The Advent That Wasn't

Advent was a big part of my church tradition growing up. Lighting the candles in the Advent wreath each week to celebrate one of the shortest seasons of the liturgical year, the pinks and the purples of the candles and the priest’s robes a funny contrast to the Christmas-y reds and greens everywhere else.

Advent disappeared as I grew into my high school and college years, as I left that traditional church setting for a different one. Nobody talked about Advent anymore. I realized that no one talked much about Lent or the days in Holy Week either. The liturgical vocabulary more or less disappeared from my life.

Until I had children.

A couple years ago, I was listening to a podcast where the hosts discussed their plans to celebrate Advent with their small children that year. They had all sorts of plans, from daily Bible studies to activity books to baking treats to tie right in with the Advent season. It caught me off-guard.

Because it was October.

Yeesh, I thought, Am I supposed to be thinking about this already? Do I need to start an Advent tradition with my two two-year olds and baby? Am I already failing?

That year came and went. We didn’t do anything for Advent. Same with last year. And, admittedly, this one as well.

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I’m doing an Advent study with some friends this year. I’ve missed more days than I’ve kept up with. Still, it feels like a step forward. Most years it gets to the second week of December before I realize it’s Advent and I probably should have started on something a solid week and a half ago.

It’s not for a lack of caring about the season. The Christmastime is one of my favorite parts of the year, for the magic of twinkling lights, snow, and Santa just as much as the miracle in a manger we are all waiting for. And I can’t say it’s because I’m too busy in this season to stop and think about Advent. Outside the chaos of life with three small children, that is. Truly, I don’t feel we’re over-booked with Christmas activities or events, my gift list is usually under control by the beginning of December.

No, I think it’s because Advent often feels like just one more thing to DO, in a season where I would love to just sit back and BE.

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I read a post on the other day along these same lines, about the trendiness of Advent these days. It was comforting and spoke so strongly to my own heart.

Because the most important thing this Advent isn’t that we do a daily Advent-related activity.

It’s that the kids have been playing with their Nativity set and we’ve talked over and over the familiar story with them. (Playful embellishments encouraged.)

It’s that we’ve baked more than our fair share of Christmas cookies. It’s that we’ve delivered them to our neighbors.

It’s that we set up the tree and I let them hang ornaments wherever they dang well pleased. (Even if I re-arranged it all later so there were ornaments ABOVE the four-foot line.)

It’s that we’ve spent time watching Christmas shows together, all piled on the couch with blankets and snuggles.

It’s that they add a new sticker ornament first thing every morning to the paper Christmas trees taped to their doors to help them count the days until Jesus is born. And, yes, also the days until Santa comes.

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There’s another tug in my brain, (as happens with other traditions or the lack of), that says, It’s too late! You didn’t start an Advent tradition from their very first Christmas so you missed it! It’s too late!

That thought is, of course, utter bullshit.

The truth is I still have very young children, who, for the most part, won’t remember these early Christmases. The truth is I don’t remember most of my early Christmases, outside of a few moments here and there. The truth is it’s not now or never. We wake each morning to new mercies, new chances. And each year and every season as well.

There’s always next year. Or the year after that. Or maybe, never at all. Maybe we’ll just work on baking more cookies and sitting back to be still in this season of magic and waiting.

Good Girl

“Why are you so quiet over there?” a relative asked in my general direction at a family gathering. I was around 10 or 12 years old and lost in thought.

An older relative fully snapped me out of my reverie when she replied, “Shannon’s a good girl. She’s always quiet.”

This relative didn’t intend anything malicious by what she said. It was meant as a compliment. She said it fondly, lovingly, with a caring smile as she looked at me. I’m sure it came from the way she had been raised, in the era of “children should be seen and not heard” and that sort of thing.

I grew even quieter. Her comment had given me more to think about.

It’s true, I was a quiet girl. Not out of a sense of shyness or because I didn’t have anything to say. I didn’t hesitate to raise my hand in school and I wasn’t scared to speak when spoken to. I was just in my own head a lot. As a girl who spent many of her days and even nights with her nose in a book, there was a lot going on in my head.

Was I a “good girl” because I was quiet? I had always identified with the good girl strain of things. Typical firstborn, straight A’s, type A, honors classes, perfectionist, always followed the rules. Was this another thing I was or needed to be? Were good girls quiet, too?

My quiet continued throughout young adulthood. I was a good girl. Whatever I may have thought in my head, I didn’t express it out loud.

I was quiet in the days and years following September 11th, as people around me vilified Muslims and anyone who wore a turban. That a few terrorists had come to define an entire world religion, an entire people, was disturbing to me. I was young, newly absorbed in high school, and I didn’t know how to use my voice to combat the terrible parodies and ignorant language I heard around me.

I was quiet when my confirmation teacher told us to blindly adhere to the tenets of Catholicism. “For example, you can’t get married as a Catholic if you know you can’t have children,” she told my group of 9th graders, “It’s hard for even me to understand, but because I’m Catholic, I believe it.” That sounded absurd to me — both the rule (if it actually existed) and her blind adherence to it. My mind swirled with thoughts, questions, and opinions for the rest of class, but I swallowed them and got confirmed a year later anyway.

I was quiet during the first presidential election I was able to participate in after turning 18. I silently, resentfully voted for John McCain because I felt the entire Christian culture pushing me to do so, despite the fact that I was intrigued by the youthful, eloquent, hope-filled Barack Obama. Truth be told, I had a strong feeling that Obama would win after eight years of the Bush administration. It helped me feel slightly less guilty about my own vote, but the fact that I didn’t vote the way I wanted still bothers me.

I was quiet as my church small group discussed homosexuality and gay marriage. Though people in the group came from all sides and opinions on the topic, my own brain was in turmoil. I wasn’t quite sure what I believed. I’d heard a lot of things from the church on this issue. Lots of “love the sinner, hate the sin” kind of talk. That didn’t sit quite right with me — so we were supposed to welcome them through the door with open arms and then later tell them to change? It all sounded like the very opposite of “God is love.” This was a much more difficult belief to swallow. I had been hearing these ideas from the church for so long now, how did I even stand up for gay rights? My brain swirled as a I attempted to harness a multitude of thoughts and express them well. Maybe I had been quiet for too long at this point. It haunted me that I didn’t know how to form the right words to stand up for my LGBTQ brothers and sisters.

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As I’ve grown older, I’ve been practicing how to use my voice. The 16-year-old girl who wanted to be liked and seen as “good” doesn’t really care about other people’s opinions now that she’s a 31-year-old woman. To be quite frank, she has no more fucks left to give.

(My teenage ears are earmuffing themselves out of duty. Now it’s a regular part of my vocabulary.)

There are too many abuses going on in our country, in our world, now, for me to remain quiet. Immigration, border walls, LGBTQ rights, sexism, institutional racism, the rights of children, the rights of mothers, slavery, climate change, the importance of journalism, politics, and that damn President of ours. Just to name a few.

I’m using my voice to say:

Not today.

Not on my watch.

This is not okay.

I cannot stay silent.

Really, I think I’m growing into who I’ve always been.

(Read the rest over on the Feminine Collective.)

The Feminist Housewife

It can be hard to reconcile my outward image with my inner turmoil these days. I sigh and cry out, weeping and gnashing my teeth as I read the news. My heart is heavy over it all. Everything from the lack of paid family leave to the fact that climate change is an actual thing.  The explicit racism that seems to be taking over. The recent rash of natural disasters, the failure of our justice system, and the lack of laws for reasonable gun control. And at the head of it, most frustrating of all, that man in the White House (He Who Shall Not Be Named).

I cheer on our female leaders, soak up their theology, buy their books, laugh at the late-night shows, subscribe to the New York Times. I want to raise my young kids to know of the injustice in the world, to work for change, to talk and ask questions and be anything they want to be. I write and I read and I discuss and I work to understand the things I don't.

And I’m a housewife.

It may be a phrase reminiscent of the ’50s, but it’s true. Call it what you will: homemaker (yeesh, even more of a relic), stay-at-home mom, SAHM for us millennials. I cook, clean, fold laundry, match socks, and put away toys. I even enjoy some of these things. (Gasp!) I bake my own bread, cloth diaper those little bottoms, and host neighborhood playdates.

There’s a tension inside of me lately. If you peek in from the outside, everything about my life screams basic stay-at-home mom. One income, a house in the suburbs, three kids, a minivan; a woman who spends her days at playdates, running errands, cleaning house, and with our neighbors. Surrounded by people who, due to circumstance, mostly live and look just like us. This stands in stark contrast to my inner feminist, the one who devours the news and analyzes it each night with my husband or over (local, craft) beers on the weekend with my cousin.

Though maybe not such a stark contrast. I am the same person, both feminist and housewife, after all. These things are not mutually exclusive. They only seem like opposing views because society tends to box us in that way. As though I can’t be a feminist just because I am also a housewife.

My beer-loving cousin is a teacher—middle school social studies— and politically active. He's white, straight, and male. He told me that for the first time in his 15-year teaching career he let his students know who he was voting for before the last presidential election. As a teacher in a large metro area, his classes are a mixed bag of backgrounds and socioeconomic status. Many are Somali immigrants, mostly Muslim, possibly illegal. It was unthinkable to him that his students could think for a second that he supported a man who ran on a platform of kicking their families out of the country. Just because of who my cousin is, what he looks like, what could possibly be wrongly perceived from the outside.

So much grates on me for the very same reason. White, middle class, privileged. It feels that so much of me could be perceived one way when in fact I feel exactly the opposite.

If you dig a little deeper, you’ll find hints of rebellion in me. I’ve never owned an iron, for one. (Such a rebel.) Neither the kids nor I possess any clothing that requires ironing. Tyson works a flexible schedule from home, mostly in sweatpants, no traditional suit-and-tie 9-5 job here. (And the dry cleaner takes over those pesky ironing duties the few times a year he does wear a dress shirt.) While I handle most of the child and household-related tasks due to the fact that I do stay home, he is quick to take over everything from dishes to diaper duty on the evenings and weekends. This summer we attended our local Pride festival, joining in the fun of the family-friendly area, where my children played games and colored pictures and didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary besides the fact that everyone was wearing so many bright colors. My e-reader is filled with book titles that educate with humor or scream for change (or both): Jesus Feminist, Of Mess and Moxie, Hillbilly Elegy, The Unwinding, Love Warrior, Just Mercy.

I’m an iced-coffee drinking, JCrew wearing, Target shopping, fall-loving basic girl who also has a heart that screams for change. Who has wild thoughts in her head of running for office (I would hate it), writing a book (maybe), and taking her kids to protest marches (much more plausible).

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I don’t know what to do with this tension, except sit in it. The best I can do right now is educate myself, to read about my own privilege and the abounding injustice in this world, raise my kids, and work on living a life based on love and understanding. I continue to work on teaching and practicing empathy, compassion, discernment. Each afternoon, snack time finds me at the kitchen table with all three kids, reading aloud from our storybook Bible, answering their questions and talking it through, about the radical Savior who stood up to the leaders, sat with the sinners, and came along in love just in time to rescue us all.

I cringe sometimes, thinking how we must look from the outside, this neat and tidy “perfect” little family in our cheerful blue suburban home. I often feel like anything but. Still, my traditional stay-at-home mom life doesn’t confine me to one neat little box. I don’t want to be boxed in, but turning around and boxing up someone else is just as bad. And I am so guilty of that this time around. Writing off anyone who checked a different box on that ballot as "the other". I am working so hard to fix that.

In the end, this life as a housewife — the cooking and the cleaning and the laundry — really is the backbeat of our lives. Tyson and I show our children how our household runs, with love and respect and cooperation. There is an importance to these things, mundane though they may be. They keep our household running, functioning, ensuring that we are clothed and fed and happy so that we can go out and change the world. Or just get to preschool on time.

Besides, my inner rebel may be emerging a bit, if you happen to see me in that preschool drop-off line. I recently added purple streaks to my hair and a “Nasty Woman” pin to the diaper bag. Take that, stereotypes.

Quiet Time for Mama

Earlier this year, I had a fairly established quiet time routine. "Established" meaning anywhere from two to five days a week. The kids went down for a nap or their own quiet time, I would eat lunch, pick up the main level from whatever havoc had been wreaked that morning, take a seat at my now-clean dining room table, and dive in.

Then I heard somewhere that I should do my quiet time when the kids were around. Which sounded like an oxymoron but okay. The reason being that the kids would see their Mama in the Word, it's a part of life even if you may be interrupted, did we mention that kids should see their mom reading the Bible?, etc. Sounds great, sure. I can get behind that. So I moved my Bible somewhere more "accessible". Except it wasn't. Because I never took it out. Not once. The kids and the chaos and the normal routine has already been established around here for quite some time and I couldn't figure out what this new rhythm was supposed to look like. So I lost a month.

Someone else told me that I should do my devotions in the morning, starting my day and filling my mind with God's word. Really I've been told this my entire Christian life, that this is the "right" way and time of day to read the Bible. So even though my kids already wake up by 6 o'clock, I set my alarm for even earlier. 

This is probably where I should mention that I have never been, am not, and never shall be that freak of nature known as a "morning person".

So - shocker! - this did not work well for me. I think there was maybe a morning or two that I managed to read that day's verses. Y'know, on my phone, still huddled under a mound of blankets, head on my pillow, through half-lidded eyes, well after my alarm first blared. Listen, I am a hard-wired night owl. Had God intended for me to read my Bible reverently at 6 in the morning, he would have given me the desire to go to bed before 11 pm. Scripture read by a bleary-eyed, half asleep mama who hasn't had her coffee yet does not a good Christian make. I lost another month. 

It took me awhile to get back on track.

I went back to my old routine.

Pause. Can we please take a moment to stop and admire how perfectly those tiny roses bring out the color of the peaches? And vice-versa? And then my Bible is like the same color?!? You don't even know the mood lift this gives me every single time I look at my kitchen counter. My designer's heart can't even handle it. *swoon*

Why did I stop in the first place? Because I was so busy listening to others tell me I was doing it wrong? Because it felt like just one more way as a mother that I didn't measure up?

I read my Bible during naptime now. Not every day. Two to five times a week. Do you know what that is better than? ZERO. It works for me. Why on Earth did I stop trying to do what works?

I don't know what your thing is, maybe it is reading your Bible, or to read anything, or finding a time to workout. It could be setting aside the time to clean, cook regular homemade meals, or fit in that yoga practice. There is no "right" time to do these things. If something is important to you, you'll find what works. Your friend meditates first thing in the morning while her kids eat their yogurt, but yours run around like crazy people and throw their breakfast on the floor? Don't do it then. And don't worry about it. Maybe you fit it in during naptime, maybe it's while they are distracted by Daniel Tiger on the TV, or maybe you are one of those crazy people who can get up a little earlier in the morning to get your groove on.

There's no big grand conclusion to this. I did something that worked, saw somebody else doing it "better" (emphasis on those quotation marks there), floundered for awhile, and then (duh) went back to what worked in the first-freaking-place. And the bottom line is this: we need to find what works and stick with it. No more second-guessing. No more looking at what this or that mom is doing. I've found what works and I'm staying in my lane. We don't need to make this any more complicated than it needs to be. Being the mama to small kids is already work enough.

(And all the mamas said "AMEN". *all the praise hands to THAT*)

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Pssst...while I was trying to figure all of this out, I did treat myself to a new Bible. Surely if I just got a new Bible that would solve my problem, right? Well, not exactly...but now that I'm back in the swing of things it does help, and I do love it! Find the She Reads Truth Bible here. (Not sponsored, I just really think they did a good job!)