Rambling about Spirituality and Parenting with Denise Roy

Someone recommended My Monastery is a Minivan to me recently, and I ordered it from the library. When it arrived, my heart sank--seeing the cover, I remembered that I had tried to read it before and disliked it so much I didn't finish it.

I told the clerk about it, and said, "I feel so guilty when I use MelCat to have a book delivered to me from across the state and then I know I won't read it."

She said, "Oh, don't think of it that way. Think of it as improving our circulation stats."

I laughed, and then said, "Well, maybe I'll like it better this time. Sometimes that happens."

I'm reading it today, and I can see why I gave up on it before. The author, Denise Roy, doesn't lead with her strongest material. It's 35 short pieces on motherhood and spirituality, and the first couple essays settle for some pretty well-worn Hallmark-card insights, and on page 13 she actually capitalizes a short sentence and then ends it with three exclamation points, for emphasis. I would bet money that when I tried to read it before, this is where I slammed the book shut and tossed it disrespectfully into the library bag.

I stuck with it today because just before the incident of the exclamation points, she told a story that made me laugh out loud. "Eh, it's free," I thought, "and I'm not very busy just at the moment. I'll see how it goes."

How it goes, as many collections do, is unevenly. One piece makes me nod with recognition; the next makes me wince. One annoys me by making too much (in my view) of the daily challenges of child-rearing, going for cheap laughs at the kids' expense; the next invites me to face an uncomfortable truth.

I honor Roy for doing what she is doing: trying to find a spiritual practice among the mess and chaos of child-rearing. I think I picked up her book in the first place, several years ago, because I was so irritated by religious memoirs that purported to describe a path and a practice, but that were written by people with no children, or whose children were grown; people who owned large, well-kept homes, so they could have a little dedicated corner or even room they retired to for their morning devotions, or a little arbor overlooking their pond. People whose time was so much in their own control that they could recommend spending at least an hour on your special time for you every morning, with perhaps some shorter time in the evening for your practice of examen.

Heh.

(These books aren't just annoying from a parent/non-parent perspective, but from their unchallenged middle-class or upper-middle-class perspective. I remember one book that talked about how much of a relief it was for the author when, after much prayer and discernment, she and her husband decided to stop renting out their second home in Tahoe, because doing so was so stressful. It's not that I don't want people to pray about what to do with their second home in Tahoe; it's that I want them, if they decide to write a book about that, to seem to acknowledge their social position in some way, rather than writing as if their readers necessarily share a similar class position: The Parable of the Second Home in Tahoe.)

Two quick anecdotes: I felt a little overwhelmed this morning. I felt, as sometimes happens, that I could face the challenges of the day better if I could just have five minutes of quiet to myself with no one saying "Mom!" and asking for something. As the morning went on, I re-set my mental clock over and over after changing a diaper, or cleaning up a spill, or dismembering a Lego mini-fig for Carl, or slicing a bagel and putting it in the toaster, or pouring some cereal, or washing some berries, or finding a show, or remembering for someone where he left his kite yesterday, or ...

This went on for several hours before I gave up and accepted, as gracefully as I could, that I was not going to get my five quiet minutes before anything else.

(It's almost 2 p.m. I'm sort of having it now. But I'm not sure where the last four hours went.)

My other anecdote is that I look back on my young, serious writer self (and her young, serious writer friends) and how we used to sit around and bitch about not having time to write, when the only demand on our time was a full-time job. Had we only known what wealth we possessed in the form of free expanses of minutes and hours!

I'm also thinking about parenting and spirituality because I came across another study today that purports to show that people think having children will make them happy, but they're wrong. I dislike these kinds of studies because I think they are part of a pernicious cultural practice of Bitching About Children.

At the same time, I recognize that raising kids is stressful. Oh, my heavens, how I recognize it. There's a paradox in my life that I often find the days challenging or stressful, but I am extremely happy with my life overall, and I wonder if something like that isn't being missed in Unhappy Parent studies. Parents report in these studies that they find caring for their children less satisfying than, for instance, taking a nap. Well, of course they do! Caring for small children practically guarantees you'll spend a sizable chunk of your time thinking, "Damn, I could sure use a nap," while cutting up cheese chunks for the afternoon snack. All morning long I have found caring for my children worlds less satisfying than Just Having Five Damn Minutes to Myself For Once.

That doesn't mean I'd be happier spending my life napping then raising my kids.

Roy talks about trying to be attentive and ready for the unexpected moments of connection and satisfaction, and she's right about that. I even agree with her that parenting has things in common with monastic practice: the repetitiveness, the boredom. If parenting is a spiritual practice, it also has in common with monastic life that you can't easily walk away from it. You may be trying to pray every morning when you get up, but it's easy to skip if you're tired and want to sleep in a little more, or just don't feel like it this morning, or would rather have a snuggle with your sweetie.

On the other hand, kids force you to be in practice with them. The diaper needs changing, the food needs to be prepared, no matter how you feel today. One of the things I miss most about my pre-parenting days are colds. Colds that you can spend on the couch watching movies, drinking tea, and wiping your nose with ultra-soft tissues. Now, there are some things--many things--I just can't put off until I feel better.

Staying in practice is good, when you're trying for spiritual improvement, because the process is so unpredictable. I have a metaphor for spiritual knowledge: it's like a tea kettle that only boils sometimes. Scientifically, if you put so much water in the kettle, and it starts at a certain temperature, and the burner is set to a certain level, you can predict the moment it will break into a boil. And it will boil every time.

Spiritually, you can put the kettle on a hundred times, and it might only boil once. Kids force you to keep putting that kettle on, and the result is that you can be right in the middle of the shittiest part of the job--10,000 Legos have just been spilled on the floor, which was already sticky from juice, and the boys have just been fighting, and Yehva is demanding another snack even though she's been eating steadily for almost two hours, and something smells bad and it's probably something you're going to have to get up close and personal with--and then there is some tiny shift and the room fills with light and you think, "This is the happiest moment of my life. This is what I was put here to do."

Damn, that sounds like a Hallmark Card insight: "Kids are hard but they are worth it, amirite?" I was trying for something better. Denise Roy is also trying for something better in the pieces in her book, and sometimes she finds it.