Simplifying the Soul – All That From a Chair?

The difficult part about Paula’s book are the practices each day – clean out a junk drawer, scrub a neglected corner, give away something, set up a prayer corner.  They don’t sound all that bad, but when paired with the meditation, the act of each practice ways heavily on me.  I’m not saying this is a bad thing, just a difficult one.

On Friday I was to give away something I am no longer using.  That seemed easy.  We have heaps of toys that are lying dormant around here.  I could easily get rid of some of the H’s things and they’d never know.  Even things I call my own could be sorted through and given away.  This will be easy I decided, already smacking my hands as though to brush this task off.

But Paula challenges us to give something away that we are attached to. That makes the practice difficult for me.  My first response was, “Well, if I’m attached to it, why would I get rid of it?” Though her anecdote about giving a piece of music away to another person who thoroughly enjoyed it made me see what she might be talking about.  She used that piece of music to write her first novel, and after the book was published, while she was still attached to it, the piece was no longer of use to her. So the equation is this: something you are attached to + something you no longer use = give it away.  The answer then was clear, I would give away my rocking chair.

The chair was delivered a few days after Hadley was born.  It was a gift from the people my dad works with.  This is the first reason I am attached to it: he didn’t know they were getting it for me, and the idea that a bunch of people got together to give me something, most of whom I have not met, was touching. It was as though they were, in a physical sense, supporting me in my early days of mothering.

I used the chair for feedings and for reading stories to Hadley and Harper.  Gliding back and forth, their  squirmy weight on my lap, as each of my daughters grew longer and wider, it felt as though I was growing with them. We moved together, my arm sometimes pulsating from the heaviness of a baby’s head, my eyes usually closed from the motion of us together. If I sit on this chair alone now, the emptiness in my chest and the weightlessness in my arms tell me something is missing.

But there is guilt associated with this chair, too.  Guilt because I hated breastfeeding.  I didn’t hate it because it was hard, or the girls didn’t “get it” right away.  I simply did not like doing it.  And writing that statement here fills me with sadness and shame.  I am set up to breastfeed. It is a gift from God.  And I hated it.

The rocking chair helped me through that guilt.  Once, when Hadley was 4 or 5 months old, a friend asked me if I had gotten any “angel kisses” from her.  This is a touch from a baby’s fingers as she reaches for a mother’s face while she eats.  “Oh, yes,” I said and smiled that “Isn’t it the best breastfeeding so we can get those angel kisses” smile.  But I didn’t know what she was talking about.

A few months later, during an early morning feeding, as Hadley and I rocked in the chair and the moon lit up our silhouette on the wall, she reached for me.  It was more of a spastic jerk, one that babies do when they’re figuring out their limbs. But she grazed my nose and I leaned forward. Her fingers splayed apart and then closed in on my nose.  She held it as she ate and I kissed her palm.

Here are the facts from that blue black morning: I hated breastfeeding. Hadley Grace is mine. Rocking back and forth with the guilt and the grace as Hadley held tight to my nose, I knew that these would always be there.  There was nothing I could do to like breastfeeding, and Hadley will always be my daughter.  “He loves you anyway” or some such phrase can be read or heard in any church across the world, but to physically hold on to grace when I am swaddled in shame is the reason I am attached to my rocking chair.

But I’m not using it anymore, the other part of the equation, so it is time to give it away. Paula suggests to give it to someone, but I am not sure who to give it to.  Most of my friends have rocking chairs, and mine is clearly a nursing rocking chair.  I can’t give this to say, my brother and sister-in-law. How much pressure is that going to be?   “Hey!  Here’s a pen and some notebook paper!  You can write that book now, right?  C’mon!  We’re alllllllll waiting!”

Yesterday at the girls’ soccer practice, I was talking to some of the other moms and somehow the topic of Goodwill came up.  One mother told me about this stereo she recently purchased and gave to her husband for his birthday.  It is one of those furniture deals that takes up an entire wall, has a record player, stereo, and speakers that can blow our your windows.  I know it well because Jesse and I had one when we lived in South Bend.  When we were preparing to move to DC, we knew it wouldn’t fit in the space we would live in next.  Jesse and I barely fit into it.  We gave it to good friends, and I remember well their faces when they took it: they were excited and happy.  I was sad to see it go, but glad that my good friends would enjoy it as much as Jesse and I did.

Listening to my friend talk about how much they love that stereo made me think that I should give the rocking chair to Goodwill.  The idea that a stranger might gain some joy from another stranger seems nice. Also, I won’t hold someone accountable for perhaps not getting as much from the chair as I did.  “What do you mean you didn’t have a spiritual revelation?  What is WRONG with you?”

Paula suggests we pray for the person that will get what we give away, and I will.  I will pray that my rocking chair will be of some use to another mother. I will pray that when she rocks her child, that she is comforted by the rocking too.  I will pray that she has the comfort and strength to sit with her shame for a time whatever it is, and I will pray that she will know grace.