Bread

Warm, soft, tender, whole. It is a mother's love wrapped in a stoneware embrace.  The gluten stretches like billowing linens on a wind-blown line full of the spacious final exhalations of tiny friendly microorganisms.  The homely crust is lumpy and brown, but pride lurks inside those wheaten-walls.  The pride of a mother's deep knowing of children fully fed, quietly nourished, and tenderly satisfied.

In a moment a steel grimace will partition this meal creating a serving where there once was a whole, but, now, while the fragrant heat slips into memory, this humble creation of flour and water stands as a symbol of home and family and faith.

One loaf made and broken again and again, giving each body the elements of life and each soul the vitalizing gasp of hope.  This two pound loaf represents to the disparate and time flung generations the hands that took up bread and gently changed the world.  Those hands, just beginning to show age, selected the humblest of foods to remind the world of the coming of a simple, gentle, mothering Divinity.  A new way and an enduring love both needing a metaphor: a metaphor of seed and growth and home and nourishment.  An alchemy of grain and water into sustenance and love and grace into hope. 

Swimming uphill in mud

Parenting is hard. Really, intensely hard. 

I can't speak for anyone else in the parenting world, but some days as a stay at home mom are frustratingly awful. Those are the days I don't so much feel like a parent as some poor sod who has woken up to find that she is the head keeper of a deranged zoo where all of the animals have escaped and are trying to eat each other. 

And I have never in my life had one single class tell me what to do about carnivorous children. 

I have taken classes that tell me what the characteristics of 12 tone music are. I have taken classes that describe how calcium channels make your cardiac muscle cells work. I have taken classes on how to beautifully render the human body in two dimensions. 

WHY?  Why do I know nothing about what makes a three year old sob and whine and lament for 12 solid hours?  I almost can't blame Oliver for biting...I'm frustrated too.  Why do I stand dazed in my kitchen after two hours of breakfast, half way through a limp attempt at cleaning up only to hear the dreaded words, "I'm hungry?"

I thought I would be a mom who never got tired of parenting. I didn't think it would be easy, but I genuinely thought careful parenting would...do...something, and I would feed off of each success and wake each morning with energy and IDEAS!  

I can't even laugh. I just sigh and shake my head because I never anticipated the lobbying. If we really want to change the government, we should just send my children to Washington and tell them if they can negotiate free health care for everyone they can each have a bag of marshmallows and an iPad. BAM!! By the time they left, Democrats and Republicans, dogs and cats and doctors and lawyers would all be working together to push the legislation through so their ears would stop bleeding.  

But...now they are all asleep, so I'm back to being a courageous and forward thinking mother instead of the sniveling, staring husk I was just minutes ago. 

Ahhhh. Ain't life great. 

Nail polish ideas for a real mom

As I sit in my children's room, holding them hostage until they fall asleep, I do a fair bit of pondering...well, when I am not reading (right now, the Outlander series). 

I keep pondering what it is to be a mom and a woman today and finding that, for the first time, I am learning something from the story of Mary and Martha. I have always resented that story because I feel like Jesus probably enjoyed the fruits of Martha's labor while simultaneously telling her she was focusing on the wrong things. For someone who is head cook and clothes washer and also slightly

#parentingsnorts

Laine: ok, mom. You can't bring dogs, skateboards, bikes or knives and forks into this exhibit. 

Me: {snort}