistency with prayer in general. While I aim for a daily time of prayer, early wake-up from kids and unplanned phone calls or class e-mails often disrupt these plans, and I was not aware of quite how often I miss my goal until I had a daily schedule. Planning to pray for 6 friends a day suddenly makes missing “a day or two” much more concrete when that list grows to 24 the next time I actually sit down with it.

Unfortunately, this spotlight was not very motivating. It turns out that prayer is really not much like running. When illness or travel temporarily derailed my training schedule I would sit down with my calendar and schedule out a shift to avoid getting behind in my progress toward my goal. When the Gigglemonster started his morning yell for “Mommy!” 45 minutes early, however, I would write myself a bleary mental note about doing my prayer time later that day, and then forget about it until the next day, when my reaction to “reading” that mental note was a mumbled “Oh crud, I only have 20 minutes, how am I going to get through 12 people plus reading scripture?” That’s not how I want to feel about prayer. I expect to have to drag myself to lace up my running shoes — that’s why I need a training schedule — but my prayer schedule seemed to work in reverse: it made into a burden what should have been a source of joy and renewal.

Now I want to be clear, even in my organizationally-obsessed mind prayer is not subject to formula; it is not a magical incantation that needs to be said just perfectly in order to “work.” Just the opposite, I experience prayer as a conversation that only “works” in the sense of the relationship it builds. The effectiveness of prayer thus depends upon the conversation partners, and in this relationship I have no illusions about where the problems come from. The God I pray to is no baal – he does need to be woken up, or called back from a journey, or interrupted in the midst of relieving bodily functions. God is always present and is always worth talking to, if I can get my head into the space where I can actually engage. And this is where my prayer schedule ran me into trouble. This Lenten journey has brought me to the realization that despite my type A, organization-loving, schedule-dependent nature, deadlines are limited in their utility. Deadlines are for things that you need to do despite the fact that they aren’t always fun — important, good for you, even necessary, but things that you are tempted to put off when there are competing options for how to spend your time. Problems come when I apply this model of motivating myself to activities that offer their own intrinsic motivation, because the deadline mentality replaces this motivation.

This pattern applies not just to prayer. The same danger arises when I start evaluating and calculating the minutes I spend in “quality time” interacting with my children (“Oh no! we haven’t done any art projects this week – quick, pull out the paints even if Princess Imagination would rather play let’s pretend and the Gigglemonster is screaming for the Wii”), or connecting with my husband (the compulsion to try to force a substantive conversation rather than another night of cuddling in front of the TV — regardless of how physically and mentally exhausted we both feel). When I start thinking in terms of quantifiable goals or benchmarks of adequate achievement the joy of the interaction gets lost in the task-nature of creating it. When I apply the patterns and structures of work to my sources of meaning and joy, then they become work. But while work is important for life, and I do sometimes need to put work into these sources of life’s meaning, I also need to remember the difference between life and work. The most important relationships in my life, with my God and with my family, are my lifelines to an existence that means more than a series of schedules and goals.

And so, as I embark on my 37th year of life, I have a new goal: to distinguish my lifelines from my deadlines, and to put them in their proper order. I can get satisfaction from meeting deadlines and achieving goals, but that is not what makes my life alive, and no deadline is more important that making sure that I really live each day.

(A few of the things that have been filling my time, and bringing me joy:)

What an awesome backdrop for a run!

Uno…due…tre…Via!

Reason #417 that kids are fun: you get to go sledding again!

Call her Princess Skier

“Look, Mommy! I such a fast ski person!”

The Giggle monster had a unique way of putting on his ski helmet.

Carnevale in Parco Sempione.

Our first AC Milan match at San Siro.

She actually had fun at the match, I swear!

I finally went to see the Last Supper (Genius!)

It’s finally warm enough to play on the terrazza again!

Look who lost her first tooth!

“Look what I can do!”

“Look. Mommy, I can do it too!”

They’re still my little babies!

Too cute not to share

They so don’t appreciate that they are playing in a gorgeous medieval square.

My beauty.

I love that they are friends.

I actually got a decent picture of all three of us!

…love, love, love that they are friends.

Gra’ma brought Easter egg dye from the states!

For book-character-day at school Princess Imagination went as Fancy Nancy

January 16, 2013
by Serena Gideon Rice 2 Comments

Laundry Guilt

A day or two ago a friend of mine re-posted one of those “mommy-thoughts” that are always floating around on Facebook. This particular quote went something like this:

Someday all those piles of laundry will be gone,

and you will miss them.

It is a beautiful sentiment – a reminder to treasure the time with your children while you can, and not to feel guilty or overwhelmed if the endless household chores that come along with having children go undone. I expressed a very similar sentiment only a few posts back in reflecting on my children’s demands for what I too often see as “my time” (see post Parenting in the Air https://faithfamilyandfocaccia.wordpress.com/2012/12/16/parenting-in-the-air/).

When I read this Facebook quote, however, it had the opposite effect on me. It didn’t assuage my guilt for the massive pile of unfolded laundry heaped onto my couch. Rather, I got a guilt-slap right across the face. Guilt because I desperately wanted to fold and put away that laundry and I had been planning to do just that as soon as the kids and I got home. You see, I was scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed on my phone, while I waited outside the kids’ school to pick them up. I’d had a busy day and I had not had the chance to get to the laundry in the morning as I had planned, and the thought of leaving it there for one more night tied my insides into knots.

Because the thing is, at some point the laundry really does need to get done. For one thing, there’s the couch. We need to actually be able to sit on it. I am not complaining about my apartment. At 131 square meters it is really a decent size for an apartment in Milan and I know a number of my friends here will roll their eyes at me if I say I don’t have enough space. But with four people and all their stuff (including the bags full of new Christmas things we just brought back), that space fills up quickly and there is certainly none left over for a dedicated laundry area. In terms of clean surfaces not otherwise occupied with more than their share of clutter there are:

tables (but we need those for eating, and homework, and art activities, and games),
beds (but we need those for sleeping, and rare is the day that clean laundry is taken down from the line, folded, and replaced in the appropriate drawer or wardrobe all within the 16 or 17 hour period that is my waking-working day);
or the couch (the single de facto option).

I usually manage to maintain a sufficient lead on the clean-but-wrinkle-forming pile that it only really covers the chaise lounge side of the couch, leaving two or even three spots free for the comfort of the family bums. This advantage, however, requires me to continually be working to decrease the pile, so that the newly dried clothes can be taken off the line to make room for the next load that is sitting in the washer and will develop mildew if it is not taken out and hung up.

For another thing, there is the fact that the children (from whom the laundry is threatening to steal my time) need clean clothes. Granted, they have a lot of clothes – much more than they really need because Gymboree was having ridiculous sales while we were home at Christmas and I just couldn’t resist. These bursting drawers, however, are of no help during the school week when the children have to wear their school uniforms. These uniforms are not cheap, and they have an impressive capacity to attract and display dirt, paint, food, and all manner of other grime. What is more, there are two separate uniforms for each child – standard and gym, which have to be worn on specific days of the week depending on the scheduled activities of the day. All this means that we do not have an endless supply and they need continually to be washed. When the laundry monster gets an advantage on Mommy the inevitable result is an increase in my morning crabbiness in direct proportion to the amount of time it adds to our usual morning rush for me to locate the needed items of apparel. If one or more of the items are not in their appropriate drawer the general result is a moaned “Oh, fudgesicle” and a frantic effort to root through the pile of unfolded laundry on the infamous couch (or through the stacks of folded laundry waiting in the hamper to be put away) all while trying not to disturb the questionable order of these mounds with my efforts. If this search is unsuccessful, the hunt commences in the dirty clothes bags, usually accompanied by a more colorful expletive muttered under my breath when the item is found, and proves to be in the hamper for a very good reason, leaving me with the question of whether Princess Imagination can still squeeze into the Gigglemonster’s size 4 shirt, or whether I can rely on my notoriously hot-blooded daughter to keep her blazer on over short sleeves instead.

To repeat, the laundry really does need to get done! Ideally this would happen while the kids are at school, and when I was a working mom I couldn’t understand how stay-at-home moms with school-aged children could complain about not having enough time. Now I know. There are so many activities that have to get squeezed into that magic, shrinking time frame “when the kids are at school.” There is the actual transit to and from school (which usually eats up an hour, either because I leave the car at school and walk home or because I have to arrive-super early and sit in the car in order to get a decent parking space), as well as grocery shopping, and Bible study prep, and training for the 10K run in 10 weeks (OK – not strictly a “necessity” but this is the one chance I will probably ever have to do something like this and it is good for my health, so lay off), and the necessary shower after that, and time to connect with friends (which I will also argue as a necessity when living as part of a very inter-dependent ex-pat community in a foreign country where most interactions make me feel like an idiot because of language incompetence). Plus, you have to remember that there is no dryer, so laundry involves much more than transfers from hamper, to washer, to dryer. It also involves all the time to individually hang each item (in a way that won’t create weird marks at the shoulder or hem), wait for them to dry (which can take from 8 hours to 3 days, depending on the weather outside and whether the building has cranked up the thermostat that controls our radiators), and then individually take down each item and move everything to the couch for it eventual progress to the folding and putting away stages.

So, when I fail to accomplish all these tasks in the 6 short hours the children are at school, I have three options:

Add this to the list of household chores that I have to complete as soon as the children are in bed. Dinner dishes are a pretty inevitable element to this list, as is tidying-up (a.k.a. – pick up all the toy cars, and dolls, and marking pens scattered arbitrarily across our limited floor space, which will make the journey from the bedroom to the kitchen at 4 am when the Gigglemonster howls for more milk a dangerous proposition in sleep-fogged darkness). If we are expecting company the next day or if the cleaning lady is coming (yes, I know, how dare I complain about household chores when my saintly Tina comes for 8 hours every other week to achieve more genuine cleaning that I could achieve in a month!) then the tidying needs to be much more intensive. And the result is that even without folding and stowing laundry I am exhausted, if not comatose, by the time I sit down next to my husband on the couch — or as close to him as is permitted by my piles of laundry and his piles of papers and work folders (which he has pulled out in part because he has work to do and in part because I am clearly too busy for him). That’s not the way to sustain a healthy marriage. He needs my time, and attention, and energy just as much as the kids do. While he is more patient with me than the kids, he doesn’t deserve to always come last, so laundry can’t always happen during “his” time.
Anticipate that I will have one of those all-too-frequent jolts of writer’s inspiration at 1:00am (what is it about 1:00am?!) that is more destructive to sleep that an Italian buon caffe (that is, espresso in American). In which case, I can utilize my unwelcome insomnia to tuck into the laundry pile with all that jittery energy. The problem is, the creative energy that woke me up does not seem to be satisfied by the mundane task of folding clean clothes and putting them into divided hampers to be delivered to the appropriate bedrooms once their occupants have woken at a normal time for human activity. No. That energy is not going to be mollified enough to allow my return to bed for a few hours of much needed slumber until I put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and make a little progress on the pesky novel that is trying so hard to be born.
So, I am left with option #3. That is, to violate the sacred time the universe has given me when my young children actually want my attention, and squander it on the ever replenishing laundry pile.

And yesterday, that is exactly what I did. I took about 30 minutes of the precious two hours between our return from school and zero hour for starting dinner preparations, and I put clean clothes onto hangers in closets and I folded them and put them into drawers.

And do you know what? I still managed to be a good mother. I took a mini-break between each fold to catch the ball the Gigglemonster was throwing to me and gently lob it back. I didn’t go chasing after it when he or I failed to catch it – “Mommy’s doing the laundry, Honey, you need to go get the ball” – but I still played with him, and he was none the worse for a little extra exercise. And I carried on a conversation with Princess Imagination that enabled her imaginative play (right now it is mostly based on the characters from Disney’s Cinderella), although my role was restricted to vocal participation.

And I don’t feel guilty any more. In fact, I’m a little proud of myself for finding a way to get the work done in a positive way in front of them. My children are not being raised in a penthouse environment where meals mysteriously appear on the table or beds miraculously make themselves while the family is out doing other things. My children see the work that goes into maintaining our household. They see that Mommy works hard, just like Daddy does, and when they complain about our busyness they hear that we do it for them. I can’t always be present to them in exactly the way they want me to be, but acts of service are a language of love as well.

And so, I will love them through their laundry.

Faith, Family, & Focaccia

A faith and culture Mommy blog, because real life gets all mixed together like that.

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Deadlines and Lifelines

Laundry Guilt

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