Hermit Envy

I’m reading this book about a monk who goes off to live in a hermitage. He feeds chickens at a nearby convent in the mornings. Cooks rice and beans on a gas stove. Then he prays and writes and reads books all day. You get the feeling that you are supposed to be in awe of this guy — his small living space — his simple meals — the fact that he does his own laundry and cooking. I’m rolling my eyes the whole time because I have a baby and a toddler and another baby on the way and I suffer from a deprivation of solitude and a deprivation of fellowship and a deprivation of getting out of the house. I won’t even get started on laundry and cooking. (I’m sure my family is sick of burnt grilled cheese sandwiches). Plus in two or three months I will be so huge and unsightly that people will be telling me daily “Oh honey, you're about to pop” and “Are you sure you don’t got twins in there?” and, of course, the ever popular, “You know what causes that, don’t you?” (A dwelling in the forest would come in handy during the last few months of pregnancy, I think.)

This monk isn’t going to get any, “wow, he’s spiritual,” kudos from me for feeding a few hens and praying and reading books all day.

I don’t feel sorry for him. Not at all.

Nevertheless, I continue to read this man’s book, a 40 day devotional (while the babies crawl all over me and bite me and pull my hair) that clearly has nothing to do with my life.

Then, on day 12 or 13, he asks a question that makes me think:

“Do you see that your path has been lovingly designed by God?”

Hmm.

Well, it’s a path I chose. A path I asked for. Though I occasionally wonder if I asked amiss. I feel terribly inadequate much of the time. My domestic exploits earn a C- at best, sometimes a C+ for sheer comic relief.

I would have been a great hermit, though. The hermitiest of them all. No supermom or food blogger or Pinterest sensation could compete with me in the hermit department. Finally! I would shine the way I was born to. I would be a real otherworldly one with long witchy hair and some kind of John the Baptist slash Xena Princess Warrior garb. When you saw me in the forest, I’d have such an esoteric expression on my face you wouldn’t come within fifty feet of me without apologizing for your existence. You’d think I was some weird Flannery O’Connor modern prophet character. You’d come kowtowing over to my trailer (yes, I think a proper hermit should live in a trailer) and put fifty bucks or so in my guitar case because I’d be strumming that guitar with its ten-year-old strings and singing songs I’d made up about moles and field mice and hair shirts and other forms of penance, all in syntax garbled from disuse, which would make me sound even holier than before, if possible.

So now I circle back, once again, to the question:

“Do you see that your path has been lovingly designed by God?”

My path? The diapers, etc? These small people screaming and fighting over spoons and measuring cups? This hollow robotic feeling? My daily struggle with bitter envy toward hermits?(Every mother has to follow these kinds of statements up with “but of course I love my children and I wouldn’t change a thing” and then she waxes sentimental about their little “precious” attempts at talking, their “cute” waddling around the room in diapers learning to walk, their cuddly squishiness, their angelic looks when they sleep, the fact that she has a profound love for them that makes it all worth it. Etc.)

Why was I not called — chosen — to be a hermit when I would have been such a good one, as the above ruminations indicate?

Every person’s answer to the hermit question is going to be different. Probably lots of people struggle with feeling that they missed their calling. I look back and see years of absurdity: fruitless grasping and searching and nights in dark parking lots after philosophy classes hearing Delilah on the radio talking to some tearful man who done his woman wrong and then she plays Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” and I am thinking Paul Simon’s “Slip Sliding Away.”

Ah! But now I have children. No more nights in dark parking lots. No time for existentialist philosophy. Now my reading materials of choice are poorly punctuated, half-plagiarized articles on parenting sites about developmental milestones or the varieties of childhood rash.

One would think that the cure for existential despair would be some profound…answer. Some dramatic mountaintop revelation. But what God lovingly gave me instead, it seems, is a different kind of struggle: or, perhaps, a different set of circumstances through which to view the same struggle.

It is as though the answer to Heidegger’s Being and Time is a crunchy Mommy blog with links to all kinds of organic vegan recipes and articles on how using “family cloth”.

I know I’m not the only one out there who feels like she is living a life that doesn’t quite fit. There are people in first world cubicles wishing they could leave it all behind and start a subsistence farm in a third world country. There are millions of subsistence farmers in third world countries who would give anything to have that mind-numbing job in your cubicle. There are single people who are domestically inclined — gifted, even — and wish to be married. There are married people who wish they were single. (I’m not saying that I wish to be single, by the way. I think hermits could marry. Maybe there could be a weekly date night dispensation.)

Our modern vocation myth teaches us to pursue our dreams — to follow our hearts’ desires — to find the purpose that the “universe” has planned for us. To leave our inauthentic lives behind. Lest you think that I am mocking this idea, I have always been a lover of Thoreau; I have my own treasured copy of Walden with the pages falling out. And I think we should — to the best of our ability and within the bounds of duty and love — take Thoreau’s advice and “live the life [we] have imagined.”

In many ways, this is a corrective to a prior error — thoughts about vocation that were too rigid — that make no room for creativity, beauty, desire, individuality — beliefs that make all of work and all of life about that which is least pleasant or desirable.

But. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Even if the baby happened to poop in the bath for the third time this week.

I would argue that, in any vocation, toil and suffering — even disillusionment — are inescapable. Nothing is perfect. Do I really want a life without struggle? Do I want life to leave me as I am? Untested, untried?

No, this isn’t what I want. What I want is to be better tomorrow than I am today: Less selfish. More loving. Wiser. More capable. And, unfortunately, this is most often accomplished through struggle.

Recently I was talking to a colleague about my desire to be a hermit. “But I realize,” I told him, “that I am too melancholy to be a hermit. Too close to becoming mentally unhinged. God probably doesn’t need any more ratty-haired weirdoes populating the forests.”

Probably the best place for a person like me is right in the middle of the ordinary. The very mundane that I find so…mundane. My current challenges — my inadequacies — my particular set of toils and labors — perhaps these were specifically, lovingly designed by God to bring about some good end — not just in my children’s lives, but in my life as well.

The Bible certainly seems to indicate this over and over again. “Count it all joy when you encounter trials of various kinds…” “Let patience have its perfect work in you, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing…” “Rejoice in the Lord always” “Give thanks in all circumstances” and “Be content with such things as ye have.”

(Plus, my kids are cute and chubby and there they are waddling around in diapers and saying funny things like “I need coffee” etc.)