The End of Motherhood?

less really is, uh, more...

# 48 part un.

As (un)relaxeddad predicted, the next lines in the poem go something like this:

In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped.

This is where I feel I have arrived as a mother.  After all those years acquiring knowledge about mothering, developing my own personal philosophy about mothering, dreaming up so many ideas about mothering, uh, I look back on it and think it is possible that very little, if any of it, was necessary.

When I stare back down the years, I think most of that busywork was my way of coping with the impossibility of knowing whether my boys would be all right. I accumulated knowledge, like so many layers of clothing, to protect myself against the not-knowing.

I'm dropping my theories, one by one. It seems I am paring my mothering back to the pure white bone of it.

At least on the days when I am not too anxious.

Here is what a house looks like when it is as simple as can be. I wonder what a mother-child relationship looks like when it is as simple as can be?

Daily Tao #48

I have been slowly working my way through the Tao Te Ching. I keep coming back to 48, because I think its message is particularly relevant to mothering. 

I am going to take it a couple lines at a time for a few days. Now that NaBloPoMo is over (yessss!), I don't feel any sense of obligation to Post - except a tiny bit toward Mizmell.  But I am going to try and find ways to stay consistently present here and just see what that feels like...

These are the first two lines from #48. 

In the pursuit of knowledge,
every day something is added.

These lines kinda perfectly describe my first, oh, nineteen years of mothering.  I studied mothering.  I pondered it. I sought as much information from as many reliable sources as I could find.  I worked the problem of what kind of mother I wanted to be. I talked with my friends about every possible detail of mothering.  I even spent a couple of years working as a journalist writing about mothering.  I was happy with the work because felt I was getting paid for books I would have read anyway.

I spent many years building my mothering self out of other people's bricks.

. 

learning to love my inner geek...

I think I am finally learning to love my inner geek. Lately, I have been hanging around some blogs written by technologically savvy, obsessive-compulsive productivity geeks. While I'm not at all sure I would want to have a beer with them, they do make for decidedly useful cyber-companions for someone trying to corral all the disparate jobs she has into some manageable system that allows her to empty her mind of the drek long enough to have a passing shot at a creative thought.

Today I read an article by one of said geeks, Leo at Zen Habits, and I gotta tell you it is REALLY good. It's called Get things done on your Mac and, though I am about to summarize it for you, I encourage you to download it here if you are at all interested in obsessing alongside me about how to be more productive. The basic thesis can be neatly summarized as follows: To be productive, we have to be able to focus. To focus, we need an environment that has a minimum of distractions.

Check.

After extolling the virtues of the Mac computer in all its forms, the author goes on to say that this instrument of productivity can actually be part of our - ok, my - productivity problems.

Here is a quick summary of what he advises to keep our Macs clutter free.

1. Clean everything off your desktop (instructions included in the actual article)
2. Hide your Dock (ditto)
3. Close every application that you are not actually using for whatever task is at hand.
4. Deal with your - ok, my - email addiction.
5. Befriend Quicksilver.*** (Caveat. Only do this if you know deep down in your soul that you, too, have an inner geek hankering to come out.)
6. Befriend Spotlight. (Do this no matter what.)

*** I first came across the Stephen Mitchell version of the Tao Te Ching while reading the Quicksilver documentation online. Us geeks have unexpected depths.

There is a lot of other good information in this article on how to declutter your physical working environment, manage the endless inflow of paper and email, make quick decisions on things that don't require as much thinking as you give them and generally blow off the entire notion of multi-tasking.

Since I have decided to let my inner geek inch its way into the light of day, I thought I would check in with my Youngest to get a handle on how successful her liberation has been.

Youngest, I asked, "Do you think I am a geek?"

"Uh," he replied just a touch too promptly for my taste, and for my money, a tad too much in the manner of one speaking to a very small child or an adult-sized idiot, "Yeehhhheeessssss!"

How about you? Do you have an inner geek and if so (say it is so!) how does it manifest itself?