Angela – Page 144 – Letters from Home

A Pet Peeve

Ugly piano books sitting on our pretty piano.

Solution: wait 5 or 10 years and they will have nicer looking books.

Or: maybe I just need to cover them with some pretty paper.

We bought some chairs

After a year and a half of deliberation, one night we decided to buy 6 bar stools to go around the island.

We paid our boys and a friend to build them for us. It was the smartest decision ever.

Love is

…shoveling your wife’s side of the driveway at 5:30 a.m. before you rush off to work.

I love the snow. It’s the incessant days of school and work, just after we get reconnected at Christmas that makes January feel long.

I am going to make something to hang from a ceiling today because garlands and buntings always make me smile.

Never mind. I just got a call to bring treats for the fifth graders in a couple of hours. Eek.

And then Richard and I will go out to eat and celebrate new snow, a month over, Mark feeling well again, and the stain that I finally got out of the carpet.

Trust

Mark has a cough this week. Boo. Tonight after reading to him I had the impression that I should stay for a while longer. It was the right thing to do because he ended up coughing until he threw up.

He asked if there was any medicine that would make it all go away. I reassured him that he probably wouldn’t have the same trouble again tonight and that his experience was pretty normal for croup. That seemed to calm him.

I am awake in the bed beside his, listening to him breathing softly and enjoying the cool, moist air from the humidifier. I was thinking how the years have taught me how to care for a sick child. How little I knew when Paige was born. How little I still know sometimes. I have learned that in these times when I don’t know what to do, I can trust the impressions that I have from our Father in Heaven urging me to go to the doctor or to sit with them a little while longer.

Hope

I spent a few minutes yesterday reading my journal from 2001. What a heartbreaking year that was. I’m pretty sure it was one of the most difficult in our lives. It was the year that I said goodbye to teaching seminary (I mourned over that) and I had my 3rd major surgery in 3 years. I was in pain for months and there were other troubles that I won’t list here. I’d get over one trial and another big one would emerge. The terrorist attacks affected the mood. Some of my entries were so sad. Other entries helped me see how I got through that time. I maintained hope that things would get better; I maintained hope in the power of prayer and faith. I clung to the written word from Church magazines and the scriptures. I believed that my problems were known and carefully measured for my good. I took time to realign my priorities.

I have been thinking about hope this month. I found a nice article about it in the September 2013 Ensign and I highly recommend it. Here is my favorite quote from the article and a quote by President Uchtdorf for you today.

Profound and sustaining hope is more than an attitude; it is an orientation of the spirit toward God.

-Vaughn E. Worthen, “The Healing Balm of Hope,” Ensign, September 2013.

There may be some among you who feel darkness enroaching upon you. You may feel burdened by worry, fear, or doubt. To you and to all of us, I repeat a wonderful and certain truth: God’s light is real. It is available to all! It gives life to all things. It has the power to soften the sting of the deepest wound. It can be a healing balm for the loneliness and sickness of our souls. In the furrows of despair, it can plant the seeds of a brighter hope. …It can illuminate the path before us and lead us through the darkest night into the promise of a new dawn.

-President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “The Hope of God’s Light,” Ensign, May 2012, 75.

January 28, 2001

I don’t feel like writing anything about today. How about I go downstairs and pull out my box of journals from storage and see what I was doing on January 28th sometime in my life?

Oh, look, here is my red suede journal from 2001 and there is an entry for January 28th.

Sunday, January 28, 2001

Doing well…

Working on patience with my children

Working on keeping the television turned off

Working to be more well-read in many books

Family is doing a marvelous job reading the B of M every day

Children going to bed earlier

The laptop works

Richard is supportive of seminary

Scripture study and lesson plans [for seminary] are good

1 degree off flight plan [makes] 1 mile difference for every 60 miles travelled (sic).

A flight plan parallels the mortal experience– am I on the right course

Punctuation and spelling are irrelevant to me in 2001. I was teaching the New Testament in seminary that year. I think that flight plan stuff came from a talk by President Gordon B. Hinckley. Incidentally, in 2001, I thought his last name was spelled, “Hinkley”. All of my seminary handouts carry the incorrect spelling.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.

–Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)

Weekend Recap

The weekend was good. I hope yours was, too. Richard and I went to Lamb’s Grill (est. 1919) after I picked him up from his business trip. We watched the documentary, Mitt. We went to the temple. We took the kids out for Italian food because Mark wanted bread sticks. Richard was busy with church stuff and I worked on the family album. Timothy had a friend over most of the time. Daniel kept the house filled with music from his computer. He’s been listening to movie soundtracks lately. Paige worked on projects in her room. We miss her a bit. Mark began a new piano piece called Creepy Crocodile and changed clothes every few hours, as usual.

I am looking forward to a visit with my parents tonight and reserving tickets to attend the Sacred Gifts exhibit at BYU.

Happy Day

Richard comes home this morning from Phoenix. I am so glad. We’re meeting for lunch in downtown Salt Lake City. How shall I do my hair? What shall I wear?

Decisions, decisions.

Here’s a parting thought for the weekend from a book that I am enjoying.

“It is an happy loss to lose oneself in admiration at one’s own Felicity: and to find GOD in exchange for oneself: Which we then do when we see Him in His Gifts, and adore His glory.”

Thomas Traherne
Centuries of Meditations

Job satisfaction

I have been watching episodes of The Wonder Years in the background of my days while the kids are away. Season 3 is my favorite. Nearly episode makes me cry tears of memory, regret, and nostalgia. I love how they depict the mother in that show. Norma is the stay-at-home mom of the 1960’s. She keeps a spotless home and she is almost always in the kitchen. I snicker when I see the scenes where the family sits at the table, watching her cook, waiting for their meal to appear. While a woman working in the kitchen alone seems antiquated, I find that her presence in the kitchen and home is one of the things that draws me to the show. She magnifies the feeling of “home.” It is good that her family can count on her.

But Norma 1. isn’t real and 2. represents a different time. However, comparing my life to a stay-at-home mother (Norma) of the 1960’s can be instructive. On the positive side, I have more appliances to do the work that Norma did. I have an education and opportunities that Norma didn’t have. While I keep house and cook a lot, it’s with diminished expectations (my family doesn’t just sit and watch me do everything). On the negative side, the network of stay-at-home moms that Norma enjoyed is gone. In almost every neighborhood that we have lived, my stay-at-home life has been LONELY because so many women are at work during the day. Now that I have sent the kids to school, the house feels extremely lonely.

Is it the best use of my life to be by myself most of the day? Many women decide to get more education or go to work when their kids are all in school. Why don’t I want to do these things?

Should I be doing more? These thoughts don’t come from any feeling of boredom; I honestly have plenty to do. These thoughts don’t come from any feelings of inferiority. I know that I am capable and of value. However, something influences my thoughts and implies that what I do may not be enough.

No job has a 100% satisfaction rate and everyone is under-appreciated in some way, but it would be nice if there were fewer voices telling me that what I am doing is not enough.

The voices distill from hundreds of sources and have surrounded me my whole life. Even The Cosby Show’s mother needed to be an attorney to be relevant. Homemakers are parodied and trivialized almost everywhere. Feminist messages affect me, not in a way that entices me to agree with them, but they perplex me because I don’t feel the same angst. Am I missing something because I don’t share their frustration?

“What do you DO all day?” (said in an accusatory voice) and “Women should be allowed to realize their full potential in the workplace!” are some echoing remarks that I feel obligated to think about, but they don’t influence me to change my personal choices. I have exhausting exchanges in my mind where I try to defend my lifestyle to a critic. I lose every time. But that doesn’t mean that I am wrong. I’ve always been a poor debater. And what is right for my life isn’t right for everyone. Amen.

I acknowledge that I am in a privileged position to have the option to stay home instead of go to work. It’s important to me that it’s understood that we make financial sacrifices so I can stay home, too.

Perhaps it could be said that I sacrificed a bit of personal ambition to be a homemaker. I didn’t pursue a career that I loved. I have walked away from obligations that required too much time away from family, but these either never did or no longer feel like sacrifices. My small sacrifice is that I endure some degree of physical, emotional, and intellectual loneliness to be a full-time homemaker.

I enjoy a lot of freedom, so it seems a little silly to say that I sacrifice much of anything to take care of my home and family full-time. I’m going to continue as a modern version of Norma for a while longer. I think I’m needed here at home more than anywhere else. It’s one of those lovely paradoxes of life that after “sacrificing” for my family, I have an abundance of options before me in the walls of the home I have helped create.

Disclaimer: Please don’t get in a fluff over this post if you disagree with my thoughts. I’m not writing about anyone but myself and Norma here.

Trying to compete with Hallmark on a dime

I made birthday cards for the Young Women last weekend to save a little money. The supplies were donated and I took the challenge of making something from a box of paper I didn’t choose. I cut out all of the flower embellishments and made each one a little different from the next. As I gazed down at my finished creations, I wondered if the girls would even like them. What if my idea of a cute card is a little outdated, but in a non-cool, un-retro way? And they took so much time to make!

There was a time several years ago when I would create handmade cards and scrapbook pages, but I’m just not into it lately. Digital scrapbook making is so fast that I now see how time-consuming paper crafts can be. If I loved doing it, that would be fine, but I seem to be moving on. I see many others doing the same. I hope that with all of the time-saving technology that I have, that some of my extra time is dedicated to reaching out to others in concrete ways, not just through wispy texts and social media.

I mourn the loss of real, tangible correspondence. If these cards can extend the life of a sweet tradition of card giving, maybe it wasn’t a waste of time to make these, after all.