Chapter 5. The Ferris Wheel

Just shy of our daughter’s third birthday, my husband completed his MD/PhD training, and applied for residency. He matched to the internal medicine program at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. I resigned from my beloved job with the trauma team. After eight years together, it was like saying goodbye to a tightly-knit (yet mildly-dysfunctional) family.

David and I packed our earthly belongings and hit the road. Cruising west on I-80, our faces to the setting sun, we joined ourselves to the multitude of people who sought their fortune following the Oregon trail into an unknown future. Those first stalwart pioneers had walked or bounced along in wagon trains, giving birth and burying their dead along the way. My husband and I cruised along at 80 mph, cranked the air-conditioning, and didn’t suffer from a single case of dysentery.

I had never laid eyes on the state of Utah before, and as we wound our way through the last mountain pass, the Salt Lake Valley spread broad before us. At the northern point of the valley, the capitol city stood flashing like a jewel in the desert sun. I was smitten; it was love at first sight.

My great-granddaddy, Van Buren Martin, originally hailed from some armpit town in Georgia. He stepped off a train at the depot in Leeds, Alabama, and Alabama is where he stayed. His children and his children’s children propagated, spreading like kudzu. The roots he put down ran deep. I am a girl born and bred in the deep south. Even so, darned if it didn’t feel like I was coming home for the first time when I saw that shiny city.

We rented a wonky old apartment about a mile from Temple square. Across the street was a little café that sold the world’s best cinnamon rolls. The cream cheese frosting was made by the café owner’s grandma. Obviously, she was a woman close to God’s heart, because he whispered that recipe in her ear.

We unpacked, barely settling into our new digs before David catapulted into his residency. Each day, week, month was a new scheduling adventure. Sometimes he worked days, sometimes nights. Sometimes he worked day into night into day again.

Meanwhile, I applied for a job with the burn center at the University of Utah. I landed an interview. As the day drew nearer, I began assembling my interview outfit. I had a classy new suit hanging in my closet. I had just the right shoes picked out—enough heel to be classy, not so much that I’d be crippled by the time I walked from the parking deck. All systems were go.

But then a funny thing happened.

About a week before my interview, I sat sipping coffee on our tiny front porch, enjoying a magnificent view of the Wasatch mountain range as it marched southeast. David, as usual, was already at the hospital. My daughter, Addie, was sitting nearby. She had received a kiddy nail polish kit for her third birthday, and was energetically painting her fingernails for the fifth time that day. A grocery-store circular was spread out underneath her, catching the pink, purple, and blue globs of sparkly polish she was applying with happy abandon.

My thoughts turned to the job I would soon be interviewing for. I pondered what my future schedule might look like. I knew from experience that surgery days start early, so I’d need to be at the hospital to pre-op patients no later than 6:00 am. That would mean having my three-year-old child awake, fed, dressed, and delivered to daycare by 5:30 am.

A full surgery or clinic schedule might wrap up around 6:00 pm, at best, so I’d pick up my child after a solid twelve hours in a daycare center. We’d run home. I’d make dinner. Maybe David would be home, maybe not. Crash into bed. Repeat the following morning. And again. And again.

I experienced what can only be described as a feeling of doom. It was suddenly and abundantly clear that if we proceeded as planned, the centrifugal force of our combined careers would launch our tiny family off into the wild blue yonder.

With thunderclap clarity, I knew I needed to cancel my interview. Our home needed a center; it needed an opposing force to resist the chaos determined to fling us off the merry-go-round. I would be that force. After eight years as a trauma PA, I decided in the span of a few heartbeats to become a stay-at-home-mom.

I would love to say the transition was easy for me. It would certainly be a tidier story if I had donned a blue-gingham apron, baked a batch of cookies, and never looked back.

But nah. That’s no fun.

Instead, we spent those first six months of single-income life in financial free-fall. If our budget was an airplane, there would have been smoke billowing out of the engines, and warning lights flashing. I was in the cockpit (probably wearing steampunk goggles) furiously pulling up on the controls, yelling, “MAYDAY! MAYDAY!”

We had no idea how to live frugally. The learning curve is steep if you’re accustomed to buying what you want when you want it. Gone were the days of asking which wine pairs best with lamb. Now our culinary questions skewed toward, “Are you feeling black beans or pinto tonight?”

I read all the books on frugality, minimalism, and penny-pinching the public library could provide. I dabbled in couponing. I sold our junk on eBay. I made my own laundry detergent. I read about Index funds. I shopped bargain bins, clearance sales, and thrift stores.

After evaluating our grocery bill, I decided I would try my hand at gardening in an effort to make the earth provide food for us. Though we were city dwellers, I commandeered a weed-choked flower bed next to our apartment. With Wendell Berry poems resonating in my mind, I set to work. I tore up the weeds, and fertilized the soil with homemade compost—a grisly mix of vegetable clippings, egg shells, coffee grounds, and, occasionally, human hair.

(Side note: I don’t recommend composting hair trimmings. Especially along a public sidewalk. It always looked like a decomposing corpse was lurking just below the topsoil.)

I meticulously plotted and diagrammed that flower bed for maximum production; each square inch would produce its share of bounty. When the green leaves of my Swiss chard started unfurling in tidy rows, I stood triumphantly surveying my plot of earth. Behold! I, the mistress of all I see, have made food out of dirt, water, and sunshine. In celebration, I prepared a green salad to accompany dinner that night. Into the salad bowl went freshly-picked chard leaves, plump radishes, and a ripe tomato.

Chard, in case you are unfamiliar, is a dark green, leafy vegetable. It is highly nutritious, brimming with vitamins and minerals, and contains a bowel-churning slug of dietary fiber. As my husband and I took the first bite of our garden salad that evening, we learned something else about chard. It tastes terrible.

Chard is not as versatile as spinach, as I’d mistakenly believed. No, unlike spinach, chard is not a team player. Chard is the hateful, chain-smoking, bitter-with-broken-dreams cousin of spinach. Chard literally made our teeth itch. I became significantly less enthusiastic about gardening after that night.

In addition to hunting down and annihilating every bit of financial excess in our lives, I was also now solely responsible for keeping my daughter alive every day. Not only this, but now I was tasked with filling her every waking moment. Every. Waking. Moment.

Prior to staying home with my daughter all day every day, I had rigid criteria for enrichment activities. I would have said they must be multi-cultural, multi-lingual, highly-immersive imaginative play-based activities, capable of fully engaging her brain, body, and heart, with a strong emphasis on mathematics, music, fine arts, language, emotional health, spiritual formation, and development of kinesthetic awareness.

After becoming a stay-at-home-mom, all these criteria were magically met in one place: the mall food court. We spent hours there. We did other things, sure. We hiked on stunning mountain trails. We explored the natural history museum, the zoo, the science museum, and the local aviary. But nothing brought the same level of sheer delight to my daughter as that food court play park.

Perhaps one of the most unanticipated aspects of transitioning out of my job was finding myself marooned on an island devoid of adult conversation. This island was a place of naming everyday objects, sing-songing instructions, and of copious repetition of simple facts. But there was very little time spent talking to other adults.

I had also been accustomed to following a train of thought from its starting point to its natural conclusion. I took for granted the ability to speak in complete sentences. Those carefree days of coherent thought were gone.

The right to privacy was another of my expectations which came crashing down. Not once during my hospital career did anyone follow me into a bathroom stall. Not once did anyone ever stand next to me while I pooped. Becoming a stay-at-home-mom came with an unexpected, and very specific, learning curve.

Lock the bathroom door when you need to poop, mothers. Let your child knock. Let them cry. Let them press their sweet faces against the crack at the bottom of the door, but lock the door. You’re allowed.

For the entirety of my adult life, I had been a well-paid, well-respected member of the work force. I was married. I had a kid. I had friends. I had a house. I had a career. I earned money. Cushioned with these forms of cultural currency, I had been protected from the hard-edged questions of self-worth.

But now, my cushioning was stripped away. No career. No money. No badass job saving lives. Just hours of baby talk, worrying about spending too much on groceries, worrying if I’m ruining my child, and endless house-cleaning.

Waves of inferiority crashed over me.

For starters, I didn’t know what to do with my 3-year-old all day. I was okay during the morning hours. Then lunch, that was easy. Naptime followed lunch, thank God. But then, what to do during the endless stretch of hours from when she woke up from her nap until bedtime?

There are people better qualified than me to look after my child, I thought, people who went to school to learn how to tell children about letters, shapes, and colors. Hell, there are people who can teach my child to name these things in Mandarin. I was single-handedly ruining her chances of being a fully-functional adult.

I wasn’t a great housewife, either. In fact, the more I dug into it, I realized housewifery has its own metric of success. Points go to those who blend their own personal hygiene products from essential oils and shea butter, who use beeswax-impregnated fabric instead of cling wrap. Super-star moms make yogurt in their insta-pots, raise chickens, tend bees, run half marathons on Saturdays, and keep up a successful mommy-blog. I couldn’t even bring myself to change the sheets with regularity.

While I had worked in the hospital, I felt like I was on top of my game, a respected part of the team. Now, it seemed I was a second-rate mom and housekeeper. My homemade laundry detergent made our clothes smell like armpits. I tried to make kefir and almost poisoned us all. I couldn’t even figure out how to use coupons effectively.

Scraped raw and bloody by these gritty comparisons, I found myself by turns despondent and intimidated. My heart, like Swiss cheese, was riddled with shame. I constructed an emotional Ferris wheel of self-doubt, fear, and anxiety. Late at night, in those hours inhabited only by nocturnal foragers and insomniacs, inferiority would come creeping.

With a low-throated chuckle, it would throw back the lever, sending sparks flying as the power came surging on. The wheel would lurch into motion, bucket seats jolting and swaying out of dreamy inertia. The dingy bulbs would flicker to life, illuminating the greasy skeletal framework of the wheel stretching skyward. Garish music in spectral dissonance would float mist-like though the purple twilight of my subconscious mind.

Self-doubt would whisper about the opportunities I’d given up. The potential I was wasting. It would drop pointed hints about my hard work, training, and experience fossilizing beneath the detritus of dirty dishes, unfolded laundry, and hastily-scrawled grocery lists. Fear and anxiety would follow, like pig-tailed twins, holding hands and skipping in time to my fast-thudding heart. They’d lend their voices to the unholy trio.

Our first summer in Utah came to an end, the weather turning crisp and cold. Fall passed into winter, and I woke one morning to the mountain peaks dusted with early snow. A few more weeks passed, and the snow made its way down into the valley. Washing up after dinner, I watched it flurry outside the kitchen window.

Later, as I lay in bed, I could hear the flakes ticking against my bedroom window. My husband and daughter were asleep, dreaming the dreams of the highly-fulfilled and thoroughly self-actualized. It was just before midnight, and despite my aggressive relaxation maneuvers, I lay awake.

The house was quiet, but inside my head, the Ferris Wheel was cranking, its carnival music boozy and slurring in the shadowy recesses of my mind. With a sigh of resignation, I eased back the covers and swung my legs out of bed. I crept into the living room. Grabbing a blanket off the back of the couch, I unlocked the front door and slipped out onto the porch.

It was still snowing, heavily now, the flakes swirling down, catching the light of the streetlamps on fourth avenue. The moon was almost full, bright enough to illuminate the mountains in the distance. I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders against the chill, and sat on the front stoop.

The silence of night, the middle-watch hours, was a fitting time to grapple with the existential mass which lay heavy and dull in my chest. I let my thoughts wander, my conscious mind drifting out wide, like a seine net stretched across an expanse of water. Given some time, whatever was swimming out there in the deep would find itself lured into the shallows, entangled, caught.

The snow continued to flurry around me, sibilant as it accumulated, massing upon itself. Some time passed, and I felt a drag on my net; I hauled it up. There, shining and writhing, cast upon the shore amongst the odd detritus of my soul’s muddy dredge, was the existential mass. As I watched it struggle, it shape-shifted, morphed. It was desire. For what?  It was a yearning, but despite my prodding, it would take no definite shape.

My restless heart spoke of wanting to do something. Something important. But I had no idea what that important thing was. Whatever it was, I reasoned, it would be of great worth. And it would be awesome. But not too awesome, I cautioned, no, I wouldn’t want to fly too close to the sun. It would definitely be something of medium-awesomeness, though, for sure. This business of staying home, of not doing, was making me panicky.

Closing my eyes and feeling the snowflakes brush past my cheeks, I cast my desire for a great and glorious cause, or at the very least for a decently cool cause, silently out into the heavens. My heart was wide open to God, ready to receive his call.

He didn’t disappoint.

Instantly, and with the clarity of pebbles being dropped into still water, I received precisely two words in response to my prayer:

Be still.

I continued to wait, eagerly expecting those two words to be followed by something vaguely useful.

But there was nothing else.

Really?

Be still?

Being still was the equivalent of doing nothing. Being still doesn’t change anything. Being still doesn’t move humanity forward or serve anyone. Being still isn’t a medium-awesome, decently-cool thing to do for the Lord. There’s no value in being still.

I tsk tsked God for his sense of humor, and asked him again what it was he wanted me to do for him.

Crickets. Radio silence.

I was left with it. Be still.

There in the hush of pre-dawn, my restless heart sat awkwardly, uncomfortably. The snowflakes continued to dance and skitter along the street, and though my toes and cheeks were growing numb, I sat thinking of the value of stillness.

When you sleep, you’re still. Amazing things come from getting a good night’s sleep. Just ask any new parent. From a breath, God created the universe. Afterward, he rested. He was still. In the fullness of time, a man knelt in stillness, praying in dark Gethsemane. Jesus Christ, waiting in anguish of mind and body, stilled his will, humbling himself under his Father’s hand.

I was like a creature of the dark, snuffling along in oft-trod burrows under the earth. Suddenly, my night-blind eyes squinted against an inpouring of light as I began to grasp the arrogance of my supposition. I’d believed that the drive to be endlessly doing, performing, and producing is evidence of having entered some higher plane of godliness. I was wrong.

I sensed the stirring of fresh air clearing away the old, stagnant vapors I’d become accustomed to. The belief that I can prove myself in any way, that I can justify the oxygen I’m consuming, is actually an outgrowth of a profound lack of humility. I am not capable of being everywhere. I am not capable of being all things. Does the world really need me so damn much that I’m willing to spin off into oblivion to fill its gaping maw?

There was a great, heaving gasp of freedom, of restoration; an admission, finally, that I am not limitless.

Oh, I see. Be still.

 I interpreted those two words as permission to simply be. To be home with my daughter; to be exactly the mother I was, no more, no less. To be home when my husband arrived from the hospital, emotionally strung out after a 36-hour shift. I received those two words as permission to simply be the constant in our tiny equation.

After I stilled my body and heart, I found myself doing odd things with my excess time. I pulled my old sewing machine down from the closet. She’s a cranky beast, and I wove a verbal tapestry of expletives before she succumbed to my will, but eventually the old girl agreed to sew for me. I transformed fabric scraps into cloth napkins in order to add functional beauty to our family dinner table each night.

I plundered the wild rose bush growing by our driveway, filling old thrift store vases with its glorious blooms. As the seasons changed, so did my centerpiece. In autumn, it was a glass bowl full of fiery-colored leaves. In winter, it was evergreen boughs and holly berries. I set out to bring loveliness and creation, on a small scale, into the heart of our home.

I wrangled wild yeast out of thin air and learned to bake sourdough bread with it. There is simply no better way to amp up the nurturing vibe of a home than filling it with the smell of baking bread. I learned how to cook good food, and then learned how to open my door for people to come in and share what I’d made.

I did Yoga With Adriene. I realized I deeply dislike yoga, so I stopped. I took my daughter for hikes. I journaled. I drank espresso. I learned how to meditate on Scripture instead of just perusing it. I learned how to pray.

These are all, cosmically speaking, tiny actions. They don’t sound like much, and separately, they aren’t much. But taken together, they became my daily sacraments; outward signs of inward grace. The quiet rituals of daily life—the scent of bread baking, the texture of pale pink rose petals, the unrushed glory of a morning with nowhere to be and nothing to do but read another picture book with my daughter snuggled close beside me—these were vessels brimming with God’s grace to me.

Through this small, tender existence, my heart grew calm; still. At this pivotal intersection of motherhood, career, and identity, the Ferris wheel of self-doubt grew rusty with disuse. Its lights flickered out, one by one. Its music slowed, slurred, and was silent. And then, finally, that bitch got shut down.