Hard Work

This semester is uniquely challenging, as we knew it would be. I thought the main problem would be baby-caused sleep deprivation, but Adele has really not treated us too badly in this respect (Miles, however, continues to be as high maintenance at night as he is by day).

The chief difficulty, though, is that we are constantly on duty, taking it in shifts to care for our kids and work outside the home. We made a decision to use only 2.5 days a week of childcare, but this has its challenges. When Jon is home with the kids, I am at my full-time work; when I am at home with the kids, he is working, either at home or, more likely, in his office on campus where he can attend to the workload of being a full time graduate student and a history instructor. We have precious little time together as a family, and even less time as a couple.

If I don't guard my sleep, and fight to get enough of it and to keep us all healthy as possible, morale can sink fast! But when it does, I'm reminded that I'm not the only person doing the hard work of raising a young family, or of doing a job that takes nearly everything you've got. We are in good company, including the company of those that have gone before us. I think of the hard-working women in my family, my nurse mother, my factory-working grandmother, my farming great-grandmother, and beyond, and they give me the inspiration not to sink into self-pity when I find my schedule trying.

I think, too, of Old Lucinda Matlock, and her voice seems to speak directly to me in Edgar Lee Masters' poem:

I went to the dances at Chandlerville, And played snap-out at Winchester. One time we changed partners, Driving home in the midnight of middle June, And then I found Davis. We were married and lived together for seventy years, Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children, Eight of whom we lost Ere I had reached the age of sixty. I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick, I made the garden, and for holiday Rambled over the fields where sang the larks, And by Spoon River gathering many a shell, And many a flower and medicinal weed-- Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys. At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all, And passed to a sweet repose. What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness, Anger, discontent and drooping hopes? Degenerate sons and daughters, Life is too strong for you-- It takes life to love Life.
Okay, Lucinda. You're right. This is the path of love right now. And its strewn with such flowers! I'd do a lot of dishes for her smile. A lot of laundry for his giggle. I'll rise early to see this sight before I go. And this one. On my walk to work in the mornings, I join Lucinda "Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys."
I am so blessed. (Also, I really like Blacksburg; have I said this?)