The more I study, the more I realize the significance of the metaphors that guide you. The pervasive themes like: wanting to be the first Heather. Or wanting to lie below the radar, safely swimming in the still waters of conformity. Or wanting to be Jennifer Capriati, discovered for her talent at an early age. At different times, I lived by all these personae.
And then somewhere in college, I learned the theology of the servant. On the night before his execution, Christ took a humble place and washed the feet of his friends. He took this menial and gross task and made a sacrament out of it. Doing the banal, humble thing and infusing it with of all things, love, took on enormous redemptive meaning for me.
When we got married, we did this at our wedding. I chose these Kenneth Cole satin slip-ons in ivory for the express purpose of being able to slip them off for Geoff to wash my feet and for me to wash his. Yes, in the ceremony. I know, what a cheesy and cute thing to include in your wedding! And yet, it has marked us. Not only do people still remark about that eleven plus years later, but we live marked by that every day. We take it upon ourselves to allow the sacrificial work to speak into our days: making lunches, washing clothes, swiffering. Taking time and care to use these tasks as a media for love.
A week after moving and getting married, we both got jobs at the local food co-op. This funky little market was where we learned about organic and local and free-range and vegan. I was a produce manager and he was a bulk manager. We worked and ate with a born-again pagan, Dick Gregory's daughter, a Critical Mass devotee, and Cab Calloway's chauffeur. It was so odd and disparate. But we all loved food. And we were willing to sweat for it.
Fast forward to now, we have this little co-op nursery school community. Back in college, Geoff's favorite professor sent her son here. So when we moved here, we looked it up. All four of our kids call it "their school." It is also funky and little. And similarly, we are motley mix of family-styles and the children are as unique as you can imagine. I belly-ache about the weekend cleaning, and the rigorous work that co-oping involves but it is good. It is good to administer the sacrament of pre-kneading hand-washing. The benediction of the coat-zip. The blessed extraction of the wood chip from the Croc.
This has been a dominant theme in our marriage and life with kids. I like that we can be passing it to the kids. And it is good to be writing this five years after the very day that I went into labor with Clara, while of all things, I was co-oping.
