I just finished Three Cups of Tea. One of the best things about our electricity fast was the books I read, especially since, for a former English major, I don’t always read well. I devoured Hunger Games and Catching Fire; I cried through The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, I loved/hated Eat Pray Love; I thought Darcy’s Story was the worst waste of paper ever (but I had to finish because I couldn’t just turn on Lost in Austen instead); I wondered why I’d never read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings before. When I finally picked up Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth again, I was flabbergasted that just a year ago it seemed too hippie. I vowed to change my life according to Soft-Spoken Parenting: 50 Ways Not to Lose Your Temper with Your Kids (harder than it seems).

Then there was Three Cups of Tea. And, I was in Manhattan the day the Twin Towers fell. I know I said more than once that we should just bomb the whole place “over there” and be done. Luckily I don’t have any sort of influence but unluckily I’m not the only one who thought that reflexively. But reading Three Cups of Tea made me think of the influence I do have over my three (and soon four) daughters, because it’s all about educating girls, and how that is the way to change the world.

Basically, I’m convinced. The book is a fascinating adventure story and history/geography/politics/culture lesson. It also confirms something I’ve long thought: that real heroes, people like Greg Mortenson who are crazy and visionary enough to effect real change in our world are worth studying and following even though they’d be hell to live with (or to be).

I had a professor who said one of the saddest things I’d ever heard, that it was rare for a book to come along that changed how he thought about the world. At the time, almost every book I read did that, and I couldn’t imagine being so jaded. Now I can, which makes Three Cups of Tea so remarkable. It’s obvious, now, that education (especially of future mothers) is the answer, but how obvious is it that one person could actually do so much about education with so little support/money/conventional development savvy?

Usually I shrug off  charitable concerns. When you tithe (10%) of your income, it’s easy (for me) to think I’ve done my part, but this book actually makes me want to do more. Then I thought: too bad I’m about to give birth soon, I know I’ll be preoccupied with a new baby for the forseeable future. Except, I’m a girl, a mother of girls. I can work every day to be a better mother and educator of these people in my own house, raise them so they’re aware of the wider world, grateful for their own opportunities, and eager to help others. We can save money as a family to donate. I can follow Greg Mortenson on Twitter, of all things. And there on the list of suggestions for how to help at the back of the book is number 5: Write a book review for a blog.

So, easy enough: everyone should read Three Cups of Tea.

For 40 days we limited our use of electricity. We made exceptions for food preparation and clothes washing. We were 100% successful only on no dishwasher, TV, and computer. I hung my laundry to dry every day but one, when I ran four batches through the dryer after recovering from bronchitis. The thing about drying laundry is you can’t fall behind because it takes 12+ hours for each batch to dry, even in arid Utah. The other thing is that it’s a little romantic (rhythmic, soothing, productive) to hang damp, clean clothing; I wouldn’t mind continuing, except the stiffness of the towels and the lint and wrinkles on the clothes are a little irritating.

For half of the fast we used no air-conditioning; it was cool most of June, so this wasn’t a hardship, except the day it was 92 degrees. A week later, Tom’s allergies (probably the cottonwood trees) were so bad he took a sick day and ponied up for prescription Allegra. We shut our windows and installed a high-tech air filter. I’m ashamed to admit just how happy I was to have that excuse for using the a/c. I said at first that we’d set the thermostat at 80, so we’d still be doing something, but that cool air is seductive (especially in the third trimester of pregnancy). Soon I had it set on 78, then 76, and finally 74. I can now say that I would rather do without internet than air-conditioning. (Obviously) I am weak, but physical discomfort is utterly disruptive to any sort of thought process..

Our fast was initially prompted by a high electricity bill that led us to lower our thermostat in winter to 60 degrees and cancel our TV. It was astonishing how easily and quickly we adapted to these two changes — and how much I liked it (especially how the kids act when there’s no TV; though Tom and I continued to spend too much time online and watching hulu). We (I) wanted more of that. I also especially wanted to re-set our expectations and habits to a more “natural” standard, waking with the sun, sleeping with the sun, paying attention to each other and the world around us, instead of all the wonderful things available electronically. Summer time was perfect for this, with school out and everyone eager to be outside anyway, and with the solstice (longest day of the year) falling right in the middle.

Here are some of the things I learned (see 1. Old-fashioned sorrows are (maybe) easier to bear in old-fashioned settings.):

2. Kids (and husbands) are impressionable; make rules wisely (and sparingly). A few days into the fast, Callie walked up the bare basement stairs towards the kitchen for a glass of water. Near the top she stumbled and hurt herself. Her cries pierced the darkness and Tom told her to turn on the light. She wailed that she couldn’t because we were doing our electricity fast. I said she could make an exception because  she was hurt (and I was too lazy to get out of bed). She insisted that no, she could not.

A few weeks later Tom was home alone for one night while I slept over at my moms with the girls (grandma has a swimming pool, and a dog). He told me later that, in addition to missing us, he had the strongest feeling of guilt over even thinking of turning the lights on. Even though it was my fast, and it was a completely subjective thing, not a sin or an objectively “wrong” thing to do, the imposition of guilt was a real thing.

3. Exceptions are a slippery slope. A couple Sundays ago as we walked to church, Callie shouted, “Mommy, you’re wearing flip-flops.” I don’t let the girls wear flipflops to church; it’s one of my very few clothing rules. Lucy’s sparkle jeans under her dress get a pass because she is a little obsessed with layering, even in summer. Callie and Avery are sometimes ball-gown fancy, sometimes playground pinafore casual. But there are no flipflops. Except, I told Callie, when you’re eight months pregnant. When you are eight months pregnant, I told her, you can wear flipflops to church too. Callie thought about that for several moments then proclaimed, “Mommy has a lot of exceptions.”

4. Maybe you’re a night owl, or maybe you’ve just never gotten a good night’s sleep. Tom has never woken up on his own (without an alarm or serious nagging) before 9 am in our twelve years of marriage. He’s always been a stay-up-until-this-one-last-bug-is-worked-out kind of guy. During our electricity fast, he still used his laptop to do freelance projects, but there was no TV on hulu, and I was asleep by 10:30 every night (except the few nights I stayed up to finish a book).  So even though he often was  up later than the rest of us, within a week, he started waking up around 6:30 every morning. The habit (what he thought was his natural rhythm) of his entire adult life was broken in a matter of days. And? Now that we’ve been catching up on Friday Night Lights? It’s 9 am less than a week later, and he’s sound asleep.

5. There’s more light outside even if you think your house has good windows. The sun goes down around 9 pm before and after the summer solstice in Mountain Daylight Time. Twilight lasts another half an hour. Before it got really hot, I resented nightfall. It meant I couldn’t see to read anymore. I was quickly resigned to not being able to finsh the dishes or hang the laundry if I waited too long, though some nights I did both by candlelight if I was in the mood. Other times I could shrug and say, I’ll do it tomorrow. Now it’s time to do something else.

Most nights I go walking with Chrysanthemum at the beginning of twilight. It’s simply gorgeous. The silhouette of the mountains, the perfume of the relieved grasses and trees sighing into the dark, the silvery fountains of the powerful sprinklers on the golf course. If we’re not walking, I usually end up angling my book towards our south-facing windows for the last smudge of light, or join Avery outside on the porch swing, because it is always surprisingly lighter outside.

6. Kids will take all the time you give them. I thought I’d have tons of free time once my computer was off. I knew I wasted time online. I knew it was bizarre (unhealthy, robotic, unnatural) how I’d head straight for the computer upon waking or returning home, during breakfast and lunch, hypnotizing myself out of hearing anything said around me until I’d gotten a hit from the internet. I was a little worried that I’d be bored. I read several books, books I might not have picked up or stuck through if I’d had easier entertainment options available, but I tried not to become lost in them as a substitute for the internet, but to instead really experiment with being more present (if you can forgive the phrase).

I trained my kids early to be self-entertaining (actually, I just selectively-neglected them into it). They play together or alone, they had already adjusted to no TV, and they coped with no movies and no computer games easily. How they ever had time for TV before is a mystery. They are busy from waking to sleeping playing, playing, playing. But I found myself suggesting card games (Uno, Skipbo), and reading more books to Callie and Lucy. Avery has her Saxon math to complain about, and Callie is more confident reading, looking to me for confirmation of a word less and less often. Lucy wants to read her books to us at naptime, and she is adorable. We all agree she is adorable, and when she smothers the baby in my tummy with kisses, I’m even more impatient for August.

But I need, and deserve, time of my own. I love to wake up before everyone else and read or write, or water the garden or even weed when it’s still deliciously cool. My kids won’t be harmed if they know there are times I can’t help them right now or even play with them all afternoon, but it was nice to not hear, not once in six weeks, dimly, outside my bubble, “Mommy’s on her computer.” It’s about balance, of course (all these buzzwords; sorry), and about not doing anything simply because it’s habit (unless you’re sure it’s a great habit), but because it’s something you’ve conciously, recently, decided to do.

7. It’s really frustrating to write longhand. It’s freeing to write where no one will ever see it, to record the day without thought of elegant structure or narrative meaning. But after awhile, it’s a little unrewarding to write only for yourself. Perhaps I have lost all my readers (it appears so from the dearth of comments on my last posts), and I don’t plan to do any of the things you’ll learn to do at blogging conferences to attract readers (besides try to write better), but somehow the act of making something public is enough, in itself, to lend significance. Perhaps if the fast had gone on longer, I would’ve learned the opposite.

8. It’s just as easy to lose your temper with the lights off. I’ve written a lot about my anger problem. For the first little bit of the fast, the novelty was enough to temper my impatience. That, and I read the fabulous book Soft-Spoken Parenting: 50 Ways Not to Lose Your Temper With Your Kids. A few days after finishing it, I realized I need to read it again, and again. The point is — no change of scenery or circumstance lets us escape ourselves, our habits and vices. I noticed when the kids spent an afternoon watching movies this week (I was the first one down with a nasty stomach virus) that they then fought for two hours afterwards. Of course an occasional movie isn’t bad, but something happens in their brains when they’re plugged in like that for long periods of time.

I had hoped that the same sort of purging of aggression would happen with me when I unplugged. But somehow little things still bugged me (though I reacted a lot better to interruption). It helped when I was fully rested (almost impossible at this point in pregnancy, no matter how much I sleep, but something I have to work on as we head into the newborn months), and when I took the time to write in my journal, to record the good things that happen.

9. Sometimes it’s easier to see in the dark. When you know it’s going to get dark soon, or hot soon or cold soon, you think about how you really want to spend your waking hours, your “good” hours, your daylight hours. I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by flickering candlelight and had some inkling of what it would mean to be rationed 1 candle per family per week. I know the majority (?) of the world’s population lives daily without electricity (or even worse, plumbing). An electricity fast is a first-world luxury, a probably unthinkably arrogant gimmick if you’ve ever experienced the real lack. I haven’t talked to Tom or the kids about this, but we need to donate our savings from this fast to Heifer International or something, in order to make it good for something real.

Summer is more than half over. Our electricity fast is definitely over, but I plan to do a month-long TV/movie/computer fast at the beginning of every summer. It’s so easy to go back to turning on lights, to putting off important things because you know you can extend the day as long as you like. It makes me wonder what else we could give up (could I give up the kinds of foods I like to eat?), how much we could do without, how our lives would be different if we thought in terms of What don’t I need? instead of How can I get that one thing I want? (I should confess here, maybe, that I love the fancy Belgian waffle maker Tom got me for my birthday in June and that I now want a breadmaker, oh, and a new vacuum.)

This reminded me a little of our first month in Egypt, when Avery was 18 months old. The power went out the first night we were there (and many subsequent nights). Avery and I were cooling off in the tub at an odd jet-lag-induced hour. We were pretty insulated from real life there, in our nice ex-pat neighborhood. But it was still jarring and exotic and reflection-causing. I’m not saying I want to impose bizarre lifestyle restrictions on myself and my family in order to be different or just to switch up our otherwise-mundane lives, but neither do I want to keep doing what we’ve always done if there’s a good reason to experiment deliberately.

On Father’s Day I sat in on a class of seven-year olds at church. Before the lesson they each get a turn to say whatever they want, in hopes that they can then listen for six minutes straight. I used mine to ask them, these kids who all live within a block or two of our house, if they had seen my cat, the cat we adopted last September as an orange-striped seven-week old and named Skippyjon Jones.

He was not my cat. I made it a point not to feed him so that he would love the girls and Tom for feeding him. I only let him sleep on my pillow at the very beginning, because I felt sorry for taking him from his mother (and I had just miscarried. What can I say?) When he came to me for affection, I petted him briefly; I never cuddled. The last time I saw him, Friday afternoon before Father’s Day, I teased him about lazing in the sun on the rug in the basement, but I had things in my hands, so I didn’t bend down to stroke him him as he stretched. I didn’t even write about him on this blog, though Tom said often that he was the best birthday present I’d ever given him, and the girls’ happiness at finally having a cat made me feel mean for denying them so long.

The boys in the class eagerly told me that they had seen my cat, dead on the side of the road, just the day before, on a corner Tom had passed in his searching several times. I had to leave the room — to cry in the bathroom and to barge into the men’s meeting to confirm with one of the dads.

I cried incessantly, uncontrollably that day; by evening I had to gulp great glasses of water to replace all the fluid my baby probably needed to swim in. I blamed my pregnancy hormones, I told myself it was stupid and I shouldn’t upset the kids with my irrational grief. Still, I cried.

It got dark around 9:30 pm, and we sat around the kitchen table eating the specially-planned rhubarb crumble I’d finally thrown together. We had one lit candle; we couldn’t really see each other’s faces. With one candle in the center of the table, we gathered close, even though we still couldn’t really see. My daughters believe in heaven, and Jesus; I told them (and myself; they were easily convinced) that we have to remember that Skippy is happy now, we’re just sad because we miss him, but he is happy.

Then I told them about my young Aunt Jodi, who died when I was 11, of kidney failure. Jodi let us all sleep on her twin waterbed and had hundreds of nail polish colors to choose from. She had a goat, three horses, Ceasar the noble golden retriever, several cats, and probably other animals I don’t remember; she was studying to be a vet though she’d been sick for years. When she died my sister and I inherited Bonnie Jean Monster. We took pretty good care of her, though not her kittens, which is another story and a big part of my reluctance to have (or love) a pet again.

Avery was quick: “So now Jodi is taking care of Skippy for us in heaven?”

We trooped upstairs, all five of us, set the candle on the edge of the sink while we brushed our teeth and then trooped back downstairs, two flights of stairs this time to the unfinished basement, where Tom and I settled into our bed and the girls snuggled in the nest of blankets they’d arranged a few feet away on the floor at the beginning of our fast.

For once there were no cries of “she hit me” or “she took my pillow.” There were “I love you, goodnight”s and a few “I miss Skippy”s. Then it was completely dark, and completely quiet. I fall asleep quickly these days. But that night I spent several minutes, alone with my family, wondering why something so common hurt so much.

Tomorrow we begin our forty-day electricity fast. I feel like there were several things I meant to do and write and plan for before this started, but today was busy with family and barbecuing and recovering from the CBC and shrugging when my mom couldn’t stop remarking on how large my 28-week belly looks.

I have printed off recipes and information for swimming lessons; I’ll probably go on Tom’s freelance laptop once a week for ten minutes to check our finances, since I don’t feel comfortable leaving them completely unwatched. I bought some candles and a drying rack and . . . oops, today we bought an electric pump to blow up the kiddie swimming pool because just looking at the handpump exhausted me. Guess I’ll be standing in the return line tomorrow. Funny how I can talk this up to the kids every day for a week and totally space that an electric air pump would take — duh — electricity.

I’m excited for this, though today I realized the only music I’ll hear between now and July 10th is whatever I catch on the radio in the car, and the hymns at church. It’s probably better that I don’t really know what to expect: perhaps it’ll be totally sublime with daily epiphanies; perhaps it’ll be intolerable. I plan to write something every day, but the question I want to answer  is one that I’ve wanted to adopt as a focal point for months now, but somehow have never found the time. (And it doesn’t have to do with living a “green” lifestyle.)

It comes from Elder Eyring: “Have I seen the hand of God reaching out to touch us or our children or our family today?”

If you need me, please email Tom at tomjohnson1492 @ gmail dot com.

Let me preface this by saying that rarely has my husband been so attractive to me. First he mopped the floors and washed the dishes after a long day of work and his (exhausting) weekly basketball game. Then he told me, after watching the kids for the first of three days, that whenever he has to do the dinner/bedtime thing all by himself, he realizes again how much I do.

Then, on the first full day of parenting the children, he took them camping. They got to the campground 15 minutes from our house in the early afternoon. They climbed willow trees, rode bikes, roasted marshmallows over an open fire that only claimed one wayward sock, ate Little Ceasar’s pizza, and were sound asleep by 7 pm.

I asked what he had planned for breakfast and he said they’d be home early.

This morning before I left, Tom and I were, uh, indisposed. Actually, he was amorous, and I was acquiescent despite my growing whale-like proportions for the aforementioned reasons (helping around the house really is sexy). Susan and Spot were playing legos in their room and Sally would be home from school at any moment. (It was her last day so she had an important hour-and-a-half of education before summer officially began).

Suddenly our locked door started rattling. Sally was home, and asking if Daddy was still asleep. (I had told her she would probably be home before he even woke up, and that I’d probably be gone by then). I said, “Yes he’s still asleep, go play with your sisters.”

She persisted. I insisted he was still asleep and she should go play with her sisters.

Finally she gave up and we were able to concentrate. Afterward, I asked her if she didn’t remember that talk we had a few months ago, about how if mommy and daddy’s door is locked, you don’t want to come in anyway. And she said,

“Well I knew you weren’t doing that.”

And how did she know that?

“Because you already have one.”

“One what”?

“A baby in your tummy.”

—–

When I could speak again, I told her that we still love each other and that married people sometimes do that for no other reason.

Confession:

I like Walmart, and I shop there regularly (it helps that we have a brand-new store, with un-sullen workers, so far). I know it’s the nadir of taste, style, social conscience, and seven other sins, but I am unashamed. And I really think that unless you’ve lived for a couple years in a third-world country where you have to go to five different stores for what you could get at Walmart, and it still isn’t what you really want, you don’t get to judge me. (Places like France are different. There, it’s a pleasure to walk from store to store. There, I would walk five miles uphill both ways for a shop that only sells pastries, because they’re worth it.)

Penance (not really; actually a pleasure, but pretend):

I like Sassy Scoops, a review website of local Utah places. Their mission is a great one, and their reviews of all different kinds of businesses, from restaurants to carpet cleaning to yoga studios, are informative, visually appealing, and usually pretty funny, too. Right now they’re spreading the word about buying local first and supporting Utah businesses by offering the chance to win $100 in gift cards to local businesses for posting about Sassy Scoops. I admit, I’d love to win the gift cards (it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if they asked me to Guest Sassy with them sometime, either ). But really, I think what they’re doing is great.

Some local businesses that I’ve been impressed with since moving back to Utah include:

Mi Ranchito. I love yummy, cheap Mexican food. Grampa took us to a new age Mexican place in Florida once and the food, while good, was just a little too healthy. You want some grease and salt with your beans, you know? Mi Ranchito is it.

San Gelato Cafe. I took my kids there during a girls night out sponsored by Sassy Scoops and the Casual Blogger Conference (which starts tonight! in Utah!). It was super-yummy and child-approved, and I’m sad we didn’t wait out the market a little longer and buy in Daybreak.

Memory Mixer. There are a lot of digital scrapbooking options out there. Memory mixer, created by Utah ladies, is the best (easiest, non-proprietary, flexible, affordable) that I’ve tried. I’ll be hosting a giveaway of their software after my electricity fast, if you can wait that long.

Timpanogos Storytelling Festival. It was a dark and stormy night. We love it. The end.

There are a bunch more, like the Back Alley Salon (a little bit ghetto, but way unpretentious!) in American Fork and my neighbor down the street who does hair in her basement. I’m in awe of women like Raw Melissa who does the personal chef thing and the doula thing. While businessy-type things often make me skittish, the whole local-person-you-meet-face-to-face-and-partner-with-to-grow-the-economy thing is conversely very appealing. Local businesses (especially house-cleaning-for-post-partum-mommy-outfits)! Contact me! Or not! Either way!

Lately I’ve found myself teaching my oldest girl important life lessons, like how to make bread and how to  prepare a Mountain Dew with just the right amount of ice and a straw (for me), and how to clean the bathrooms — things I want her to know before the new baby comes so she can help keep things going around here. Sometimes I could learn from her: somehow she’s trained her two younger sisters to wait outside her door and ask “Can I come in please?” before entering her room. I told her that whatever she requires of them I could require of her, so to think that through carefully.

When she is enthusiastic about getting her chores done, she can pied piper those kids into racing to see who can finish first. All this without a single Love and Logic course. Is that just the prerogative of the first child? I remember my mom asking me to set a good example and to get my younger siblings to do things on Saturday mornings. Instead I hid in the bathroom and read (actually, that sounds really familiar, Sally).

But I still have some wisdom to impart, bit by bit as she’s old enough to handle it:

#1 Always check a new box or bag of groceries or household items carefully, so you don’t open the wrong end or ruin the zipper on the easy-reclosable opening. I demonstrate this for her on a regular basis, just for emphasis, because it’s tragic when you open a 2-pound bag of Twizzlers right UNDER the zipper.

#2 Always check your fountain drink before leaving a drive-through or gas station. There’s nothing worse than driving away with a slightly bitter soda that needed the syrup bag replaced. This one I haven’t been able to teach from my own actions; it’s one of those mistakes you only make once in life, so dire are the results. But when she got her Sprite from Costco last week, it was a teachable moment right there in the parking lot.

I do teach her important stuff, like the meaning of sex, or why we don’t drink alcohol (Hint: it’s not in the 10 Commandments, like she was trying to tell Susan), but sometimes, though she inherited a mean voice to rival my own (maybe THAT’s how she got the younger girls to keep out of her room), she seems to intuit how to do important things. (And I can’t tell you how I cringe whenever I hear that voice coming out of her mouth.)

Last night there was only a small section of pie left. Tom had already had some, and Spot hadn’t come downstairs for scripture time, or finished her dinner (which was a friendly peanut butter and jam sandwich, I might add). So I divided the rest between Sally, Susan, and myself. Spot started crying, the broken-heart crying, not the tantrum-crying (which is much easier to ignore). I held her in my lap and rubbed her back with one hand as I shoveled in pie with the other, telling her I was sorry she’d made the choice to not listen to scriptures and not eat her dinner.

Sally went to the cupboard, got a plate out, and cut off the larger half of her piece for Spot.

Maybe that’s why they welcome her like banshees every afternoon, and why Susan will hole up in her room late at night doing the reading lesson I futilely cajoled her about earlier. Even though it bugs me when people say their kids teach them so much, I’d like to have some of that mystique she weaves around them effortlessly, magically, but somehow I don’t think a mother is ever going to be as idol-worthy as a big sister.