Strength doesn’t lie in numbers
Strength doesn’t lie in wealth
Strength lies in nights of peaceful slumbers
When you wake up
Wake up!
It’s healthy
- Julie Andrews, “I Have Confidence” from The Sound of Music
We tend, wrongly, to assume that the trivialities of life are strictly necessary. Does a four-year-old’s ballet class matter in the grand scheme of things? It is true enough that our lives are nothing other than what we do every day and instilling a sense of commitment and rigor seems excellent. But at what cost do we pursue our children’s excellence?
For mothers, in particular, there’s a common experience of being spread thin, “like butter scraped over too much bread,” to quote Bilbo Baggins. When there seem not to be enough hours in the day, when the actual necessities—prayer, sleep, food, relationships—fall by the wayside in a tidal wave of extra work and activities, when we feel agitated and disconnected from ourselves, our husbands, our children…what then is the proper response?
Women are now told to embrace their rage. Women’s fury is justified at every turn. We’re told that change only happens when we demand.
Is that true?
Angry people are often those most easily manipulated. They have lost access to rational thought and strategic considerations. They operate blindly and destructively. Is a rage-blind, unthinking woman the mother we want our children to remember?
Of course not! Before we turn our wrath on the “patriarchy,” there’s a simple examination to make: Are we trying to fit too many activities and obligations into our days?
The professional mother who recounts trying to make lasagna at two o’clock in the morning for the faculty meeting the following day (and burning it and kicking a chair and hurting her foot), is demonstrating nothing other than a surplus of commitments and invented obligations. Bring a store-bought veggie platter or bring nothing to the meeting. Shift your career to part-time and relish the days making lasagna for your children while sporadically attending faculty meetings run by other people. The options are many for reducing anger and increasing joy.
If we insist on overcommitting in all areas of life, we can expect to feel frazzled and angry. We should also expect to be rather weak and ineffective. Strength, as Rogers and Hammerstein put it, lies in “nights of peaceful slumber.” Absent that and we are prone to exhaustion-induced emotionalism that does little good for anyone.
For strength, we must restore habits of respite.
