In an effort to find the areas where I am wasting my life – as if I didn't realize I was sinking hours into reading recaps of Mad Men online– I've started recording how I spend my time each day. Among the number of challenges that have grown out of this practice is this: I really want to use my life to serve God and tp serve those around me, but that's not what I do with most of my free time.
This was easy to correct when I was “just” married. I could work a 60 hour a week job, or sign up for a dozen new York Cares projects, or sleep at homeless shelters. But now, every minute of free time I spend serving others, I don't spend parenting my son. And because I love my son, because I see him both as part of me and as something I wanted and asked for and now have, I struggle with the feeling that caring for him is less an act of service, and, as such, is less legitimate a way to spend my time, than, for example, caring for other people's kids.
I don't really mean that, or, if I do, I don't actually believe it's a problem; however it makes me feel, given the choice between serving others and caring for Mac, I know where my priorities lie.
But I do wish I could find moms like me, who want to balance the two. While I know there must be moms like this somewhere, the people I find at missional community meetings and New York Cares all seem to be childless. This is hard for me. In my smaller moments, it reminds me that they have careers “worth” prioritizing and I didn't really, so I didn't need to wait any longer to have kids.
It also leaves me feeling that there's a division between "kingdom vision" and serving God on the one hand, and parenting on the other. And I don't think there should be; I feel like churches in other places where I've lived, and even in the city, support families, and vice versa. But having kids in the city is such a huge financial undertaking if you are middle or upper middle class that it seems to divide people from their community more than connect them.
And that seems wrong to me. If well-off white professional can connect to kids in the projects, as our church is trying to do, why wouldn't a thirty-year-old mom in Park Slope be able to connect to a twenty-two-year old mom in Bed Stuy? Although they experience it in radically different ways, I imagine that each one has some things to say about the kind of neighborhood they envision for their kids, for other people's kids.
I want to start a ministry that connects moms whose experiences and needs are radically different. I want to work with other moms on understanding how parenting fits into what God has called us to do, despite the feeling I get, even in church, that parenting isn't somehow not a part of building the kingdom. I think this feeling is exacerbated by the division of moms who can buy their kids the care, tutoring, etc, that they need, from moms who rely on a village for it. I suspect that the kind of isolation and removal parenting seems to engender among privileged people (like me) is particular to our class; from what I've seen, among other communities, parenthood actually serves as a starting point for community.
I wish that there was someone besides fundamentalist Christians who took seriously the idea of parenting as service, and of parenting as a motivation for other kinds service, rather than a competing claim on our time. I wish I could express that when choose to give up a volunteer project so I have a free Saturday with my husband and son, I am doing God's will, without feeling like I'm just making excuses. Most of all, I wish there wasn't this division between what you do for your family and what you do for your world -- that we could reframe service as a way of bringing their children into the community already around them, rather than constructing, or purchasing, artificial communities of kids that look like them.
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