There are worse things at sea!

I had a private heartbreak this weekend. I called my friend Rebecca to wail about it. She was very compassionate. Then after our conversation got a little more lighthearted she told my her Dad's expression every time she skinned her knee was "There are worse things at sea!"

Which I first understood her to say "There are worse things at tea!" Which instantly gave me some cool mental images of hidden cruelty flung casually around linen and fine china saucers.

But no, her Dad was in the Navy. So he'd say there are worse things at sea.

That made me corrected line made me laugh. Laughing feels good over a sore heart. I really love the internet and the good friends I've met over the phone after falling in love with their blogs.

(Note: My pregnancy is fine)

Gym Class Heroes: Stereo Hearts ft. Adam Levine [OFFICIAL VIDEO]

I love to pray along with the radio. I'm in love with this song this weekend. It sort of reminds me of an updated take on St. Francis of Assisi's "Make me an instrument of your peace." I like singing this one to my Jesus. "Make me a Stereo of Your Heart." I was an 80's girl who was so excited to buy her first "ghetto blaster" with her own babysitting money. It just makes me laugh and smile to think about becoming a better boom box for Jesus.

Getting Knocked Up, Means Getting Knocked Down

I made a joke with my husband in our kitchen on Friday Night. I had big plans for my Friday. I took Tess shopping for her coveted horse birthday present from Target at 8 AM. I picked up caking making supplies. I had plans for making Hershey's Perfect Chocolate Cake for dessert and prepping for our family's beach vacation on Saturday.

At 1 PM, some extreme nausea hit. By 3 PM, I was hugging my puke bucket and hollering for a big kid to put Abigail back in her crib for a second afternoon nap. It took me until 9 PM to make it quivering out of my bed. I rejoiced in eating some plain spaghetti and laughed at my pathetic condition with my husband. "Getting Knocked Up, Means Getting Knocked Down."

I feel like most of the advice that I receive as a pregnant woman is on how to "avoid getting knocked down." Take ginger pills or Zofron. Order Take-out.  Hire a cleaning lady and a Mother's Aide. For heaven sakes, stop homeschooling this year.

The thing is, I'm not a novice pregnant lady by the sixth time around. I've tried all the easy solutions. I've taken all the advice from my doctor and from my friends. What's left is just a period of "hardness" in early pregnancy, no matter how much ginger ale I have stocked inside my kitchen.

This time around, I'm getting more comfortable with "Getting Knocked Down." I'm losing control. I've lost focus in my prayer life. My laundry schedule is behind. Dinner is plain and simple. Often times, Jon has to finish mashing the potatoes for dinner because I need a nap at 5:45 PM.

On Friday, we had a birthday party for Tess with a grocery store made cake, Breyer's ice-cream, and no balloons at 9:30 PM. It was sweet and lovely and perfect. It's a reminder to me that none of my impressive birthday party ideas matter to my kids (and I'm such a happy party planner in regular life).

Only love matters.

Never results.

St. Teresa of Avila, patroness of the sick, pray for me. Help me find contentment in my helplessness during early pregnancy. This is a special gift.

The Power of Saying No

I learned how to say no a lot this summer. No. No. No. No, thank you. Yes, I'm serious. Yes, I mean it. No.

I said no to volunteer positions at my church. I said no to vacation plans with my extended family. I said no to Swim Team. I said no to teaching Vacation Bible School. I quit a bunch of church committees. I skipped out one some of my kids' extra-curricular meetings. I canceled a few play dates.

Some people took my "No thank you" calmly. Some took my "No thank you" badly. A few times my kids burst into such intense tears in front of me I thought that my heart would break.

At the end of an entire summer season--from May to August, a thousand "No thank yous" later, we actually have enough time, energy and money to consider a beach trip tomorrow. God willing, we're going to Assateague Island near Ocean City, Maryland. This is a beach front National Park where 300 wild ponies live.

We've lived in the Washington, DC area for 7 years. This could be our first ever trip to the beach! We're beach people! We simply never had a car, or never had enough money for gas, or never had enough vacation time or never had enough energy while I was pregnant or nursing.

It's shocking to me that after refusing to deplete myself over trying to please outside people this summer, I actually have enough energy to plan a Beach Trip while I've got first trimester morning sickness! God, please help me keep setting firm boundaries. I love the results of living happily inside God's Will for my life instead of veering off it at the slightest whiff of peer pressure!

Tess is Three!

A special thank you to every Abigail's Alcove reader who prayed this sweet girl home from the NICU three years ago!

SET (Support, Empathy Truth) as a Successful Approach to Homework Attitute Problems

One of my hardest hurdles of homeschooling my kids is their giftedness. Before I started teaching my own kids, I had this idea that giftedness would make homeschooling easier. Yet I was missing out on one of the beautiful frustrations that often accompany a gifted mind--acute emotional sensitivity.

Emotional sensitivity is awesome. I've got it in spades and so does my artistic husband. Yet it takes a bit of maturity to use emotional sensitivity for good-- such as coloring a dramatic still life, rather than screaming bloody murder because one of your beloved crayons has a broken tip.

If there are any X man comic readers out there, my homeschool looks more like Francis Xaviers Home for Gift Youth where the new, untrained mutants frequently blow things up accidentally, more than the refined creativity synergy that is Julliard in New York City.

Today, I experienced a strong tension in the teacher/student relationship. Grace came to my rescue. I'm currently doing research on how to better support with a person with a personality issue. It had nothing to do with my teaching relationship with my son. Yet since I reached the end of my rope in homeschool far quicker because of morning sickness, I gave it a try.

SET is an acronym for "Support, Empathy, Truth." Someone with BPD needs the emotions talked about in the start of a conversation, instead of focusing first on the facts. I couldn't believe this thing worked so well in a homeschooling problem.

The problem I had today was the my 3rd grade son, wrote a fantastic piece of dialogue for his writing assignment this morning. I wanted to work on the proper placement of quotation marks. So I spent a few moments explaining the rules. I then rewrote his work with proper punctuation, proper spelling, and use of low case letters instead of the all capital letters he is so fond of using. At 8:30 AM, I gave him the assignment of copying my notes for his final draft. I fully expected this task to take less than 7 minutes.

At 8:55 AM, there were six words copied on the page. Six words that managed to have fantastically worse spelling than his original draft. This was after two "check-ins" me.

It was one of those painful moments when I felt so disrespected by my kid. He's got to be thumbing his nose at me, right? There are no learning disabilities or ADD issues in sight. He can do the work. He's done writing work in the past. What is it about today that makes a normal school assignment a gigantic heroic effort?

I blew it the first time we talked about his attitude towards this assignment. The second time I used "Support, Empathy, Truth." I told him that I wanted to be his teacher this year. I talked about how hard it is to be working and have your teacher say "You're not working hard enough on this assignment." We talked about his emotions for several moments. Once I made a firm connection, I totally switched gears.

I talked Truth. I said "You hate doing school work. That's a normal 8 year old boy thought. You are probably going hate school work today, tomorrow and the day after that. Yet when you are 25, you might have your dream job on Saturday Night Live. You have awesome ideas in your head. At sometime you are going to want to jot those ideas down for your boss. It's going to hard for your boss to read this draft (I pointed to his work) rather than this draft (I pointed to my draft). That is why we do picky final editing work. We want our ideas to be as easy as possible for other people to read, besides us."

I was really surprised because only the Lord knows how often I've given similar motivation speeches in the past, but after the easy warm up of validating his emotions, my eight year old son was surprising receptive. We finished the Grammer Pep Talk with making specific, measurable goals. I set the kitchen timer for 5 minutes. I told him how many words I hoped he would get on paper before I came back to check on him. It took a total of 20 minutes to get about 50 words copied on a sheet of paper--but the slow work was accompanied by a much calmer student and happier teacher.

Here is hoping tomorrow's copying session only takes 17 minutes!

(A lifeline in my homeschooling process has been the "Exploring the Emotional Needs of Gifted Students".)

The Beauty of Not Getting Anything Done

Life right now consists of morning sickness, waves and waves of nausea. My pregnancy causes nausea is misnamed "morning sickness." I have it 24/7. I'm not actually puking--so the baby and I aren't in any danger. I'm keeping down food and fluids just fine. It's more like this constant feeling of "I'm about to puke."

 My emotional health is to my physical health. In the morning, my nausea is worse. Yet I'm usually steady emotionally. I get to enjoy a quiet breakfast time with my husband and pray while the house is still dark. By the afternoon, my nausea is much better physically, but I'm in much rougher shape emotionally. I'm tired. I'm depressed. I'm judgmental about "not getting anything done" in the house. I feel depressed reflecting that it will be so many weeks more until I can even hope to feel better.

It's amazing to write that there are spiritual gifts inside this place of "emotional suck." For me, there is a beauty in not getting anything done.

Last week, this beautiful Carmelite priest from Vietnam, Father Joseph, gave the homily at my local parish church in West Virginia. He told us about his life. In Vietnam, the Communist government has denied granting a permit to any religious group in the country since 1975. Without a permit, the small Carmelite friary is subject to persecution. Government inspectors can search their home at any time, even at midnight. As a result, these 30 men must chant their Evening prayers softly and keep their house "as messy as possible." They need to look like normal male student slobs, instead of a highly disciplined group of monks. Too much order in their housekeeping tasks would immediately tip off the Government Inspectors that something bigger was happening inside this house.

Baby Abigail's antsy 18 month old legs needed stretching soon after this part of the homily. I took her out of church, so she could run in the parish hall for a bit. While I was alone with her, I had this opportunity to really reflect on Father's Joseph's story.

Both Father Joseph and I are living in a house far messier than we'd like. We're both doing it because we are following the Will of God. Father Joseph has to use a messy house to hide from the Communist Government. I'm living in a messy house because my morning sickness, combined with my poorly chaperoning an 18 month old and 2 1/2 year old, equals outrageous amounts of household disorder by 5 PM each day.

I thought it was cool that a chaste Carmelite friar can have the exact same sacrifice as parents of many small children! I decided to offer up my annoyance with my messy house during this pregnancy specifically for the Carmelite friars in Vietnam.

This morning, a fellow blogger named Melanie, sent me an awesome article about a fellow Carmelite's take on combining her ADD and with more Holy Housecleaning. This is more blessings of taking an enforced rest from most housecleaning tasks. A rest can also be a retreat. An inspiration to do a familiar task with great focus and grateful prayer.

I love this kid inside my belly. His nickname right now is "Leo." (Not that I have any idea yet if he's a boy or a girl, but we like to call our beloved babies a sweet nickname well before the first sonogram in my house. Poor Alex, my only son, was affectionately called "Beatrice" for weeks!) Leo is shaking things up within my soul, well before his arrival into my arms. Thank you, kiddo! I love you!

Surviving The Survivor Guilt

Tomorrow marks a 90 day anniversary of attending Co-dependents Anonymous meetings for me. It's a big milestone. What makes CODA so special to me is that, on the outside, our meetings seem so simple. I show up for meetings in a church's ordinary Sunday School room. I sit on a metal folding chair. I eat the Mini-Hershey Chocolate Bars that are passed around as a snack. I sip water from my water bottle. I listen. For one hour every week, I listen to people share stories that are eerily similar to my own autobiography. Sometimes I talk too. But mostly, I listen.

I've yet to learn anything earth shatteringly "new" in a educational presentation at CODA. That is also reassuring. I'm talking to God regularly. He's telling me how to heal. Healing from emotional trauma isn't rocket science.

What I witness in CODA is the real life example of people who have put these Christian principals of self-examination and self-forgiveness into practice. Now they are better off than me. That's inspiring! I can get better too!

I almost always leave a CODA meeting feeling more connected to God and less afraid. There is an amazing feeling of community. It's amazing to me that I can receive such deep encouragement and support from people radically different from me.

I've watched a lot of TV this week because that's an easy distraction for me from the waves of morning sickness. I saw this scene where a woman had horrible survivor guilt because she was saved from a bus accident, while the man who pushed her out of the street died. Day after day she sat at the bus stop in shock feeling horribly guilty for being alive, while a more worthy hero was dead.

A friend of the dead guy snaps at the guilty woman and starts screaming at her "Go, get a life!" Stop wasting time sitting here and replaying the accident in your head. Leave here now. Don't every come back. Go, get a life!"

That scene like such a metaphor to me for my experiences in CODA. I have extreme survivor guilt. I am the only person from a large Christian family who is actively talking to God on a regular basis. There are train wrecked lives all around me. These are people who I love. These are people who are "better" than me. It feels selfish and wrong to delight in fishing with my husband and kids on a perfect summer afternoon while there are so many people I love who will likely never become a parent because their hearts are so mangled by our joint family experiences that they never risk intimacy with another human being, ever.

Marriage is intimacy. Marriage is vulnerability and risk. It's a huge gift from the Holy Spirit to even be in the place where I said "I trust myself enough to make a commitment to love one man, Jon Benjamin, for the rest of my life. I'm open enough to receive that same gift back from him."

I look around my life and I don't just see a society that contracepts after 2 kids. I see a bunch of friends from college and law school who around age 40 are still not in a position to get married. They have the shiny career. They have the house. Yet inside they still feel emotionally insecure and afraid of serious commitment.

I'm a survivor. I lived that life too. I was more emotionally insecure than anyone. However, here I am, praying and laughing and kissing the same guy for over thirteen years. Give God the credit.

I feel like the "bad" evangelization efforts I do, is a product of co-dependent thinking. Bad evangelization is from survivor guilt. I feel guilty that I'm "here" pregnant with a sixth child, attending Mass, baking peach pies instead of "there"--living in stressville with all my workaholic college buddies. I want to "save them." I want to scream out some Bible Verses, and post some cool quotes from the catechism. I want to feel less guilty that "I got chosen" for a major life overhaul and not them.

CODA meetings remind me to back off on my rescue efforts. I'm not a member of the Chicago Fire Department. I need to focus on my own recovery right now. I might be outwardly Catholic right now, but I'm sure as heck not healed. I'm not in a place where I'm peaceful during normal conflicts in my marriage. I'm not in a place where I'm allowing my children to make their own mistakes. I'm still fighting perfectionism, and rigid black/white thinking, and religious scrupulosity. I'm still learning how to Let God love me for myself alone, and not for what I can "do for him."

At the exact same time that CODA shines a flashlight on my soul and shows me "Whoops, I'm so not as healed as I thought I was..." CODA also gives me a solution that is little and gentle. "One day at a time." "Easy does it." "Let Go and Let God." It's shocking to realize that planning a horse-back riding trip with my 10 year old daughter does more healing for my soul, than reading stacks of self-help books. I suspect that one horseback riding trip is also a better evangelization tool that righting 50 earnest Abigail's Alcove posts. I think it was Mother Teresa who said "Joy catches souls."

I'm grateful for my recovery. I'm excited to learn how to cultivate more Joy in my life, rather than feel likes it's a fleeting thing that so rarely can be enjoyed or captured.

St. Therese of Lisieux, patroness of missionaries, pray for us!

A Gem of a Post

A heartwarming post for all mothers of baseball fanatic sons!

Post Update: here

ht: Jill Stanek

T for Tess!

My daughter Tess is about to turn 3 next week. She is such a talker! She has a huge vocabulary and the way she puts words together is so interesting. She likes to say "The baby in your tummy is going to be my friend!" I think that is so sweet. The new baby isn't going to be "her sister" or "her brother." Instead he (or she) is going to be "her friend!"

Just a few weeks ago, I had the joy of sharing her own story of the NICU stay. We were looking at the scar on her tummy, which I'm so affectionate about now, and I said "that's the cut where the Doctor's saved your life!" She was finally old enough to start to really understand what happened. Now she says "I was sick, but the doctors saved my life! Now, I good! Now, I strong!"

Every anniversary of her birthday and three week NICU stay is so amazing now. I'm so happy I'm healed enough that the memories of her NICU stay make me feel grateful, instead of scared. God bless all those amazing doctors and nurses at Children's Hospital in Washington DC.

On Teaching the Hard to Teach Readers

Ironically, homeschooling has given me greater empathy for the "Crisis in Public School Education." I come from four generations of public school teachers. Public Education debates used to reduce me to an overly excited quivering mass of emotion. I was certain that urgent change was needed and educational reform was a high priority for politicians.

Now that I've spent the past seven years teaching my own children how to read, I've gained humility. I'm no longer shocked that many kids have a low reading scores in Washington DC Public School. I've learned that reading is an incredibly complex process. There are some kids that will easily pick up literacy skills no matter what method a teacher uses. There are some kids that will pick up the harder aspects of reading through repetition. However, there are many kids who fall "off the graph." Their brains are just wired "differently."

Teaching reading isn't an easy. There isn't one set of techniques that work for all students all the time. It takes incredible patience and perseverance on the part of a teacher to calmly sort out which method of learning how to read is going to work for an individual student.

I've got three very different students in my family. I've got one kid who was bored to death by reading lessons. Reading was a hated school subject, until she could finally read advanced chapter books. I've got another kid who has all the intellectual phonic skills but who struggles to keep his emotions in check long enough to advance in reading. Our reading lessons are less about academics and much more about focusing on modeling good behavior skills. Another kids has the most positive attitude about learning imaginable, but who has almost zero retention skills. A reading lesson is beautiful and fun. The next day, the slate is wiped clean in her mind and its as if she's never seen the letter S before.

Teaching my own kids has forced me to become very creative. For the "I can't read anything boring ever student" I created a "high/low" system of reading. She read advance chapter books that interest her. Then she reads "baby books" below her grade level to increase her fluency. She writes an essay every day. I pull out spelling words from her own work. Memorizing spelling words helps her increase her reading speed as well as enhance the clarity of her writing. This kid refused to read grade level text. However, by going above her reading level and below it on the same day, I'm rapidly getting her up to grade level.

For the kid with retention problems, reading and writing work is focused on her own interest. My rising first grader can't spell "hat" but she can spell "chocolate." Chocolate is a word that is interesting to a serious cupcake baker. Hat is not. To deal with this lack of interest/lack of focus problem I handwrite a "word list" for her. We learn new spelling words that are catered to her everyday. Then we write three sentences using her favorite words. Along the way, I sneak in phonics lessons and easy grammar lessons. It's totally teaching reading through the back door. After a long brain warm up, my kid can handle a short reading lesson from a more typical phonic workbook.

In a tribute to extreme flexibility in my parenting beliefs, I'm now a huge advocate for online computer games! Talking to other kids while playing Rodblox and Minecraft has finally made my rising third grade son want to learn how to read and write. We flipped from major behavior struggles during reading lessons to eager participation overnight. "Watc out for the ber!' didn't get the same reaction online from his peer group as "Watch out for the bear!" Developing internal motivation makes a huge difference in the pace of reading education.

Before I had the humiliating experiences at labeling myself a "failure" in teaching reading to my own kids, I was a real intellectual snob when it came to literature. Somethings counted as "real reading homework," and many things didn't. Now I see reading as a lifelong skill with many different uses. I'm happy to read out loud "Lord of the Flies", "Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves," and "The Odyssey" to my kids. It's my job to expose them to great literature. Yet I'm also happy to center our writing lessons on computer game instructions and cookie recipes. Reading and writing are skills that quickly become a part of the individual blueprint of a child's soul. It's okay if reading lessons become very specific and won't normally be "countable" under the typical public school curriculum.

On Losing Friends

I've strained three friendships with my latest pregnancy announcement. I've been down this road before. I lost friends when I joined Carmel and when I had a sick baby in the NICU. There is some sort of pattern with me. Many times when I'm making a big leap forward in spiritual growth, I lose friends.

It's hard for me because this time I really tried to be more authentic while making new friends after our move to West Virginia. I didn't hide myself. I'm pro-life. I'm Catholic. I've got 5 kids already. Why should it come as a shock that I'm adding another new baby to the mix?

I really identify with St. Peter. It's easy for me to make blustery promises to pledge strong devotion to Christ on my own, but ask me to risk one disapproving glance from a friend and I fall to pieces. Vanity is a strong cancer in my heart.

In some ways, it's nice to have the fallout from something so concrete as having a sixth baby. My usual pattern is to collapse into self-doubt in the face of disapproval. I start thinking "What did I do wrong? How did I mess this up? I must be at fault if I've made someone mad at me. I better start apologizing immediately." That's the co-dependent part of me. (It's good to apologize quickly when I've committed a sin towards a friend, but if I start apologizing immediately for the mere fact of living a life different than a friend then that is that start of a slippery slope which always ends in heartache.)

Yesterday, I was chatting with God about the pain of quitting Facebook. I know its the right decision in my gut. I feel the benefits of leaving. And yet.... it hurts.

I expected to just solider on. Losing friends, quitting Facebook, it's all a part of the relentless journey to "Depend solely on God." I've got massive trust issues since birth, so it makes sense for my spiritual journey to be messy and uneven.

Yet God is so merciful, he threw me a bone. Yesterday, while praying for another reason while waiting in the checkout aisle at Target, I ran into someone from our church. I hadn't seen her in a year. We chatted about light stuff. Then it was time for me to pay and leave. When we walked out of Target, I told Jon--that was an answer to a prayer but I don't even remember her name!

It's never easy to leave Target with 5 mobile kids in tow, so while I was protecting my kin from near death in the parking lot I felt consumed by self-judgement. "I'm so stupid. I always do this. I'm too shy to admit that I don't remember someone's name, then I talk to them for 10 minutes, now it's going to be even more awkward to ask for their name the next time I see them."

Then four parking spaces down from me, I saw her. God had given me a second chance. I returned my shopping cart and rushed over to her car. I was brave and asked for a lunch date. I left with her full name and telephone number!

It was just a little thing, but it really means a lot. I'm not rushing into this relationship looking for a best friend. It's enough to have someone to call to invite over for coffee on a weekday this month. God always seems to know my limits. Right when I'm really struggling in the desert of "losing friends" or "leaving Facebook" he gives me a little wink to say "I've got you covered kid!"

Smith College Commencement Speech of 2013

Wow, I just found this on the internet. It's filled with some convoluted secular terms for some very common spiritual insights--but I found this speech reassuring. I graduated Smith College in 1997, when this was NOT the theme of my commencement speech. It's nice to feel like I can go back for reunion now and say "I'm living a life in the third metric." It does trip off the tongue as nicely as "I'm living a life of prayer and peace"--but oddball alumnae like me can't be too picky.

On Quitting Facebook

I quit Facebook Cold Turkey last week. It still feels weird!

I got inspired after reading an article by a Catholic writer. I felt like right now its such a dangerous time-suck for me. I decided to stop going on Facebook until after I finished the full rough draft of my book. I've tried Facebook fasts before. I'm too weak. This time I did the radical "delete your entire account" option.

Living Poor, Feeling Rich

We were too poor this year to take our annual vacation at the KOA Harper's Ferry. Instead, we hit the jackpot. $20 a night for tent camping in the Catoctin Mountain National Park.We spent two nights inside a deep forest with bears and bobcats roaming around--with five kids! I was so thankful we brought our dog. (Knowing we had a warning system if a bear came into our campground helped me sleep at night.) I was so thankful my husband has perfected his fire-starter skills. (We were 25 miles from the nearest McDonalds, so there was no back-up plan for breakfast if the fire didn't start.)

I had no idea that my young kids could handle such serious camping. They were awesome. There was something about being immersed in the deep woods that spoke to everyone's soul. It was such a holy experience for everyone.

Catoctin Moutain National Park is home to Camp David, a presidential retreat for President Obama. When I got home, I found this funny advertisement online. Only $1,200.00 to rent a cabin at Camp David for the weekend!

Happy Feast of the Assumption

It's a day of Holy Obligation for Catholics. My husband left the house at 5:00 AM this morning to hit Mass in Maryland before work. I'm taking 5 kids and my pregnant self to Mass at 8:30 AM. No better way to say "I love you to Mary, the Mother of God!"

I Am the Old Women in the Shoe

Last night, my toddler Tess woke up at midnight and came into my bedroom. My six year old woke up about 2 AM and came into my room. So it was no surprise when I woke up at 6:30 for morning prayer. I saw two kids sleeping on the three foot floor space between my bed and the closet door. I was surprised to find my dog curled up under my daughter's feet and my cat curled up under the dog's feet. Sometimes living in a big family means seeing layers upon layers of cuteness!

Odds and Ends

It only took seven pregnancies, but this new little baby is bringing me a book! Hurrah! I've been writing with greater intensity now that I have a hard deadline. I keep thinking "Man, if we get another baby with infant reflux I'm NOT going to be able to write again for 9 months. So get this thing done now!"

I'm super excited because a structure is coming finally for the book. I'm one of these girls who finds Outline writing IMPOSSIBLE. I never know what I'm trying to say, until a lot of trial and error writing gets done first. To finally have a structure in place is such a huge help. I feel like I'm making measurable progress everyday now, instead of just aimlessly wandering around in my thoughts.

I discovered that I write better at home, in my bedroom, in the middle of all the chaos, than I do going for "quiet time in the library." I'm writing in the early morning now, right after Morning Prayer. Usually everyone is still asleep from 6 AM to 7 AM. When I get interrupted, I feel less upset. Sometimes the morning sickness is too bad to write, or sometimes another baby is cranky and needs me. I'm more accepting of this interruptions now. I think "Oh, it's not a writing day" and the next day write with twice the energy. It's beautiful to have that interior mental shift that daily writing time is a gift, rather than a right.

The other change is that I realize that writing this book is just for me! I think before I was getting nervous about "How is this book going to be received?" "What is the market?" I made this leap that writing is just about me. When  I type, I get ideas out of my head that I don't even know are in there. Writing is valuable because it clarifies my interior thoughts. This book is worth the time it takes out of my family life, because it helps me. Writing is about the process--not the end result. If anyone else is cheered up by reading this book, that's a secondary goal far below the primary goal of helping me strengthen my resolve to better serve Christ.

Thanks for all the cheerleading as I write my first book. I appreciate all your prayers! I get a special lift from each of your supportive emails. Thank you!

My Rant of the Day: Please Stop Complaining About Not Having a 50/50 Split on Housework with Your Husband!

Well, I must be pregnant because my Irish Temper is in its full glory. I'm starting a new series called "Abigail's rant of the week." Here is my latest Temple of Baal that I'm attacking with the zeal of Elijah today.

There's an article in the New York Times that talks about the agony of the "The Opt Out Generation Who Wants Back In." The Opt-Out Generation, (of which I'm apart) are women who left high status careers in the 1990s and 2000s to opt into full time stay at home motherhood. The feminists non-affectionally call me "a traitor" so I wasn't surprised that the unspoken lesson from writer Judith Warner's article was "you're going to regret it!"  What surprised me was the paragraph after paragraph about wives complaining that a major source of stress in their marriages was that their husbands don't do 50% of the housework. One lady said she didn't mind doing child care because "that was a labor of love" but she really minded "sweeping the floor."

That quote sounds so familiar because that's how I felt until last summer. It's like there was this massive collective brain-washing exercise for young women. I left college thinking "I'm smart, creative and funny. But man, if I do one more janitorial job than my husband I'm a loser, a doormat, and it's a quick slippery slope until the man thinks its okay to beat me with a stick smaller than his thumb. I've got to hold my ground on this 50/50 housework thing."

The housework issue was ridiculously emotionally intense for me.

I can only improve on the deep core issues with God's help. Last summer, my husband went on a retreat for a weekend. I spent days alone with a colicky six month old and four other kids. I expected our house to fall apart in Jon's absence--because he's such a hands on guy with both parenting and housework. I was shocked to find that the kids were great and 100% of the housework was no problem. The decision making was so clear. Either I got a chore done, or I went to bed with it undone. I didn't have this angst about "Oh, I should stay up and finish a task." I was shocked at how much more could get done more easily when I wasn't playing the mental angst game of "What jobs should I leave for Jon to do so that life is fair?"

When Jon came home from a retreat, I asked him if we could keep the experiment going for 2 more weeks.  He was pretty resistant because his self esteem came from being a "helping husband". But I told him, I really think this idea came from God. I need two weeks of doing all the housework. I've got a mental block and I need to work over it. I fully expected to go back to the 50/50 housework split in our marriage after 2 weeks (which to be honest was more like Jon does 70 percent, Abigail does 30). It's been 14 months now, and we still haven't switched back. Here are some notes from my journey.

1. Getting mad about housework for me was a distraction from deeper issues. I actually started to have more meaningful fights with my husband about real issues, once the time worn "I'm not appreciated because you didn't stack the dishwasher tonight" fight was off the table. It was a little scary at first to fight about the deeper issues, but healthier for our marriage.

2. When I stopped asking Jon to help with "my work", I started noticing how much my husband does for me around the house. His brain works totally different from mine. The stuff that bothers him around our house--the gutters, the different things that need wood glue, etc--are all things that would never cross my mind.

3. Having to do all the housework alone made me figure out a realistic standard of clean for a house filled with small children. When I could still count on the labor of two, I could occasionally get to "Better Homes and Garden" clean. It would last two hours, then I'd be totally depressed and irritated for the rest of the week.

4. When I can't get the housework done alone now, I verbally ask for help. I've got morning sickness. I've got a teething baby. There are days that I can't get something basic finished like making dinner. When my husband comes home, I tell him clearly what chores need to be finished. The difference is that I have to nakedly ask for help.

5. It's just housework. At the end of the day, it's a blessing to do it. Mother Teresa put herself on the rotation to scrub the toilets in her convent. St. Francis Xavier turned down free laundry service in Japan by saying "The greatest protection of a man's dignity is to wash his own clothes." St Teresa of Avila said "God exists among the pots and pans." Author Louisa May Alcott says in Little Women "People who hire all these things done for them never know what they lose; for the homeliest tasks get beautified if loving hands do them."

A Link to "Mama Knows, Honeychild"

A side-splitting take on the pains and joys of praying the rosary with small children.