Haiku the Day Away

I know that how-to blogs are really popular. We love to be told what to do. We especially love instruction when we are moms and homemakers, when we are women who home school and cook every day. We want to know the best way to do laundry and how to clean our oven in 30 seconds. We want to know how to keep our children from screaming and how to pamper ourselves while also being the best mom ever.

We want to have everything: the pretty red washing machine and the energy-saving clothes line out back, where it never rains and bugs don’t crawl. We want to know how to make the best chocolate chip cookies, but also how to keep our bellies from rolling over our jeans.

So when my husband gave me a website for Mother’s Day this year, I was excited. Then I was really nervous. I thought, I can’t have a blog. I don’t know how to do anything, and as for the things I do know, there is no constant.

It’s true. I don’t separate my laundry. Instead, I mostly just shove pieces of dirty cloth into the machine until it’s full. Then I pour in a cap full of soap, and push the ON button. I only clean our oven when it starts smoking up the kitchen. My children aggravate each other and they aggravate me, and though we share a lot of amazing moments, they are almost always unplanned, a result of something I didn’t do and can’t recreate. I don’t wear makeup. I don’t blow dry my hair. My idea of getting pampered is doing anything alone, and that’s not a plea for martyrdom. It’s really the truth. All I need in order to feel refreshed is a good few minutes with myself, where everything is quiet and I can process the world that is spinning and leaping and shouting around me. Every cookie I bake is different from the ones before it because I love to try new things, even if they aren’t as good as the last ones, and though I try to exercise a few times a week, I often end up just doing some combination of push ups/squats/jumping jacks/high knees while my children try to crawl under my legs exclaiming, “Mom’s a tunnel!”

The bottom line is that I’m only sometimes a tunnel. Other times, I look more like a crazy person, my double jointed elbows flailing around in the air, seemingly free from my shoulders, and sometimes my children get kicked in the head. I don’t have the answers.

Instead of trying to figure out how I could maintain a blog, I sat around for days wondering about it. Well, I have three children, so actually I barely sat at all, but that sentence is metaphorical. You know I love metaphors, right? I have been waiting for an idea, for a spark of lightening, for a muse, for a vision, for a mission statement of some kind that speaks of my life, and explains what I can offer.

Here it is: This is not a how-to blog. You will not find tutorials, and you will not find advice.

You want to know why not, right? Of course you do. If I’m not going to tell you how to do things, you at least want me to tell you why I’m not going to write tutorials.

Well, it’s not them, it’s me. And that’s the actual truth. It’s because I am not a directional person. I mean this in all senses: I get lost all the time, even when I have been to a place before, and though I admit that it would be nice to always be on the right road (and thus avoid almost all the marital arguments that ensue around my home), creativity begs for a journey. Since I know that I am a creative person, I have to be okay with the journey, and more than that, I have to enjoy the journey. I have to love the journey. I have to find joy and contentment while I am lost among orange cones and detour signs. Though there are a lot of people out there who hate being the passenger in my minivan, I simply cannot allow myself to always be focused on the quickest way to get from my home to whichever grocery store I decide to shop at that day.

My hope is that my journey speaks to you, and encourages you. My hope is that you find joy and rest and mercy as I reveal pieces of my journey here. You have to know that my journey, though it may sound beautiful and humorous, is a mess just like yours. Any beauty or humor found here is only a result of time. And time, though not all-powerful, does often allow healing and provide perspective for circumstances which may have once been really difficult.

Now, I invite you to join me, here, in this place, where the laundry is clean but not best, and where the cookies surprise and the bread is fresh, where I look for rest but only find it when I stop and realize that I can’t create it. Rest, it seems, is always here, if we invite it.