A Perfect Misfit

I've decided I like the rugs anyway. Things that fit just right into the spaces we already have are overrated. Things that make us smile, even -or maybe especially- when they leave pockets for mud and rain and mess to enter into our lives, are worthwhile. I smile every morning when the sun streams in through the door and window and hits the kitchen floor.

The Meaning Behind the Mess

When I wake up in the morning to find this on my bathroom floor:

I have to remind myself that it started off like this:

No, that's not quite right. It started like this:

Mommy, I DON'T want to take a bath!

Really? Oh, that's too bad. I was wondering what would happen if I got a BIG bowl of snow from outside, and then scooped it into your hot bath. I was hoping you'd like to help me out with that.

Oooooohhhhh! Oooookay!

I was thinking science.

They were thinking snack.

And when my husband woke up this morning, he was thinking:

What am I supposed to do with this silver bowl and pair of spoons that's sitting smack-dab in the center of where I'm supposed to take a shower?

Hence:
























There's always a story behind the objects strewn throughout the house.

This is today's.

Change

I read my post from the other day, and the Exceedingly Practical voice in my head says: hire someone to clean, fer Gawd's sake, and your load will lighten. Get that budget worked out, girl!

And Exceedingly Practical always has a good point, so you know it's true.

But I took a walk in the snow with my boy last night, and I thought while we walked, and it's not only the housework.

I'm almost thirty-six, and I chose a life of constant change a good many years ago. But I'm tired. And I look ahead...and it doesn't end. Our babies become toddlers and then children. My career will need to pick up again somewhere, and while I have a variety of lovely ideas, I'm just. tired. I'm jogging, here and there, practicing a little pilates, and a little more yoga. I don't feel stronger yet though, most of the time. Just exhausted.

The housework is part of it, but my body's tired too, and I'm existentially exhausted. I want to be a loving parent, and a joyful, playful teacher. I want to exercise, a lot, and to teach my kids to love their bodies. I want to plan menus, and keep the kitchen clean. I want to stop stepping on Cheerios and cheesy crackers, so often. I want to write, sometimes. I want to honor the things that are good in myself, and in all of us. I want to get closer to God. Oh, and I wouldn't mind figuring out who the hell God is, also. This stuff is hard, exhausting stuff.

And part of it, too, for me, is that the beautiful simplicity of mothering babies has been replaced with the challenges of parenting children who will someday be out in the world, dragging me with them, my heart naked and terrified, beating with fear in plain sight of everyone, outside my warm winter coat, unprotected, leaping forever in front of my loves. I didn't write often enough about how much I adored the baby phase it while I was in it because I was always afraid of sounding smug, sanctimonious, or straight-up-crazy. Who the hell loves the post-partum/newborn period?

*waves hand* *shrugs*

It's sad to say goodbye to the season of my babies -and my old job- because together they enforced a slow, gentle structure upon my life. Slow is my speed. Slow is my jam. I sat with my babies, soaking them up, and then I went to work and sat with other parents, and shared it with them, and they shared their babies with me. It was pretty wonderful. And I was lucky too, in that my babies were easy.

But now the easy babies are bigger, and they race everywhere they go, leaving messes in their wake. The house is on hyperspeed at all times. My husband has a new job, and so do I, both with longer hours, both with steeper learning curves. My boy will be starting school next fall. My girl's laughing at the word no. I'm picking up new yoga and pilates classes next month, and my kids will be trying another gym childcare. I have career plans in the works, and a long list of next steps. I still want to learn to make my own yoga pants. There's just so much change that's happened, and a bunch of change that's still happening, and when I look ahead I see more change that will happen. Even if someone else deep cleans the floors, I'll still be tired.

Change is exhausting.

Don't get me wrong though. I already told my husband I want to call the cleaning lady again asap.

Balance

Warning: this post is all over the place. I ought to edit, I know. But it ain't gonna happen. It was this or nothing at all. That's just where I am with life these days.

So I stumbled upon this article today. Go ahead and read it. I'll wait. What? You say you're in a hurry? Maybe you'll peruse it later? Fine, I'll summarize: In the latest round of the media concoction mommy wars, positing that stay-at-home mothers and work-outside-the-home mothers are at each other's throats for ratings purposes, enter Anderson Cooper and Dr. Drew to fan the flames, claiming that a recent study says working moms are happier, and asking if stay-at-home moms are lazy (is it just me, or wouldn't the stay-at-home moms be happier if it were all about being lazy!? You show me lazy, and I'll show you bliss! But maybe that's just me...) .

But this blogger (who I never read until today) did something I really appreciate: she followed the links back to the original study and read it. And what did it ACTUALLY say?

Basically, that I'm right about everything! :)

Okay, okay, it didn't cite me personally or anything (hmph!), but here's the title of the study: Mothers’ Part-Time Employment: Associations With Mother and Family Well-Being. Turns out it's part-time employment that offers the most benefits to mothers, kids and families. I read it, sitting on my couch, looking at the room I just cleaned that already needs to be cleaned again, and I pined for my old job back. My lovely, wonderful, I'd-send-it-to-the-Vatican-for-sainthood-if-I-were-still-a-practicing-Catholic, as close to perfect as can be, old job.

And while it had a number of things going for it, here was the very, very best part: it was PART-TIME! And the hours were FLEXIBLE! It was luscious. Delicious. A thing of great beauty.

I am still struggling with adapting to this (not-so) new (anymore) life, six months later. It's a lot HARDER than my old life. On the days the boys come, I work ten hours: 7:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. On the days they don't come, I have my two kids for the ten hours my husband is at work. On weekends, I have essentially the same job; it's just bring-your-husband-to-work-day, twice in a row. Oh, and the grocery shopping needs to be done too. My house ALWAYS (and I cannot stress enough that it. really. is. ALWAYS.) needs to be cleaned. And I don't feel like I can slack off on that when I have other people bringing their children here every other day. It's one thing to subject your own family to your irredeemably messy tendencies; it's another thing altogether to subject clients to the same. So the haven of my home doesn't feel like a haven very often. Sometimes it feels like a work-induced hangover that never ends.

By the definitions in the article, I worked part-time before, and I work part-time now. But my old job was twenty hours a week; this one is thirty (three more hours per week and I'd be out of the part-time category). My old job was divided evenly between five mornings a week; this one is three long days, with two days off (but my days off don't feel as different as they did when I worked outside the home). And having your home be your workplace is stressful for me. I recently said to my husband: It's like if you went to work one day, and they said: Good news! Grades and curriculum are optional now! Teach whatever and however you like! But -oh yeah!- the cafeteria workers and janitors have all been laid off, and we will need you to do their jobs. Also, people LIVE in your classroom now, and will treat it accordingly. It's up to you to keep it up to whatever standards you need to successfully teach. Good luck!

There are times I catch up on (or ignore) the housekeeping, and focus on the teaching. These are the times I enjoy most. But it's hard to focus on teaching when the students are eating feathers off the floor because they escaped from your throw pillows when you were busy building Pillow Mountain in the middle of the living room. Suddenly it's time to put Pillow Mountain away and vacuum. Again. And then it's time to serve lunch, and sweep, and mop, and throw in another load of laundry, and get it folded, and then...and then...and then. It's way too easy for the lessons to end up in last place, while the never-ending upkeep takes over my time. These are the times I enjoy least.

I'd love to sum this up, all pretty with a nice bow. But I have no idea where the bows are. Organizing the Christmas stuff is still on my to-do list. I just threw it up there on a Sunday night sometime early this month because the boys were going to be here in the morning, and I haven't gotten back to it yet. So, sadly, this is all I got:

Part-time work is the bomb-diggity-dog, and don't ever forget, you heard it here first! But balance? I don't haz it right now. And I don't know how to find it.

One Brand New and Marvelous Thing

I have so many things I could tell you about. So many nights I've planned to write, and then the couch beckons, and the soft, fleecy blanket gets tucked around my toes, and all my good intentions are fast asleep before I type the first word. So tonight I'll tell you just one thing.

Since beginning this new chapter in my life, as a SAHM, or a WAHM, or a homeschooler of the infant-toddler variety, or whatever it is that I am since losing my job, there is just one thing that has troubled me. Just one thing that makes me feel as if I'm failing, as if working as hard and as fast as I can will never be enough. Just one thing that overwhelms me, fills me with resentment, and makes me question my ability to continue on this path. And I know there's no one in my life who can help me overcome this. I love my husband, but he can't be there for me in the ways I need. I've known for a while now that I needed someone else, someone brand new.

Today someone came to my house. We met over Craigslist, exchanged a few e-mails, set up a time to meet. The car was late arriving, and I stood at the window, began to feel hopelessness creeping in. But then I saw a vehicle creep slowly down the street, pull up in front of a grassy patch in my neighbor's yard, and park. I rushed to the back door, waiting to answer it before I even heard a knock. We walked through the house together, spent just moments in each other's company, but before leaving, this person spoke the words that delivered me from doubt, fear, and resentment. Spoke the words I so desperately needed to hear.

Yes, after seeing the house, I can do it for the price I quoted you over e-mail. I use all green cleaning products, so it will be safe for the kids, and I use a steam mop on the hardwoods. I can start next week, so just e-mail me your schedule and I'll fit you in a slot.

I have a housekeeper.

And I won't know for sure until next week, but I think I'm in love.

Kafka and My Feet (finally) in the Sand

Yesterday I finished reading Kafka's The Trial. This morning I woke up without the cloud of melancholy that I've been unable to shake for the last week or so, when I spent a little time each morning and evening losing myself in Joseph K.'s tribulations. It was an engrossing read, but perhaps starting and ending my days with it was the wrong approach.

I know I've thought of the tedious process of washing, drying, folding and putting away laundry as byzantine more than once in the last week. I don't think the word byzantine is anywhere in the book, but I'm willing to bet you'd find it in the Cliff Notes. And considering that my washer and dryer are just down the basement stairs and to the left, straightforward would probably be a more accurate description of my laundering process. Boring would suffice if you wanted the subjective experience captured in a word. Byzantine it is not.

I also remembered that 1) my previous employer (actually, it's the agency we partnered with, but my office was in their building, and they thought of me as their own, so...) holds a Thursday morning playgroup for stay-at-home mothers and their children, where I can stop weekly and visit my old friends, and 2) I had promised to host a Friday night get-together for all of them, and promptly forgotten all about it. So for all my complaints about loneliness, in lieu of making new friends I could choose to expend a modicum of effort and simply get in touch with the ones I've got.

My husband spent the weekend building a walkway from our driveway to the deck of our home. It was an eight hour Saturday followed by a twelve hour Sunday. I think this concludes our home-repair projects until next spring. We do have to fix the snowblower (again) but he claims that this will be short project (I'm not sure why I believe him; this is a standard lie he tells me to make both of us feel better; we always choose to believe it; we want to feel better).

He has done a major home repair project every. single. weekend. since. the first one in August. No wonder I'm lonely! I lost my job, began working at home with only the company of young children, and lost my husband to a mistress much larger, older, and more demanding than myself, all at the same time!

He has a new job; I have a new job; our home repairs and upkeep have been on fast-forward (and our previous speed was ultra-low), and we've taken almost no time at all to rest, relax or unwind. This is a tough transition. We're ready to shift gears, settle down, maybe spend a Saturday picking apples and pumpkins instead of replacing doors, rearranging attics, building fences or scrubbing baseboards.

I kept wondering why Joseph K. continued to show such willingness to participate in his trial. It's as if the events swept him up and along like a river, and he couldn't seem to stick his feet in the sand and stop moving. Reading the book was dream-like: the attic labyrinths with their stuffy air where the court resided, my short morning stints to myself before being overrun by the needs of several small children, the odd encounters he had with strangers who seemed to know more about his own trial than he did; my husband and I, self-deluded and scrambling to survive this last, momentous project we had promised to complete before we had any inkling of how overwhelmed we would find ourselves by late October, the way he knew he was supposed to plunge the knife into his own heart at the end, the harsh standards we're holding ourselves to, and the moments where we find ourselves, exhausted and almost weeping over the kitchen counters, clinging to each other, showing one another the kindnesses we seem to be withholding ourselves for no very good reason whatsoever, except that we've been picked up by this current and carried so far into the river of having to do it right that we haven't stuck our feet in the sand and simply stopped.

The Court wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and it dismisses you when you go.

And it's that simple! Well, then, I think it's time to go.

Choices

It's 1996 and I'm in the woods with a bunch of strangers, backpacking through rural Arizona. We're about to embark upon what's called a "solo," where we split up and spend three days completely alone: sleeping on the ground, fasting, drinking from streams after adding iodine drops to our water bottles.

This will change you forever, my guide intones. At the end of my solo I had streaked my face with mud and discovered a side of myself I didn't know existed.

I knew it wouldn't change me. All the things they say will change you: travel, falling in love, becoming a mother: they've only ever made me more deeply myself.

I spend those three days naked on a rock, looking up at desert trees, writing bad poetry and making lists in my mind: all the things I'll eat when I finally get out of the woods and back to civilization; my various perfect dream jobs, in order of likelihood of actual occurrence; all the religions I'd be willing to try out, knowing I'll never find one that fits. Then I plan my wedding dress, even though I'm not engaged, or even dating. I haven't met my husband yet; I'm decidedly single, just out of a long-term relationship that held on longer than it ought to. And I'm not a wedding dress planning kind of girl. I've never dreamed of that big day, never played wedding with my barbies, never particularly cared about weddings one way or the other before.

But here's what's inspired me: I bought a dress at the Salvation Army before the backpacking trip began. It's blue, with chiffon layers starting at the neckline and running all the way down to the floor. I want my Salvation Army dress remade in white for my wedding. My grandmother will do it; I know she will.

I don't meet my husband for another year after that trip. We're engaged within three months. My grandmother makes my dress: a replica of my thrift store find. My husband's grandmother makes his suit out of hemp; we order yards of it from somewhere on the Internet. We make our own invitations on homemade paper and the wedding is held in my parent's backyard. Our flowers are bought from the farmer's marker and stolen from farmer's fields the morning of the wedding. I make the arrangements myself, stick them in mason jars, and place them on the tables. My grandmother also makes the bridesmaid's dresses; she teaches me how to do the last one, and I stay up with her and sew the maid of honor's dress for my sister late into that summer night. The sky is dark when we finish, and I've made my first --and last, at least for the next decade, as it turns out-- dress.

Someone calls it a hippie wedding and I'm half-offended and half-amused. But of course, it was.

My father, a year earlier when he heard of my engagement, had asked: what's he going to do?

I knew he meant for a living; my fiancee was an art major with no job prospects after graduation.

I don't know, I answer honestly.  But we're smart, dad, and not afraid of hard work. We'll figure it out.

I can hear my father's grin through the telephone wire; he approves of that sort of answer.

The point is, we've always been the sort of people to look at a bright, shiny, perfect wheel right off the assembly line, glance at each other, smile, and say:  Bet we could reinvent that!

That's who we are. For better or for worse.

Unpacking Privilege: Resentment

I spent this past weekend with the kids so my husband could continue attacking our home repair projects like the one-man construction crew he is. I have home projects of my own to do: there are bags and boxes of outgrown clothing to store behind the attic wall, and other bins to pull out, unpack, fold, put away. There are baseboards to scrub and bins to buy; books to stack and art supplies to arrange. In the rush to make our home presentable before the start of the school year we've moved a lot of things up into our attic bedroom. These things need to be sifted through, organized, made sense of.

I need some time to make sense of everything, but there is no time. My husband has heavy lifting to do, and I need to corral the kids so he can get it done. This is the way our marriage must function, for now, --and this is neither the first nor the last time it will be so-- and both of us struggle with it. He doesn't want to be a one-man workhorse, and I don't want all my work to be pushed to the back burner until his is done. But this is how it is. It's temporary. It's going to get us where we want to go.

In between entertaining the children and attempting to mop the hardwood floors I tried to sooth the rough edges of my anxiety by perusing blogs online. Rather than finding any solace, I found myself resentful of the following things:

• Beautiful houses (that do not need ridiculous amounts of work). (In my state of mounting resentment I was sure -absolutely sure!- that nobody but us owns a fixer-upper. Nobody!)
• Expensive accessories, including, but not limited to:
• purses (I have about 12 trillion purses upstairs that I own but never use, but no matter)
• shoes (ditto)
• jewelry (yep, ditto there too)
• Pinterest boards of all types, especially those featuring:
• clothing (I haven't bought clothing from anywhere but the Salvation Army since 2007; I'm feeling a bit peevish about it, can you tell?) 
• home decor (I want new throw pillows. I can't have new throw pillows. This makes me grumpy.) 
• anything nautical (get out of my face with your adorable beach house!) 
• uplifting or inspirational slogans (if I wanted to be uplifted or inspired, do you really think I'd be sitting here feeding my resentments so voraciously!?)
• And finally: anyone with any certainty about God and "his plan". (If God is involved enough that he cares about the minute details of your homeschooling curriculum then where the fuck has he been when it comes to the entire continent of Africa for the last several decades?!?) (And er, um, why do we have to fix up our own house instead of hiring a professional to do it?) (I think I somehow managed to think both of these things, with a special sort of resentment-fueled cognitive dissonance.)

It was one of those moods.

For Part 2, go here.

How Things Are Now

The morning before grocery day, scavenging frantically for a breakfast I have to pack and bring to work because I don't have time to make it, I spot a lone bottle of beer, standing tall at hearty hops and barley attention in the vegetable crisper (beer's not a vegetable?).

I actually paused, like maybe -just maybe- it was a good idea to bring a beer. To work. For breakfast.

In the end, I went with a whole grain dinner roll and a jar of natural peanut butter, thick with oil and gooey nutty goodness (no time to scoop a single serving into a tupperware container; the whole jar tossed in the lunchbag; quicker), the best I could do on the way out the door the day before we replenish our food supplies.

* * *

We left the sandbox open at some point. I don't know exactly when it happened, but we left the lid off the sandbox, and between the neighborhood cats and the falling tree debris, it's just not fit to use for another summer. So we need to empty it out, but where to put this big box full of sand?

The groundhogs who used to live in our yard seem to have abandoned their abode. The first year we lived here we shared the space with a groundhog bigger than my ten pound baby. He was pretty confident the property belonged to him. The house sat empty for over a year before we moved in, and he had gone ahead and made himself at home, digging burrows closer and dangerously closer to our foundation. Last year we found one of his babies dead on the sidewalk leading from our yard out toward the street, flies buzzing over his tiny body decomposing where we imagined our children might one day play with sidewalk chalk. His family ate all our next-door neighbor's garden vegetables. We aren't disappointed that they have gone. They weren't the most pleasant of squatters to share the property with.

We threw our Halloween pumpkins in his hole to rot, and covered that compost with a thick layer of yard waste in the fall, and then again in the spring. The hole was near-full, but still not quite level with the surrounding grass. I emptied the sandbox, shovel by shovel, into the rusting metal wheelbarrow we found when we moved in. I dragged it up the grassy hill to the groundhog's former hole, and -shovel by shovel- I buried the remaining evidence of their existence.

There's so much work! my husband despaired, looking out over our property.

We're filling the holes, baby, I said as I rubbed the space between his shoulder blades with my hand. We're finally filling the holes. Think about what this looked like almost three years ago, when we first moved in. And now? We're filling the holes!

Damn, he said, you're right. We're filling the holes!

* * *

I meet with my boss, and my collaborating partner, and her boss, around a rectangle of conference tables. We have stacks of paper hundreds of pages deep: requirements for reporting our progress, rubrics for measuring our success against the other programs competing for limited funds, budget spreadsheets, and various pieces of a report that will determine our future strewn across the tables.

We look good.

It's on me to make sure we look good. And we do. We look good.

Maybe June will just be an early-to-rise, nose-to-the-grindstone, Puritan-work-ethic type of month instead of a clusterfuck of epic proportions. I can handle early-to-rise. Inhale. I can do nose-to-the-grindstone. Exhale. My Puritan work ethic is all polished up and pretty; it's in fighting shape what with all the practice it's gotten over the last couple of months. I'd make a fine farmer's wife these days with my ability to work dawn to dusk and then on and off overnight tending to a baby in need of mother's milk.

I can survive another month as a farmer's wife. Especially as opposed to a clusterfuck of epic proportions, which is what I was expecting. Another month as a farmer's wife is doable.

And there's always beer for breakfast, if things should come to that.

* * *

I scrub out the kiddie pool, hose it down with a jet spray, unscrew the nozzle and slowly let it fill while my son hops foot to foot with excitement in the soon-to-be summer air. I pop my baby girl's backside into the Bumbo seat, placed strategically in the shade of the conifer tree where she can watch me work and listen to the birdsong and windchimes hover in the humid air.

We've been walking over patio stones for going-on-three years now, never knowing they were there, buried under the grass, until our feet wore a path deep enough into the ground to discover them. I dig them up, one by one, and place them in a pile by the back deck. They'll need to be reset in the soil, somewhere higher where the rain water won't flow over them, burying the rock in mud and allowing grass to grow over them again.

Sinking the blade into the dirt at the edge of the stone, I place my foot atop the hoe and heave my weight forward. Again and again, I dig down into the earth -this piece of earth that we own! just imagine that!- and reshape it.

My children laugh in the background. Their voices mix melodically with birdsong and windchimes. And I work, and I work, reshaping the very earth upon which we live.

* * *

I am so tired that days and nights blur together. I close my eyes in my office and wish for a pillow in place of a keyboard. I drift off on the couch with my children crowded close to my body, listening to late afternoon rain, and waiting for my husband to arrive home from work. I pause in the early morning, gathering my bearings, wondering if a single beer is a suitable breakfast for a workday lunchbag before coming to my senses. Sometimes in the middle of the night I lie awake and watch my daughter kick her little legs and laugh like a banshee before cuddling her in and nursing her back to sleep. My life resembles a rushed montage from a movie more than a linear sequence of events occurring in real time.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel, fast approaching while I ride this wild wave to the end of June.

And I am reshaping the ground beneath my feet, building my future with my hands, digging through dirt and sheaths of paper to unearth whatever comes next. And it looks good.

It looks good, you guys.

Inhale. Exhale.

It's the Middle of the Night

It's the middle of the night and I was feverishly rearranging my kitchen when I heard my son start to cry.

It's the middle of the night and I was feverishly rearranging my kitchen to set the groundwork for tomorrow, when I'll cut the rotten spots off the apples and juice the remainders. The juicer is low where the toddler can -and does- help me to make it, forcing the fruit into the machine and mashing it down with my help. The juicer is right next to the spot where the bread machine will go if we buy a bread machine.

It's the middle of the night and I was feverishly rearranging my kitchen. Was it to make room for the imaginary bread machine in the imaginary future where we can't afford the delicious bread we like to buy from the Farmer's Market, and so we have to make our own?

In part, it was.

It's the middle of the night and he began to sob and instead of being upstairs sound asleep, I was in the kitchen right near his room and I darted in. He began to talk, but between the crying and the fact that he seemed to be saying more nonsense than sense, I didn't try to understand; I just soothed.

We sat in the rocking chair in the corner of the room in the middle of the night, rocking. I used to sit there with him every night and read stories and listen to lullabies; that was our bedtime routine. Somewhere late in my pregnancy the rocking chair got uncomfortable and we started to read stories on the living room couch instead. Then, because it's a cardinal law of science that a pregnant woman ensconced upon a couch remains a pregnant woman ensconced upon a couch unless the actual force of going into labor acts upon her, my husband would carry him into bed. So now that's our new routine and we don't sit on the rocker in the corner anymore.

He got big. He got huge! How and when and why did I not notice this? His head was resting on my shoulder and his toes grazed my calves! In the darkness of the middle of the night my two and half year old felt like he could 5 or 7 or even 12. He felt like a boy, a big boy, even though sometimes the pudge of his cheeks or the open wonder of his face suggests he's still a baby.

It's the middle of the night and now instead of feverishly rearranging my kitchen I'm rocking my baby who has suddenly morphed into a tween in my very arms and I don't know how or when or why this all happened so suddenly. And at the verysametime I'm feverishly rearranging his bedroom in my mind's eye, which can see into the imaginary future, while I sit in the rocking chair in the corner of the room and rub his back.

I'm rearranging my kitchen and his bedroom because I don't know if I have a job for much longer, and it looks like I might be working from home in my imaginary future with my imaginary bread machine. And so the arrangements that have worked for a working girl will have to be changed and also I had coffee in the late afternoon while I usually just drink tea now, and that mostly in the morning.

So my mind is racing to rearrange our imaginary future, to make it into a manageable vision, to smooth it into something that will work for our family, to flat out will it into some way in which we will survive. My mind is feverishly writing some story in the middle of the night, some tale in which the details look like blueprints and bake like bread machines and smell like freshly baked bread rather than a dream deferred, and in this story we will not only survive, we will thrive.

It's the middle of the night and I'm feverishly rearranging my whole entire life.

My baby's lullabies are playing, but there's a gigantic boy in my arms, and I can scarcely believe he's even letting me hold him still, large as he is. My imaginary future is moving right into my home -now!- in the middle of the night, and there's nothing I can really do to stop it.

And although I know it's the middle of the night, I don't know exactly where we are, and I don't know where we're going, or when we'll get there. All I know is that we seem to be moving awfully fast.

Report from Inside the Residence

Yesterday, watching the local closings/cancellations scroll across the bottom of the television screen, I felt as if I might go insane. It was the again-ness of the whole thing. Again!? Seriously!? It feels like it's been snowing since early December without cease.

I spent a week and a half without a car, so we didn't leave the house at all except for weekends when my husband was home. During that time I stumbled on the fact that my son has zero accidents with the hang-out-naked-around-the-house method of potty training, and he can initiate and use the bathroom completely independently (still needs help cleaning up). We've halfheartedly tried a number of potty training methods with varying degrees of success, but never 100%! The only problem with this skill is that it, too, requires never leaving the house.

So between the ceaseless snowfall, the car in the shop, naked potty training, and the presence of a six week old with age appropriate feeding and diaper needs, we pretty much never leave the house.

Wow, now that I write it out like that, it becomes clear I deserve much more credit than I've been giving myself simply for not going insane!

Yesterday was actually one of the first times I felt the pressure. The housework was killing me; I tried so hard all day to clean, wearing my daughter on my chest to keep her from crying, attempting to engage, or distract, or redirect my son through a series of tasks so oppressively repetitive (laundry, seriously!? dishes!? what is up!?) and soul-wearying..and that isn't even what was killing me. What was killing me was that five hours later, the house was somehow, still, unbelievably, not clean! I was doing my best at a boring, crappy job and I was failing!

Just to be absolutely clear, the housework was the crappy job, not the kids!

As a teacher, it was so easy to separate child care from cleaning. You did the cleaning either while the kids were asleep or after hours. While the kids were awake, you interacted with them, taught them, played with them. This is how I envisioned my primary role with my kids if I eventually stayed home with them.

This part? I love.

But the problem with this lovely vision is that it turns out when you're in the house all the time (and please remember that I do mean all the time), you create messes. And babies and toddlers? Create lots of messes. And it turns out that if you don't clean them? They TAKE OVER YOUR LIFE! Like a mild cold turns to deadly pnemonia, the baby/toddler messes will rule your home in no time flat without constant vigilance. And the other thing it turns out? Babies and toddlers suck at both constant vigilance and cleaning! I know!

But for once, the answer wasn't to chill, or ignore the mess, or even to leave the house and avoid the mess (all my usual coping techniques). I wanted these feelings --the exhaustion, the irritation and frustration, the looming sense of failure-- to go away, but instead I sat with them. And then I sat with my husband while the kids slept and we talked. We talked about things we fear and things we hope for and things we carry around wrapped tight in the white-knuckled fists of our deepest hearts while we stumble through our days at work and at home, feeling our way into this family of four.

And then I woke up this morning and made egg, cheddar and spinach sandwiches for myself and my son, nursed my daughter at the dining room table while we ate breakfast and looked out the window at a squirrel atop a fence in the deep, deep snow. I rinsed and stacked dishes, did as many loads of laundry as I could manage, changed diapers and emptied trash cans, cleaned out the kitchen sink. We spent a small part of the day with the toddler in underwear (with no accidents!), and we watched the closings and cancellations scroll across the bottom of the television screen. Again.

The answer, this time, was to dig in deeper. To try harder. To do better. To (wo)man up. Right now I'm here with my babies and it's winter, and we're learning –which is messy-- so I need to clean up.

Today, I did, with a smile. And that feels good.

Not as good as the first day of spring, or the day in my future when I finally hire a housekeeper. But for a constantly messy crew surviving an upstate New York winter, half-naked and stuck in the house? We're doing alright.

The Detrius of Everyday Life

 

Half-Assed Interruption

I hate to interrupt our regular schedule of reruns, especially for a clear case of half-assery, but I just want to say, in my defense ...

It started well.  It really did.  I was determined to begin moving our bedroom upstairs into the attic.

We weren't going to do that yet.  We were going to stay downstairs in our old bedroom/the baby's new nursery.  At least until spring, if not summer.  We haven't even bought her bedroom furniture yet.  She's in the bassinet next to our bed, which makes it easier to nurse her in the night.  And I planned to use some of our tax return to buy her bedroom set, so there's really no hurry for us to move upstairs.

Except.

Well, except ... me.

It seems that giving birth makes me a bit manic.  When my son was born I directed that energy outward, visiting parks, pushing his stroller on trails, making the most of the summer weather, and even taking up jogging, which I enjoyed for the first time in my life.  This time around, since we're mostly stuck in the house watching the morning PBS lineup and the snow fall outside our windows, my manic energy becomes directed at our home.  Each day I have to not only tidy and keep up on the regular chores, I have to accomplish some task that I've deemed "above and beyond," which means that once it's done I won't have to do it again.  I need this, to feel satisfied.

Thus, the Christmas ornaments were taken down earlier than I had planned, packed away and re-stored in the attic.  Including the new ones I created out of silver and gold ribbons, bows, and beaded hooks that I made my husband take me to the store to buy the day I was released from the hospital.  And stayed up half the night making after wrapping all the presents.  Yeah, just a little manic.

The toys were thinned out to make room for new ones, and the toy shelves have all been reorganized thematically to soothe both my frenzied ambition and my teacher's need for order.  I've even purchased toys and created activities with the express purpose of expending physical energy (both mine and the toddler's), but it isn't quite enough for either of us.

So when my son emptied his dresser drawers onto his bedroom floor, in what was likely an attempt to entertain himself with some grand physical gesture to compensate for the household's sore lack of playground equipment and running space, I decided to go ahead and go through them all for a size check, making bags for the attic and the Goodwill, labeling and delivering them instead of shoving them back in the drawers and smooshing them shut, like I would have before having the baby.

And when I ran out of areas to organize on the first floor, my attention turned upward.  And all of a sudden, I felt certain that we needed to move upstairs A.S.A.P.  That way, not only could we start to organize the attic (a task that feels just as ambitious and unlikely as running a marathon) (which also means I totally want to do it! Today!), but we could clear the first floor of all our bedroom clutter --laundry piling up on top of dressers waiting to be put away, or dirty on floors where a basket should be, but isn't because it's been left in the basement, the odds and ends my husband manages to collect that have no defined place yet (these odds and ends are endless when you live with an artist/packrat!), the ever-increasing number of newborn baby/new mama supplies (where's that lanolin? didn't someone give me a box of breast pads? we need alcohol to clean my scar and her cord! and cotton balls!), and all the jewelry I've been keeping only semi-organized up until this point-- and create space for a beautifully spare future nursery/guest bedroom containing nothing but easily tidied and well-catalogued, necessary items.

The vision?  A place for everything, and everything in it's place.  Are you with me?

The reality?

I took the drawers out of two dressers and placed them --precariously balanced-- on the attic stairs.  I cleaned a stack of storage cubes from my son's room and carried them to my daughter's.  I dragged the dressers to the hallway, waiting just below their drawers to make that big move to the attic.  So far, so good.

But then, my boy:  Mommy, I need some-ting.

What do you need, sweetie?

I need some extra hugs.

And so, extra hugs were given.

And then my girl:  Waaahhh!  (Food.  I wants it now.)

And so, food was given.

And suddenly, my husband:  The snowblower broke.  I need to go to the hardware store.

And then my son needed some-ting again, and so did my daughter, and then my husband:  It didn't work, and now I need to shovel the drive.

And so it went.

The attic stairs remain adorned with dresser drawers, the hallway with dressers sans drawers.  And the bathroom: sink and toilet cleaned, tub and tile floor awaiting further attention.  And the living room: armchair halfway to the guestroom/ future nursery, piled with pillows from the couch while that cover finishes its trip through the laundry.

It's halfway there.

Of course.

And here I am, too tired to finish a single thing I started today.  Except for the beer I'm drinking.  And, apparently, this blog post.  And, presumably, the night's sleep I'm about to embark upon, until my daughter wakes me with a wail.

Whereupon I will scramble from my warm bed, gather her in my arms, snuggle her tight, and give her the breast.  She will open her mouth like a baby bird, latch on, eat heartily, and continue to grow.  Fortunately, even amidst the mess I've left in my wake today, there is nothing half-assed about that.

Happy, Happy New Year

Sometimes when the doctors say: No Exercise, what they mean is: No Exercise Unless the weather gets above 50 degrees in Upstate New York on the first day of January after the snowiest December on record, AND you are attempting to engage in earnest with the fact that you have 50 (OMG!) pounds you would really, really like to lose, AND your toddler has a touch (just a touch) (or perhaps a chronic case) (and you might be catching just a touch of it yourself) (or a chronic case) of cabin fever, AND your neighborhood has an undeniable chronic case of hilliness with no flat places to walk whatsoever, AND there is a reservoir within walking distance of your abode and when you hike the steep, still-snowy stairs with your boy to the top the water is so blue it's indigo in some places and turquoise in others, AND you got 12 hours of cumulative sleep last night (not uninterrupted, no, of course not, but still, 12 hours!). But if all those exemptions apply, then by all means exercise.

At least, I'm pretty sure they mean exactly that.

I'm seldom moved to blog just to record the chronological details of my day, although it was exactly that impetus that inspired my first blog entry (which actually became my second) just over a year ago. And here I am again on a Saturday, the first day of the year which seems like it must be a good omen of some sort, and a similar sort of day (walking the neighborhood with my husband and kiddos) inspiring me to chronicle the details for posterity.

I slept til 11. I think that bears saying twice.  I slept til 11.

And though it was New Year's Eve, I went to sleep at around 11 last night, too. Life is good, when such a thing happens.

We had company in the late morning (my sister and brother-in-law have been here since Thursday, and an aunt and uncle were in town and stopped by for an hour to meet the baby), and when the house cleared out ate a late breakfast of leftover quiche (we had an appetizer tray for dinner last night, with pale ales, a bottle of wine that never got opened, a fire in the fireplace, two Netflix discs of Modern Family, and more than one of us falling asleep in the living room before midnight. We still know how to rock it out, hardcore, as you can see.), took an afternoon neighborhood walk in the lovely warmth of the melting snow, then a slow, meandering city drive, and are beginning a quiet evening at home.

We maneuvered steep hills wearing ourselves and the toddler out, and I can't wait to move my body again. I never want to exercise so desperately as at the end of pregnancy and immediately post-partum. My body aches to be fast and fluid, in my command. I want to run.

Most of the time, let me assure you, I do not want to run.

And I really oughtn't to take up running before my six week post-partum check-up. I do hope that in a month from now I still want so desperately to run.

After our walk we came back for a quick lunch and then went out for a family drive, taking the easy route to putting the toddler down for a nap. We drove through downtown looking at lights, the giant tree they display every year next to ice skaters circling the rink, brick buildings hovering over our heads, humanity out in the streets en masse enjoying the unseasonable warmth of the day. Both kids slept peacefully while we wandered the city streets in my husband's car, staring out our windows in quiet contentment, weaving up and down side streets, through neighborhoods neglected backed up against those well loved, buildings swelling with light, heat and heartbeats interspersed with plywood windows and old graffiti fighting for territory. This city is my home, and the truth is, it's a version of the city I called home as a child, but with more hope. I breathed that hope in, quiet as a prayer while my children slept, breathing warm sighs into our car moving with stealth down streets of luck and ruin.

We came home to the place we make our own in this city we've chosen almost at random after a decade of flitting about. We settled in with my cup of tea and my husband's bottle of beer leftover from last night's bounty, still mostly untouched. The kids continue to sleep quietly, although the baby is starting to stir. I have time to write, and then edit one-handed with her tucked in the nook of my arm. My husband is on the couch, relaxing with the laptop his dad surprised him with for Christmas, the best gift he received by far this year.

I am greedy for the details of this day because I want every day to be as simple and exquisite as that day that finally drove me to begin blogging after almost a year of procrastination, so I would remember, have record, of the moments when the ordinary became extraordinary. I am greedy for more days as easy and magical as this first day of this new year, the second time I've been moved to jot down the details in remembrance of an ordinary day just splitting at the seams with simple happiness.

I think it was Anne Lamott who said that all prayers boil down to Please and Thank You.

Today is Thank You.

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, and a deep inhale, and a hold, like you don't even want to exhale. You just want to pause here, for a little bit longer.

Preparations

Some days I feel so ready to go into labor it's a shock to find myself still pregnant and standing.  Other days I feel so good I imagine I could last forever in this waiting state.  One night I was possessed to pack a bag for my son with clothes and food for the next day.  I told my husband he'd have to be ready to drop him off with his sitter first thing in the morning and meet me at the hospital because I felt the baby was coming sometime that night.  The next morning I woke up feeling fine.  Another night I woke up every few hours and refused to get out of bed to go to the bathroom.  I was certain if I stood, my water would break, and since we didn't have anywhere to take our son until morning, I was determined to remain in bed until then.  Again, the next morning I stood up and walked through the house without incident, feeling better than I had in days.  Every day is different.  If I make it halfway through this month at work, I get a final, full paycheck.  On the bad days, I remind myself of that paycheck.  I envision it like a light at the end of a tunnel.

* * * * *

My husband painted the nursery over the past week.  Walking through our house now, we have color in the kitchen, dining room, one out of two hallways, and both downstairs bedrooms.  Last year at this time we had nothing painted.  It feels like an enormous accomplishment.  Our living room is still stark white, but the paint is in good shape, and I haven't settled on a color scheme for that room yet, so I'm not too concerned.  It's been a whirlwind of activity preparing the house, and I'm glad for so many good days when I can clean for hours, do the stairs and carry laundry, and organize things.  This morning I had to clean a foot of snow off my car, and I realized that three weeks ago, I couldn't have done it.  Today I could.  What a relief!

My Christmas shopping is also almost finished, and I'm so excited to get the house decorated for the season, and spend our first Christmas together at home.  I'm not a shopper at all, but I've had a blast buying gifts for my boy this year, even when I can barely walk around the stores!  Our tree is up, but we're waiting for the branches to dry and settle before we decorate it.  I will miss the tradition my husband and I started years before we had kids, of polishing off a bottle of red wine while decorating the house for the holidays.  I thought kids were supposed to inspire traditions, not put an end to them!  Ah well, I guess the wine can wait until New Year's, and my husband can have more than his fair share since I'll be nursing.

Sitting in our warm house with our two babies, a brightly lit tree, almost every room painted colors of our choosing, and maybe a fire in the fireplace will leave me warmer and probably happy-weepier than half a bottle of wine anyway!

* * * * *

My sister is now a week overdue.  Her midwife recently decided she doesn't feel comfortable waiting 42 weeks, so she'll try acupuncture to induce, and if it doesn't work she may end up with a hospital birth instead of the home birth she's been planning all along.  She's anxious, but so ready to be finished with a difficult pregnancy that I think it will be a relief to give birth regardless of the circumstances.

I, too, find myself less and less concerned about how the birth plays out, the closer it gets.  I'd like my sister to have her baby first, so my mom is available to help her, as well as travel here when I need her without leaving my sister pregnant, overdue, and waiting.  My sister has other family there to support her, and has been generous about saying my mom can come to me, but I'll feel better if she's given birth and had some time to recover first.  

I've also been piecemeal-ing together child care for my son when I go into labor.  If it's daytime he can stay with his sitter, who is available 8-4.  If it's late afternoon or early evening, I'm sure she'd keep him for the 3 hours it will take my mom to get here.  But she lives in another town and drives back there at 4, so even getting him to her if she's already left would be an hour trip, or double that if the driving is bad (schools are closed today because of snow).  I have a friend just 15 minutes away who's willing to come over in the middle of the night if he's asleep, but she works until 10:30pm.  

My worst case scenario is that my husband drops me at the hospital alone for 3 hours while he cares for our son and waits for my mom to arrive.  Last time I went into labor the contractions started off at 5 minutes apart and were 3 minutes apart by the end of the first hour.  I went to the hospital after that first hour and stayed there.  Because we're attempting a VBAC they want me at the hospital as soon as I have regular contractions this time, no matter how far apart.  I'm trying to psyche myself up mentally to spend a few hours alone at the hospital before my husband can come.  Some moments I feel tough, and tell myself I can handle it.  Other moments I want to hide in my bed and cry at the thought

All these difficult logistics make the possibility that she won't arrive by her due date and I'll end up with a scheduled c-section seem awfully convenient.  I could arrange my mom's visit and child care!  I'll make it home before Christmas Eve!  So if she doesn't come early, there are benefits.  The closer I get, the easier it is to simply shrug, and be willing to accept.

* * * * *

After moving the furniture back into the nursery and setting up the bassinet next to our bed (we're going to share the nursery with our daughter for the first few months and then eventually move into the attic and leave it to her.  I don't want to worry about walking the stairs right away after giving birth, and if I'm nursing all night at first anyway it's just easier to stay downstairs.), I lay down in my bed and looked over at the bassinet, remembering setting it up beside our bed in our old apartment when our son was born.  Then remembering waking up to nurse and change diapers every few hours.

And then I realized that I've been so consumed with preparing for my daughter's arrival: for the birth itself with my doctors, for my leave at work with my colleagues, for the house and holidays with my husband, for the arrival of a sibling with my son, for the logistics of child care with my mom and sister and sitter and friend, that I have given next to no thought whatsoever about what it will be like to be the mother of a newborn baby again.  I'm not a woman who puts myself last most of the time.  I'm inherently rather self-centered and have no problem taking care of my own needs, and asking and expecting others to respect them.  But in this case, I have worked very hard to prepare everyone else for this upcoming event, and it suddenly struck me how unprepared I am! 

I spent a few minutes thinking about incessant breastfeeding, and interrupted sleep, and soft skin and fuzzy hair, and remembering to support the head, and the intoxication of every little thing they do.  And then I got up and gave my boy a bath, and tidied his toys, and folded a load of laundry and put it away, and there was no more time for reverie.  But soon enough there will be plenty of time to sit and soak it all in.  For now, we finish our preparations.

Nesting

Normally, I like paperwork and hate housework.  My job requires a rather ridiculously large amount of paperwork.  I get a certain satisfaction out of organizing all this paperwork into systems I think work best for our staff.  I want the paperwork to reflect the work we do on the ground; I want it to paint a picture of the magic we create with families.  I usually believe I'm the best person to do this job, and the endless reading and printing and editing and piling and filing are part of this job, parts I do willingly, and with great satisfaction when I do it well.

Housework ... well, I guess I'd rather just skip to the end result.  My son's too-small clothes are semi-organized.  Meaning: that one time when my sister came to town and organized the 0-12 month clothes?  Those ones are still organized.  The 12 month to 2T can be found in an assortment of bags, both paper and plastic, and piles, most of which are found in the general vicinity of the attic, with no organizing principle whatsoever, except get-this-out-of-my-face.  I don't necessarily believe that I'm the best person for this job.  My sister showed me that in one weekend visit.  In fact, I'm pretty sure she's the best person for the job!  But the fact that she'll be birthing a baby any day now makes it substantially less likely that she'll show up and do it anytime soon.

And lately I've made a switch, as complete and dramatic as a florescent overhead light in a pitch black room.  My disorganized attic calls out to me.  It haunts me while I hobble to and fro on the first floor of my living quarters, trying to tidy things as best I can.  I daydream sitting cross-legged (I can't sit cross-legged; are you freakin' kidding me?  I can hardly sit at all.) behind the walls, in the uninsulated eves where we store all the belongings with no defined place, all the too-small baby clothes, boxes of Christmas decor, and bins of books awaiting the future purchase of bookshelves big enough to contain them, all our homeless, forlorn belongings.  They whisper my name while I'm sleepless in bed, and I imagine myself creating order from that chaos, moving like a whirling dervish (yeah, highly unlikely) through stacks of stuff we've chosen to keep, but left neglected while trying to manage our everyday lives outside the attic eves, the parts of our lives the world sees.

And paperwork?  Bah humbug!  My dad recently retired from teaching, and has long enjoyed the cynical teacher's past time of scoffing at any new development designed to improve the learning of students, but seemingly more likely to create a new set of hoops for teachers to hop through on their way to wherever they were already headed.  Usually I'm more optimistic.  I readily adopt, and adapt whatever is sent to us, and attempt to use it to show how amazing what we do really is.  I look at the endless forms, reading between formulaic lines for hidden poetry to unearth ideas for how we can be better.  But now?  Ugh.  My desk?  UNcomfortable!  Forms?  A PAIN in my ass!  Paperwork?  WHATever!  I think I'm ready to be done with work.

My chiropractor recommended I not teach my last yoga class, scheduled for this Thursday evening after I told her I don't mind the stretching, but the students, my God!  What are they doing there?  What do they want from me?  They need to chill.  She told me about her last day of popping backs before her maternity leave a few years ago.  She knew it was time to go when clients told her about their back problems and all she could think was:  You think YOUR back hurts?  I'm eight months pregnant here, buddy!

I want to retire to the cave-like clutter of my attic eves.  My husband and son can come with me, and we can unearth treasures like children in a junkyard of discarded toys.  I want to leave my office abandoned, let the spiders weave their webs between binders on my bookshelf, and my paperwork  pile up to the ceiling, sniffling in sudden neglect.

I want to come home.  I want to prepare my nest.

One More Day

They really trick you with those three day weekends, don't they?  Every Sunday I find myself saying: if I only had one more day...  And then I get one more day, and decide it would be a perfect weekend to finally paint the hallway.  We bought three samples back in May, slapped them on the wall, gave ourselves a week to choose, and even planned the weekend to make it easy.  I would take the toddler to my Mom's house; she was overdue for a visit anyway, and my husband would take a day to paint the hallway in peace, without battling a small boy for dominance of the whole middle of the house (the hallway in question separates the living room, where we do most of our living, from the kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms, where we do need to go on a fairly regular basis).

Then we didn't like any of the samples, so we skipped the painting that weekend.  We uploaded photos of the hallway into paint-store websites and compared shades.  Found a few we loved, and bought more samples.  Our hallway began to resemble a poorly made quilt, while the shades on the wall bore scant resemblance to the online photos.  Summer came, and if you read anything I wrote here all summer long, you know we were far too busy doing nothing to accomplish a single damn thing, and so we drifted through our patchwork existence with only the vaguest plans to eventually finish the hallway.

In the end, we settled on one of the original colors.  We could have finished the room in May!  But then where would that leave October, bereft of any extra work on its one and only three day weekend?  So in these three days the hallway was painted, and an endless amount of laundry was done (but not folded or put away.  It's still in baskets on the desk in the dining room if you're interested.  I'll love you forever.), and ditto for the neverending pile of dirty dishes (done, but left to dry piled on the kitchen countertop), but somehow on Monday night, I still found myself saying: if I only had one more day...

That extra day is an illusion, isn't it?  It's just an idea.  The Day Where Everything Gets Done.  You can't find it on a calendar anymore than you can find NeverNeverLand on a map, or the Fountain of Youth in Florida.  But I've always believed that some magic is real.  For example, it now appears predestined that my hallway was not painted until October.  And if you're feeling anything like Linus this Halloween, come on over.

This just might be the year the Great Pumpkin finally makes an appearance.  We've got the space all decked out in it's finest October glory!  This room might not have impressed me as much in May, but as the weather gets cooler outside and we prepare to hibernate indoors for many long months, I love that we went bold, and warm, and a little wilder than we usually do, with our safe greys and pale beiges.  Here is our finally finished hallway:

Now if only I had one more day, I could fold and put away all that laundry...

In Praise of Procrastination

I suppose I should begin by admitting that I planned to write this post on Monday.  Or perhaps it was Sunday.  Either way, here we are on Wednesday, and I suppose we'll just see if we make it to completion.  If not, that's okay with me.  Whenever we finish, it will be fine.  What's more, the longer I wait, creating in my mind, putting off putting pen to paper (or fingers to keypad, but that lacks both rhythm and alliteration), the more fun it will be to finally finish.

I wish you could have seen me in action this weekend, y'all.  For a round-bellied slowpoke who spends most of her afternoons napping, I was in rare form.  I spent ten hours Saturday feverishly cleaning and organizing, and then eight hours on Sunday doing the same.  Monday I awoke and insisted that we drive nearly an hour to my favorite forest for a long morning hike.  Where did I get this burst of energy, you ask?  It's very simple.  All summer long, my house has been in dire need of reorganization.  This weekend was the very last one before my husband returned to work for the start of the school year.  Long story short, it was the last minute.

And my, how that last minute motivates!  I don't understand the stigma of waiting until the last minute, the cloud under which procrastinators hover, like smokers hiding outside in the cold, puffing away shamefacedly, like there's something inherently wrong with pushing up against a deadline, waiting for the rush, and then racing the clock, flying down that list sitting listless for ages, zooming through duties with the best buzz this side of an espresso!

And what's more?  If I hadn't procrastinated?  If I hadn't spent most of my summer in a dream state, floating through life like a starry-eyed stoner, licking popsicles lackadaisical on my deck, lacking a single care in the world outside of when and where I might next go swimming, napping as if my very life depended on it?  Well then, I submit to you that my dining room would not be the pinnacle of organizational accomplishment that it is, sporting separate shelves for wine and martini glasses, cookbooks sorted by type of cuisine and children's books grouped by size and interspersed with puzzle, art and alphabet areas.  My son's living room toy shelves would never be organized into perfectly put together truck and construction centers, running like the ever-so-efficient trains in the basket on the top shelf to the right of the toolbox-puzzle board book which now has its very own decorative box for storing those pesky pieces that have formerly ended up spread across the floor.  My maternity clothes would surely lack organization by type, season and degree of give in the waist relegating them to first, second or third trimester.  My hardwoods would hardly be sparkling to their present degree.

Procrastination makes possible these last minute feats of amazing accomplishment.  Lazy days add up, not only in the body, but in the psyche too.  They are deposits in the account of "someday I can...", and the more you've got saved up, well, the more you can eventually withdraw, and spend on the accomplishment equivalent of a boozy blowout weekend in Vegas.  Now, I'm not much for Vegas.  Been there a couple times, and it really isn't my scene.  But if I can bust out a hidden inner Martha Stewart, just a couple times a year, enough to inspire me to put the legos where they belong on the shelf after the toddler retires to bed, and stay on top of the paperwork that constantly piles up in my mailbox, well, let's just say I'll consider it my sacred duty to create those conditions.  My absolute imperative to spend as much time napping and daydreaming as it takes.

Now if you'll excuse me,  I think it's time to put my feet up on the sofa and gaze around my newly organized living space with spacey, scatterbrained satisfaction.  All in the interest of future accomplishment, of course.

Catching Up

Contrary to the way it may sound around here, there are things happening in my life.  A few, at least.  It's just that I'm finding it all so boring to write about!  How many times and ways can you say: I'm content, and continue to make it interesting?  Not so many, it seems to me.  So the writing is slow and sluggish, and I suppose the living is a little slow and sluggish too, but in such an easy, breezy, summer sunshine kind of way.  Like a Grateful Dead song.  Minus any psychedelic effects.  We're more low key than that.  And also sober.

Today is Wednesday, and on Wednesdays in the summer we do something different at work.  Instead of running our usual classroom sessions we meet at a shaded playground, a block away from a gorgeous city park.  We play at the playground, eat snacks, do arts and crafts, and then walk to the park with the toddlers to splash in a giant fountain.  My hubby volunteered (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I volunteered him, which is what actually happened) to run the arts and crafts session each week, keeping his art teaching skills sharp over the summer, and of course he brings our boy, so my whole family comes to work with me on Wednesdays.

I arrive first after spending an hour preparing in my office, and my husband and son, the other teachers, and the families we work with wander in over the next half hour or so.  Each week I park my car and then unpack: my purse, snacks, craft supplies, attendance sheets, and anything else I may have packed for the day.  I spread them out around me on a set of cement stairs, sit down, and wait for everyone else to arrive.  It's almost 10am by that time, but the neighborhood is still quiet and there are always birds chirping.  Every week I sit and listen to birdsong, sipping from my water bottle or iced half-caf coffee, sweet with milk and sugar.

Today I marveled at the fact that this is my work.  It's the very thing I would choose to do if I weren't at work, and how often do you get to say that?  My season of discontent with my job has passed, and I'm back to loving it.  I supposed work is like marriage in that way: seasons of deep joy and satisfaction and those we grit our teeth through and wait for them to pass.  I've been lucky in both marriage and work in that the discontent usually passes quickly, and even when I'm angry I'm also aware that it isn't ever so serious as I'm making it out to be.  I guess we need to get angry sometimes, if only to think about things in a different way.

Our dining room is a brand new place.  Still not complete, but close enough that we can get a sense of the finished room while sitting in there now.  I've never been a huge fan of formal dining rooms.  They look beautiful in magazines and even in other people's homes, but they always seem to end up as a paperwork storage center in mine.  We've been in this house two years this fall, and despite repeated efforts on my part to organize the room in a way that works for our family, it always ends up neglected except to pass through and drop our things on the various surfaces I've painstakingly arranged.  I think I may have finally solved the problem.

We bought a small, pub table that fits four chairs, and is the perfect height for my son's high chair.  We put it against the large wall of windows so that it fits seating for just the three of us, and then put an extra chair along each wall on either side of the windows.  This arrangement, along with the smaller table size, leaves enough room for a black leather futon on one side of the room and a computer desk on the other.  Now the room isn't just for eating, it's for relaxing and working on the computer as well.  I'm hoping the variety of uses will draw us into the room more often, and so far it seems to be working.

We hung the giant chalkboard we got from freecycle, and used it to write our weekly dinner menu when we planned meals before grocery shopping.  The farmer's market was overflowing with ripe tomatoes and peaches last Saturday, and so we indulged in both and my husband made and canned three gallons of salsa this week, half of them a peach salsa that I would be happy to eat every day for the rest of my life.

Every evening is a meal cooked on the grill and eaten on the deck, or a playground well-used and a toddler wiped out, or a park to explore: trails or creeks for hiking, or maybe a trip to the beach with sandwiches tossed in a cooler for supper.  It's the definition of what summer should be.  Before I had children I was restless.  I constantly wanted to do new things, go new places, start myself over every few months or years, build up new lives in new places just for the fun of it.  I'm so glad I did it then, because now this is brand new too.  Staying in one city, owning a house, getting to know a place inside and out, making a home.  It's a whole new pace, but no less of an adventure.

And soon my husband will go back to work, and I'll go back to dropping my boy at his sitter's every morning and teaching yoga classes two evenings a week, and we'll be busy with the hustle-bustle of being teachers in the fall.  And then we'll be a family of four, and won't that be a way to make everything brand new again?  So the ebb and flow will continue, and the seasons will pass, and maybe someday this life will seem same-old, same-old, and I'll be pining for a strange place in which to shed myself and reinvent our lives all over again.

For now though?  Same old, same old.  And ever so content with it.

The Middle of a Dream

I don't know if it's summer or pregnancy, or maybe the rhythm of our schedule these past few months, with rushes of deadlines at work, frantic traveling, and refurnishing rooms interspersed with lulls of quiet days, hot and humid or thunderstorm rainy or just perfect with sunny skies and a breeze, but I feel as if I'm floating through life lately.  Drifting, dreamily, and my feet never quite touch the ground.

I see women at the end of pregnancy and their faces always soften, and look very dreamy.  It's a little early for me to have reached that stage yet!  So perhaps I can't blame it on the girl-babe, who seems to be quite kicky and active anyway, and more ready to run marathons than smile at the sun, sighing happily, stars in her eyes, which is more or less the space and speed at which I find myself.

It's the middle of everything.  It's the middle of summer.  It's the middle of pregnancy.  We're somewhere in the middle of so many projects at our house, although that timeline stretches out so long that almost anywhere is going to seem to be the middle, really.  I have none of the sure-footed stamina of the start of things.  My lists are languishing somewhere and I don't want to see how far I've come or check things off or add new items.  I know in my head, and in my heart, that we're lost in the wilderness of it all right now - no point in checking - and so the only thing to do is keep moving forward.  But there's none of that furious energy of the end either.  No deadlines looming just ahead, nobody on their way in the car and about to arrive, no sense of impending urgency to fuel the fire of get-it-done-already!  So we're wandering ... slowly meandering through each day, and waking the next to do the same like a continual loop of slow smiles, shrugged shoulders, half glasses of lemonade and feet in the pool, swishing slowly back and forth with nowhere else to get to, at least not anytime soon.

It's nice.  Nice like an afternoon nap rather than a skydiving expedition, but I'm really more of an afternoon nap kind of person anyway.  I don't know that I've ever had the urge to go skydiving.  I watched some friends do it once, and when they landed I remember thinking: I could do that, but just that I could, never that I particularly wanted to.  My sister read a book about a group who climbed Everest and told me how inspiring she found it.  I read the same book and thought: God, those people are a little bit crazy, aren't they?

I once said of my sister that she's the sort of person who, when riding a bike, would get the greatest satisfaction out of fighting her way uphill.  My boyfriend at the time I said it, on the other hand, was the sort who wanted nothing more out of life than to sail forever downhill.  Going up made him cranky and he never seemed to grasp that you must go uphill in order to earn that rush of flying down, wind in your hair.  One of the reasons we parted, I suppose.  I'm a flat ground girl myself.  I lived in Kansas for a while, and it's the only place I ever liked bike riding.  I will pedal forever at a constant speed on a long, flat road going nowhere, and I will be satisfied.  I go uphill when I have to, and apply myself with diligence, but not until I make sure there's not an alternate route that's smoother.  And the downhill flying scares me a bit.  I have trouble letting go and enjoying the rush.  I prefer smooth sailing, constant pedaling, mostly knowing what to expect.  My husband is an uphill climber, never quite satisfied with himself unless he's working at peak capacity, always comparing his present state with some optimal performance and then scolding himself for his failure to achieve the optimum at every waking moment.  But the summer, or the baby on her way but not very soon, or the house in a constant state of flux, has slowed him down too. 

Or maybe it's surrendering to the role of caretaker.  Last summer he would drink his customary half-pot of coffee each morning and then find himself surprised by the constant low-level demands of an infant, never allowing him to complete any of the tasks he had imagined he'd be able to complete.  This summer he accepted from the start that being with our boy was the only thing he'd aim for, and anything else he managed to do would be gravy.  So he's dreamy too, skipping his morning coffee and asking me to remind him of everything multiple times because he's just "not in remembering mode".  It's funny to see him this way; I tell him he's turning into me!  I'm sure it would wear on me if it were permanent (who wants to be married to themselves, God forbid?), but school is just around the corner and he'll be back to the man who unloads the dishwasher before dawn and dances in the kitchen with the mania of too much caffeine tossed back while most of us are still tossing and turning in our beds.  So, in the meantime I like this slow moving man, and so does our son, who tells me every night before bed now: I want Dada hold you, and knows I'll allow one more trip to hug and kiss Daddy before retiring to the crib for the night.

So we're all dreamy here, just meandering through the middle of things.  I can just now see the rush of fall beginning to approach in the distance, but rather than rise up to meet it prepared and fortified for any and all battles it might bring, I want to roll over and pretend not to notice it for a little bit longer.  I want to stay asleep if I can.  I'm in the middle of the nicest dream.