TLC

If there's one thing I'm learning through parenting with Spirit it's that any experience life throws at you - no matter how mundane - can become a spiritual experience if you choose to look at it that way. Case in point: the chicken pox, which Nicholas came down with two days before March Break was scheduled to begin. It's rare to be struck with this kind of convalescence these days: one whole week off - at least - and quarantined from public places. I canceled plans, rescheduled visits, and prepared for boredom, misery, and mangy-ness.

The afternoon that I discovered the spots we bundled up against the rain and gloom and I pulled the kids in the wagon to the nearest drug store. I bought the biggest bottle of Epsom salts available and enough calamine lotion to last through my grandchildren having the chicken pox. Back at home, cold and weathered, there was nothing to do but take care of each other. I ran Nicholas a hot bath and poured in the salts slowly and from a great height so we could watch them cascade and plink into the water. I grabbed a fresh hand towel for his back so he could lay comfortably against the porcelain, a soft cloth to pat his sores and a measuring cup to ladle the warm water over his battered skin and - presto! - created our own little ritual of healing.

Like water on rock, this illness slowly smoothed out my curt, rough and busy ways. Normally I don't have time for such coddling - running water over blistering sores, carefully preparing pots of rosehip, chamomile or lemon echinacea tea, patiently dotting tiny spots with pink lotion - but there I was, labouring over a bath, warming the tea pot, scouring the linen cabinet for cotton balls, and feeling surprisingly content because I'm useful and comforting and...much more gentle than I usually am.

I don't know exactly what got me to it, but in the week that I was at home with my son and the chicken pox I came to the realization that being gentle in life is akin to being reverent. Perhaps it was the intense intimacy involved in caring for someone who is sick; cleaning wounds, dressing sores, cuddling a shivering, skinny boy, each act in and of itself a sort of prayer...my son, who art my heaven, hallowed be your name! It seems to me that the search for a gentle way to relate to others - interacting without being harsh or rough or inconsiderate - is simply the best means of honouring the sacred in our midst; that is, the incredible and impossibly curious fact that we are alive, and that we have these precious bonds to other living being as parents, or children, or life partners. Illness reacquaints me with the sacredness of being alive - and of all life on this planet.

When Nicholas was sick last week I took care of him like I meant it - with tender, loving care. It embarrasses me to say I'm not like this every single day, because we all deserve a little TLC, if only for the awesome fact that we are here and we are living - and not just when we're ill. Indeed, I've come to see a gentle reverence for life as the only thing that will keep us well.

Just Dance!

I made a delightful discovery last week, on the lookout as I was for a gentle way through the (sometimes) rough moments of day to day life with young children. The challenge: to get through that awkward time many mothers call the "witching hour" (or "arsenic hour," as my mother called it) without any harsh words on my part. Are you familiar with the witching hour? If you haven't lived through it, let me fill you in. The witching hour happens after school, but before supper when you're trying to cook dinner but the kids are already hungry and tired and in need of more of your energy than you have it in you to give. During the witching hour there is too much to do for one set of hands, but your partner isn't home from work yet. A colossal challenge for any mother, the witching hour is that much more difficult for us Canadians in the long winter months when it is impossible for us to send the kids outside and out of our hair without a fight.

The solution? No, it's not TV, and it's also much healthier for you than downing a glass of wine or bottle of beer to make it through until your partner comes home. What could it be? Why, Lady Gaga, of course!

Mid-arsenic hour the other day, Nicholas and Emma wanted to listen to "rock" music, which is what they call any music that is pop-y and played at loud volume. Normally I detest loud music during the witching hour as it only seems to add to my stress when I'm cooking under the gun and tripping over toys on my way between the fridge and the stove, but just this once I gave in, put on Lady Gaga and pumped up the volume.

As soon as the music came on Nicholas and Emma ran off to put on their costumes, each of them choosing something pink and frilly that gives good twirl when they spin. In the midst of the chaos that is our kitchen in the witching hour, the kids were having so much fun, spinning and swirling and grabbing whisks to use as microphones. Feeling their joy in spite of the pressures it dawned on me that even though it was technically the witching hour, that didn't mean I had to be a witch. Gentleness was right there, I just had to embrace it.

So off I ran into my bedroom and rooted around in my "give away" bag for the slinky black number my 19-year-old-built-like-a-runway-model cousin had passed on to me. It was a dress made for her body and not mine, accentuating my floppy stomach and the way my bosom, well, barely exists, but for dancing in the kitchen, it was just the thing. The kids loved seeing me in costume too - they thought I looked beautiful. "You should wear that to church, mama," Emma said. Now that would be a Sunday you wouldn't want to miss. My mood went from sour to soaring as I danced my way through the chopping and the simmering and the washing and the tidying, rocking out to Lady Gaga in my little black dress.

I was reminded in the moment that when we can find ways to make light of the heavy parts of life - choosing to be a little more gentle with each other, while still attending to the tasks at hand - life is a lot more fun. So, now, when tensions rise and my natural inclination is to whip out a harsh word and launch it at anyone in firing range, I'm going to remember the gentle wisdom of my children and, of course, Lady Gaga and her wise directive to "JUST DANCE!"

La Vie Boheme

This week and last week I have been feeling overwhelmed and sensitive about the lack of "things" in my house. It started last Monday morning when I woke up and couldn't get past the fact that I still don't have a proper bed and I'm in my 30s. At the moment we make do with a box spring and mattress, a big step up from the mattress we used to have on the floor. Why don't we just go to Ikea and pick up something cheap, you might ask? Good question. Here's the answer: Steve and I made an anti-consumerist vow not to buy any "temporary" furniture; we would wait instead until we could afford good and solid pieces that would last the rest of our lives and avoid adding one more poorly-made bed frame (and dining room set, and living room furniture, and television) to the landfill. But I'm starting to feel like it's time to buy something already because our living conditions are just plain weird.

Last week I couldn't help but look at our house the way visitors must look at it. I felt like journalist Gail Sheehy must have felt on her first visit to the dilapidated Grey Gardens mansion to meet the eccentric Big Edie and her daughter, Little Edie Bouvier Beale - full of shock and awe that real people were actually living in such a run-down crazy place and seemingly okay with it. At least I don't have raccoons inside my house like the Bouvier Beale ladies...at least I don't yet, but believe me they look in our windows like it's only a matter of time.

Who do I think I'm kidding? It's obvious that the "couches" I've created in our front room with a big bunch of fabric and throw pillows are the kids' beds. The old change table in our bedroom is too wide to pass as a book shelf, I should know this. And the old jam jars are just that and belong in the recycle bin; I can't keep passing them off as water glasses. We need so much stuff in order to be considered a normal North American family, starting with a whole house instead of just the main floor and an actual bed frame.

So my "to buy" list feels a tad long at the moment and this is overwhelming because I don't have any time to buy anything anyway, and no car to cart all my stuff home and no means of entertaining the kids on what would be long and tedious errands.

In the midst of all this I needed to think about my focus for the month of March and went out for a long run to process my thoughts. I wasn't expecting to meet my goddaughter at the park where I run the trails, but there she was, out toddling around in the way that only two-year-olds can, enamored with a rock and a dog and a mom that passed by pushing a baby in a carriage. I stopped, talked, pointed out a tree that had been gnawed by a beaver, gave the girl a big squeeze and - wouldn't you know it - felt a million times better about myself and my life when I got back home. Children - my own and others - remind me that feeling good within and without is the result of treating ourselves gently, meeting our daily physical needs for nutritious food, vigorous exercise, lots of water and sunshine along with meeting spiritual needs like connecting with others and nature. I'm always the first to tell my children that buying more "things" isn't going to make them any happier. As I said goodbye to my goddaughter and finished my run I knew that of all the fruits of the Spirit what I really needed to focus on this month was growing in gentleness - towards myself and the planet - and that this would do more to help me feel right in the world than any amount of furniture ever could.

Shopping can wait. I think that treating myself gently - meeting my physical and spiritual needs - is the only priority for which it's worth rearranging a schedule. If browsing for a bed frame means I won't have time for a much-needed run, and if a shopping list makes me feel like I don't have even half an hour to sit and read a few scriptures and pray, then it's the browsing and the shopping that I need to comprise, and not my health. People before things, wise women have always said. Besides, the earth needs some gentle treatment too. I don't need to add more discarded purchases to our planet's garbage dumps, and I would undoubtedly end up tossing what I buy in haste sooner rather than later.

So I ran three times last week and I actually got up to the loft to read scripture every morning and I just got back from a wonderful afternoon at the playground with the kids. I don't have a very clean house this week or even a whole house or even any gosh-darned furniture to put in my house, but I think a spirit of gentleness is more important than all that anyway - it's got to be. As Big Edie said, "My body is a very precious place." So is our planet. And my challenge this month is to judge my life more gently, by how I FEEL on the inside, instead of fretting about what surrounds me on the outside. And I think Mother Earth will thank me for this. But my house will still look weird.