I had a really rough day.

The kids screamed at each other from basically 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm. Wait, strike that. 7:27 pm.

The girls ran through the upstairs overturning my stacks of neatly folded laundry.

I had to pay $1500 for roofers to fix the leak in our roof.

I got in a giant (stupid) argument with my husband at noon and then we didn’t resolve it until he got home.

But…

I danced with a three year old in pajamas. And I snuggled her on the sofa and kissed her bath-fresh toes.

My after dinner treat was a beautifully crayoned coloring-book page from my my seven year old. She presented it to me as a surprise so I’d feel better.

I got a phone call from my sister. Talking to her made folding clothes bearable. (even if the stacks did get toppeled 15 minutes later)

My husband is home and safe.

I called a friend on the phone. And I felt loved by her.

We have food to eat (leftovers to warm) and a non-leaky roof in the rainstorm.

My girls have warm beds with quilts to stretch their growing legs in.

Even recounting the blessings of my day, woven in with the trials, helps me not to remember so fiercely the minor pains of my afternoon. The joys outnumber the difficulties by far.

I feel my blessings tonight.

She holds the pink construction paper accordian “arm” of Valentine’s Day project her sister has dismembered. The rest of the heart-shaped “man” is somewhere else. Somewhere far away from us.

Sitting in the backseat of my car, she turns it over in her hand and pulls open the zig zag of the paper, probably unaware of what she’s doing and surely by now forgetting her sister’s sin.

I’m seriously wondering where motivation comes from.

Whether it comes from some genetic-attached-to-your-soul type of place or whether you create it day by day.

Because honestly, I could not care at all about the dirty dishes downstairs. In fact, they are 85% of the reason why I came upstairs. But last Thursday afternoon, I was all about cleaning and organizing and putting things away. Some days its just there, and some days its not. And I don’t know how to get it back. I wonder why motivation is something that moves in waves: sometimes it washes over me and sometimes its lost in a fog.

Right now, on a Sunday night (which is typical of most Sunday nights after weekends of playroom choas and turning the light out at night on messy rooms), I have no motivation. No motivation to write, to clean, to fold clothes. I barely have the motivation to give the girls their baths. Its like I just kind of don’t care.

My dad gave me a book to read (or actually a few chapters of a book) called Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris. In short, acedia is a semi-archaic term meaning spiritual torpor or sloth, apathy, numbness, or the absence of care. But its more than all that. It isn’t a simple emotional apathetic attitude toward something or someone, Norris says that, “the person afflicted by acedia refuses to care or is incapable of doing so.”

Writers and monks have described it as a “paralysis of the soul” or the “noontime demon” who only brings inner restlessness caused by the tedium of waiting for life to progress. There certainly seems to be a connection to dissatisfaction and boredom with one’s current state.

And right now mine is motherhood. And a messy house.

There is much more to the acedia idea (it has been connected with depression but is not the same thing) and Norris devotes her book to how acedia was woven throughout her whole life beginning in adolescence.

So I find myself balancing between low motivation, watiting (patiently?) for life to move on, and guilt for all of the above.

I don’t know where motivation comes from, and I don’t have a solution for myself (and I haven’t finished the book yet so I don’t know how Norris comes out at the end, whether she learns to live with it or somehow overcomes it.) But I do know that I believe I battle this noonday demon who waits to steal my joys at the little things of life, and rob me of my productive desires.

And I really don’t want to let him win.

I have one of those banana hanging things.

Somehow it saves the bananas and keeps them fresh longer. It keeps them from rotting on the counter. I don’t even know what they are called. It is probably an As Seen On TV name like the Banana-Wow! or Bananas-A-Fresh or something. Regardless, I finally broke down about a year ago and bought one. And it works.

I have no idea why, but it does. It might have something to do with keeping them in the same position as when they are still attached to the banana tree, but I really don’t know if that is true either. The Banana-Wow! just works. So I use it.

When my seven-year-old comes to me with questions, especially why ones, I can’t answer most of them. I do know why the sun comes up or why stars seem to flicker, but I can’t tell her why her cousins live six thousand miles away in England.

I know the practical reaason: that their parents are planting a church. But the make-you-feel-good-reasons that make sense to her, I don’t have those. Why can’t they come over after school? Why can’t they have a sleep over? Why can’t she see them on Christmas morning?

There are bigger, God reasons that apparently I’m not privy to. The only understanding I can access is what is directly in front of me and directly behind me. For the rest of it, I’ll have to trust. Like ants following each other to the crumbs in the corner of my garage, almost blind in a line, they have faith that following will get them to their goal. They put one little insect foot in front of the other and walk forward.

Or like a horse in a trail line. She relaxes when she pushes her nose into the rump of the horse in front of her and slips into auto-pilot. There is something calming to her both knowing there is both a rider on her back that she can trust and another horse in front of her who knows where he’s going. She just trusts.

I’m so glad God has the ariel view of life. That He can see the farm-field-quilt of it all and knows the whys and the whens and the hows that I will never see.

When I don’t know why, I just move forward. I just walk. Because the God who knows why the Banana Wow! keeps my bananas from dying, is the same God who knows why the rest of it all happens: the deaths and the illnesses and the broken hearts. And he’s crafted it that way.

At my mom’s group yesterday morning the speaker asked us what we would do if we had eight uninteruppted hours to ourselves. Without kids. Without dirty dishes in the sink. Without piles of laundry to fold.

What would we do with a day of time without any other responsiblilities.

A dream, right?

Because even when I do have a day when my mother watches my three year old and my oldest is dropped off at school, I usually have to knock exercise, errands and classroom helping off my list before I have any time to do something I want to do.

That leaves about 19 minutes between 1:54 and 2:13.

I think the answer to this question is different for each of us and also very telling.

If she would have given us time at our tables yesterday to discuss our eight-hours-of-bliss dream each of us might have said something different. Our eyes would have lit up because we would be talking about something that is both important and personal to us. We would have been discussing the thing that makes us unique.

Some of us might have said scrapbooking, or cooking, or reading or sewing, or making jewelry or talking with a friend…

I would have said writing. Beacause I just long for undistracted time to focus and think and craft words. Any my eyes would have lit up.

About a week ago I decided to stop telling my husband what he was doing wrong.

You would think that would have clicked something like ten years ago for me, but some things take me awhile to get.

I used to think that I wasn’t a nagger. But as I write this, I am realizing that I am. Or I was a week ago.

It always seems like I am the problem sniffer in our relationship and then I expect him to solve it. Not always a good thing because, as a man, he needs a solution to a problem. It isn’t enough that I analyze our communication or interactions and figure out what is wrong. I should have a solution, right? I never have one. Simply sniffing out a problem and then telling him where life stinks is basically nagging.

So what I usually sniff out has a lot to do with him and how he is failing. Of course I always give the caveat, “I’m sure I do this too…..” or “I know we both are feeling badly, but…” He never says much. He just takes it. Takes me.

What a horrible wife I can be!

What stinks isn’t how he is failing, what stinks is my incessant nagging.

So about a week ago, after a “discussion” about finances/discipline/schedule (I actually can’t remember), I decided that I hated the way I sounded. It was kinda like the decision made in the dressing room in May when I’m trying to decide about a bathing suit. The that’s-it-I’m-sick-of-myself decision that I need to DO something about the way I look (or in this case, sound).

I decided to just shut up. Because it wasn’t doing anything except make us both feel bad.

Nothing happened. Not really. Except I had to bite my tongue a few times and I think I slipped up at least twice. Until yesterday.

He sat me down and told me about how much he knows that he’s not perfect, that he needs to change in so many ways. And then he told me that we both had some “work” to do. And I agreed. We agreed to each focus on our own failings, not each others, so that we would free ourselves up to change. We decided to help each other by praying and speaking kindly. And I promised myself again that I wouldn’t nag anymore.

I want to smell good to my husband. I don’t want my words or my speech to stink in any way and the only problems I want to sniff out are my own.

So, um, Natalie made a very brave and hilarious post about earthquakes versus tornadoes. The girl is talking crazy Oklahoma and I need to jump into the ring and set the record straight.

Here are some facts for you. And no, I don’t have fancy drawings either. And this is for you, you who live in warm, balmy Southern California, and you who also live in icy, windy Oklahoma (did I ever tell you I did my 3rd grade state report on Oklahoma?).

DEATHS AND STUFF
The last time anyone died in California (yeah, like the whole state) from an earthquake was in 2003. And that was probably because they thought it was a tornado but it was only an earthquake.

Okay, yes, in 1906 a lot of people died from the San Fransisco earthquake but that was way before they put extra steel in our buildings and built everything to earthquake codes. And there weren’t fire exits, and the cars were crappy and the old bridges fell on people. California is a different state today.

According to wildwildweather.com (because EVERYTHING on the internet is true), “The United States has the highest occurrence of tornadoes of any nation in the world. During an average year, over 1,000 tornadoes occur across the continental United States. Nearly a third of these tornadoes occur in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, an area known as ‘Tornado Alley’.” (emphasis mine)

There might be only one state more tornadoey than Oklahoma: Kansas. But we don’t even need to talk about Kansas because people die in Oklahoma every day. From tornadoes, and heart attacks from tornadoes, and falling down because they are running from tornadoes. Its pretty much just one big tornado.

In fact (still from that wild wild weather site) the highest wind ever recorded in the US was in Bridge Creek, OK in 1999 at 318 miles per hour. Really people, are your houses made of concrete?

And, according to cnn.com, the “figures for tornado deaths have skyrocketed over the past four years. In 2005, there were 38; in 2006, 67; and last year, 81.”

WHY EARTHQUAKES CAN BE FUN AND TORNADOES ARE TORTURE
I mean, seriously, they happen once like every couple of years. And every 20 years or so a big enough one happens that people do die, but its usually in an older section of town with old brick buildings, and let me tell you, when the earth shakes, those bricks fly.

But not like they do in a tornado. Ever heard of the straw through the telephone pole? True. What about the fork through the car door? Also true. Just imagine what a brick could do…It might just clear a hole straight through a barn or an outhouse or a corn silo or something.

Growing up in California, I’ve never been scared of earthquakes. I don’t want to be in an elevator when one happens but considering the amount of time I spend in elevators is next to never, its no big deal. For the 3 Oklahomans (Oklahomians, Oklahomists?) reading this, you just hang on, grab your kids for the SIX SECONDS OF ROLLING and just hang on. Books might shift on shelves and cabinets might rattle, but when its all over, you clean up the breakfast dishes and turn on Good Morning America.

So Natalie,

1. Earthquakes are dodgeable. They only happen in one place and then radiate out from there. If you are standing smack dab in the middle of the desert on top of the fault line when one hits then you might be in trouble, but then again, if you are in the middle of the desert there is nothing to fall on you.

2. Earthquakes do not eat children. I don’t know what movie you are watching, but this is entirely untrue. The whole Superman, with Lois Lane in the car being swallowed by the earth thing (and there’s like gravel in her mouth and stuff) is so fake. I have never seen that happen.

3. Earthquakes don’t really have seasons (yes, you can have that). But when they happen so infrequently (as opposed to the 10 month tornado season you have) it really doesn’t matter.

4. I agree, they aren’t trackable, but who really cares? They don’t move around like freaky, chaotic tornados so who would really want to “chase” them anyway?

4. Earthquakes don’t give me nightmares. Not once. Tornado dreams, however, have caused me to wake up screaming. There has to be something there, right?

I will take earthquakes and flying bricks any day. Just don’t put me in the middle of this:

So in 12 days I’ve written 4,624 words on my book.

To some of you who spew out paragraphs and chapters like they are just wating to be photocopied off of your soul, that might not seem like a lot. And certainly not very much to those of you who have 1000 a word day goals (I’m winking and smiling at my good friend, Annie, who just finished her book!)

But there are two small but mighty things to be kept in mind here: one just turned three yesterday and the other is trudging through first grade on a daily basis.

I have to pretty much carve time out of my life to write. Chisel out focused time between their bedtime and my bedtime (which is close to impossible considering requests for water and bandaids that can reach a feverish pitch). Carve out time to do the kind of writing that requires real thinking, and yet still be present in the lives and days of my daughters. Oh, and my husband. Can’t forget him.

So the urge and motivation are there to write, but my biggest obstacle right now is just finding the right kind of distraction-free time in an environment with an electical outlet nearby (because the battery on my laptop doesn’t last more than about 45 minutes).

So I know that 4, 624 isn’t much. In the scheme of book length projects its a little pitiful.

But its 4,624 more than I had 12 days ago. And that is something.