The great big feather bed

I did not set out to be a co-sleeper or many of the things I’ve now become, for that matter. Before having kids I made such bold statements as, “My kids will never sleep in my bed!” And most horrifying in its naiveté, “I will never hand my kids a screen to shut them up.” It’s a miracle onlookers, some of them seasoned mothers, did not slap me silly. The audacity of my claims is mortifying in retrospect.

Because it’s here I find myself. It’s 3:15 am and I can’t sleep. I’ve awoken from a bad dream to find too many bodies next to me in our king-sized bed. There is: my snoring husband, two children (one of whom is more than half my size, another well on her way), and the latest addition, two fluffy black cats who sleep all night with us, entwined in the curves of kneecaps and elbows, who now purr contentedly at my being awake and the prospect of a bonus late night snuggle.

My children routinely find me at night, like ships drawn toward the harbor they wander in, sometimes more asleep than not. They clamber up to claim whatever space available and I wake up to my alarm with one child’s arm thrown over me, an uninvited big spoon. If I’m awake when they arrive they offer platitudes like, “I’m cold” or “I just had a bad dream” or “I got scared.” If I’m awake, it is just barely and my only desire is for everyone to go the bleep to sleep, so I hoist them up and tuck them in, the cats resettle, and we are whole again.

When I was a child we camped regularly—including one stint at Badlands National Park without running water or electricity. One sister and I shared one side of our pop up camper, another lay on the couch nearby. We would giggle—so quickly having forgotten we were only a few feet from our parents—until they, also wanting everyone to go the bleep to sleep, would tell us to be quiet and to go to bed.

Before those bedtime giggle sessions, we would sit around a campfire and sing old songs—likely to other campers’ genuine amusement or dismay—until the flames turned to embers and the night sky lit our steps back to our temporary home.

One song my dad loved to sing and we loved to hear was John Denver’s “Grandma’s Feather Bed.”

It was nine feet wide, and six feet high, soft as a downy chick

It was made from the feathers of forty-eleven geese,

took a whole bolt of cloth for the tick.

It’d hold eight kids and four hound dogs and a piggy we stole from the shed.

We didn’t get much sleep but we had a lot of fun on Grandma’s feather bed.

As a child I loved the idea of sleeping in a big bed among cats and dogs, cousins and sisters, and even a pig stolen from the shed. I imagined a huge expanse of down comforters and old quilts, all of us safe and sound, limbs akimbo, until we awoke to begin the day anew.

Growing up we didn’t have a huge friend group the way Mike’s family did. We didn’t throw Friday night parties or have weekly sleepovers at Grandma’s. We didn’t run the block with our cousins, skipping rocks down alleyways and getting into just enough trouble to be dangerous.

We had the church, instead. My sisters and I knew every crook and cranny and often played hide and seek in the preacher’s albs. We weren’t above stealing the Communion bread the old church ladies prepared in big fluffy white mounds and left unattended in the church basement awaiting sinners’ open mouths. 

Our friends were from church, our stand-in grandparents, aunts, and uncles, cousins and acquaintances all came from church. We were the chosen ones, the kids everyone knew for the solos we sang and the pageant roles we played. We arrived early and stayed late. For years, my entire existence played out between the church building, the library next door, the Dairy Queen behind the library, and the Fairway across the street.  Church people were our people. We lived and ate and sang and gossiped and worshipped and played and dawdled under the same roof. It was our own version of the great big feather bed.

In the midst of the pandemic, I began missing that feeling. I craved for my children to know the hidden passageways and the mysteries of a church at dawn—the setting out of sacraments and the hush of waiting for people to arrive. I wanted them to mark the passing of their lives with the church calendar, by observing the way the colors of the stoles change with each season. I wanted them to fall asleep on the way home from midnight Christmas Eve worship, or see the sunrise in a chapel on Easter morning.

I began to miss, too, my childhood faith—one of angels and arks, Jesus born in a manger, and a coat of all colors. It all felt so much simpler then, cloistered in the great big feather bed, unaware of a world beyond. Unaware that across a big world other kids were visiting mosques and synagogues and mandirs or staying home and watching cartoons on Sunday mornings, oblivious to our religious spectacle. And how much simpler it was at ten to accept a miracle than to look for miracles amidst the day-to-day hubbub, the shocking headlines, and adulthood worries. 

Hoping to find my way back, I started listening to a daily Bible podcast while getting ready for work each day. I soon found myself tuning in to the most over-the-top soap opera, unable to turn away.

“He did WHAT?” 

“Then she got married off to his brother just like that?”

“She killed him how?!”

In the early days of my podcast listening I would recap the day’s story at the dinner table. Until I got to Judges, that is. It is, in the gentlest of terms, unsuitable for little ears.

Listening to the Bible each morning reminded me that I’m fooling myself by looking for the perfect church, one with the exact combination of liberal social positioning and traditional religious observation. I’m amiss in thinking I can recreate the church of my past too, or relive the time when I didn’t know all that I know now. I’m not alone, though, in my religious wanderings. I’m only half-way through my Bible podcast and already see how every step gained in belonging to God later meant two steps back. Every escape from slavery is later threatened by the doubters and idolaters, the prideful Sauls, and the adulterous Davids. 

As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one yearning for a return to self and community. I wasn’t the only one needing a weekly rest in the great big feather bed full of messy souls and lost sheep, all curled up in kneecaps and elbows, together and whole again. 

Studies have shown that in the last few decades we have traded church, community, togetherness, for our work. Our work has become our livelihood, our sense of self and self-worth. There’s nothing wrong with finding community in an office place, or friendship amongst co-workers. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing a calling that also happens to pay the bills. But we’ve gone beyond that, I think.

We’ve kept emailing and typing and stressing well beyond the hours our grandparents and parents kept. Our work has a seat at the dinner table, a lawn chair at the sidelines of our children’s soccer games, and is safely buckled up next to us in our school pick up lines.

Until the pandemic woke us up like a child’s knee to the face (speaking from experience), and snapped us right out of our dreamlike state. After the days melted into each other and the lines between work and home became too blurred to recognize what was what, we awoke to see all of the things we had been missing. We woke up alone, no longer surrounded by community in the great big feather bed. We woke up desperate for a way back to ourselves, to each other.

We’re now opting for something more official people than I have dubbed the Great Resignation. We’re handing in notices and demanding more. There’s power in our numbers, this collective bargaining chip we carry.

Mike was among the resigners. It began with us simultaneously charging full-speed ahead at our jobs, and me studying for my MBA, and two children who needed school just as much as we needed them to be in school. The long and short of it is that we were just so tired.

We would arrive home for work and look forlornly at each other over the dinner table. 

We weren’t tired in the way all parents are tired from waking up in too-full beds. And not in the way we’re universally tired because of COVID and schedules and “Why do we pay so much for quality medical care?” Not tired because of meal prep and chauffeuring and birthday party planning.

We were nearly existentially tired. 

Until one day, Mike woke up. After years of 60-hour weeks and an hour’s long commute, he decided one day he just couldn’t possibly grind anymore.

“What are we doing?” we asked each other, our hearts so weary we could barely speak. Instead, we looked out onto our children playing, the same children who had stopped asking where their dad was, knowing the answer in advance.

And so one day, though really over the course of many sleepless nights and haggling with the Powers that Be and scrimping and saving and questioning our mutual sanity, he just quit.

He kept quitting even when they offered him a transfer, and threw in a bonus, and even after his coworkers said their goodbyes with tears threatening to fall. And we began again. 

We began to craft a family life of rituals and presence, a community of shared food (leftovers count, right?), and chaotic beach trips in a house with six adults and ten children under ten. Mike and I began to go on dates, selecting a new-to-us restaurant from a jar each week and actually talking to each other the way we used to, the way we’d somehow forgotten to do in the season of work, work, work and go, go, go. 

We are making time for church again too. We’re slowly but surely gaining traction, creating space for the mysteries and miracles, merging childlike faith and adult contemplation. Mike is thriving in his new role. There are no nights or weekends, only seemingly endless time. 

And with perfect timing, Advent is upon us again. We light the candles and read the old stories. Some of us fight over who gets to use the fancy gold candle snuffer after dinner and rush to break up the now hardened wax pooled on the table. A competitive child begs for quiz questions about each reading, while another only wants to talk about baby Jesus. It’s here I find myself. Awake.

In this new season, I find I am no longer making bold statements about the things I will never do, nor trying to recreate an already lived past. Instead, we await the future with hope, look for a light in the darkness, and in the meantime, are snuggled safe in the great big feather bed of our making.