Mrs. Tittlemouse and a Song of Ascents

When I was seven or eight, my grandparents went to England. And among the things that they brought back to me was one of those coveted little books bound in green cloth and wrapped in a gorgeously-familiar glossy white dust jacket. Not to date myself, but it must be pointed out that this was at a time in which Beatrix Potter books were not to be had for the asking at any Borders or Barnes & Noble, not to mention the Little Professor book shop on the square in our town. (Alright—I’m not quite as old as I’m making myself sound here. 😉 Let’s just say that a lot has changed in my lifetime!)

I had already befriended Miss Tiggy-Winkle and the illustrious Peter (how haunted I was this spring in the construction of my new cold frame with the memory of Mr. MacGregor’s cucumber apparatus!) but The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse was a treasure that immediately became a favorite. Perhaps it was the cunning little box bed that she slept in, with her slippers at one end and her dust pan and broom laid by at the other. Or the silliness of Mr. Jackson taking the thistledown that she offered him at tea and blowing it all over the room. I know that the ‘acorn-cupfuls of honeydew’ that the mice enjoyed at her party seized my little girl heart with longing, much as Edmund’s was piqued by the thought of Turkish Delights.

But it wasn’t until I was grown up and had a house of my own to keep that I realized the real, potent, deep magic of the story of Thomasina Tittlemouse. And it’s just this:

She’s me.

I completely sympathize with Thomasina’s obsession with a clean house. From one perfectionist to another, I hail her with a kindred salute. I keep her on top of my bread box in the kitchen with a small stack of other resoundingly house-wifely titles (like a facsimile edition of an old Williamsburg cookbook and a domestic science textbook from the twenties) and the other night I leaned against the counter and chuckled over her skirmishes with muddy footprints and uninvited guests of an insect variety.

But beneath my smiles I was aching for her a bit. It’s difficult to keep house. It’s a battle to combat the daily evidences we homemakers encounter of demise and decay and the constant reality of entropy. No matter how much we might love it as an overarching vision and ennoble it as a vocation in the truest sense of the word, down in the flatlands of the everyday it can be rather trying to complete one task and move on to another, only to turn around and find that the first one needs doing again. Or to be too exhausted at a given moment to rationally prioritize the onslaught of chores that all seem to be clamoring for our attention at once. Both of which, incidentally, our diminutive heroine contended with in thirty tiny pages of text, with additional botherations thrown in besides.

“All noble things are difficult,” said Oswald Chambers, and homemaking is nothing if not noble. But it can be almost as difficult to keep a governor on noble desires in overdrive. To prevent order and beauty from slipping over into perfectionism. It’s a field that I have to take every single day, or suffer the consequences. And I’m not nearly so cocky as I once was in thinking that I could take it alone. I need the help of the God of creation to run my house in a way that honors Him. And I need the camaraderie of other souls.

“If you expect perfection or nothing,” I pontificated to a friend the other day, quoting Brenda quoting Edith Schaeffer, “you will always end up with nothing.”

And it wasn’t two hours later that I was on the phone with the very same friend being gently admonished for the very same thing, only in different words.

I had the most striking insight a while back that puts a much graver face on the quest for control that lurks behind the innocent smile of perfectionism. It was from the 127th psalm: one of the songs of ascents that were used by Jewish pilgrims as they traveled, singing, to their true home.

Unless the LORD builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the LORD watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
It is in vain that you rise up early
and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.

Being the lover or words that I am, the great big bulking Strong’s Concordance is one of my best friends. And every once in a while a word will leap up from its context in Scripture and beg to be explored to the enlightenment of the whole passage. Such was the case with the word ‘vain’ in the verses above. I looked it up , keeping in mind the setting, the futile efforts for control, the promise of rest. And when I found it in the original Hebrew I gasped. And then I felt a little ill. For it’s a word not used often in the Bible–one of the only other references was from the account of Moses handing down the Commandments in Exodus 20: “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.”

To call upon God for help in the issues of life–great and small–and then to neglect (another word for refuse) to avail myself of it on His terms (another definition of surrender) is not only futile. It’s blasphemous. It’s taking God’s name in vain. Here all these years I’ve been preening over the fact that I don’t use God’s name as a swear word so commandment number three is a shoe-in. And yet, I’m doing essentially the same thing when I pay Him lip service in my prayers and then go scrambling around trying to perfectly control my environment from the effects of the Fall.

“I eat the bread of anxious toil,” another friend told me candidly. “I knead it and I bake it. I chew on it–often far into the night. I digest it where I should be digesting God’s words.”

But the majestic tenderness of God gleams like a precious gem in the culmination of this section of the psalm: for He gives to His beloved sleep.

“You’re not in control,” He essentially says, “but that’s alright because I AM. I am building your house and I am watching your city. It’s too much for you and you’re tired from all the work that is your own to do. Rest now–go to sleep. You can, you know, in perfect peace, because I love you.”

Good literature begs good questions. I’m not going to pretend that The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse delves the great difficulties of the universe. But neither will I conceal my respect for Beatrix Potter as one of the significant writers of the 20th century, particularly in the spirit of Walter de la Mare’s “only the best for the children”. If one can write timelessly for the children–timelessly to the tune of being the best-selling childrens’ author of all time–then I would venture to say she was on to something. That she knew a little that was worth knowing about the intangibles and the unutterables. That her books, simple as they are, live because they are true.

“Will it ever be tidy again?” worries Mrs. Tittlemouse.

Yes. And no. And it’s alright. We care for the smeary prints of honey all over the cupboards and the muddy footprints and the loving of the souls in our charge. And He cares for us.

And “all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”.

all images and captions, Beatrix Potter, and compliments of The Project Gutenberg