Mennonite Women USA

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By Valerie Weaver-Zercher timbrel, July-August 2005 I’ve been trying to read some books for a review I’m writing. The operative word is “trying.” The following are all ways in which I’ve read these books: (1) While carrying the baby in the hall, just before one of my sons falls off a stool and bangs his lip. (2) With a flashlight, while holding my toddler’s hand as he falls asleep, and rocking slightly so the baby in the sling stays quiet. (3) In the basement with the children, while I forget the eggs I put on the stove until I hear the smoke alarm.

Sometimes I’m not sure why I try to read books and write essays—or do anything else but parent my three boys ages 4 and under. It’s insane, really, to think that I should spend my few free hours doing more “work.” (Judging from two of the above incidents, not only insane but dangerous, too.) Lord knows there’s enough work in my days—and nights—that I shouldn’t feel guilty about using those off-duty hours to drink coffee and read a novel. Plus, I’m all over the idea of “sequencing,” the term that these days refers to the way that many parents give up professional pursuits for the years when their children are small. I’ve used the “this is just a season of my life” phrase so often that it’s taken on the weight of a mantra: just a season, just a season. Someday I will return to the world of remunerated work and professional development. Someday I will have all the time in the world to write. Someday. Someday too, when I have no more little boys with split lips to cuddle, people tell me that I will miss these things with a pain that is almost physical. Sometimes I don’t believe it. More often, however, I do, because I frequently imagine that day with a profound sense of loss that makes me hug the boys with a fierce combination of panic and love. Why, then, if this time is so precious and fleeting, escape to the study for even an hour? Why try to do anything but be mom, which is more than a fulltime job? I think I write as a way to remember myself. This isn’t easy in these days when I can forget to eat or pee because I’m making sure everyone else does. People told me before I had kids that mothers often forget their own desires; no one told me that I’d forget to go to the bathroom. No, writing isn’t as urgent as eating. Yet I am learning that my needs, however subverted and secondary to my young children’s, are valid. I am learning, slowly, that if I don’t remember my own needs, no one will. Sometimes this honing of attention on my own needs doesn’t feel very Anabaptist. What about Christ’s call to deny oneself? But even as   parenting small children is convincing me of the inherent goodness of self-sacrifice, so is it helping me learn that unrelenting sacrifice is not what God desires for anyone. As Carla Barnhill points out in The Myth of the Perfect Mother, “[w]hen women, who already tend to sacrifice their own needs to those of others, are reminded to be servants, they hear that they aren’t doing enough, that they are failing the most important people in their lives. So they dig in deeper, try harder, and work to subvert their needs even more.” This is indeed my temptation during this season of life: to dig in deeper, to try harder, to give and serve and tend and nurture until I am absolutely empty. “Temptation” may seem a strange choice of words, since it calls to mind guilty pleasures like cream-filled donuts and marital affairs. But it fits. Temptation can lead to sin. When I give in to the temptation to sacrifice too much, I become depleted. And when I am depleted, I do things like shriek at my children when they don’t go to sleep fast enough or simply say, “Mama! Mama!” 20 times in a row. When I am depleted, I treat them as objects to control rather than humans made in God’s image. I can’t think of a better definition of sin. Two college friends and I get together each year, and this spring found us in Arizona strolling past giant saguaro cacti, gazing as purple mountains turned orange in the sunset. “This is filling a space in me that I didn’t even know was empty,” one friend said. I nodded in agreement. I don’t know whether she meant the intimate conversation or the blooming desert at sunset or a break from parenting. I do know that mothering young children, while an utter privilege and gift, empties me of energy like no job I’ve ever had. Like my friend, my empty spaces are filled through conversations and beauty and writing and walks—and sometimes even through my children.   I’m learning, slowly, to recognize my needs rather than to subvert them. Still, I’m grateful for a God who fills me with good things before I even know I’m empty—and who laughs with me when remembering my own needs means forgetting the eggs on the stove. For reprint permission, contact the editor.