Sunday morning shut-in

The beauty of living next to church is that you get to experiment with how to wrangle your toddler and manage to make it to all the services with comparative ease-- a luxury that most of my mum-friends don't have.

But with that comes the temptation to feel that you can and SHOULD make it to every service. After all, it only takes me two minutes to walk to church. And that's made it rather difficult for me to accept the idea of taking my 40-day break from church after the baby arrives.

For those of you who don't know, the Orthodox church prescribes a 40-day fast from church, as it were, for women who have just given birth. This is not because, as some might think, that the church thinks of childbirth as an unclean thing. It is not a banishment, but rather a sort of recommended holiday or permitted absence from church to allow new mothers time to bond with their babies.

I know I am not alone, however, in feeling resentful about this particular requirement. It's hard not to feel banished and I know a lot of women simply choose to ignore this rule, however common-sense it might be. Parenting is incredibly isolating at times so it can be a hard rule to accept.

And because my baby is due the week before Pascha this year, I have been determined to go to every service I possibly could regardless of whether it conflicted with Theo's bed time or I had the energy to go. My mother told me to just admit defeat and stay home and I guess she was right because after Presanctified Liturgy on Friday poor Theo started throwing up and hasn't stopped. It's all been too much for him. So this Sunday I sit at home watching Wallace and Gromit for the millionth time while the service is going on 50 feet from my door.

It's difficult for me to remember or accept perhaps that sometimes taking it easy is the least selfish thing I can do and I think that applies to a lot of modern women. We don't like to admit that kids just mean less freedom for us--even if we want to use that freedom for something like going to church.

So perhaps that's what God wants me to learn this Lent: to accept that parenting is the way God wants me to serve Him--even if it means I have less freedom to go to church or opportunities for fellowship with other parishioners. I need to learn that mothering is it's own form of Christian fellowship.