Lois Lyda

I have officially made it my goal to unsubscribe to all bulk emails. John McCain’s Country First, Farouk Shami for Governor, Mom’s groups, Kid’s organic toy companies that, even with “mega sales” of a whopping 20% off, I will never afford to buy.

This unsubscribing equivocates part of my prelenten efforts to steer clear of “wanting”. The need to accumulate and buy at times attacks my psyche and, while our budget hardly budges, convinces me to buy.

Yesterday, for example, I clicked on an add for some reduced price diaper bag, and ended up purchasing four pairs of lace-free kiddie shoes (75% off MRSP, noless). While two pairs may have been legitimate, the $6.95 flat shipping rate convinced me that I’d get a better deal the more shoes I bought, which was almost the same cost as one pair of shoes.

One hour later, still deciding between the periwinkle blue gators and the orange fuzzy kitty’s, I fizzled away my evening wondering which footy friend would delight my children the most. In the end, I settled on the lightning bugs, and spent $38. All because of one failure to unsubscribe!

These emails take not just my money but my time. The irony is that while I seem to end up with time to open the email, and loose myself in online shopping, I never “have time” enough to press on the unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email. But this year, I’ve had enough of being prosletized and marketed to on email.

To date, I have 5425 emails in my inbox. At least half of these from bulk marketing.  From time to time I’ll go through and determine to delete , but I never make it below 5000. I have a mind to just “select all” and wipe out every trace of the past 5 years-worth of email communication, but the google search feature makes it too easy to keep things in my ever growing cyber landfill.  Imagine if those 5000 emails were paper. I wonder how much room they’d take up. One file cabinet? One garbage can? The entire garage? Who knows.  But 5000 seems excessive.

Unsubscribing to email is just one way I am trying to take control of my lack of self control, by eliminating the stimuli that convince me I need to buy things I never before thought I needed to buy.

So far so good. I haven’t bought anything since. . . well, okay, just one ltle thing . . .but it was an icon to help prepare me for the self-denial of lent!

What else in my life can I “unsubscribe” from?

My “outgoing mail” of excessive talking and my “junk mail” of overeating is next!

 When did parenting become reduced to the bare-bones task of keeping them alive?

When I first started full-time mothering, I was convinced it was “the highest calling.” I envisioned soul-profiting days of Bible memory and life skills. I was even under the illusion that I’d be implementing praying the hours with my kids at our icon corner, in between bouts of meaningful tasks in our media-free society.

My perfect parenthood world came crashing down around me on Friday (shortly after opting out of morning prayers in lieu of Blue’s Clues). I was tidying up the kids bathroom with a little Windex wipe-down, and the kids were happily playing together about five feet away in the neighboring room. Their squawks and squeels made me smile as I scrubbed the watermelon toothpaste from the counter, peeking in every few minutes to watch them scale the side of the newly assembled bunk bed with great determination and delight. “Be careful” I cautioned, and then went back to my cleaning, while happiness was still on my side.

But then I heard an unusually strained squawk & squeel. One that, had I not been mere feet away, I would have never heard. I jutted into the room, “Everything okay . . ?”

To my horror, Eden was hanging from the side of the bunk, suspended by a rope that noosed her neck. She was an inch from the ground, but dangling, caught in her descent by a four-year-old’s determined grasp. “I’m pulling you up, Eden, come on!” he was shouting excitedly, completely oblivious to her struggle for breath.

Expeditiously, I scooped her up, pulled the knot loose, and drew her to me. Coughing and sputtering, and still grasping at her raw red neck, she could barely utter a word. “Lord have mercy” I whispered, holding my daughter silently, frightfully, too tightly until I began to cry the words as the thought of near-death struck me deeper still. In the blink of an eye I could have lost my daughter. I was unnerved.

I didn’t have the stamina to spank my son, who had started bawling from the top bunk. I couldn’t let go of my daughter, who’s little body was still taut, her heart pounding, her eyes filled with fear. I studied meticulously the pink ribbon of tender skin around her neck.

Gradually, tears watered our frightened embrace with unimaginable relief.

Thanks be to God, she was alive, and how precious this fragile little life was to me.

I have always taken it for granted that my home is a safe-haven. A place protected from harm. While I am certain my “baby proofing” could be more thorough, I have never thought of my home as a danger-zone, let alone potential crime-scene. I have never thought of myself as a negligent parent, either. Fluctuating between attentive and distracted perhaps, but never negligent.

All this has now changed for me. If I ever put myself on a parenting pedestal, I’ve been completely knocked off. My so-called “agenda” has been completely stripped. To be single-minded in my effort not to multi-task is one thing. Choosing to make important what is really important, another. But if I can just keep my kids alive while they’re in my care, it will be a most blessed accomplishment. One that, in and of itself, is a very high calling!

Coffee hour duty is spiritual warfare for me. 

Those Sundays, I am like an inactive soldier reporting for boot camp.  When that one weekend a month arrives, I am in for a serious kick in the pants.

For me, cooking for 50+ people is not a delectable desire, it is a duty that usually ends with a culinary death, and leads to spiritual suicide.  Truly, coffee hour duty has been one disaster after another.  Whenever that Sunday approaches I moan, I stress, I panic.  I start cooking, boiling, steaming. . . hormonally speaking.  The night before, the verbal battery begins when I spout off all the reasons my coffee hour offering will be doomed.  For example, last time I made beans, in my dimented state of mind, the congregants had already complained about them being bland and crunchy before they’d even made it in the crock pot.  Another time, I was so fired up about getting my fruit salad to the church on time, I put the china dish on top of the roof  and drove off full speed. 

  So this time, I prayed a special “coffee hour duty” prayer as I boiled the eggs the night before.  Piece of cake, I thought, as I climbed into bed.  Just peel, scoop, and mash in the morning.

 At 8am the peeling process wasn’t as easy as I had imagined.  The whites were gluey and stuck to the shell, making my so-called hard boiled’s look like mutilated poached eggs. 

“They don’t look cooked all the way” said my observing husband, 15 minutes before our scheduled departure, as I’m standing at the sink with my robe still on estimating my losses, and wondering how a seemingly simple task  has come to this.  So I frantically reboil them, as my hormones also begin boiling.  It doesn’t take but a few minutes, and I see that eggs have started to crack and ooze.  Subsequently,  my emotions also begin cracking and oozing.  Soon, my spirit is completely scrambled. 

For 30 minutes, I cry,  &  declare I can’t possibly go to church in this forlorn state with such forlorn looking eggs.  Then I drink a coke for consolation as I nurse my emotional battle wounds on the couch. 

But  then it occurs to me how important it is that I not let my temperamental emotions and temperamental eggs spoil my day and  my meager offering to God’s people.  So I peel myself off the couch and pull myself together.  Later than usual, we make it to church along with 50% of the eggs, paprika and all.

Silly as it may sound, as I reflect on the morning’s mahem, I am convinced that this was a war waged by the Evil One.  The battlefield,  my mind (and the kitchen);  the assailant,  my thoughts (and the devil’s eggs).  He used the culinary comotion to ruin my spiritual appetite.  In the end, did I devil the eggs, or did they bedevil me?