I was reading blogs…many,many blogs. They took me from here to there and through several different blogosphere subcultures. Eventually I found myself on the type that typlified my past life (as I call it now). More like pastlife2 , as opposed to pastlife 1 which was pre-bornagain, wild and messed up me. Pastlife2 was diligent and angst-ridden about organizing and coming-up-to-snuff me.
I have ambivilent feelings about that pastlife2. I don’t know what it accomplished, but it is so hard to disengage the loyalty from it. It seems so …so virtuous. But without a purity of what I feel is real virtue. Real virtue having something of lasting value and substance. Lots of slaving over being the best housewife and mostest sort of mom seems very virtuous, but I think the directions were wrong. Now. But I’m not sure yet…so it is sort of a virtuous woman limbo…if there is such a thing. In pastlife2 I could not blog like I do without huge portions of angst and guilt. And I was dead tired, all the time.
Of course I was pregnant and nursing during many of those years. And I now know that if you are in that portion of your life…. all the extras that are expected from you are unfair. In this lopsided silly culture of ours.
yes, I did say silly. I think I mean that, too. I just haven’t fully thought it out.
Anyway.
What I meant to comment upon was the forever tyranny of the time management theories. Those were death for me. And yet the world runs on schedules and you will never be the good mom you are required to be without lots of those schedules lording it over you.
I was happier when I gave those clucking disapprovals of society to the wind. When I and my children were a little more barefoot and a little more mud-pie busy …. and lots less presentable.
There are things I want to add back in now that I am not having children -with that expense of energy to pregnancy and nursing. I want to be more creative and more involved with cooking and baking things. I am tired of having to “run off’ or seeing someone else “run off” to this world shaking necessity of an event. I am tired of being the one who says “no”, so there is some semblance of a family. I am dead tired of the tyranny of churches with their endless rounds of “must-do”.
I don’t believe all that “must-do” is godly. I believe a good half of it is …. see, I can’t say it, I doubt myself and I say you all are right. But my heart knows you are not. You are not.
Will I be the type of older selfish woman that is rife in the church? Too busy with herself and her own little kingdom to help out in the nursery and to be a help to the younger women and to say “we don’t need all these _works_ that we drum up”? I don’t know. I am still recovering from the tyranny. The cultures tyranny that the Church has lusted over and invited in fives times over. Because we will better the world at what what it does…at least by five times.
I want something more worthwhile in my life and I know it will cost me to go after it. It will cost me in repute. It will cost me in risk…because what if I am wrong? what if I am not seeing it clearly…what if it is all bitterness and strife from the dregs of my soul?
but I think I will gamble this year.
I am in the gambling mood.