pardon the interruptions
“The mother who stays home with small children experiences a very real withdrawal from the world…Her tasks and preoccupations remove her from the centers of social life and from the centers of important power…to be in harmony with the mild and learn empathy and unselfishness…she is forced almost against her will to mature.” Ronald Rolheiser
Rolheiser talks of the demands of motherhood as a way of touching the divine. A mother’s life is full of interruptions, making sustained prayer difficult. But there is a holiness in the interruptions.
How do you deal with interruptions? The small ones, like the text message or phone call that draws you away from the food you’re preparing or the project you’re trying to complete. That feeling that you’re just getting your day organized and are finding your stride when the doorbell rings and you find there a neighbor in crisis, a cat up a tree, someone has hit your parked car. The power goes out in your neighborhood, and you have to wait on a repair crew to find the problem before you open your refrigerator one more time.
There are the bigger interruptions. Your doctor calls and your liver enzymes didn’t look good. You have to repeat a blood test, schedule an MRI, begin radiation or chemo, or even have surgery. Suddenly your whole planned life schedule is interrupted…vacations are cancelled, visitors put on hold.
Then there are the global and cosmic interruptions. Your nephew is picked up at the airport and deported, caught up in a sweep of undocumented immigrants that threatens to upend an economy with the loss of a whole work force and income taxes that make the American economy run. Or a fire or earthquake happens and you’re left scrambling to find shelter, competing with thousands of other displaced people. Or a world leader invades a sovereign nation, sending gas prices out of reach so that every product depending on trucks to transport them to your neighborhood store now costs too much, tempting desperate people to commit more crimes to supplement their income. Interruptions have a rippling affect.
Recently a dear friend learned that her husband has been put on the list for a heart transplant. His congenital heart defect has made this an inevitability during their whole married life. Her prayer was always that it wouldn’t happen until her children were done with high school. Guess who graduated last week. Now her husband waits in the hospital, and she sits by her phone anticipating a call that a heart has become available. NOW!!!
Her daughter, upon learning of her father’s plight insisted on skipping school to go down and see him in the hospital. She knew she needed to be with him more than she needed to defend her senior project. Arriving in his room and seeing him attached to IV lines and monitors, she broke down in tears. She allowed herself to feel all the feels. Then she pulled herself together and played UNO with him, and they laughed the rest of the day away.
This is emotional intelligence in a teenager coming from years of traumatic interruptions. I’m not sure that there is any other road to maturity. Some of us never achieve it, so married are we to our own routines and schedules. We flail against the small invasions into our personal time and space, and so are left unprepared to emotionally meet the catastrophic events. We get frustrated, angry, outraged even—how dare they?!
To this I say, as Rolheiser says, withdraw, find solitude, seek to be in harmony with the mild or the child. Find God IN the interruptions, not in spite of them.
Love, Liz
“Our faith is meant to be a beautiful interruption to all the ugliness, divisiveness and pain.”
Rev. Mike Angell
Photo by Denise Lerma
