Attention to things

Recently, I came across two magazine articles while helping Ellie with homework. One on cleaning and one on miscarriages.

The one on cleaning invites you to have mindful housekeeping. Don't just attack your housework like it's a snake ready to bite back. Imagine you're doing the task for the first time. Use all your senses. Consider it a neural workout and let it be mindful, not mindless. Don't think of housework as punishment, but let it cultivate kindness to yourself and others. [Not found in the article, but good advice I think - pray for others while you clean.]

I like her last paragraph. "Cleaning changes things. So much in life is uncertain - you take vitamins and get sick, love people who disappoint you, pour your heart into a job and lose it at the end of a fiscal year. But if you take a rag to a piece of soap scum, it will go away. From that point of view - the pure continuum of cause and effect - cleaning stops seeming futile. It starts to look like the only thing worth doing." The author also quotes a Zen priest as saying the magic soap is your attention. "Attention to the meal you cook, the clothes you wash. Attention is love. And that's transformative."

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The one on miscarriages caught my eye, because I've had two. But even saying that is hard, because I haven't always completely considered them miscarriages in the same sense of a miscarriage to a woman whose pregnancy was 13 weeks along. I knew I was pregnant for only a week, and only because of doing IVF. If I had gotten pregnant without assistance and had a miscarriage at the same week gestation, I wouldn't even have known it. I felt like I was a fraud or something. So I rationalize that it isn't the same. Friends and family have told me otherwise, but still.

So, when I read this article and saw that I fit into the category of women who have had miscarriages, I felt included and that I could more easily say I've had two miscarriages and not feel like a fraud.