Seeing It Both Ways

On Sunday, a daughter in a white dress with beautiful peacock trim harassed me for two hours over it feeling uncomfortable. She looked lovely in it. I even felt inspired to take a picture of her.

But, she's slim, and she needed a slip to help prevent a gap between the dress and her torso. And the slip straps tended to fall down occasionally. And sometimes, the dress (or the slip) was itchy.

"Welcome to the world of being female," I wanted to say.

Actually, I was torn. I could see it both ways.

Because there was nothing really wrong with her outfit and she'd even worn it before, I wanted her to stick it out. I want her to develop some emotional stamina and not need to give in as soon as something becomes difficult to deal with.

On the other hand, I don't believe women should put up with a ridiculous amount of discomfort just to look pretty.

We all draw our own lines between comfort and appearance. I want my daughter to learn to do this for herself. I tried to talk to her about it. From outside the dress, it was hard for me to tell just how bad her discomfort was. It seemed minor. This daughter reminds me of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, and pulls this rather often.

I talked to her about the dress and determined that she does like it. I talked to her about the idea of clothing rotation, and that if she wants to keep this dress, she should wear it sometimes. I asked her questions, but she didn't say much. She made faces and squirmed. I encouraged her to put it out of her mind. Part of that was for her benefit, but, honestly, it was also to accommodate my duties at church. Helping her change, at that point, would curtail my timeliness.

She kept it up after the services started. I put my arm around her and encouraged her. I said, "It's only three hours," but I think she heard, "It's only three days."

She squirmed. She frowned. She made faces. She scratched. She flounced. She pulled at her clothes. She huffed, and she puffed, and she blew my patience in.

"You're not the worst-off person in the world," I whispered to her as the sacrament song began.

I have sometimes wondered about the worst-off person in the world. Who would it be? And what would s/he have to be suffering to earn that distinction? It makes me shudder, but, still, it has crossed my mind more than once.

This comes from my own moderation of self-pity as I go to work each day and see people whose lives are--no matter what my current challenges may be--quite likely to be worse than mine. I see people who have made stupid mistakes--like tatooing the F word onto their body, as though getting a job weren't hard enough. I see people flattened by an unbelievable series of misfortunes. I see people who've never known anyone who didn't live in poverty--who have no family members who have ever finished high school or held a job. I see people who have piled so many barriers onto their own heads, it seems it would take a Resurrection or an archeological dig to unearth them. I see people who "did everything right" but woke up to find their health gone forever.

I've developed a mantra that has helped me keep perspective: You can always find someone better off and worse off than you are.

Whenever my mind has veered to wonder about THE WORST-OFF PERSON in the world, I imagine it must be someone in incredible pain, in a horrible victim situation, or being tortured. I can't think about it for long. My one comfort is the hope and likelihood that no one person occupies that place for very long. Hopefully, she or he mercifully dies, recovers, or is replaced shortly by someone in an even worse situation.

I'm sure it's something only God can track.

But, as I said those words to my daughter while the introduction to the sacrament song played in my ears and my hands opened the hymn book to the right page and offered it to share with her and my eyes caught some of the words of the song, I had an amazing insight.

I knew who the worst-off person in the whole world had been.

It had not occurred to me before, but, surely, the person who had ever suffered the most pain, the most agony, the heaviest burden, EVER, had to have been Jesus.

This surprised me, because I tend to think of Jesus as the best-off person. I mean, He was perfect. He's the Chosen One, the Beloved Son, an exalted God. He can do anything.

And then I thought again about the paradoxes in the gospel that always mystify me. The last shall be first. The greatest must be the least. The poor in spirit and meek inherit the earth. He who loseth himself shall find himself. If you seek riches in order to do good and not for yourself, then you will find them. To gain all, you must sacrifice everything. I think about the balance this gives.

And this brought an even better insight.

Long ago, I noticed that, while men generally build things in straight lines, God builds in circles. All fruits are round in some way. The earth, the sun, the planets and stars, orbits, atoms, body parts--round. Circular patterns in almost everything--the cycle of life, the water cycle, the cycles of systems in our bodies--reproductive cycle, circulatory system.

Advanced building.

And then I pictured two opposites--the dichotomies inherent in the gospel--filling out to make a round shape. The worst and the best on opposite sides of each other in a circle.

As God breathes life into these opposites--or fills them with spirit--they become a round whole.

As we achieve balance, as we are directed to do, we achieve a kind of wholeness that is our perfect form. We must be humble to be great. We must give to receive. We must forget ourselves to be remembered on the rolls of heaven.

Just one more way God builds--US--in circles.

So I struck some balance with my daughter. After she had suffered for half of the time of church in her dress, I took her home to change. But I felt unsettled, so I eventually asked a friend who has good sense what she would have done with a child whose clothes were uncomfortable at church.

"Have them stick it out," she said. Then, she reflected on her words and added, "But, sometimes, I think how I would feel in that position, and if I were really too uncomfortable, I might take myself home to change."

So, there I had it again--balance.

I guess I didn't do too badly, after all.

Except for the part where I lost patience. So I'll keep practicing on my balance beam until, through God's grace and with His help, I can round out to be whole.

Walking around in Our Own Skins

A little while ago, two different advice columnists published the same letter from a woman driven to distraction by her mother's apparently distractibility.

You see, her mother never locks her car door while she's driving. She goes walking alone in the moonlight and comes back to her unlocked house. And all without some dreadful thing happening to her.

This poor woman has warned her mother of all the horrific things that could happen to her. Her warnings apparently fall on deaf ears as her mother goes about enjoying her life.

This is interesting to me.

I'm all for enjoying one's life.

I'm even more all for not letting someone else snatch that enjoyment from me.

In my life, I am the mother locking the doors and praying her children will always be safe.

Even more interesting were the advice columnists' responses.

The first one said (and I paraphrase): Leave your poor mother alone to enjoy her life. It's only just on this side of the line of possibility that something awful will happen to your mother, and some people simply prefer to not concern themselves with gruesome but remote possibilities. And maybe hinted at: Get some counseling.

The second one said (and I paraphrase): Good gracious! Did your mother grow up in the Garden of Eden that she is so naive as to have no idea of all the dangers lurking out there to catch someone like her unawares?!

Actually, there were dangers in the Garden of Eden. But I digress.

As one who devours every news story of mishaps to people, analyzes them to discover if she might be making the same mistakes herself, and corrects things about the house if she is, I am pretty sure that such a letter will never be written by a child of mine. I also intend to teach my children properly impressively about Dangers Out There and How to Avoid Them while they are properly impressionable, and then not nag them about it when they become adults.

In this story, there are clearly four points of view, leaving out mine. Or, perhaps I should say, two points of view shared by two people each.

I can see both as valid.

I suppose if the mother who is the subject of the letter was naive before, she certainly cannot be after her daughter has educated her until she is blue in the face. She's making a conscious choice to be unconcerned.

I suppose it's all a matter of how comfortable one is walking around in her own skin. Personally, I am more comfortable knowing for sure that no one could have entered my house without making a huge mess and/or racket to tip me off.

Where do your ideas fall?

The Rhythms of Life

Yesterday was my last official Friday off as a state employee.

I complained plenty when we were all forced by the former governor, Jon, Jr., to disrupt our family lives to accommodate his four-tens whim. But that was 37 months ago, and, well, I've adjusted to it.

At first, ten-hour days (with no lunch, in my case) seemed to last forever. I simply could not keep up the same rate of production for that long, and each day seemed endless. I even taped a cheat sheet to my desk underneath my telephone to help me cope. It told me at what time in the week I was 10 percent through that week, 20 percent through, etc.

I started going to bed at seven-thirty, with the children, so that I could get up at 3:30 or 4:00 to go to the gym before work. I started doing my laundry the minute I got home on Thursdays. Having to get my forty hours in exactly between 6:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. on four consecutive days worried me. What if a huge snowstorm made me late? I could no longer use my lunch time to make any adjustments. Believe me, it's difficult to have every minute of your life so structured that you would have to take personal leave just to mail a letter.

I soon realized that 4:30 on Monday, when I left my house, to 4:30 on Thursday, when I left work for the weekend, meant that my weeks were split nice and exactly in half. I had my home-life half-of-the-week and my work half-of-the-week.

Different worlds.

Guess which one I liked heading into better than the other one?

But, out of this strict schedule, I learned to take some comfort. Everything I did, it seemed, became part of a routine. My life became very predictable, but I found some solace in this.

I actually liked going to bed with a good book or a Sudoku puzzle early in the evening before the light outside faded away. I liked noticing the moment when the sun made everything in my bedroom burn a brilliant gold before fizzing out for the day.

I even liked sorting the laundry on Thursday nights, as though flinging my work cares and troubles into piles of darks and whites. Bringing order to my household as I let go of the workplace each week filled me with peace.

I learned to look forward to certain times of the week--when I get to open the Sunday paper, family activity time the morning when both my husband and I were home, hot chocolate time each evening.

Recently, I heard a radio program about a book a woman had written in conjunction with an Amish woman. The author pointed out how marvelous it was that the Amish woman stayed in touch with the earth's rhythms more than most of us do. In an electricity-filled world, we can pretty much ignore the sun and do what we want when we want to. She noticed the joy and freedoms the Amish woman found in keeping her life in sync not only with the daily sun, but with the earth's seasons.

Not that I'm about to give up electricity, of course, but I think there is something to that. Instead of simply dreading winter, maybe I can find some comfort in the changes it brings. We get to shut down certain functions, like yard work (not that it isn't replaced by snow shoveling). Winter brings certain things to our lives that we simply don't experience at any other time of year.

In thinking hard about the changes I'm facing next week, I've decided I might as well give myself over to finding new rhythms and making this work for me as best I can. I would prefer to still go in to work at the same time and leave early in order to be there for my family more, but this isn't going to be allowed.

I have to take a lunch, something I'm not used to doing. But I'm sure I can get some of my weekend errands done then, find a few minutes here and there to do needlework.

I plan to use extra time in the morning for more exercise and/or writing. I plan to use extra time in the evening for my children--not that it won't hurt us all for a while for me to be gone one whole extra day.

But I'm actually a little excited for the challenge. Maybe I won't have to say no to quite as many things that don't fit into my strict half-week-this and half-week-that schedule.

Maybe I'll find some new comforts and freedoms.