Pressure Cooker Life

When the LifePot exceeds capacity,

This post was inspired by Nadya Williams’ Your Homeschool is a Slow Cooker over at The Bad Moms Homeschool. It’s excellent, and I hope you go read it. However, this is not at all a response piece, but an aha! tangential piece, because apparently kitchen appliance metaphors are my language. Thank you, Nadya, for your insight.

In full disclosure, I am not an Instant Pot marketing partner…I just rely upon my Instant Pot(s) for feeding my household on a near-daily basis.

Note: After publishing, I updated my little drawings because I realized the originals didn’t make sense. If you saw the original and thought, Leah, that’s not how Boyle’s Law works, you were right. Hopefully now this is how Boyle’s Law works.

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The Instant Pot pressure cooker became very helpful to me when I was working as a nurse. Working 12-hour shifts means that your availability at home looks like this:

My brain went into visual learning mode for this essay for some reason.

Which means you need to pile extra cooking on to the non-Xed days, because absolutely zero is happening on the X days besides The Job. The Instant Pot made this possible for me: Multiple family-size meals prepped in a single day! The efficiency!

The magic of a pressure cooker lies in these laws of thermodynamics relating pressure, volume, and temperature. I don’t know why, but this concept is what stuck in my head from high school chemistry and never left. I tried to find an internet image helpfully expressing Boyle’s Law, but all of them seemed too complicated, so I’ll share it the way I remember it. (I hope I’m remembering it correctly. I also hope this is helpful.)

Here is a pot. Pressure is in equilibrium with volume and temperature.

If V or T increase (you add ingredients or start cooking), P will find a way to decrease (here, by letting off steam) and keep the equilibrium.

If P remains constant (the lid is sealed) and T increases (starts cooking), you’re fine as long as there’s not so much V (you don’t overfill your pot). But, if you do overfill the pot…

…things get dangerous.

If you have an Instant Pot, you know the rules: you must not overfill the pot for pressure cooking. In fact, my 6-quart pot loudly declares that PC MAX takes place at 2/3 capacity.

Cooking 4 quarts of food creates steam that will take up the other 1/3 of the pot. If you overfill it, the steam has nowhere to go. Except for — and here’s the reason all of you who are scared of pressure cookers don’t use them — out. In a very explosive way.¹

I’ve never had an Instant Pot mishap in my kitchen. I think this is because I follow the rules: When cooking under pressure, you only have so much room for your ingredients. I never ever overfill my Instant Pot. I know better.

Well, in my real-life Instant Pot:

• I recently added a large-volume ingredient — a baby

• The temperature of environmental stress increased — lack of sleep, Wisconsin winter, husband working extra hours

• The pressure of my overall life situation didn’t decrease — homeschooling, in a smallish house, without outside help

and I somehow assumed that the whole machine would still function.

GUYS. MY LIFEPOT IS PAST THE 2/3 MAX FILL LINE. IT IS NOT FUNCTIONING.

You cannot have an increase in all the elements at the same time without an explosion happening. LifePot has rules, too.

There have been minor explosions over here lately, mostly coming from me. I’m not proud of them. But my Instant Pot reminds me that explosions are a sign that something is not right, and maybe exploding will happen less if the not right thing is fixed.

This means something in the P, V, or T of the LifePot has to decrease. You might look at my life and say, Clearly she should decrease P! Put the kids in school — tomorrow! Don’t have another baby — immediately! But you don’t live my life. I don’t live yours. We don’t know all the things that are right now considered non-negotiable, impossible, necessary, and why.

In my case, I can’t remove any pressure right now. I can’t really reduce the temperature. So…that leaves me with: I think I have to reduce the volume.

It’s time to scoop some ingredients back out of the pot.

(The baby won’t be one of them. He gets to stay.)

The thing is, I thought that all the current ingredients were pretty necessary to this recipe I was cooking in this household of mine. But I suppose the dish might still turn out fine if I scoop out

• some school work (it already didn’t seem like much, but OK),

• the number of times per week I cook from scratch (but not too much because food allergies and also, eating well prevents stress),

• some resistance to my kids’ movie time (sorry, guys, about your brain development).

Is it possible that these ingredients aren’t actually necessary? Probably. Does God simply have a different recipe in mind than the large-family-classical-education-at-home I was picturing? I don’t exactly know, from this point in the cooking process. But as I’m looking at the modified recipe, it makes me sad.

I wanted something different for our life right now.

What I wanted was an organized, linearly progressing homeschool life, with a large and easy-to-summon village, all moving in a predictable dance that let me actually enjoy the things I really love about teaching and homemaking. And I’ll admit it in writing: I really do want a pretty school room that’s not a bedroom or a couch or a dining table or a basement that’s really cold in the winter.

I don’t have it. I don’t [today] have the type of homeschool life I wanted.

I don’t exactly want to put that out there, because I’d like to just be a shining example of gratitude and contentment and a wholesale encouragement to embrace the growing-family homeschool life because it always works and it’s always fun! But I do it in case any of you readers ever assume that things over here are just easy and happy and power-through-able all the time, and maybe also end up wondering why sometimes things in your life aren’t that way.

The truth is, things in life aren’t easy and happy and power-through-able all the time for any of us.

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I recently reached this point in Luke’s gospel where Jesus’ ministry is really taking off: He’s casting out demons left and right, He’s raised two people from the dead, He’s fed the 5,000, He’s healed countless diseases. It’s exciting stuff. Glorious, actually.

But while they were all marveling at everything He was doing, Jesus said to His disciples, “Let these words sink into your ears: The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men.”²

Let these words sink into your ears.

Because the words He was about to speak didn’t match the current experience of the disciples. They didn’t match their expectations. Jesus can raise the dead, they must have thought. Everything’s going to get better and better.

Maybe they thought life was finally going to be easy. That they wouldn’t have to hand over their money and their pride to the pagan Romans anymore. That the ground wouldn’t require as much toil and sweat to yield its fruit.

Let these words sink into your ears, Jesus says. Things are about to get extremely difficult. And Luke says of the disciples:

But they did not understand this saying.

We never really do understand it, do we? No matter how many times I see the image of my Lord, crucified, I still squirm away from the crosses His Father places upon my own back. Isn’t there some other way? I ask. Can’t I have the homeschool life I want, instead of this other thing You’re asking of me?

It’s a fine question, I think. Jesus had a Gethsemane. And even if our crosses are far less weighty than the sin of the whole world, I think we are permitted our own Gethsemanes, too. God asks many things of us that we wouldn’t have naturally chosen for ourselves, and the agony of prayer happens in the gap between.

But the Christian life has to find its peace, in each cross-bearing, with the eventual admission: Not my will, but Yours, be done.

Let these words sink into your ears.

Stop thinking it’s going to be easy and glorious and straightforward, Leah. Stop thinking you won’t have to feel some pressure, or modify the recipe, or even be forced to cook a different recipe altogether.

Stop thinking you have to do this your own way.

Christ promised us suffering, but He didn’t want us to inflict it upon ourselves by straining to achieve something He never asked of us. He wanted us to experience the easy yoke of sharing in His sufferings with hope. There is peace in the suffering He gives, but restlessness in the suffering we put upon ourselves by kicking against the goads, as our Lord once put it to a particularly stubborn man.

If God wants to change the recipe of my life in order to accomplish His particular finished product of our particular family, then I have to let certain ingredients — like a homeschool room and a tidy house and a smooth transition with a new baby and perfect pencil grips, maybe I’m still crying — go. Let them go.

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Just after Jesus warns His disciples of His impending suffering, they start arguing about who is the greatest. Luke doesn’t give us the details, but I’m sure it was something like, Who’s Instant Pot recipe tastes the best? or Whose homeschool life is going to look the most appealing on social media? or Which mom looks like she’s really nailing self-care?

You know. Greatness.

But Jesus, knowing the reasoning of their hearts, took a child and put him by His side and said to them, “Whoever receives this child in My name receives Me, and whoever receives Me receives Him who sent Me. For he who is least among you all is the one who is great.”

My life right now is literally a participation in exactly what Jesus calls greatness. I don’t even have to embrace a metaphorical meaning. And He’s not saying, Whoever has her life so figured out that her children’s optimization is never affected by her own personal weaknesses and basic human needs — He’s saying, Whoever receives a child in My name. The ingredient list in that recipe isn’t very long.

I feel quite least when the pressure is on and the temperature is rising and the receiving of children keeps happening so fast, minute by minute and pregnancy by pregnancy, that I can’t keep up with all the things that I hear are supposed to make my homeschool great. Maybe it’s time to stop resisting the least in my life, of myself.

I’d rather hear Christ, who was delivered into the hands of wicked men for my sake, call me great. And maybe He would permit that word, in His voice, to be the one that sinks into my ears.

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A note to my readers:

I mentioned in January that I was going to be writing less because my self-titled maternity leave was arbitrarily determined to be over (by me). As it turns out, six weeks postpartum is an awful time to return to work, whether you’re a nurse or a homeschooling mom of six. And this creative outlet has been tremendously helpful to me in the LifePot I’m currently cooking with, so, here I am still writing and posting and reading. I’m learning my lesson: don’t publicly predict what you’ll be doing with your life. Thanks, as always, for reading. Blessings to you.

1. My Instant Pot assures me of its safety features preventing these explosions. I am careful to avoid putting them to the test.

2. Luke 9