Raising Children, Raising Adults: Expanding is finally good

I have this ongoing battle with food. I love it. Really, really love it. I love chocolate, I love baked goods, cookies, fresh bread from the oven. I also love the way food tastes. And I love waking up in the morning and planning my three main meals for the day. It is so convenient that I have three children to make loads of treats and nourishing food for each day. It gives me a good excuse to cook, but sometimes I am all too aware that I stay in the kitchen too long. "Just a minute," becomes my refrain. Or, "Let me just finish cutting up these vegetables for the soup." I have yet to find the balance between healthy kitchen time and living in the moment with my children. Sometimes I feel like I stay too long in the kitchen because it gives me something to do when in fact I could be spending time reading to my children or playing a game or imagining a world of knights and queens and pirates. The kitchen sometimes keeps me from serious play and I allow it.

I also have an ongoing battle with my body. I don't mind the grey hair, the wrinkles on my neck, or the weathered pale skin, but I hate parts of my body I wish I could change. I try. I swim. I walk. I practice yoga and pilates, but I never seem to get that body back I had ten years ago. But then I really wonder, is it really the body I want back or is it the time? My obsession with making sure I do some form of exercise each day seems like I am longing to write myself back in time to a place where I had freedom to move, to explore, to read, to meditate. It was my desires that formed my patterns not someone asking me for this and that each moment of the day. But, my battle with my body is so much deeper than the skin and fat. It is about real longing. About balance. About love. About abundance. And about expansion. If I don't begin to see the battle as an expansion, it too will form a nice and neat distraction from living in the moment, here and now.

When I really think about it, I don't want to go back to my life ten years ago when everything seemed in control...my diet, my exercise, my relationship with my body and food and eating. I just want some good expansion.

That's what my children have given me. Expansion. Yes, carrying all the extra pregnancy weight, the birthing, the feeding, have left my body, well, expanded. My physical shape has changed and has grown. It has a holy story to tell if I will listen.

But there are so many more ways I have expanded thanks to my children. Deeper ways. Emotionally, spiritually, socially, relationally. All those hidden parts of me are pushed daily to practice expansion. Life used to fit into a nice and neat box. I understood (or thought I did) the big questions in life like: Why are we here? Is there really a God? Why is there suffering? Why do we age? What is hope? Love? Peace? In fact, I used to think those questions didn't need close attention (I ignored them or at least considered them for a brief moment), but now I see how important they are to practicing contemplation. In fact, contemplation as opposed to finding all the answers is a shift that is helping me to stretch spiritually and emotionally. Contemplating the smaller moments in my life and not the larger more expected questions seem to be more my reality. The heart of my contemplation is the desire to be a person of compassion and peace. A simple idea but needs loads of stretching and expanding.

I look at the big stretch of expansive sea and sky every time I drive my children from here and there,to this activity and that one. I am in awe of its bigness, and I am beginning to see the expanding part of me, the part that goes past who you see I am on the outside and reaches into the depths my true and inner being. That landscape, like yours, is so rich and beautiful and full. It is worth contemplating.

It is hard to expand. It is painful and I can honestly say that as it happens to me, I wish it wasn't. Being pushed to remember and to experience the complexities of life is not a simple task, but I suppose it is what life is all about.

So now I know why I am so tired. It is because I spend my days with my children. They push me like a balloon being blown up that has not been stretched yet. For me, I still resist the expansion, but each day, I know I am being stretched. When I really expand, really experience massive growth, I will be like that red balloon my son wants near him as he sleeps. And, that would be lovely.