Living Intentionally Instead of Longing for the Past: A Little M2M Guest Post Action

If there is a crossroads between young and old, I think I have arrived there. At 34, I feel like I have one foot in my youth and one foot over the threshold of being old. Now, before you laugh and dismiss me on this, take a moment to ponder it for yourself. If you are older than me, think back to a time where you felt like you could still very clearly remember the angst of your teenage years, the rebelliousness of being a young adult, the bliss of your newlywed years, and the tenderness of carrying, birthing and cradling your first newborn. Then, as the years went on and you matured and watched your babies grow, those memories of youth began to fade and the wisdom of adulthood took its place. Life, once simple, became more complicated and although its simplicity is still reflected in the eyes and chattering of your children, it has nearly become lost on you….

Continue reading over at What Joy is Mine, where I have the incredible honor of guest posting this week. Enjoy!

Like what you see here on M2M? Want to add your voice? Share your own story of motherhood? I would love to feature you! Please contact me and I will be happy to send you the specs for content. I hope to hear from you soon!

*THAT* First Day of School Blog Post

Every year it is the same…”back to school” ads in the paper and on TV, every store window looks like the perfect dorm room, there are fewer school-age children at our favorite daytime play places and, last but not least, my Facebook newsfeed is filled with “first day of (fill-in-the-blank) grade” pictures of happy, new clothes-clad, chalkboard-holding school children.

Years ago, as a mom of babies, I hardly recognized the switch from summer to fall, save for the changing colors of leaves, the crisper air and my abundant garden needing to be preserved. When my oldest was in preschool we decided to homeschool, so the beginning of the fall school year meant 1-3 days of an hour or two at home and some fun “field trips”to the local pumpkin patch. It wasn’t until last year, when we decide to put her into public school kindergarten, that the enormity of back-to-school-ism really hit our family. We bought our school supplies, took our “first day of kindergarten” pictures and posted them on social media, just like the rest of the world. But, still, it was only half-day kindergarten. I still had one preschooler and one baby at home and it never REALLY felt too serious. Flash forward to this year. Our oldest is in all-day 1st grade, our middle child in homeschool prekindergarten and our baby in homeschool pre-preschool. This. Is. Serious. (And for those of you with ALL your children in all-day school, please don’t laugh.)

Our first grader is attending a very cool, very sustainable, very HIPPIE charter school here in our home town. School days are Monday through Thursday 8:50-3:05 and Fridays until 1:05. They have art twice a week…real, actual ART (gasp!), recess every day outside, rain or shine (and hello, this is Portland, Oregon so that means RAIN for much of the next seven months) and they take a walking “out and about” each week. So, for our back-to-school supplies this meant a $90 waterproof jacket from REI, $60 Bogs rain boots that keep footsies cozy and dry in 10 degrees, a reusable water bottle and lunch box filled with gluten, nut and sugar-free, organic items in recyclable or reusable bags and containers. (Insert husband’s gag.)

Phew! It’s only the 2nd week of school and I’m already exhausted! Not to mention, I cried like a baby when she and my husband left on the first day and I stayed home with the younger two (a scheme we devised last year on her first day of kindergarten so I wouldn’t exhibit said crying at the school and embarrass my big girl). Ironically, however, when I assumed the task of dropping her off on the SECOND day of school, the crying fit came anyway. Aaaaand, to make matters worse, I feared all day long on the first day that I had forgotten to get her. 11:40 rolled around and as I’m making the other two lunch, I panicked thinking I should have left to pick her up already, only to remember that I still had over THREE MORE HOURS. Geeeez! My days have never felt so long! How am I going to last another nine months of this! Forget that, how am I going to last the next 12 years?!!

There’s hope for me, right?! I’m ready for this, yes? (No.) YES!

 

Living a Simpler Life

So, last week I found myself without my mobile phone for five whole days. “Somehow” the screen got cracked, rendering it completely useless until a repair shop could get the right part and fix it. Utterly unprepared, I found myself thrust into a world without data packages, instant text messaging and social media at my very whim. A world that I have grown unfamiliar with. For five days, I had no more games, emails, weather reports and calendar appointments to check from bed, in waiting rooms or at stoplights. I couldn’t take an instant picture whenever I wanted, call a friend if I needed or get quick directions on the fly.

It made me realize just how dependent I am on such a fragile technology. That in an instant, I could lose all access to my “cloud,” my daily planner and countless pictures and videos that I had saved in that little 3×5 black hole. For five days, I used my husband’s phone to make calls, I hand-wrote all my appointments for the day, complete with addresses and directions, I used only my laptop for checking Facebook, emails and the weather. And for five days, I was transported back in time, to where things were just a little less plugged-in and a little more simple.

I’m always inspired by reading blogs on living unwired and hands-free or the wistful historical fiction and Amish fiction novels which describe living a little slower, without power and all the technology that make our lives today so fast-paced. It reminds me of a simpler time just 20 years ago, being raised in the country without the internet, cable television or a million hand-held devices. Sure, we watched a lot of TV (all six channels that we had!) But we also played outdoors on my parents’ vast eighteen acres of hills and old-growth fir trees, using our imaginations and reading books.

Even seven years ago when I began having my own babies, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest an (gasp!) blogging didn’t consume hours upon hours of my day. I didn’t even have a data package on my “smart phone” blackberry. I “blogged” by writing each day in the stained, yellowed pages and fading ink volumes that I’d been keeping since the 5^th grade.

But, here we are today in a world where everything is fast-paced, automatic and viral and I find myself longing to slow down a bit, go back to my roots and do things a little old fashioned, sometimes. I love the music genre of country (cringe, I know!) and one of my favorite country singers is the beautiful and spunky Miranda Lambert, whom I’ve been a fan of since her first album came off the heels of winning Nashville Star, the American Idol for country music. Her recently released song, “Automatic” rings so clear and true for me along these lines of desiring a simpler life:

“What ever happened to waiting your turn, doing it all by hand? Because when everything is handed to you, it’s only worth as much as the time put in. It all just seemed so good the way we had it; back before everything became automatic”

Her lyrics discuss exactly how I feel torn between worlds and memories from the past…putting a quarter in a pay phone, drying laundry on the line, recording the top songs from the radio on a cassette tape, letter writing with stamps and three-day delivery times, car windows with the hand cranks and Polaroid pictures that you “shake.”

I feel like I have made feats to bring myself back to a simpler life in some ways. I am a full-time SAHM; we’ve used cloth diapers on all three of our babies and I homeschool our preschoolers. I have a huge garden where I spend most of my springs, summers and early falls and then preserve much of its produce by canning, freezing and drying for the winter months. We don’t have AC in the house, so on warm, summer days, I despise the hot clothes dryer heating up our home and hang much of our laundry on a line in the backyard. I also enjoy making most of our meals from scratch, with fewer ingredients like bread, cakes and casseroles, rather than from a can or box.

So, five days after the “black-out” I had my phone back in all it’s glory…along with three missed calls, two voicemail messages and ten unanswered texts, but I had a new resolve not to allow myself to get too attached or dependent on this fragile devise. Because even though we have in-home Wi-Fi for our laptops, smart phones and iPad and own nearly every Disney movie  ever made on dvd, it is still important to me to have a healthy balance of an unplugged life, full of the richness, innocence and beauty that sometimes only the “old-fashioned” things can offer…and that a shattered screen cannot take away. And I hope to instill in my children that despite the modern conveniences of this world, we can still live in moderation and keep some things in life a little simpler.