How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.     -Annie Dillard

It’s happening again.

It started in late May, and it continues to roll out across my social media feeds through the first weeks of and into the middle of June: the shriek of panic or lament that school is out for the summer.

This doesn’t come from the students, of course. The students are thrilled to be cut loose from the constraints of the school year’s 180 days.

No, the cry comes– to a person– from their mothers, women who work full-time, part-time, away from or at home, mothers who meet the many demands on their lives–in one way or another–in part because their children are in school.

Until they aren’t.

Yes, the school year has ended, and suddenly these children are not neatly and appropriately occupied for six to eight hours a day and are instead unavoidably At Home.

The heart of the maternal need is a simple question: What to do? 

And this blog post intends to answer it.

Or, anyway, to offer something–just a little something–that could potentially be helpful. 

***

First, an acknowledgement:  It might be easy for someone standing on the outside to throw a little shade on these lamenting mothers (“Don’t you want to be with your children?” they may ask, and maybe–can you tell?–they are even snide about it). Because mothers are supposed to revel in motherhood. They are supposed to preside over the lives of their children unruffled and wise, smiling warm and unwavering smiles. They are not, in fact, meant to be people so much as mothers–which is an oxymoronic expectation, but I digress.

Those smug assumptions about motherhood come from people who have never been mothers or who have never observed motherhood closely– or who, having long ago released their now-grown children into the world, remember all of it with an affectionate and overblown fondness that has obliterated the harder kernels of memory.

Parenting is hard. That’s a fact.

And children, newly released from the bonds of school, brimming with energetic demands or rendered dissatisfied and fractious by their freedom, can be a challenge. Even to themselves.

***

So here, another acknowledgement: Children are meant to be enjoyed. I will amplify this and go so far as to say that people are meant to be enjoyed, that beyond meeting the demands of survival (that whole food, clothing, shelter bit), enjoyment is The Thing. Enjoying someone is embodied love: it is saying and showing that the other is terrifically worthwhile.

We should do this for one another, and parents should most absolutely definitely do this for their children.

***

Yet another acknowledgement: No one is enjoyable all the time. And a child, newly released from the fetters of the school’s calendar year, might be uniquely un-enjoyable

• because he is suddenly released from the fetters of the school’s calendar year (and sad/moody/disgruntled about it). (No, seriously, that can happen).
• because she is overwhelmed by the space of days and the newborn freedom to do what she chooses.
• because they are, quite simply, bored.

Children ought to be enjoyed–as ought all people. But with children the stakes are high because they won’t be children long, and so we feel an urgency to enjoy them and a wretched guilt when we can’t.

The thing is (see above), no one is enjoyable all of the time. At the end of the day, children are people.

As are their parents.

***

In light of all this, I have an encouragement for families and especially for the Mother of the Summertime Lament:

Create (and keep) a routine.

I know, I know. That sounds so boring. And after all of this build-up, surely I could have something a bit more thrilling in mind.

But hear me out.

A routine offers structure and predictability–and these things are unbelievably helpful to children. And their parents.

Need proof? Think of Mr. Rogers, who is currently if belatedly enjoying a new appreciation of his work. How did he begin Every Single Episode? With a predictable routine: changing work-shoes and jacket for sneakers and sweater–signs that he was at leisure with the children, giving them his undivided attention. He finished the program the same way, in reverse. And although I was always sorry to see him make his way to that coat closet, he was also meeting my expectations.

For a child, predictably met expectations create a sense of security.

A secure child is a (more) content child.

And a content child is always (far) easier to enjoy.

***

Beyond contentment, routines bring other gifts. For example, they enable better supervision over the use of screens.

Screens, the bedeviling temptation of the summer holiday. They pacify children–until they don’t. I’m sure there are all kinds of studies about screens and boredom and the surprisingly heightened dissatisfaction they

engender as soon as the screen goes off.

Without going into all of that, I think a parent’s best ally when confronting screen use is to limit it, and to be the boss of it, because children typically lack the judgment and control that is helpful to do the same.

With a routine, screen time can just fall into place. As in

• we always have an hour of screen-time as soon as we wake up, or
• we never have an hour of screen-time until we’ve had breakfast or
• we’ve made our beds and
• done the chores for the day or
• something like that.

See? You decide. You be the boss. Your children will be happier that way.

Routines also enable those pesky negotiable things like

• play-dates
• appointments
• outings
• projects

When my children were in middle-to-late grade-school and early-middle-school and I was teaching full-time, our summertime days quickly began to fill up. My children were going in three different directions (because I have three children), and as a result, so was I. Invariably, some-two of them had play-dates on one day and another had play-dates on three other days, and before I knew it, I was never seeing all three of them together.

So I established a routine: Wednesdays were “Mom-days.” They could have play-dates on any other day of the week, but Wednesdays were reserved for the four of us. Then I pulled out my laptop and found Interesting Things To Do all over our town, and I planned accordingly.

Sometimes we just went to the pool. Sometimes we visited a heretofore un-visited historic site.  The library. The museum. The movie-in-the-middle-of-a-summer-afternoon-at-home-and-it-wasn’t-even-raining. Whatever it was we did, that was our day to do it.

It gave them time to do their things, and it gave me time with them together.

I’m pretty sure none of us regrets it.

***

Another perfectly splendid thing about a routine is that it can incorporate things that need to happen.

Example? Summertime assignments, reading or otherwise. I have a daughter in high school, and every summer it seems she has some assignment or two that she is expected to complete during the summer months.

We all know how this can go. Summer brings its own demands and pleasures, and it’s easy to continually push deadlines away in favor of fun. The problem can be that August arrives long before you expected (have you noticed how that happens?), and suddenly everyone is miserable because the workload is too heavy compressed into that time-frame, and the mother IS the heavy, trying to ensure the work gets done.

Everyone is unhappy.

Enter the routine. “We” work on it every Monday afternoon for two hours. Or Mondays and Wednesdays for one hour. Whatever works. The project gets underway (which also magically often makes the assignment less daunting) and then it gets underway some more, and it’s well in hand–even finished–at the end of July.

***

Routines can also meet the need for REST.

What’s that?

You know. Remember? Peace and quiet. An hour or two during which Mom can get some work done or even think her own thoughts for a space.

When my children were young, we had a resting time every single afternoon. Sometimes they had to read on their beds; sometimes they were allowed to play quietly in their rooms. But the quiet and solitude were sacrosanct. And also tremendously helpful. I can’t recommend it enough.

***

I know, I know. Not everyone is a “routine” kind of gal, and that is completely fair. But the beauty of a routine is that it’s a general expectation. You can keep it as carefully or loosely as you choose.

You might be a dawn-to-dusk planner. You may be a one-day-a-week planner. You may need your kids to Just Be Still for an hour every afternoon. So build a routine around those needs and then gently and oh-so-lovingly Stick To It.

Your children will learn to expect the pattern and then– guess what??– you have yourself a routine.

***

Here’s the thing: whether you are a routine-sort of person or not, you want to enjoy your children. And you are also a person, which means limited energy, limited perspective, and demands on your life that may or may not include, be enhanced by, or involve your children.

At the same time, you know what’s coming: Your children are growing up fast. You’ve been observing this already out of the corner of your eye. You know that the days– even the ones that creep by in the present– are going.

So consider building yourself a little schedule. Decide what you and your children need in order for you to have a healthy summer together. Make a routine out of those things you need, want, and hope for.

That routine will be “a net for catching days”–these fleeting days of summer that will be over before you know it. Yes, you can be sure that your summer will slip by, but maybe it will do so while you enjoy it. And your children.

The post How We Spend Our Days appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I feel as if I’ve done a lot of traveling lately. It’s that time of year, right? Summer vacation. We’re gone, we’re here, we’re gone again.

Definitely not complaining. I love to travel. But lately it’s got me thinking about how I pack.

Like most people (everyone?), I’m guessing I have the normal categories: clothes, toiletries, shoes. Standard, right? That’s standard.

But when it comes to packing, what really matters to me is the Carry-On.

You know the Carry-On. That’s the smallish bag you keep with you on the plane, the one you squeeze into the space under the seat in front of you. The one that holds your wallet and your chapstick, maybe your toothbrush (depending), and anything else you’ll be wanting to grab during the flight.

So the Carry-On is vital. But for me, it’s not just for planes (do you do this, too?). It’s for car-travel. And even though we don’t have to wedge it under the seat in front of us, it’s what my daughter and I have come to call it even for travel in the car. We always pack a Carry-On.

In a way, the Carry-On is the Most Important Luggage of my trip. Because while I consider the clothing, shoes, etc. to be necessary, the Carry-On sort of contains (this sounds so ridiculous) all my hopes and dreams.

Okay, granted. That definitely sounds over the top. Bear with me.

The Carry-On represents, firstly, that 1) I’m going to be away from the normal demands of my life for awhile, and 2) I’m going to Sit.

Sitting is not a normal thing for me. Even if I’m writing, I try to spend much of the time on my feet. Sitting isn’t terribly good for you; and also, I manage a household. On any given day, I am up and about Doing Things, and I am doing these things Most of the Time. Most of what I do, on any given day, does not find me doing the sorts of things that one can find in my Carry-On.

As such, my Carry-On usually contains things I Should Get To. Blank paper and envelopes for notes I need to write, a bill I need to take care of. The general flotsam of my desk, culled and reorganized (or not) into a doable, smallish stack suitable for the road.

And it contains the Dailies. My Bible, my journal. Whatever it is I’m reading at the time. My laptop and its power cord. A phone charger. The Things I Need to Do My Job(s). (Writer. Mother. Wife. Person.)

Then finally (here is where the Hopes and Dreams come in), it holds a representation of the Things I Would Like To Do. As in, if I had All the Time in the World. Which one basically does (or can imagine one does, anyway) if one is flying to Shanghai. Or riding as passenger around New York City. Or anywhere at any time ever on I-95 near Washington D.C.

Hopes and Dreams are really hard to get to, but maybe if one simply had Enough Time….

Take the trip I’ve just returned from. We were gone for exactly one week, and my Carry-On for the ride in the car to and in and from New England included the following: my journal, Bible, Psalter, notebook. Issue # 37 of Ruminate magazine and the July-August issue of Smithsonian. My mother’s journal (not my mother’s journal, but the journal I keep and write in about being a mother). My laptop, its charger. A blank thank-you note; a Compassion International letter. A new book of poetry written by Christopher Janke; a creative non-fiction book, Wake, Sleeper, by Bryan Parys. Andy Crouch’s Culture-Making. A copy of my novel (can’t quite say why) and the wonderful sci-fi, literary fiction brilliance that I’ve read once before but am So Glad to have re-read on this trip: P.D. James’ Children of Men.

That’s for one week, Saturday to Saturday.

Listing it out like this (or looking at it in its bulging bag, or swinging it over my shoulder to tote to the car) makes me feel a little bit silly. Do I truly imagine that I’ll get to it all?

And yet. It’s an interesting thing to distill it like this. To pack into a discreet container The Things One Really Loves and Hopes To Do.

This is where the moral goes, right? The application. The metaphorical point to all of this.

Truth be told, I don’t really know what to say. I could ask in a tone tinged by a Capital One advertising campaign: “What’s in your carry-on?” Or I could encourage young mothers who don’t currently have time or room for carry-ons of their own that they might, someday, have carry-ons in their futures.

Or I could comment on the truth: that we got home on Saturday night and most of the laundry was done by Sunday, but I didn’t fully unpack my carry-on until Monday night. Or was it Tuesday? Because, for the most part, I wasn’t using any of it.

In which case the point would be how hard it is, in this life, to make time for what I love. For what we love.

And that maybe it’s vital to do so.

“Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them,” says Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. As such, this notorious demon suggests, delights and joys are dangerous because they very well might–horrors!–lead us to God.

I love this very much.

What is it with God and delight? What is it with Him and pleasure? The more I look for Him, the more I see Him appealing to me with precisely this: the things that truly delight me; the things I most desire (Psalm 37:4).

No matter how hard omni-media try portray Him as Kill-Joy; no matter how the Commandments are preached as prescribed misery, I have learned and am learning that the opposite is the case: that the One who declared this world Good is also the author of delight.

That yes, He has rules and laws, but these, too, when followed, are actually meant to be life-giving. To delight us.

That He Himself is actually the greatest delight we can know, and all the other delights of this world–like a cold beer, the soft fuzz of a newborn’s hair, sunlight limning a cloud or the stunning beauties of a well-crafted phrase–are the edges of the beauties of Himself.

Which amazes me.

And also makes me hope (Oh! here’s the point!) that you always pack a Carry-On. That you don’t leave it untouched at the foot of the stairs, but that you dip into it often and are repeatedly delighted. And that you find Him also (somehow) tucked miraculously inside.

The post Carry-On appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

We are in New England for the week, staying on a farm in a quiet corner of Rhode Island. It’s beautiful here–because it’s New England, because it’s green and wooded, because it’s about ten degrees cooler than any July at home.

Of course we want New England to look as it *should,* and Rhode Island does not disappoint: the stone walls are everywhere. Gorgeous, rambling, antique lines of them. They appear along the sides of the roads, a sudden demarcation between roadside and woods or farmland, the edge of someone’s lawn. Or they spill out of the woods, and if you look quick enough as the car goes by you can see them extending away from you, dividing the trees. They trace the topography of a hillside, they mark the undulating line of the ground.

Stone walls are what New England is supposed to have, like clapboard, and shutters, and steeply pitched roofs. Here in New England, stone walls are–to borrow the overused word–“appropriate.”

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.

Robert Frost, a 20th century New England poet, won four Pulitzer Prizes for his work and was the inaugural poet for President Kennedy in 1961. He was born in San Francisco and later had a winter home in Florida, but for the most part, he spent his life in New England: New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts.

For a long time, he farmed (unsuccessfully) in New Hampshire. He knew a thing or two about stone walls.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

These walls are ubiquitous in New England. There must be miles and miles of them. Bill and I have wondered aloud about them as we drive. We guess a wall is just the thing to do with the stones. The soil here must be rife with them.

And certainly, in addition to the stone walls that trace the landscape, the ground here is forever exposing large slabs of rock, huge outcroppings that one can only assume might be the tip of a proverbial iceberg. Bill and I imagine making a life from the soil here, tilling the earth with our rudimentary, colonial tools and finding–again and again and again–a rock and yet another rock to prize from the ground.

Fruitless, tiresome, unintended crop.

In 1939 the mining engineer Oliver Bowles estimated that there were probably more than 259,000 miles of stone walls in the northeastern U.S., most of which is in New England. Many walls have since been destroyed, but probably more than half of these remain. –Connecticut State Museum of Natural History.

It was the glaciers that started it, eons ago, sliding slowly southward over what would eventually become New England. The glaciers themselves were apparently full of stones, the hardest of which–granite, gneiss, limestone–survived the grinding journey locked in ice. As the glaciers melted, they deposited the stone in the ground.

Hence, so many stones. A real hassle for sowing crops, but perfect for building a wall. Walls. 259,000 miles of them.

The tenacity of these walls is impressive: no adhesive was used in their construction; each wall is a balancing act, stones supporting stones. Most of the walls were built between 1775 and 1850, and yet here they stand today.

Nonetheless, “Mending Wall” is a poem about the process of repairing the holes in one of these walls. Apparently, they had their periodic ruptures, their sudden and inexplicable “gaps.”

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

Frost questions the process. His is a 20th-century sensibility:  Why should we bother repairing the wall? Do we need the wall in the first place?

Well, but all farms have fences, right? We need something to mark the edges. It’s difficult to imagine now, but I’m told that when the original farmers had cleared the land here, trees soon became scarce. It was sensible, if not incredibly labor-intensive, to use the natural resource of stone to form animal pounds or fencing, to outline the boundary between one and one’s neighbor.

If you on your farm have cows, say, and I have apple trees, I’ll want to prevent your cows coming over to my property and decimating my bumper crop of apples.

Solution: stone walls.

And yet,

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

And here begins Frost’s metaphor. Or mine.

What is it about a wall that makes us feel safe? Here in the 21st century? I’m not talking about actual, physical boundaries. I know enough from movies and the news–don’t we all?–about technologies used in heist or warfare. The jig is up: something (someone) somewhere will always be able to get through.

No, I’m talking about those other walls, the ones each of us constructs, the separations, the divisions that, somehow, make me imagine I’m safe.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.

The news these days in this country is rightly all about these walls. But we’ve found they are not, after all, unique to New England. They are everywhere. They seem to cross every region, state, heart, and are (and have been) more visible to some of us than others.

But the walls–even the ancient, “wild walls,” so long untouched that they have become their own vibrant ecosystems–didn’t arrive of their own accord. They didn’t emerge from the ground in tidy rows, vestigial trace of a glacier’s wake.

No. The walls come from stone farmed, mined, balanced, planted. I can’t help but think–studying them, even my own–that these walls are cultivated. They are the product of rehearsed anger, of practiced bitterness, the insistence *not* to forgive. And while we rightly find them most grievously offensive in shootings in Louisiana, Minnesota, Orlando, Dallas, I believe they have their origins in the smallest places: in every prideful thought, every smug estimation of our superiority.

Any time we ever imagine–even for an instant–that we are better than someone else.

…many farmers would find that their farmland would have many stones on it that weren’t there previously…. When a farm is plowed, it causes layers of soil beneath the surface to push up their rocks from different soil layers to another…Many farmers would have to remove the rocks on their farm if they wanted to plow it again, only to find that they would have to repeat the process of removing stones. -Corey Schweizer

I think everyone’s field is full of stones. Everyone’s. It’s the human condition. And just when we think we’ve got our soil cleared, we’re unearthing more: more selfishness, more hard-heartedness, the chronic tendency to love ourselves more than our neighbors, to be willfully blind to another’s experience, hurt, need, goodness, worth.

I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old stone-savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me

Not only of woods and his father’s trees.

We do this, as a society, on a large scale. And we do it personally, too. Daily. Minute by minute.

We are–to a person–rocky soil, laden with the deposits of that long-gone glacier, burdened with its mineral waste. Being alive means tilling that soil, making a place to sow good seeds, and pulling up rocks in that effort.

It’s ours to decide what to do with the stones.

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. -Ezekiel 36: 26.

Sources here, here, and here.

The post 259,000 Miles of Them appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Perhaps we love the shore
because the debris here could not be ours
no matter how hard our lives.

Or because the long shelf of land
continues on under the water
so even here at the edge

of the world the edge is uncertain.
Perhaps we love that the water rises
to uncertain levels leaving

and returning. We may love
the shore as we love the madwoman
who repeats the same phrase

endlessly, as we love the dying
who go on living, the traveller
who promises return.

Here, just here, we leave
no mark. Spume renders footprints,
castle, cry the same.

It’s all the same
what we say to the traveller,
the dying, the madwoman:

Come back, I love you, come back.

-Penelope Austin

The post Yes, That’s Why appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.