It has for some time now been the fashion to say that we are in a morass, and to attempt to get out of the morass by attacking Romanticism; and I am going to do this too.
[Iris Murdoch]

Reading books with Lucy is not like any other reading I have done. A current favorite is Curious George Visits the Library, and this is how it goes.

Lucy [toddling over waving book]: Wreedt!
Me: [sitting down on the nearest patch of chair or clear floor and pulling her onto my lap, still clutching the book]: Sure.
Lucy [chuckle-gurgles of delight, holding up the book]: Wreedt!
Me: “Curious George Visits the Library.”
Lucy [opens to title page]: Wreedt.
Me: “Margaret and H. A. Rey’s Curious George Visits the Library. Illustrated in the style of—
Lucy [turns to middle of book]: Wreedt!
Me: “It was story hour! George loved stories. He sat down with a group of children to listen. The librarian was reading a book about a bunny. George liked bunnies. Behind the librarian—”
Lucy: Manki!
Me: Yes! George.

Lucy: Doge.
Me: “Behind the librarian was a book about a dinosaur. George liked dinosaurs even more. He hoped she would read it next. But next the librarian read a book about a train. George tried to sit quietly and wait for the dinosaur book to be read. But sometimes it is hard for a little monkey to be patient.”
Lucy: Wreedt.
Me: This page is done. Want to turn the page?
Lucy [takes the proffered single page]: Wreeedt!!
Me: Can you say that without whining?
Lucy: Wreedt.
Me: And can you say please?
Lucy: Peese.
Me: Thank you. “When the librarian started a story about jungle animals, George could not wait any longer. He had to se the dinosaur book. He tiptoed closer. ‘Look, a monkey!’—”
Lucy: Manki!
Me: “shouted a girl. The librarian put her finger to her lips. ‘We must be quiet so everyone can hear,’ she said nicely. ‘But there’s a monkey!’ said a boy. The librarian nodded and smiled. ‘Mmm-hmm,’ she agreed. When she finished reading the jungle story, the librarian reached for—”
Lucy [pointing to the picture of George’s rump disappearing around the corner]: Doge!
Me: Yes! George. “—the dinosaur book. Where did it go? And where was George?”
Lucy [turns a chunk of pages]: Wreedt.
Me: “Until—CRASH!—George and the cart ran smack into a shelf of encyclopedias. Books flew up in the air. And so did George! He landed in a big pile right between O and P.”
Lucy: Wreedt!
Me: This page is done.
Lucy [turns backward a chunk of pages]: Wreedt!
Me: “George found so many good books, he soon had more than he could carry. He leaned against a shelf to rest. Squeak, went the shelf. ‘Shhh!” said a man. Squeak, went the shelf again—and it moved! Why, it wasn’t really a shelf after all. George had found a special cart for carrying books. What luck! Now George—”
Lucy [flips almost to end of book]: Wreedt.
Me: “With his books under one arm, George waved goodbye to the volunteer, the librarian, and the children from story hour. ‘Come see us again, George,’ the librarian said, waving back. ‘Enjoy your books!’”
Lucy [turns to last page]: Wreedt!
Me: “And so he did. The end.”
Lucy [flips to middle of book]: Wreedt.

We live in the house my parents lived in before us, in which I finished the last two years of high school. This means a lot of things: we’ve inherited the high-efficiency lemon furnace my parents installed, though the previous one was working, because the heating company sang its praises and made it sound like they’d make their money back in five years through lowered heating costs. This might be true, if the thing did not need twice-yearly major repairs because it is among the most finicky and ill-built machines we have ever met. It is (and has for the past two cold snaps) been on the blink. It can be coaxed to come on for about five minutes, proving it is capable of running, but then it shuts off. It is, as I have heard said of certain athletes, a head case. (Lest you pity us too much, there is a separate furnace upstairs and a gas fireplace downstairs, so we are more annoyed than actually freezing. But the kitchen is pretty cold unless the oven is on.)

Living in the house my parents owned before us also means that when we moved in, it was not empty. They downsized and we upsized (one-bedroom apartment to four-bedroom house). Our living room would look lonely, with one red loveseat and a rocking chair, if it were not for the two white easy chairs my parents left us. Our dining room would have no lamp and no table; same for the breakfast nook. I don’t want you to have all kinds of junk from us to sort through, my mom would say, but every time she offered me kitchen things I told her to put them on the pantry shelves, because having more baking dishes, and tart pans, and springforms, and muffin tins than I can possibly use at once sounded lovely. And it has been. I could take three or four casseroles to potlucks and forget the pans before I’d start feeling it (this is a great joy, as I have been forgetful all my life, and having a toddler has given me more to remember and less brain power with which to do the remembering). And I’ve got a baking dish for things that want to be in a deep dish with a lid; and for things that want to be in a big shallow dish; and for things that want to be in a small shallow dish with a lovely dark blue outside and creamy white inside for dramatic presentation. Kitchen life is good.

The upstairs closets, also, were not empty. In the art room, there are frames, boxes of framing hardware, stacks of old paintings, boxes of acrylic mediums, and things I have not opened yet. In the master closet, there is an unfinished door laid across the two top shelves in the back, holding a huge stack of 2×2 masonite panels in various stages of incomplete paintedness; two large drawing boards; and a box that holds full sheets of matboard (32”-40”). Then there are boxes of memorabilia: stuffed animals, T-shirts from college, photos, and books.

Lots of books.

Some of the books are obviously mine—I remember where I got them and when and why and how often I’ve read them. Others I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen before: like Dschinnistan, a book of fairytales published in 1982 in former East Germany, seven years before the Berlin Wall came down, on tissue-thin paper in a low-quality binding with what feels to me like strange, slightly archaic German with an occasional ü where I would put an i, like in the word “würklich” (“really,” usually spelled “wirklich”). Dishonest and powerful Jews, overpoweringly beautiful and intelligent dark-eyed women, immortal genies, and grotesque, apelike black slaves romp across its unapologetic pages. They are set, incongruously, in stories that otherwise have good bones. I picked it up to see whether I should throw it out, and have surprised myself by reading three stories so far.

Then there is a small stack of sheet music. Most of this is for the soprano recorder, of which I have two. There is a sonata for piano and recorder I played once (making a mistake I still remember) in a school talent show. There are also four or five booklets of German Christmas carols, most of them with music, all set in the range for a little recorder (that is, not dipping below middle C), and some of them with a second line of recorder harmony included.

Lucy loves these booklets of carols. She loves all books, but especially ones that do something when I read them. The books of just words don’t do much. But the books of songs do lots. The German carols live on the lowest shelf in the master bedroom bookcase (which is upstairs where there is heat), and when we are in there she often pulls one or more off, then marches over saying “Lied!” (song.) She opens to a page, and I tell her “That’s a page of guitar chords. I don’t know how to sing them,” or “That’s the table of contents.” When she finds a song, I sing it (or try stumblingly to sight-read). For most songs, I get about one line in before she turns the page, ready for something new. The one reliable exception is “O Tannenbaum.” On this one, she stops and dances, bobbing and swinging and turning in circles and grinning from one ear to the other. I sing all three verses once through, and then again, and usually I am the one who loses interest first. If we go through a book of carols for too long without hitting upon it, she will request it specifically: Mohm!

It is now the beginning of Lent and I feel a little time-warped singing Christmas carols. Also, “O Tannenbaum” is not my favorite carol. But it is appropriate, I suppose: we do look out in every direction on huge evergreens. And lately, unusually for Portland, they’ve even been snowy. The song’s second verse talks about how hopeful fir trees are because they stay green all year; and I’ll take that. Certainly it is hopeful to have found a song I can sing that will reliably make Lucy light up and start dancing. It feels a little like being a fairy-tale creature.

Yesterday morning, Lucy took a long bath. Yesterday afternoon after she woke from her nap, I decided to use the block oil my friend Liz made me (a honey-scented mixture of beeswax and mineral oil (and nothing else), in a tiny Ball jar with handwritten brown paper labels) and give all our cutting boards a good moisturizing. I have been trying to find things I can do while Lucy is awake that we will both enjoy—-which in this case meant something that helps me feel like I am accomplishing something, while also leaving space for her to be involved.

She was very much involved. I put an old towel on the floor, opened Liz’s jar, and brought down all the cutting boards from their shelf. “Mehmeh!” Lucy said, enthusiastically (Creme, German for cream). She loves cream, and rarely gets to dig all her fingers into it and keep the large gobs that result. Some of the gobs went on the cutting boards, and many went on her face. Some went in her mouth. The beeswax paste has a high enough melting temperature that the gobs melted very slowly on her cheeks, and occasionally I stole them back. When she lost interest, the hair around her face hung in greasy strands and she had two matching chunks of beeswax in her eyelashes, one on the left and one on the right, which did not seem to bother her at all.

I still had two boards left, so I kept an eye on her as she wandered around the edge of the counter and into the kitchen, but kept working. I could not see her, but I could just see over the top of the counter, and watched her hand come up and grasp the handle of the sea-blue ceramic mug that had the cold remains of the Earl Grey I’d drunk during her nap. “No!” I said. “Lucy, set that down. It will spill.”

She was already turning, holding the mug with great care. But she’s two. Some spilled as she turned. “Set it down!” But she was too fascinated by the pattern the splashes made on the floor. I watched, my hands full of beeswax, as she upended the whole cup onto the floor. Before I had time to get my scolding into full swing, she took a step forward. Her foot shot out from under her and the rest of her body followed, torpedoing her to the floor. She lay in the puddle of tea on her back in the posture of a bobsled contestant, unharmed but rigid with shock, and then began howling.

I picked her up and held her. The black tea dripped from her back while I tried and failed to stop shaking with laughter.

Last week I talked on the phone to a dear friend with whom I had lost contact for a number of years. She said she had found a handful of things of mine published online, including “a short piece you wrote on time–and I’m sure you have gotten endless comments on this–but the topic is so fascinating.” I have not, actually, gotten many comments on the piece, in part because I don’t think I told many people it existed, and in part because Cardus is a Canadian Dutch Reformed organization whose publications are not widely read in the States.

The most provocative question in the Cardus piece (which the editors chose for its title) is about time; in particular, about whether, as Christians, we ever get to say “I don’t have enough time.” I argue no: because God made the days the length they are, and made us creatures with the need to sleep, and understands our limitations. Therefore, what we are each called to do fits in the hours we are each given. As a wise TA of mine in seminary put it, “we are often tempted to say ‘there is not enough time.'” In the comments (which I can’t find now when I look at the piece), a thoughtful bookstore owner and father strongly disagreed with me, describing family life and service and work and their overlapping and conflicting demands in the context of a short, short day. I know exactly the feeling he described: that I am faced with a situation in which the best I can do is to rob Peter in order to feed Paul. (Or: rob Lucy to feed writing; rob writing to feed Jim or our marriage; rob our community to feed our family.) If that is true, then my claim that it is heresy from a Christian perspective to claim that we don’t have enough time is adding insult to injury. It is piling guilt on top of the agony of choices that never let us do justice to anything or anyone.

The question is still urgent to me, and it is, in spite of my previous self’s confident pronouncement about heresy, not one that feels easy to answer. In our phone conversation, my friend and I agreed that we are at our worst when we hurry. “I have,” I told her, “done categorically the stupidest and most harmful things that I have ever done, at times when I was rushing around late to something.” And it is true. I am silly when I hurry. I lack judgment (never mind perspective). I am irritable. I am quick to blame others (often for my own mistakes). I see people not as people (never mind as beings made in the image of God) but as tools or obstacles in my quest to get caught up again, to make it in time, to be okay.

I once heard of a study in which seminary students were given the assignment to preach a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan. They were given a room number and a time to deliver their sermons, and when they got there, they were told it was the wrong room and that they needed to be on the other side of campus, which meant they were now late. On the student preachers’ path to the correct room, the study organizers planted a person lying on the ground, moaning aloud in obvious distress. What did the students do? They hurried past.

This study haunts me because that is exactly what I would have done. Even with a sermon on the Good Samaritan in my mind (a story that is specifically about stopping on one’s way to help someone in distress)–make me late to anything in which I am invested, and God help anyone along the way who seems to need me to stop. Because I will not be stopping.

But even though I have known for some time that I am at my rock bottom worst when I am in a hurry, I have not succeeded at eliminating hurry from my life, even to the extent that it is within my control. “I think,” my friend said, “it is partly hard not to hurry because being busy, being under some pressure, elevates our heart rate and tells us what to do next and gives us a shot of adrenaline, and those can feel pretty good.” It is hard not to hurry because if I don’t need to hurry (says a persuasive voice in my head), then maybe nothing I am doing really matters. When I asked her why she thought hurry had such power over us, why it felt worth it to be such an awful person in order to meet its demands, she said “I think for me it is because I have an idea of myself that is some distance out from who I really am. And that idea of myself is at stake in meeting the demands of hurry. If I don’t meet them, maybe I am not really much of anyone at all. Maybe I have no real shape.” Her answer felt uncomfortably true. I can’t be late to the sermon I’m supposed to preach. I’m not the kind of person who is late to my own sermon. And if I am that kind of person, then—who am I? And can I live with being that person? Hurry’s shot of adrenaline comes from chasing an idea of myself that is, as my friend said, “some distance out from who I really am.” If I live pursuing an idealized version of myself, I am setting myself up to be behind, always, and never to be present in my own skin, where I am, now. As John Ortberg writes in The Life You’ve Always Wanted, hurry is a sickness that makes us incapable not only of enjoying our own lives, but also of hearing God and of seeing or loving anyone else. And that’s if everything goes smoothly. If anything gets in my way, then I am not just passively incapable of love, but actively violent. It turns out my whole sense of self is on the line—because I am ten minutes late.

The question “do we have enough time?” is incomplete. In order to answer it, we need to know, enough time for what? I think my TA (the one who said that we are tempted to say we don’t have enough time, and who, incidentally, also had four kids and was writing a dissertation) had in mind something along the lines of “enough time to be where God is calling us to be right now.” I do not think we always have enough time to be rested, or to feel imperturbably zen, or even to get enough sleep. If Christ is our model, we don’t always have time (or whatever else we need) to live to a decently old age. But we do have time to be who God is calling us to be right now.

I sometimes escape into the question of whether we have enough time. It is easier to puzzle over it philosophically than it is to face the places in my life where I know quite well that I am making choices, unnecessary choices, that will lead to my being in a hurry not long from now. Which means I am choosing to be the worst version of myself at some point in the future.

I want to stop doing this. Forget the hurry that feels outside my control; I want to deal with the hurry that is inside my control. I am not sure how to do it, but does anybody want to join me? I would love an Eliminate Unnecessary Hurry Club (better name suggestions please).

whuhdt—Wort/word

Woat—road (GPS: “turn left on Statesville Road.” Lucy [from car seat]: “Woat.”)

Ah-OO!—Uh-oh (two months ago; accompanied by flat-palmed circular hand movements, as though she is wiping an invisible windshield)

Ah-OH!—Uh-oh (now; hand movement same)

Ow-dowt—Oskar (the Ladd grandparents’ one-year-old beagle-ridgeback-boxer-pitt mix, who is subjects to fits of overzealous rough play with everyone, including the nine-year-old twins, but will let Lucy poke him in the eyes or try to pull out his tongue without so much as nipping her (I mean, hypothetically he would, if we ever got far enough away from the pair of them to give Lucy the chance))

ah-daht—outside

eh-deht—exercise

Nana—Nana (Grandma Kensinger)

Nanana—“sing me the na na na song”

Dati—“sing me the dati-da song”

Anooooooo—the nine-year-old twins, Charlie and Andrew; said with massive enthusiasm and a big grin

Dadti—Charlie, if specifically quizzed

Gigi—Gigi (Grandma Ladd)

Bob-pop—Pop-pop (Grandpa Ladd)

Nuna—Nudel (noodle)

neen—jeans

[upturned face, mouth slightly open]—kiss me

A’vwee—Aunt Havely (said in a slow, deep voice, always with a smile, and frequently when Havely is not even in the room)

Nit—Uncle Nick

Vafa—Wasser (water)

wawa–water

vafish—red fish

Vefish—Weste (vest; if not understood this word may be accompanied by strokings of my vest-covered back)

daw—draw (accompanied with sweeping circular hand motions across a large sheet of imaginary paper)

tai-taich—zeichnen (draw)

Beetah—Bitte (please)

Foor—Feuer (fire)

Puhpuh—Uncle Peter, who gave her

ah-woool—stuffed Hedwig, Harry Potter’s white owl

Eh-meee!—Amy (our duplex neighbor in Durham, whom Lucy recently saw again in Durham, and remembered by name. Me: We are going to have coffee with Amy. Lucy: “Eh-mee! Eh-mee!” Me: “You remember her? After six months?” Lucy: “Eh-mee!” [enter Amy] Lucy [big grin, no stranger danger]: “Eh-mee!”

Eness—Essen (eat/food)

och!—hoch! (up)

Nin—Kinn (chin)

batta—button

Hets—Herz (heart)

auch—auch (also)

fow-fow—flower

Oot/at—Hut/hat

Dattah/Ta-too—Danke/thank you (accompanied by chinpalm, her approximation of ASL)

bite—bite

Enu—Entschuldigung (sorry)

nowm—sorry

dow—scarf

ani—anziehen (put on)

rainee—rainy

heissss—heiss (hot; accompanied by cautious motions in the direction of the object)

weichhhh—weich (soft, accompanied by stroking)

nassss—nass (wet; used frequently as she pulls the front of her shirt away from her after playing at the sink)

Ah-bod—ipod

abn—haben (have)

Dudu—Lulu

Tsitsu—Lucy

Au—Auge (eye)

hadee—radio

Tifu—Stiefel (boot)

Meme—Creme (cream)

Dette—Decke (blanket)

Bapish—Spielplatz (playground; important word; used frequently on walks, especially whenever we pass a colored structure in someone’s yard)

mit!—with! (as in, “I am taking this with me,” accompanied by tucking the object in question under her arm, regardless of size, and looking up as though daring us to take it away.)

Toof!—Tschüs! (bye)

This past fall I have felt like one of the pieces of beat-up wooden furniture my dad used to buy from people in Germany—once he drove to someone’s barn to get a big solid-pine dresser with two drawers and two doors. When he bought it, it was covered in many layers of paint, and it took him weeks out on the balcony to strip and sand and pry all the bits of paint off before you could see the beautiful plain wood. Then he rubbed it all over with beeswax until it gleamed and smelled like wild honey, and then he brought it inside and it sat, glowing, in the living rooms of all the houses we lived in after that. It even went in a container and rode on a ship from Germany to Oregon, and now it is in our living room, because my parents didn’t have room for it at their new house (and maybe also because they knew I loved it).

I feel like that dresser before the refinishing, like I’ve had a lot of owners and they all had different taste in colors, and all used oil-based paint, and laid it on thick. Some of the layers make me want to struggle to match an ideal I have, some make me want to fight an expectation I believe the world has of me, some create darkness that makes it hard to see anything. But they all make it feel impossible to take a moment and simply be in it, to accept it as what it is and start from where I am. And as the splinters in Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen distort the vision of those in whose eyes they lodge, the layers under which I am living project outward onto everything I look at. Our neighborhood becomes not a place in which particular people live, but a generic and unchangeable rich suburb. My marriage becomes not a living relationship but a competition of photographs. Our house is not a gift and a home but a complex series of traps, a thing that will eat me whole if I let it.

It feels incredible, when I write the layers out, that I could take them seriously. It feels even more incredible that I can be aware of what a layer is, of what it is telling me about my world or myself, of how it is sucking the light of my life, and yet feel unable to get out from under it. Here is where the metaphor of the dresser has been helpful: I have been wanting to step out from under the layers as though they are blankets, as though a few shrugs and a sidestep ought to get me clear. But if I think of them instead as layers of paint, then this is a piecemeal, inch-by-square-inch process. It takes care because you don’t want to gouge the wood. Different tools will work on different parts: deglosser everywhere. But then a sanding machine on the large flat surfaces, a sanding block on the smaller flat surfaces, paint knives and wads of sandpaper and hours of sweaty patience on the scrollwork at the corners. And you can be through all the layers, down to the wood, in one place, and not even through the muddy beige outer layer in another place.

The layers that make me saddest are the ones that have to do with Lucy. I have been realizing that her curious, patient, eloquent toddler self is not delighting me as much as I’m pretty sure it could be. The first paint-removal forays will go toward figuring out what’s up with that.

For now, a moment of recent delight: Toof! Is her word for Tschüs, which is bye in German. This trip she has learned to open doors, if they have handles rather than knobs. She will reach up on tip-toe, open the door, maneuver herself out, reach up on tiptoe again, and then wave with her free hand through the narrowing gap and say “Toof! Bah-bah!” as she pulls it shut from the outside. Then there is the whap-whap-whap of her feet smacking down the hall, getting fainter, and then pausing and getting louder again. And then the handle depresses and the door cracks open and she comes in and grins at me and turns around to do it again.

In a documentary podcast I’ve been listening to, the narrator recently described her problems as the problems of a privileged person. (She is, at this point in the story, attempting to make a living on the podcast alone; she has quit her job and used up her savings, maxed out her credit card, and still the ad revenue from the podcast has not risen to an amount that gets anywhere near paying the rent, let alone her daughter’s childcare. She is taking a break from the podcast and has asked her dad for money, and is exhausted.) She (and not to be mysterious: it’s Sophie Harper in Not by Accident) did not use the phrase “first-world problems,” but what she said reminded me of that phrase, and made me think again about privilege and how I can relate to mine in a healthy way.

Something bothers me about the phrase “first-world problems.” One thing that bothers me is that it points out that I spend a lot of time making a big fuss about things that are ludicrously less serious than the difficulties with which the majority of the world’s population deals on an everyday basis. That is a fair and healthy discomfort, and no reason to discontinue using the phrase. But there is something more.

At one point in grad school, I lived in the narrow upstairs bedroom of a five-bedroom house on Trinity Street. My room was directly above the front porch, and roughly the same size and shape, with a long row of high square windows facing south and into an endless-looking willow oak that housed hoot owls. It cost me $250 a month; I paid my whole first semester’s rent by selling art at a big show in Portland before I left. I put a dresser on the landing outside. A desk fit inside. In order not to clutter the room with a bed, I put a double-thickness air mattress in the narrow walk-in closet (it just fit, with a bit of a pinch at the middle where a support beam came down). On the first night I got off my airport shuttle and awkwardly met my housemates before heading upstairs to bed. I got into my minimal pajamas (North Carolina in August without air conditioning) and inflated the air mattress. As I opened the closet door to crawl in, a large roach dropped from the door frame and ran down my shoulder.

There were no roaches after that first one. But I was sitting on that same air mattress with the closet door open, on a Saturday afternoon, when I had an important conversation with my friend Theresa about pain. She grew up in South Africa and had a rough childhood (as everyone I know from there did). I was talking about the things I was learning about slavery in one of my divinity school classes, and about the ways it reminded me of learning about the Third Reich in tenth grade history class, in Germany. My suffering seemed simply irrelevant in the face of genocide. Or even famine or plague or poverty. What did it matter if I had insomnia? Or was lonely? Or struggling to work out relationships with my family?

“I don’t think,” Theresa said, “that pain works that way. I think that pain sort of fills up all the space available.” She paused. “I mean, I’m working right now for this family down the street who just had twins. And they are SO overwhelmed. Both the parents. One newborn is a wild ride, but two of them at once—and then they wake each other up when they cry—and you have to feed two, and change two, and don’t have enough arms. And—well, the thing is, I don’t think that the presence of any other suffering anywhere else in the world really changes that. You know?” Then she talked about a book she’d been reading, one of Frederick Buechner’s, that talked about “stewarding your pain.” As though pain is a resource, something that must not be wasted. She said this was changing the way she relates to her own pain. “It doesn’t do anyone any good—not even the descendants of holocaust survivors, or of African slaves—for you to sit around telling yourself your life has become irrelevant in the face of the magnitude of their suffering. What you need to do is be you. It’s the only way you can do anything worthwhile in the world. It’s the only way you can actually see or respond to their pain. Being you means doing the work of your pain, rather than going around avoiding the work by telling yourself your pain doesn’t matter.”

The phrase “first-world problems” has the effect, for me, of compressing two different sets of things together that do not belong together. One set is my mundane and insignificant annoyances, which grow out of being accustomed to a standard of living that is, by historical and global standards, absurd. The other set is my actual pain. It is useful to compare my inconveniences to the struggles of others because it gives me perspective and may convince me not to complain foolishly. But it is not useful to compare my pain or suffering to other people’s pain; in fact it is a misunderstanding of what pain and suffering are. Pain happens to human beings, to all of them and in ways that do not in the end vary much. Privilege protects you from some kinds of pain (you’ll get better medical treatments, for example, and are less likely to lose family members to disease). But it does not remove the pain you experience if someone you love does die. When someone you love does die. Privilege may give you space to do your grieving without having to struggle to keep yourself or your children alive. But it does not do your grieving for you. And you do the world no service at all if you avoid doing your own grieving because right now, in a war zone somewhere, someone cannot stop to grieve because he or she is being shot at.

There are first-world inconveniences. But there is only one-world pain.

Jim had spent the evening reading through the government-issued fifty-page voting guide, mailed, astonishingly, to every household in Oregon. Half an hour before ballots were due, he had given me the quick overview of things, told me who he voted for and why not the others, which ones were hard choices and which ones were easy, and I had voted with him on some things and against on others. While he was reading, I was making tuna salad, and Lucy was going back and forth between the living room, where she tried to help Daddy by writing on the pamphlet he was reading with the pen he was using to vote; and the kitchen, where she climbed a chair to reach the counter and helped me stir the tuna. On the first attempt, she levered a chunk straight to the ceiling. After that she stirred more effectively (or anyhow less messily), until she tried to eat off the stirring spoon. When I explained that it was a serving dish and we don’t eat out of serving dishes, she took the half-chewed bell pepper out of her mouth and put it back in the bowl. When I made her a little bowl of her own, she wailed and then ignored it, and tried to stick her baby spoon in the big bowl. When I tried to explain again that we don’t eat directly out of the big bowl, I realized I had just taste-checked the dressing with a big spoon, straight from the big bowl.

After Jim delivered the ballots to the drop-box and Lucy was in bed, we ate the tuna melts. I thanked Jim for all his research, he thanked me for all the backup and for the food, and then I said I was feeling a little overwhelmed by the kitchen and that tomorrow would go a lot better if it got into better shape before the next morning. The table was still covered in nonperishable groceries that needed to be sorted into the pantry, and the sink was full of mixing bowls and baking pans from Lucy’s and my first joint cake-baking endeavor that morning. The counter and Lucy’s chair and the floor under her chair were sticky and strewn with little bits. And in order for anything to move forward, the dishwasher needed to be emptied.

“Sure,” he said. He is better than I am at housework, because he does not as easily get overwhelmed by it; he just gets it done. “I could help with that right now.”

Then he added, “Oh, actually—do you mind if I check in on the election progress first?”
“No, go ahead,” I said, the “I could help with that now” still echoing in my head, assuming the election results would be quick. I usually ask for times on things, because we have had the fight we were about to have so many times already. But it did not occur to me. I grew up in Germany, where we couldn’t vote because we were Americans; my parents voted long-distance before the Internet, and even though I have become marginally aware that some people (Jim’s family included) watch the elections on TV like a sports game, but it did not occur to me that he might mean something like that. I visualized the two-page ballot, and thought, “It’s two pages of percentages on who’s voted for what. Ten minutes, maybe?”

Ten minutes later, he was still at the computer, feeding me fascinating snatches about how many people had voted this year compared to other years. “They’re saying this could be a voting record—if it keeps going like it is, this high a percentage of people won’t have voted since 1916.” That, of course, is fantastic. But the updates had not, thus far, gotten to any of the things we had actually voted on. And I was doing the hardest part of the kitchen cleanup, the initial scoping and maneuvering, when everything is dirty and in the way and there is no room to set anything down, and (if you are me) it begins to feel like the screen in a game of Tetris just before you lose. (Sorry, very young people. Google it.)

“So, are you coming…?” My voice had a thinly disguised edge of irritation. The thing I ought to have done at this point, as Jim and I determined hours later right before bedtime, was to come into the dining room where Jim was reading on his laptop, sit down, ask him to take a break, and go over our assumptions together, beginning with a clear sense of what is involved in “checking up on the elections.” Or, even better (we realized past bedtime), I should have said “I am feeling scared and overwhelmed and tomorrow morning feels like it may be my last chance this week to get much done, because my mom is watching her and I don’t know whether I’ll have childcare any other days since Lucy’s still coughing. And if we don’t get the kitchen sorted I feel like I am not going to be able to take off and go work, because my mom’s watching Lucy here. And it’s already a packed morning, with the earthquake retrofit guy coming for the estimate at 11.” Jim would, he said after the fact, have pointed out that he could cover for me during an evening. He would have asked why he couldn’t do his half of the kitchen later. And I would have said, Well, I guess, okay, but the first part feels hardest. And I might have added that this probably felt overwhelming because housework was always a big source of conflict between my parents. And he (already knowing this since we talk about it plenty) would have said, That makes sense.

Instead, I got more scared and correspondingly more irritated. As I felt increasingly overwhelmed, I held on tighter and tighter to what I thought we had agreed on. And the more I implied by my tone that he was defaulting on a promise, the madder Jim got, until finally, he took off upstairs, leaving me alone in the kitchen.

I decided to listen to Richard Hays’ farewell lecture (he’s a New Testament professor and was at one point the dean of Duke Divinity School). Two people have sent it to me, saying that he mentions the calligraphy I did of Malcolm Guite’s sonnets that is up in the Divinity admissions hallway. I was curious about the mentions, and Hays is a kind, thoughtful, brilliant man who says worthwhile things. As I thought about Dean Hays and his gentle, thoughtful tone, I realized that if I would not be able to get through listening to the lecture without realizing that my fury was petty and out of proportion. Because I felt attached to the fury, I debated whether to go through with listening, and, for the first twenty minutes, tried to preserve a sense of indignation. But by the time he started talking about Bonhoeffer writing that God calls us to come and die, I realized it was futile, and went up to Jim’s room for the first attempt at reconciliation. This ended with him explaining why he wanted to take longer on the elections, which I took as him fighting for his assumptions while telling me mine were wrong, and therefore I responded with “And that’s fine, but—” to which he said “I don’t need your condescending tone! Get out of here.”

I went back to Richard Hays, put in a load of laundry, and finished the kitchen. On the second try, I found Jim watching Live, Die, Repeat on the big monitor at his desk (this also has happened before; it is his cool-off movie). Once he extricated himself, I did a better job listening and realized that it was my taking a reprimanding tone that had upset him so much. At which point it started to feel like all the apologizing that was needed was on my side. That was when we made progress, and I figured out what I could have done instead of getting mad and beating him over the head with what I took as his broken promises, and I began to feel hopeful about having a slightly more enlightened version of the fight next time.

• Be honest. The philosopher on whom I wrote my dissertation, Simone Weil, talks a lot about a practice she calls “attention” that can narrow the gap between our perceptions and reality. Reality is often inconvenient, but it is so much more inconvenient in the long run to ignore it. When you have that nagging feeling that you’re trying to bend space-time, find some way to pause. It’s not worth it.

• Obligations: does it have to be you? If you are feeling stretched thin, consider the necessary tasks in your life and ask: am I the only person who can do this reasonably well? If someone else could do it without catastrophic loss, start looking into ways of finding such a person. Be creative; consider trades, bartering, offering a service in return. This kind of trade is how my mom got me drawing lessons from a professional illustrator when they cut art for a year in school.

• Try to determine to what extent your sense of tension and overwhelmedness is external (a literal matter of time shortage, with more necessities than you can handle) and to what extent it is internal (a matter of having standards for yourself that are not serving you well and may be physically impossible to meet).

• Give yourself permission to set your own standards; be ruthless when you discover yourself measuring your own performance (in any role) by a standard you have not deliberately and thoughtfully approved. You must become a cultural critic in order to do this, and notice what the stories are that attach to the standards which exert emotional pressure on you.

• Try if at all possible to get yourself a job description. Write it yourself if you need to. Get someone who can read and is not you to approve it. It is so much easier to meet goals that are clear.

• Take deliberate time for marginal things (like coordinating daycare). They require time. It is part of your parenting to put effort into the time your child spends away from you.

• When you ask for help, be specific and give reasons. “If you could watch the kids from 6 pm on and put them to bed tonight, it would let me go to this reading by this writer whom I have long admired, and I think it would give my work new energy.” Jim loves to help with a purpose.

• Figure out what kind of help you need and start moving toward getting it (this may include counseling, or childcare you can’t yet afford, or a gym membership, or taking a class or any number of things; figure out what you want and then pursue it, even if you can’t get it right away).

• Find a schedule that works for you, and follow it in a way that works for you.

• Take time to reflect.

• Take time to rest.

• Choose to look forward to things; own the agency you have in directing your own thoughts. Do the work of fighting to be present where you are, and do the work of learning to celebrate what is good in where you are. Choose to enjoy the freedom of making a mess with a toddler; choose to enjoy the (limited) quiet of being in your office or a coffee shop or wherever you work, when you are away. When I say “choose to enjoy” I don’t mean that you have direct control over feelings. But you do have direct control over at least some of your thoughts. So choose to think enjoying, grateful thoughts, like: I am glad I have this time to do this thing that matters to me. I am glad we have a kitchen in which to make a mess attempting to bake a cake. I am glad we have a dishwasher/sink/running water to help with cleanup. Or try It is good. It will be hard at first, and will be hard again at points in the future. But it will also start to become true, emotionally. And one of the most wonderful parts that will become true is that you will be able to say, to your kids, I am glad you are here. And you will be able to say, to yourself, I am glad you are here.