Month: May 2021

At the End of a Shipping Week

By / May 28, 2021

I’ve been busy with shipping all week long. Shipping is a lot of physical labor and an overload of micro decisions. You can get a feel for the complexity of the process by reading one or more of the shipping updates that I post to the Kickstarter each Friday. We’re now in week three of shipping. Usually by this time I would have moved from shipping unsketched orders into sketched ones, but the addition of slipcases has slowed down the packing process considerably. To add to the complexity, Howard has been livestreaming every sketch. This has actually been enjoyable both for Howard and for the small group of friends and fans who come to hang out with him while he works. I’m hoping that when the sketching is done, Howard can incorporate streaming into his regular creative process.

Today I didn’t ship out any packages, focusing instead on running a few errands, managing some household tasks, assisting with the streaming, writing the Kickstarter shipping update, and prepping for family movie night. One of the wins for today was acquiring some chairs for our patio. I eventually want to have a patio set that is lovely to look at while being comfortable for lounging, but that sort of thing takes time to locate and a significant chunk of money to acquire. Instead I grabbed these.

They are solid, plastic, stackable, sturdy, and comfortable for sitting. They solve the immediate problem of not having anywhere to sit and enjoy the patio that I spent most of last summer creating. The aesthetics of these chairs don’t make my heart sing. I’m not sure I picked the right color, but they’ll be nice to have anyway. And when I do manage to find the perfect patio set, these can be stacked out of the way to only be brought out when we have more guests than our perfect set has chairs to accommodate. It is a solid win, especially at just over $20 per chair.

Now we launch into a weekend where we’ll get to see family in person for the first time in more than a year. After that, there is another week of shipping to do.

Befriending Blue Jays

By / May 26, 2021 / 2 Comments

We’ve had blue jays as visitors to our yard for years, but this year is unique. I think one of last year’s fledgling jays picked our yard for his home. Specifically, the pair of jays nested in this pine tree right next to our porch.

This has led to our cats watching out the front windows and the blue jays watching back.

So our house is filled with the sounds of jays yelling at cats while cats chitter at the jays. Even when neither is making noise they still keep an eye on each other.

It is hours of solid cat entertainment.

The jays are less concerned about humans. In fact they seem calmer if a human is in view along with the cats, as if they know that the humans will control the cats. However on the day when I was photographing flowers near the nesting tree, the jays expressed loud opinions.

They kept a close watch on me to make sure I wasn’t going to find their nest.

However it is also possible that the yelling was less about the nest and more because they wanted me to go get some peanuts for them. So I did that too.

Blue Jays are noisy, pushy, bossy birds. I like them and am happy to befriend this pair. Sometime in the next few weeks their babies will be ready to fly and then they’ll stop guarding my front porch so closely. I will be glad to have the yelling and chittering be a little less constant, but I also hope they still come and visit.

May Slipping Away and the Return of Shipping

By / May 19, 2021 / 2 Comments

Last week our shipment of books finally arrived. This instantly plunged me into organization for book signing, sketching, and shipping. It has been more than two years since we did a big shipping. In that time there have been multiple updates to shipping software so I’m having to relearn how to integrate everything. I love that I no longer need to keep a file box of manually sorted pieces of paper. The software does a lot of the sorting for me. The learning is fairly straightforward, but it is occupying some creative time and space. On top of that, Howard wants to be able to live stream the book sketching, which is a great idea, but has also required a lot of rethinking our spaces. We ended up evicting the large sectional from the family room so we can set up the livestreaming spot. The sectional is dismantled and sitting in a pile in the garage. Once we’re done with the sketching we can decide what is to be done with it, because in some ways it wasn’t the best piece of furniture for how we actually use the room.

With all the shifting of boxes and shifting of furniture and learning new processes, May is more than halfway done. I’m hopeful that I can get the first glut of shipping complete and settle into a steady process for getting all of the other packages sent. Then I’ll be able to reclaim my contemplative time and writing time.

One thing that is bringing me joy is that a pair of blue jays have nested in our yard. We haven’t actually found the nest, but the jays are around all the time and they spend significant amounts of that time peering in our windows and yelling at our cats. They watch the people too, but they don’t yell at the people. So we end up with chittering cats who are bird watching and yelling blue jays who are cat watching. Fun for everyone!

I need to clean my windows and get some better pictures.

Prompts and Personal History

By / May 8, 2021

My artist daughter Keliana has been participating in Mermay in which the goal is to draw a mermaid each day during the month of May. It has been fun for me to see her art go up on her Patreon, some of them finished, some only sketches, some with stories attached, others just images. In the past I’ve participated in similar prompt lists focused on photography. They can be very useful ways to spark new ways of seeing the world, to create things that otherwise would not have occurred to you. I really like that aspect, but my primary art isn’t visual, it is words. So I wondered if I could find my own prompt list to help me create more variety in the things I blog about. I also wondered if I could use a list to remind me to write about pieces of my life that otherwise get missed. I’d had an entire train of thought the other day about how during the first stages of the pandemic I was very focused on recording what daily life was like because it was suddenly different. Except in the Before Times I neglected to record daily life, and now that the pandemic is winding down, I’m again not recording daily life as much. So as a historical record, my recountings of pandemic existence lack a basis for comparison. Perhaps prompts would help me provide that basis. I figured that searching for personal history prompts might be a good place to start. I found these sites: 1, 2, 3

I gleaned out a set of prompts that might be interesting to write about. I was very amused how one site assumed some very specific things about who I was as a person and what my life had been like. It assumed my parents were dead, that I missed them, and that I had grandchildren I wanted to give advice to because I was myself approaching death. Only one of those things applies to me. (I do miss my parents because they live several states away and pandemic made visiting verboten for more than a year.) And then there were questions like this one: How common was working mothers in your day? Have working mothers been good or bad for our society? Explain why or why not. Which, yes, does possibly prompt a person to write something about their life experience and opinions, but wasn’t matched with a question about working fathers and whether they had been good or bad for society. I am side-eyeing the assumptions around that question and lack of matching question. So I’ve … adjusted… several of the prompts so that the shape of them doesn’t irk me.

(For the record: Working mothers have always been common throughout all of history. It is just that during a period of about fifty years in white, American, middle-and-upper class families there was a narrative that somehow having mothers work outside the home was an aberration that caused problems for society. Does Mom working cause problems? Yup. Does Mom being a home maker and domestic worker and childcare provider cause problems? Also yup. I’ve been both of those Moms. I’m in favor of providing families with choices and support so they can decide their own best balance.)

So there in the parenthetical I’ve answered my own first prompt. I don’t plan to do these daily. I have enough creative projects in progress without assigning myself another one to track. But sometimes I want to write a blog post and feel a little stuck on where to start. Now I have a set of prompts to pull from. In the meantime if you want to see some fun Mermay pictures, you can become one of Keliana’s patrons for only a dollar.

Touchstones in My Parenting

By / May 4, 2021

Mother’s Day is drawing nearer and I’m watching it approach with some trepidation because I’m never quite sure what emotions will hit me on that day. As I was trying to figure out how to feel, I went spelunking for a twitter thread I wrote a few years back that I thought would be a good reminder to put in front of people. (This one) Yet during that dive, I found some things I did not expect, like this post on The Endgame of Motherhood, written by me eight years ago. In that post I was facing my oldest leaving for college and the grief I carried around that life shift. By itself, this post would have been a moment of nostalgia, but the next thing I found was Walking the Spiral, a post written two years later. Those years had been transformational and painful in ways that I hadn’t even imagined when I wrote Endgame of Motherhood. To quote from Walking the Spiral:

2012 was before. It was before all the transitions that our family made stepping all the kids up, one to college, one into high school, one into junior high. It was before my younger daughter had panic attacks. It was before my older son began his long slide into depression. It was before we recovered from that. It was before I discovered that our recovery was a limited one. It was before my younger son also had panic attacks. It was before all the appointments, therapists, doctors, medicine, and meetings. It was before something in me broke, or gave up, or grew too tired. The person who visited the spiral in 2012 could honestly look her depressed son in the eyes and promise him it would get better. The person I was when I returned wondered if that was true. I wondered if I had been lying to him. I knew I had to keep going, taking the right steps, but somehow I’d lost touch with the belief that we could pull out of the emotional mire which kept reclaiming us. We’d seem to be out, but then the troubles would come again. My feet stood at the opening to the spiral. The last time I’d been here was before. I didn’t know why I needed to come again, nor why I wanted to cry at being there. I stepped forward and began to walk…

…Finding and walking the spiral seemed such a silly thing. I still don’t understand how so much meaning got attached to it. Yet in that step out from the open end of the spiral I felt like I’d left some grief behind and took something hope-like with me in its place. The spiral helped me remember that there was a before, and the existence of a before heavily implies that somewhere ahead of me there is an after. I just need to keep wending my way along the path until I get there.

I realized that I have now, eight years after the first post and six years after the second, arrived at the after which I posited must exist if I could just keep moving forward. After took a lot longer to arrive than I would have hoped for, and if anyone had told that me who walked the spiral that she had six years of struggle ahead, it would not have felt like good or hopeful news. And it wouldn’t have been. Even with all I’d been through, the hardest bits were still ahead of that younger me who sought out a spiral without knowing why. Yet here I am, with all four kids still alive and beginning to thrive. And I can see all the ways that progress needed to be slow and steady. The ways that we had try and fail and try again. (and fail again and try again and…) Now I read these words from my eight years ago self who was facing one grief without knowing a multitude was coming for her.

I don’t miss the baby and toddler years, though I enjoyed them while I was in them. Right now is what I will miss. I’m going to miss four at home, two teens two kids, all of them running in different directions, squabbling over the cat, and the incessant sound of video games. This is my heart’s home and just now it feels like I will spend the rest of my life missing home.

I would not trade positions with her for anything. Yes that all-the-kids-at-home time is a treasured memory, but now I get to have all-my-kids-are-adults-and-their-lives-aren’t-my-job-anymore. I loved that stage and I love this stage. There were a lot of things between there and here which were heart wrenchingly difficult, but I wouldn’t trade those away either because most of the best things have happened as a direct result of the hardest things. I have a new heart’s home now, and it is a good place. More than that, I can feel that future heart’s homes exist out there for me. This one is good. The next will be too.

Right now my primary task in relation to motherhood is to make peace with myself about all the things I did and did not do, to find kindness in my heart for the choices made in difficult circumstances. I still have mothering work ahead of me, a role to play in the lives of my adult children. Depending on the long-term needs of my young adults, I may never be an empty nester. Also, they are not the only ones I will nurture, I’ve turned some of my (joyously surplus) mothering energy toward helping other creative people grow. I have a lot of work ahead of me, but it is far less intensive than what I’ve been through, for which I am glad.

I still don’t know how I’m going to feel on Sunday, but whatever feeling shows up, I’ll give it a space to exist for a time. Then I’ll move onward.