Kristin asked specifically about FlyLady and the rosary, both of which are fertile ground for breeding that alarming monster, the Perfectionist-Slacker hybrid. You can recognize it by its giant trailing flagellum (the better to beat you with, my dear) and its nauseous miasma of self-loathing.
I first subscribed to FlyLady's emails not long after she started sending them, eleven years ago, and I have been an off-and-on subscriber ever since. There are three things I have learned in those eleven years that may be useful (but may also be obvious). First, I have finally figured out that nobody else's program is going to work for me exactly as written. FlyLady and I part company early on, because I don't wear shoes in the house and I have no intention of doing so. (That was the big asterisk in my 2010 FlyLady resolution: "...everything* FlyLady tells me *except about wearing shoes because why would I want lead-contaminated soil and stray bits of dog poop tracked all over my carpet?") My house, my kids, my priorities -- why would she be able to predict exactly how I should keep my life in order?
Second, there are two truths in tension when it comes to FlyLady. I'm almost always glad when I do something she tells me to do. At the same time, I can only do everything she tells me if that's my primary focus. Outings with my kids seem to get pushed aside because I have one more FlyLady task to accomplish and suddenly it's naptime so we can't go out. It's better for me to plan on doing part of the package, perhaps choosing a particular habit to work on, and give myself upfront permission to delete freely.
This leads into #3, which is a hard one for me: running a household with small children is just not easy. There's this misperception that it's only housework, only childcare, and if you weren't a lazy slob you would just get it done. I disagree. Even in a small house there are a zillion things that need doing and entropy is an implacable force. It took me years to admit something that you may find self-evident (or whiny, depending on your POV), but I suspect I am not the only one out there laboring under the weight of a false idea. It's not an easy gig. Don't beat yourself up if you struggle: it's not you, it's the job.
Next up, the rosary. For those of you who aren't Catholic, the rosary is a structured meditation in which a person reflects on events in the lives of Jesus and Mary. A person could sit down for 20 minutes and pray the rosary contemplatively, pondering in turn the mysteries and the related scripture and her intentions and the words of the prayers. A person could also pray the rosary on the run, counting Hail Marys on her fingers while folding laundry and stopping in the middle of a sentence to redirect a contumacious child. Such a person might get to the eighth Hail Mary and say, "Wait, what decade is this supposed to be?"
Honestly, the rosary at my house looks like option B more often than option A. My strength is not contemplation. My strength is showing up. I cannot pretend to offer guidance on how to pray like St. Teresa, but I can tell you that you won't get to ecstatic union if you don't keep showing up. (Let me throw in here that I love Peter Kreeft's little book Prayer for Beginners -- it's just full of good stuff.) If you are trying to get started with the rosary, think of option A as a destination, not a starting point. Contemplation, kind of like keeping house, is harder than I expected it to be. It's reasonable to start small.
If you are trying to fit the rosary in, it may be useful to know that it takes less than three minutes to pray a decade. It may be useful to pray along with a recording so that you are not derailed by a moment of distraction, or so that you can do something mindless with your hands. I often pray the rosary while washing dishes or folding laundry. A person could complain that this diminished attention debases the rosary, though I hope only a really crabby person would think that. I prefer to think that I am sanctifying the housework.
Because a decade of the rosary is quick and composed of familiar prayers, it's fairly easy to do with kids. We almost never sit down to pray five decades, the way a Good Catholic FamilyTM might, but one decade I can manage. Instead of launching into an unbroken string of Hail Marys, I usually give them a brief thought to reflect on at the beginning, after the third Hail Mary, and after the seventh Hail Mary. The goal is to combine facts and food for thought, so I might say, "Forty days after his Resurrection Jesus rose up into heaven as his apostles watched," and then, "We honor your authority over heaven and earth," and finally, "We ask for the grace to carry your holy truth into the world" -- just something quick and off the cuff that I hope will help those words from Acts 1 sink into their heads. The kids can all tell you that it takes less than three minutes but it's longer if you interrupt. And you know, maybe if I were a better mother I wouldn't emphasize how fast it's over, but I have to tell you they're almost always willing to cooperate -- in part because it's short.
One last idea, because my word count is creeping up and up, is to pray the rosary with a child who is going to sleep. To teach my children how to go to sleep without nursing, I would rub their backs and pray the rosary quietly. I think it is a lovely peaceful association for them -- my 8yo (who has been weaned for a long time!) still asks me to tuck him in that way.
So-- I am a half-hearted FlyLady follower, but my house is cleaner than it used to be. And I am hardly a rosary role model, but I can tell you that good things will follow if you just show up.
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