In Which I Break Up With Martha Stewart

"Every child's holiday will be made infinitely more magical if your holiday décor features a homemade gingerbread replica of your home, and don't they deserve a magical Christmas, you lazy slacker?"

That was printed in the lifestyle magazine that showed up in my mailbox yesterday. Well, it basically said that. Pretty much. A magazine I felt guilty sitting down to read because there was probably some linen I should be ironing or yogurt I should be culturing or fresh evergreen wreath I should be fashioning out of clippings from the indoor ferns I didn't kill because of course I'm an excellent horticulturist and I even know what a horticulturist is. (You believe me, right?) But since this magazine held wisdom on perfecting my technique of all of the activities above and the holiday spirit was upon me, I settled into the guilt and flipped away at the glossy pages.  

You know the magazine – it's the one that suggests stuffing your Thanksgiving turkey with figs and pancetta and roasted artichoke hearts with butternut squash (not slathering a half-frozen bird with Jell-o powder and orange juice like I do) while you wait for the sautéed escarole on the stove. I'm not sure what you're waiting for the escarole to do exactly because I don't even know what escarole is and I'm too busy trying to figure out where to find fennel and endive for the fennel-endive-pomegranate seed salad every decent human being can whip up for a light lunch when having surprise company.

You know the magazine. Martha Stewart Living.  

Because of Martha, I know how to make handmade marshmallows in Christmas-y shapes and create my own hand-beaded bag, which I should be making unique for each outfit or at least for every day of the week. Page 3 tells me I need a $10,000 oven to ensure my cream puffs are baked with the most even heat distribution possible, which must be true even though I've never baked cream puffs in my life, but I still feel good about myself for a split second because at least I know what a cream puff is, which is more than I can say for the endive. I'm pretty sure the oven in the Dollhouse retails new for about twelve bucks.

With every page, I wonder things I hadn't even thought of until this very minute. Things like whether my hair is thick enough or my kitchen mixer can make pasta. I start realizing things I need that I never needed before. A hybrid. A wine cellar. A sheep whose wool I can make into fashionable winter clothing for my family. I see things I probably should make because I'm sure every other person in the universe is making them and the instructions are right here! In my hand! Page 26 alone gives me all I need to know about making both a catmint pillow bed and bracelets/tassels made with the hair cultivated from five Friesian horses…and I'm not even making that up.

Page 69, spice-infused milk and sugar-dusted macaroon trees. Page 71, scented tree ornaments. Page 37, a $520 makeup bag. Page 45, perfectly complected laughing children in matching outfits. Page 53, hand-punched paper doilies. Page 55, patterned men's socks, folded, lined up in a drawer and organized by shade. Page 61, handmade bell jar terrariums with miniature skiers and tiny penguins on snowy glitter mountains. Page 62, toast in the shape of the USA. Page 82, chamomile-yogurt panna cotta. Page 112, a hand-carved menorah. Page 124, a miniature winter forest in a $172 bucket. Page 145, a "simple desert" – lemon mascarpone crepe cake made with 62,789 layers of crepes and lemon curd made with eggs from your own personal chicken who is also a designer poultry model.

Plus 186 other pages I didn't mention.

None of this resembles my life. Martha's calendar (which she graciously shares with us on page 2) features twice-weekly appointments with her personal trainer and other ridiculously unrealistic pursuits like "harvest citrus from greenhouse," and "write thank-you notes."

But somewhere during my mental vacation to Bedford Farm, I become overwhelmed and tired. Those hand-beaded purses are kind of ugly. Escarole sounds a lot like cooked snails. I have zero desire to dust or even possess a collection of tiny skiers in glittery jars.

This all is the brain-child of a woman who might as well live on another planet, a woman with a team—nay, an enterprise, dedicated to this kind of fluffery. I don't have a maid or a stylist, and my entourage is populated with small people who still pee themselves. She wears tailored pantsuits; I pick kid boogers off the knees of my mom jeans. She hand-glitters her letterpress holiday cards; I haven't sent a Christmas card since 1998. She loves propagating rare plants from cuttings (her words); I kill silk flowers. She has an entire day marked off her calendar for Frederic Fekkai's birthday; I get my hair cut once a year...at Walmart.

Like so many others, this magazine is designed to make me want this life, to be convinced that I need this life, and even more, that I should spend time and energy and loads of money in the pursuit of it. But the whole thing really makes me want to climb back into bed, on my drug-store sheet set in my thrift-store pajamas, and give up the glittery ghost. I don't want to live at Bedford Farm and I don't want to be Martha. I don't want chickens with headshots or a beagle in Tartan pajamas. I don't want to teach Snoop Dog how to cook or practice perfecting the recipe for chocolate kugelhopf (or give myself a headache trying to pronounce it). I don't want to tolerate the message that I am not enough and don't do enough, and I sure as hell don't want to pay for the privilege.

So here it is. So long, Martha. Your pantsuits are lovely. Your home is impeccable (both the gingerbread and brick-and-mortar versions). Your holiday table is splendid. Your cider-braised slab bacon looks delicious. But we have to break up.

Because here's the thing. My bacon is just fine like it is. I would rather strangle myself with tinsel than create a to-scale gingerbread replica of my home. Sheep stink and so do chickens. You should consider changing the name to Martha Stewart Can't Even Live Like This magazine, because at least it would be truthful.

Consider my subscription cancelled, my ticket for the guilt-trip torn to bits.

How's that for Living? 

Blessed Are Those Who Don't Do It All

In past seasons of my life, I filled notebooks with goals, to-do's, strategies and techniques for getting things together. From a fundamental place inside of me came the constant, relentless message: Be Better.

I wanted to be better at everything and somewhere inside I believed that every other woman out there was accomplishing all the things I couldn't manage, an entire lifestyle of doing it all with grace and effortlessness. I saw myself as failing in some level at just about everything, not only everything in my life but everything in the world if you counted all the things I wasn't doing. (And I counted.)

If I spent five hours cleaning the kitchen, I felt bad about the state of the pantry. If the house was neatly picked up, the carpet stains screamed loudly at me every time I walked into the room. If I'd baked a fabulous dessert for my family, I berated myself for the mediocre dinner they were served just prior.

But somewhere along the line, something within me broke and I saw that part of myself from outside eyes, like an out-of-body experience. I learned to be kinder to my heart and treat her like a friend of mine and not just an abused little girl who couldn't live up to anything. This was all unfolded, I'm sure, as my depth of understanding unfolded about grace, about the God who loves so purely and completely that His heart for me cannot be changed by any amount of my goodness or lack thereof.

At some point, I stumbled on peace and self-forgiveness.

I started a Things I Don't Do list in my head and began to check off, one by one, the things that would creep up on me and tell me lies. I thought hard about the things that tormented me and decided whether I really needed to make space for them in my life, whether I really did believe my call was to be better in that area. Sometimes the answer was yes. Sometimes, I added them to the TIDD list, and breathed a little easier.

The Things I Don't Do are mostly good things. They are things that may be sacred and creative and might beautifully enhance another person's life. But for me, they are things that would take the space I have to give the other things in my life, the ones that give me life and joy and serve a higher purpose than to simply be better. As I have let things go, I have learned that with less effort to be everything and more effort to be the uniquely created me, I am a little bit better by proxy, and that is the ironic-flavored icing on the cake.

Here is a portion of my list:

I don't go to the gym. My body is not perfect or even necessarily pretty but it is the body that has bore three children and held tightly to a dozen more. It sags in areas it shouldn't and bulges in places I wish it didn't and has erupted in a terrible case of adult acne, but its scars and stretch marks reflect its purpose. I love to see old Bibles, worn from years of use and tears, notes scribbled in the margins and pages bent back. I'm beginning to see my body in this way too, an open book, a love story, in which my life is written slowly into laugh lines and chipped nails, tan lines and chronic illness and chapped lips and birthmarks, calluses and tattoos and scabbed-over wounds that I am beginning to love. My exercise comes in the form of wrestling t-shirts over squirmy kid heads and games of hide-and-seek, hiking to waterfalls and the thousand leg-lunges I do every single day while picking up Matchbox cars. I don't count calories and I eat more chocolate than is good for me but I've decided I'm basically okay in my size 11 jeans because this body has been awfully good to live in despite its many flaws. 

I don't garden. I grow children well, pets poorly, and I kill most other living things. I admire and respect those who find gardening to be a spiritual experience, but for me it is dirt and thorns and grub worms, and it takes all the beauty and mystery out of nature. If I manage to keep alive a rose bush, I resent it for the creative time lost in its cultivation and therefore, gardening makes the TIDD list.

I'm not on the PTA. I'm not the room mother or the field trip chaperone or the teacher's aide. I care deeply about my children's educational experiences but this is not the outlet for that, for me. I admire that there are others who are so much more patient, more talented, more gifted with teaching children and I give them space to be positive influences in my kids' lives, too.

I don't pair socks. Laundry is serious business around here and I spend way more of my life than I care to in the act of cleaning and putting away clothing. We have a Sexton Sock Basket, and when I fold laundry, all socks go in the bin. When someone needs a pair, they Scuba dive for two that pass for matching, and we all live happily ever after, the end. Most people are seriously horrified by this. What kind of mother doesn't even match their kids' socks? Let me tell you. This kind of mother. The kind that has living room campouts with them for the heck of it and throws unbirthday parties every once in awhile and decorates a living room birthday tree for the special kid of honor. The kind who has decided to make other things a bigger deal than socks and does so without apology.

There are scores of other things I don't do. I don't eat organic or change my refrigerator filter as often as it needs it. I don't do play-dates or mom's group or homeschool (anymore). I don't cloth diaper. I don't vacuum every day or run marathons or cook from scratch or iron or dry clean. I am not against any of these things. They're good. They're great, even. They're just not great for me, right now.

I am not totally guiltless over all of these things yet, but I'm getting there. The Things I Do list (I have one of those too) is getting shorter and shorter in quantity, but fuller and fuller in quality and I'm learning to see that as the better thing.  

You're blessed when you're content with just who you are – no more, no less. That's the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can't be bought.

(Matthew 5:5 MSG)

What's on your TIDD list?

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Linking to Unwrapping His Promises and Imperfect Prose. Click on links below to join us.

Stuff-less

Photo Source: Pinterest.

I am living out of a suitcase.  

My three children are sharing a full-size bed and just about all of our belongings are shoved in a 10’ x 20’ storage unit, balanced dangerously and teetering hither and yon.  To make it worse, we unloaded the moving truck in the dark and several of the items that were meant to stay out of storage (um, like, checkbooks and passports, business cards and stamps, conference tickets and cute dresses and school supplies) were packed away and buried in the rubble... and no luck so far on trying to retrieve any of it without completely unpacking the darn thing.

This is unnerving, especially because, after much scramble regarding employment here in Oregon, we’ve determined that, although we are blessed beyond measure to both be gainfully employed (and for me to work at home – hallelujah!), for several reasons, we’re better off staying put at my mother-in-law’s house for awhile.

Like, staying a few months when I was really banking on (and packing for) a few weeks.

I am having a hard time rolling with the punches on this one.

Not because I don’t like being here.  Actually, I love, love, love my in-laws and couldn’t really think of any place I’d rather have to shack up like teenage parents (which, for the record, we're decades away from being).  But living in someone else's home goes against my very strong instinct to nest (no, I’m not pregnant) and putz about, fluffing this and straightening that, hanging curtains and wall decor, introducing my DIY-creations to their proper locations... and making a home.  And my guilty conscience makes it hard to feel like I'm okay here, that I'm not being a burden, or stepping on toes, or creating a hassle for anyone. 

The antidote to living in transition is, for me, to settle down and make a home.

Alas, I cannot.

This year, I will probably not get to decorate my home for Christmas.  I will not bake in my own kitchen, or set up my office to watch my kids run around the back yard while I work.  I will find, several times every day, that the outfit or nail polish or legal document I desperately need is packed away and I’ll have to live without it.

A few tears were shed when I realized that my Bible, devotional, current Bible study, and favorite commentary also managed to get (accidentally) packed away.  Six days without my Bible was remedied by six bucks at a local bookstore, and had me sniffing the pages and holding the thing close to my heart, soaking up the Scriptures even with closed covers, filling with the words inside like osmosis, gripping the paperback make-do like the precious possession that it is.

I’ll be heading to Relevant ’11 in a few weeks, and, bummer, despite my plans for a put-together-girl on display, it looks like I’ll have to head out there with just the comfy clothes I had packed for a few weeks at grandmas.  No high heels.  No cute jewelry.  Some jeans, my camera, and a pair of gray Chuck Taylor’s are about all I’ll wind up there with, I’m afraid.  You’ll love me anyway, won’t you?

I’m taking the opportunity to prove to myself all the things I can live without when I really need to, to count it blessing that we have this opportunity and that our belongings are only temporarily in storage and not incinerated in a house fire, or vandalized in a burglary.  It’s all only stuff, after all.  So I’ll rejoice in less cooking and house cleaning for the time (since I have others to share that responsibility with here).  It will be good for my soul, too, to go to Relevant without knowing anyone, and wearing no disguise – just me, myself, and my Chucks to show y’all the real Slim Shady Whimsy Smitten, in my grubby-girl finest.  Something tells me I’ll be welcomed with open arms anyway, and that, my friends, will do a girl good.

Counting, still numberless, today, all the gifts that keep on giving.  Linking up with Ann, and all the others counting, counting away. 

-          Husband, hired!

-          Starting work myself soon (later this week, probably).

-          The graciousness of my in-laws.

-          Our anniversary on Thursday, six years of marriage, ten years together.

-          Reading A Confident Heart by Renee Swope.

-          An opportunity to learn more about simplicity.

-          Conference tickets that are re-printable.

-          Being able to afford a plane ticket to Pennsylvania and a hotel room at Relevant, even while being in between jobs and during a tight financial time for us.

-          A beautiful drive this weekend, soaking up the beauty here I’ve missed for so long.

-          Discovering an omission error in my husband’s veteran’s benefits documentation that will be $150 in our favor every single month for the rest of my husband’s life.

-          My kids absolutely loving being at their new/old school.

-          Hot, middle-of-the-afternoon coffee, and weather chilly enough to enjoy it.

-          So much peace and family time, lately.

-          My kids, getting to spend time on a regular basis now with their grandparents and great-grandparents.

-          Our boys back in Texas, apparently doing okay with the transition of new houseparents.

-          Returning to our home church again yesterday.

-          Big, busy dinners, full of laughter… and lots of leftovers.  

-          Provision, in all the ways it comes.