vows to self and life

This 30 Day Vegan experience has been a good one for me.  How I have marveled at the plant realm's ability to nourish me, many days exclusively.  I have not kept a vegan diet 100% of the time, and I have not felt compelled to.

What I have done is discover that, at 40 and at this stage in my life, I am much opener to dietary changes than I was ten or fifteen years ago.  I am now more curious:  how does dairy affect my health?  What does my body feel like while eating wheat?  Meat? 

Sugar...that's a different topic, maybe one I'll explore later on this year.  Who knows?

For now, I joyfully keep a vow to remain plant-centered in my eating.  I crave beef and fish, and enjoy eating those meats.  I listen to my body and what it asks for.  What an amazing experience!

What I've been surprised by is that avocados, raw cashews, maple syrup, kale, sweet potatoes, coconut milk and oil, dark or semi-sweet chocolate, bananas, artichokes, blueberries, almonds, and many other things are more than luxurious enough to get me through the day. 

I give thanks for the grass-fed hamburger I've been privileged to enjoy, the free-range eggs that are on their way to me, and the plants that are the center of my sustenance.

In the midst of all the toddler-care, homeschooling and family responsibilities, I took the opportunity to make and share a delicious vegan soup on Saturday.  As Heather shared with the other retreatants on Saturday, soup-making and, of course, all cooking, can be a spiritual discipline.

Not only that, our very lives depend on our cooking and food preparation.  I sense this in a deeper way now than I used to.  The necessity of chopping so many fruits and vegetables has attuned me to that.

I was asked Saturday evening if I was sad to return from the conference I attended last week.  "Was it hard to come home [to reality]?"

I guess the vow I am and have been making is one (many) to use ritual, daily habits, how I eat, to try and keep life "all of a piece."

I have to chuckle, though, as I read that last sentence, because I'm a newbie, a baby, an ever-needing-to-begin-again beginner with regard to habits.

Yet I am conscious.  I am conscious that I want both the ecstasy and the laundry, to borrow the title of the Jack Kornfield book I have been wanting to read.

Livin' with polarities.  That's life.  That's me.  Here I am. 

Thanks be to God.  Blessed be.

the vegan scene

I, dairy farmer's daughter and hog farmer's niece, still can't believe I am even experimenting with veganism. 

That said, I will share that I am noticing...

a great deal of energy coming from the food I eat
that I have many, many options for what to eat
joy in cooking that I haven't felt before, even though I enjoy cooking
a sense of amazement that I can feel well-nourished eating only plant foods.

I have enjoyed green smoothies, roasted vegetables with tahini sauce, almond milk smoothies, mushroom bierrocks, hummus, and so much more.

I'll be pondering this experience for a while to come.

a little more hidden than I would like...

The wholeness in my life right now is feeling obscured. It is there, I know, but busyness and toil and a fair bit of wheel spinning are causing me to feel alienated from some of my favorite ways of renewing myself (long walks, goofing off outside with Henry, baking and cooking, reading). Our family is too busy and struggling too much to make ends meet. I am not caring for myself or Joel as much as I would like to.

This will change. Right now life is intense, though, and I need an added measure of love, patience, hope and gentleness. And probably a booster of resolve, too. Any other suggestions?

A fond memory of the weekend is the day we spent at the cabin with friends. Henry got gloriously dirty and expended a colossal amount of energy. Joel painted in the bunkhouse. Anna and I had a nap on a hammock in a lovely hollow. We came home smelling of sweet smoke. So good.

Here are our darlings. One is missing a tooth and one is still working at her first.

sleepy treatise on nursing and working

Here she is at about eight weeks--photo taken about a week ago. We went for her two-month check-up yesterday and learned she's 12# 10 oz. in the nude. Way to go, Anna! Her onesie comes from Paul, who works here.

I've had the idea for this post in my head for days, but I'm too tired now to carry it out with as much thought as I had intended. Just read this blogger's post about the breastfeeding relationship and carrying it out over the long-er haul. I'm happy for her that she's going to a really cool writers' workshop, but sad that women who work "outside the home," to use that quaint turn of phrase, are constantly expected to put their children's needs behind those of their employers/vocations.

Yes, I know it is important to ply oneself to the task at hand, but I don't understand why working mothers, especially the mothers of children under a year, are not afforded more options in deciding how to mother and how to continue the breastfeeding relationship through at least the first year of the baby's life.

What might these options be? More U. S. employers, according to a recent NPR report, are making it possible for infants under six months to accompany their mothers to work. It is my humble opinion that, were the work world to take this idea seriously, interested nursing-working mothers from all sectors of the work world would do their best to make the arrangement worthwhile for employer and employee alike. I work as a chaplain in a long-term care setting and believe that, with the support of my mother (who is Anna's caregiver on the days I work), I could successfully have lovely Anna with me 40 to 80 per cent (or maybe more) of the time I'm on the job. Moreover, I think the women who work alongside me as nurse aides, nurses and med. aides could also, with a staffed baby room within a 30-second walk, have their babies (held safely in slings) close by much of the time they are working.

Another option, of course, would be that our nation could grant mothers / families twelve months of maternity or paternity leave when a baby is born. Right there we could do so much to ensure successful mother-baby breastfeeding relationships for at least the first year of life. And save ourselves some money in health care expenses, too, considering all that's been written about how breastfeeding ensures good health for the mother-child dyad.

For me, full-time ministry and full-time mothering don't mix. I feel too divided in my soul if I have to choose (in the middle of the night or on a birthday or too many week nights in a row) between my children and my career. I want my children to win, because I'm the only mother they have. Even working fewer hours than I did before Anna was born (about twelve now instead of about sixteen), those two days of working outside the home take me four days to catch up from.

When Henry was an infant I nursed him in the middle of the day and then pumped my milk in the morning and afternoon. I felt okay about this arrangement. It seemed like the best it could be given the circumstances. I was thankful to have a husband who was committed to getting our baby to me once a day. Now, thanks to my mother (who lives a short walk from my office) and my employer's willingness to let me be flexible with my schedule, I don't even have to pump. My nursing relationship with Anna can continue on work days and at-home days.

Here's the thing: like many women in the workforce, if I were to quit my very meaningful job right now (or if I were to be "terminated"), Joel and I would face great difficulty continuing to feed and house our family. The money I earn is not recreational or even savings money; it is essential to our family's well-being. True, we'd come up with some kind of alternative; we'd have to. But that alternative may well be my going back to full-time work in a lower paying job, taking both Joel and me away from home and our children nearly 100 per cent of the work week.

Oh, my earnest prayer is that all families would have the security they need to start their children off in the world. I wish all mothers who want to could breastfeed their infants 100 per cent of the time. If you're passionate about this topic, you might read this and listen to this. After listening to that last link, I felt exceptionally ambivalent about the National Organization for Women.

from my mother's files

The cleaning work continues...and I'm so lucky to have friends who have helped and will help me. Now I'd just better ask them. Anyway, here's a funny paper I'm going to recycle after I share it here on my blog. So true!

this is thirty-eight

I'm thirty-eight tomorrow evening. There's a baby growing in me, doing a lot of kicking, but you can't see the belly very clearly. (We always have trouble with this camera at night. Daytime shots are simply the best. So maybe Joel will take another picture that I can post tomorrow). I enjoy my birthdays and try to make sure each one includes a solitary walk, if possible. Two years ago I walked twelve miles for my thirty-sixth birthday. What a walk and day that was. I was quitting the chaplaincy position (that I later resumed at 40% time) that I had held for 6+ years, and wanted to commemorate this transition by walking the route I had driven so many times before. I felt liberated on my journey. And dehydrated. I didn't take any water with me, and that was a mistake. But it was a joyful journey and that's what I feel on my birthday. I can say with Gerard Manley Hopkins, "...for all this, there lives the dearest freshness deep down things." Birthdays, delights and struggles all come and go. But, above all, there is still life. I am so thankful to have this life to live. And I feel blessed to be carrying another child. An amazing gift on my thirty-eighth birthday eve.

happenings

While it's a joy to return to blogging after a three-week (or so) hiatus, I have to say the rest has been wonderful. I wasn't aware of how much time I was putting into taking photos, downloading them, writing down thoughts. This discipline is well worth my time, but I come back to it with a new appreciation for the many other ways I want to (and need to) ply my strength.

The biggest thing I've been up to is growing a baby to fill these well-loved shoes. It has been an amazing gift to hear this baby's heart beat (with doppler assistance) and to feed my body's cravings. How anxious I have felt: are you alive in there? Have I done something to hurt you? After two miscarriages, I don't think I'll ever be able to be casual about pregnancy again. The blessing of this time of uncertainty (not that there is ever any final certainty, even now that my first trimester is over) is that I have had the privilege of hearing other women's stories of pregnancy loss and infertility. Oh, the dear women in my life! I can't thank you all enough. My sisters, my sister-friends...you are an amazing source of strength to me!

Let me spout on just a bit about pregnancy cravings, because I think they are so very, very entertaining. Here is what I have wanted to eat, in more-or-less chronological order, beginning around July 4.

lovely golden-yolked free range eggs from Cheryl
shrimp (which I believe isn't a very ethical--or maybe healthy--thing to eat)
shrimp
shrimp with sour cream cucumber salad on baked potato
fantasies about a carbonated sour cream-shrimp-cucumber milkshake...ugh...yum!
milk and chocolate chip cookies
beef stew
tomato juice/V8
nachos: beans, cheddar, guacamole, sour cream, tomato, chips
biscuits and gravy
biscuits and gravy--yuck! I normally don't like this, but have loved making them both from scratch this last month
red lentil coconut curry
beet borscht and reubens with lots of kraut (so thankful for Yolanda's menu)
kalamata olives
gazpacho
wraps and sandwiches made by someone other than myself that may include heated meat but do not include ham (usually a favorite of mine)
...mmm. I think I'll find something to eat soon.

Here is a photo of a beautiful meal that I really did not feel like eating due to funky nauseated pregnancy feelings. Our wonderful guests brought over the whole meal, which we ate out on the porch. Too bad I mostly felt like eating the boring beef stew in the crock pot.And here's a photo of my sister Barbara's new set of wheels. Couldn't resist including this one! Her electric bike is an eGo. It recharges for about 8 cents worth of electricity after which it can go 60? miles. Wow! And then there's the consolation of this array of healthy local food, grown and purchased from within 100 miles of home. Wow again!Take care everybody!

gush, gush

Here he is. My dearest dear. He's a five on the enneagram, he loves Pink Floyd and Mostly Autumn, he likes Frank's Quality Kraut, "Mennonite" sausage, raw kale, mustard greens and spinach, homemade ice cream and Liquorice Altoids. He can make pretty much anything out of Legos. This is a picture of what he likes to read.
Joel is a philosopher, a visionary, a darn good computer technician, and he's refraining from editing this post for accuracy. That, in itself, is a sign of his goodness as a person.

Ten years ago today I was sitting in Sermon on the Mount with Mary Schertz at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary wondering how I would gracefully exit class (we had only told people at church he had a lump; not the wider seminary) to drive to Goshen with Joel to get the pathology report we had waited four days to hear. It was Easter Monday. We drove to Goshen, spent an hour and a half in the waiting room reading Conde Nast's Traveler or some such magazine, went into the tiny, dark consultation room at the surgeon's office and heard the news: lymphoma, probably Hodgkins, "What I want you to know is that this is treatable." All the same, I could scarcely cope. Stomach knot. Sweat. Oh God no.

Laughter came half an hour later when, once in the door, we checked our messages to hear Joel's dad's voice. "Just called to see how the autopsy report went..." [Then his mother's voice interrupting] "Autopsy! My God, Virge!" Then [nervous chuckle], "I mean biopsy report [more nervous chuckling]...well, anyway, give us a call when you find out."

That did it. "I'm not dead yet," came the response from Joel. That evening held many phone calls, pizza, visits from our pastors and friends. The next day (I think) the journey of testing and staging began, then twelve weeks (six sessions) of chemo and a month of radiation.

Ten years later we are the parents of Henry Daniel and so very grateful for these past ten years. Troubles come. Troubles may seem to stay. Suffering happens. But the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and ah! bright wings.

Is inequality making us sick?

This is the question asked at a website one of my brilliant sisters :) introduced me to. Check it out and see what you think.