A fun and interesting blogger named Ellen Painter Dollar takes up the seasonal reminiscence we reposted here on the First Things website, “Dakota Christmas.”
She likes my writing—”so gorgeously, lucidly written that I wanted to lay my hands on my laptop screen, hoping I could soak up just a teensy bit of his graceful way with words.” Ahem. See, Mom, that’s me she’s talking about, though if have to dwell in the land of over-the-top praise, I think I like even better the guy who left a comment on the memoir that read, “This is better than Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.” Yep, if only old Marcel had kept at it . . .
But it’s Dollar’s follow-on that seems worth taking seriously, for, she writes, the story as a whole “struck me as so male.” Late in the essay, I wrote about a kind of reaction that set in against the overabundance of Christmas when my sisters and I were young:
I remember bundling up and going out for air after Christmas dinner the year I was sixteen. Trudging along the lip of the white-dusted gully on the edge of Pierre, I looked out to see the land, like a cold sea stretching off to the horizon. . . .
[S]ometimes in winter, I could sense something else in that cold, blank range—or, rather, nothing else, emptiness itself like a positive force, an overwhelmingly present absence: purer than we were, cleaner, truer to God’s purposes, more real. . . . The prairie in December is brutal and indifferent, but that sated Christmas I was sixteen—with presents back home spilling off the sofa, the annual racecar-track looped in a figure-8 beneath the tree, too many new books and boxes of candy, the mothball odor of the Christmas linen and the cloying scent of the juniper branches—I perceived, in some confused adolescent’s way, the spirit’s harrowing side. I came to cast fire upon the earth, as Christ declares in the Gospel of Luke, and would that it were already kindled! There was a burned-over purity to that frozen landscape, an icy clarity to its ash-white slate. There was an escape from the mess and clutter of our overpopulated Christmas desires, ruined by their secular attainment.
Well, yes, she later adds—but “Joseph Bottum could wander out onto the prairie to think deep thoughts because other people, most likely his mother, aunts, sisters, stayed behind clearing away the Christmas mess and clutter.”
I should say that the lonely prairie end of the Christmas memoir was supposed to be a looping-back to the prairie beginning of the essay—a claim that there exists in us an impulse to seek God in solitude and bleakness, but there is another demand that also calls us back to seek God among people. For that matter, if you think prairie-town kids of my generation didn’t have household chores, you must be living in suburban California.
Still, Dollar is a smart cookie, and her point is interesting:
I’ve come across similar advice—set yourself apart, beware the busyness of life “out there,” hunker down in your cottage, deny, simplify, focus—in plenty of other books and essays and sermons that advocate separation and simplicity as keys to the spiritual life: Spend more time in solitary prayer, set aside Sunday as a true Sabbath by forgoing all but the most necessary chores (because, you know, I spend the rest of the week doing unnecessary chores), and, of course, stop spending your Advent getting ready for Christmas. For the most part, this sort of advice seems to come from men.
Is that right? Is the impulse to solitude and simplicity primarily a male impulse, which men are allowed to indulge only because there are legions of women behind them cleaning up the mess? Men are from Mary, Women are from Martha?
December 24th, 2009 | 3:50 pm
As a single father who raised two children, now in their mid-twenties from infancy, and cared for an elderly mother at the same time for twelve years till she died at nine-eight, Dollar’s observations are shallow stereotyping. My dad worked three jobs so my mom could stay home and raise their five children. Someone has too much time of her hands and I suspect that it is your writer who fatuously determines which sex does what and how much.
December 24th, 2009 | 11:03 pm
I know that impulse, and it’s irrelevant if it’s male-only. The only way I could indulge it is by sacrificing precious sleep, already in short supply.
Dollar’s point is, by now, an old canard; or if not a fabrication, then ignorance from living in her own kind of isolation. Today, whose schedule is not saturated?
Clearing the kitchen, cooking, and ordering the house is work with a predictability that I find therapeutic relative to my other responsibilities. And sometimes it’s boring: boo hoo.
December 24th, 2009 | 11:31 pm
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December 25th, 2009 | 8:50 pm
Wow. Very cool that you read my piece and responded. Thank you for that. Yes, my piece absolutely indulged in some stereotypes. Stereotypes always have lots of exceptions, and I know plenty of men and women who do not fit the pattern that I live and write about in this piece. But stereotypes also have kernels of truth in them. My husband and I live with a relatively traditional division of labor, with me doing most of the household/child care work and him gone 11 hours a day during the week (though I also work P/T from home writing a book that is under contract as well as my two blogs, and he is a highly involved father and contributor to household chores when he is home). Most of my friends here in suburbia (and from what I read and see, many, many people around the country) have similar patterns, and it was to our/their situation I was writing. I cannot speak to the experience of single fathers or stay-at-home fathers or women who are more effective than I at carving out significant time for their spiritual life.
It is my experience that achieving the separation necessary for most traditional spiritual disciplines (prayer, meditation, study, etc.) is more difficult, sometimes near impossible, for primary caregivers of children—probably whether they are male or female, though most primary caregivers are still women. My schedule is no more saturated than anyone’s, but it is saturated with tasks that are much harder to leave behind. My husband agrees with that assessment. His job can be consuming, but he also takes the opportunity now and then to shut his office door, cancel meetings and put his phone on voice mail so he can roll up his sleeves and do some things that he sees as priorities. Unless my children are all elsewhere (a rare event of very limited duration), I am always “on call.” They can be deep into their play, and I will walk upstairs and close my bedroom door to check my e-mail, read, pray, or write, and usually within seconds I hear footsteps on the stairs and a knock at the door. My husband, on the other hand, can go outside to do yard work and be there for hours without an interruption. I can be elbow-deep in bread dough in the kitchen while my husband is reading the newspaper, and the kids will walk past him to come ask me for whatever they need.
This is not a pity party for how overworked I am but an honest questioning of how to nourish a vital spiritual life given these dynamics—dynamics that occur in most households where one parent does the majority of child care. One of the ways I have answered that question is to find solace in the repetitive, mindless household tasks that, as one commenter observed, can be therapeutic. Sometimes mindfully mopping the kitchen floor, enjoying the process and its result, is my only spiritual practice for the day—and sometimes that is enough.
I was asking a question (in fact, the question was the title of my piece) and an honest one—Is this spiritual divide I experience in my own life a real one that other people experience too, or, as I wrote, is it the lament of a “worn-out mom who spends too much time being ‘unbecomingly pissed-off’”? The commenters here clearly think the latter, and they may be right, but I’ve gotten comments on both this piece and others on similar topics that are more convinced that the divide I name is a valid one.
Thank you for reading and commenting on my piece, and Mr. Bottum, for the lovely, lovely piece of writing that inspired it. Christmas blessings to you.
Oh, and obviously, you’re right about prairie farm boys having plenty of chores, certainly more than my suburban (though not Californian!) children. That comment was gratuitous, and I’m sorry.
December 26th, 2009 | 2:22 pm
Give me the heart of Mary and the hands of Martha!
December 26th, 2009 | 11:54 pm
Since my youngest (of 8) is now 9, I have a little more breathing space, and can find time for my own hour of Adoration at our chapel, but I remember well the time when my only solitude was on the other side of a closed bathroom door!( Even then, someone was likely to be calling ‘Mom’ through the crack under the door…)
I think we’re on the right track when we do our best to do our duty (Martha) and make our work and our childcare time into our spiritual communion with Christ. We can do this partly by taking all that time with our children and using it to bring them into Christ’s presence by including them in our daily spiritual routine and teaching them how to keep Christ as the heart of the family.
When they grow older, into teens, they will own those habits of devotion, having compared their own experiences with those offered by the secular world, and will be able to take Christ with them on their adventures in the outside (of the family) world.
In this scenario, where parents are together facilitating the spiritual and other growth of their children, ‘gender roles’ are only circumstantially significant – as in ‘if its your job, do it’ , each family having its own circumstances.
Martha and Mary working together, not in opposition.
December 28th, 2009 | 3:08 am
LOL. After leaving my comment about my mother and her mother also producing 3-tined forks for their homemade watermelon rind pickles, a tomato aspic (yes, they made it) and other Christmas recipes from the Oklahoma plains, and reading the comments by Ellen Painter Dollar, all I can say is, how ironic – my mother and her mother each were named Martha.
December 29th, 2009 | 12:13 pm
Another illustration: I remember a Benedictine chaplain who was casually encouraging my male friends to follow his vocation remarked that their were plenty of seamstresses to make plenty of Benedictine habits, while my girlfriends considering a vocation to the Dominican sisters could expect to sew their own habits as postulants.
January 2nd, 2010 | 10:44 pm
Ellen – I’m writing as a single mother, so as someone who has quite a few inescapable chores. And the men on this thread don’t even have to be defensive about the fact that really, I am doing more than “the man of the house” since he left years ago.
But the reason I’m writing is to pass along some things that helped, as far as carving out some time and not feeling so over-burdened.
1. For years, Sunday night was my night off: we had a snack tray rather than a cooked meal. We would have a tray of sandwiches / coldcuts and whatever veggies or fruit we could have without any prep work, maybe a bowl of ranch for dipping the veggies, maybe some sliced cheese or nuts or individual-serving yogurt or applesauce. (It wasn’t all of that at the same time! Just enough for each meal.) And that was it. We’d make a picnic of it, laying out a mat in the living room & watching a movie that was age-appropriate for the little people. (Bonus: no cooking = fewer dishes too, since no pots or pans need to be washed.)
2. When one of the children misbehaved, their discipline was being assigned extra chores. Which chores? Whatever needed doing. “Re-organize the movies” and “Re-organize the pots and pans” were among my favorites. I would go from stressed (“Not one more thing!”) when they acted up to being back in charge of things (“Two birds with one stone!”)
3. I had a list of things that cut down on the workload, and when I was overburdened I used one or more of them. Examples: There was a reserve meal of canned stew left in the pantry for the night that I was just too worn out to cook. It might go weeks before I used it & needed to replace it, but it was always there if I needed it. There was also a stack of paper plates that I used when I wanted to be able to skip doing the dishes. At times when I was under harder deadlines at work I would plan at least one crock-pot meal each week. I gave myself permission to serve one ridiculously-easy / marginally-healthy meal a month (e.g. chili dogs).
4. I resolved never to cook for more than 30 minutes on a weekday. I went recipe-hunting and recipe-testing til I had a nice long list of meals that fit that requirement.
5. I came up with a short list of reasonably nutritious meals that could be done, start to finish, in 15 minutes or less. If anyone had to be somewhere within an hour of the time I got off work, one of these jiffy-quick meals was planned.
6. And I trained my kids to cook as soon as they were old enough that it was safe. These days, when work gets tough / overscheduled, I have them cook a meal each week. I don’t care if it’s Tuna Helper and a few of the noodles are stuck together; I have a “no criticism” policy when it comes to the kids helping me out of a tight spot.
I know that none of that actually sounds like spiritual stuff … it just leaves you with an ounce of extra energy at the end of the day, which can be leveraged however you like.
I also read a book on the Sabbath which pointed out something: “On the seventh day you shall rest” was prefixed with “In six days you shall do all your work.” It made me look a little differently at how I scheduled my chores. I did find a way to schedule laundry so that none of it fell on a Sunday, so that I would get more quality rest on that day. I have a “no laundry on Sunday” policy too. I found out that the world wouldn’t actually end if I didn’t do any chores at all on a Sunday. It would wait. It took some work, but I eventually taught my kids to allow me a nap on Sunday afternoon.
Take care & God bless
Anne / WF
January 5th, 2010 | 12:24 pm
Anne – Your suggestions are helpful and thought-provoking, and your encouragement to keep Sabbath comes at the perfect time for me. In crafting my New Year’s resolutions and a new schedule to accommodate my new status as a to-be-published author, I finally realized that a Sabbath is a necessity, not a luxury. I mentioned your comments in my latest blog post. Thanks!
- Ellen
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