Sandra Tayler

The Tally for Today

By / January 4, 2014

6 hours freeway driving split into two parts.
1 college girl settled into her dorm room and ready to tackle a new semester.
30 minutes town driving because college students take advantage of parent with car while she is available.
1.5 bottles of caffeinated soda which are not going to help with sleep tonight.
Notes for 3 blog posts which I’ll write when I have a less tired brain.
The beginning of a new picture book.
Vague concept for another new picture book.
A source of tension and a character realization for my novel.
2 loads of laundry.
House feels quiet and empty.

I like the empty and quiet because I am so very tired. I hope sleep is friendly tonight.

It is interesting that our family now has two versions of normal. There is the normal where Kiki is at college and there is the normal where Kiki is here with us. I’m looking forward to next week when we can finally settle in to this new year and see how it feels.

Noise and Motion

By / January 3, 2014

I don’t pause enough. The minute I finish a task, I check in to social media sites, I read blogs. These things represent a break in my day and taking breaks is a good thing. Except I rarely eat without also reading. Somehow there is a piece of me that is convinced that we need some sort of input all the time. I can’t do one thing if the task allows for two things. Again, this is a useful way to accomplish more. The trouble comes when I am constantly inputting things into my brain and never leaving time for them to percolate and process. There need to be times when I am doing one boring thing so that my brain has a chance to quiet.

I haven’t been sleeping well. This is sad and strange because during the holidays is one of the few times when I get enough sleep on a daily basis. My usual schedule has me running at an hour-per-day sleep deficit which I try to catch up on Saturdays. This past week I’ve gotten eight or nine hours per night and still been tired the next day. It is like the anxiety waits for me in my subconscious and disturbs me all night when I’m supposed to be resting. I’m restless, I wake often, as if unremembered things chased me through my dreams all night. This particular pattern is a familiar one and I know the cure. I need more exercise during the day. If I break a sweat during the day then I don’t at night. It is some sort of weird conservation of sweat I guess.

This evening I was at loose ends. My work brain had shut off for the day. There was nothing I particularly wanted to read or watch. I knew that I wasn’t likely to sleep well, particularly since I have a driving day tomorrow and the night before a driving day is almost always an anxious one. I wanted to be distracted, to not have to think about the work I felt I should be doing or the long drive tomorrow. But as I was preparing some food and pondering my current lack of book, I realized how seldom I allow myself to be alone with my thoughts. I thought about this lovely video poem I discovered several years ago on How to Be Alone. Then I sat down and ate with just my thoughts for company. I noticed some things out of place in my house and decided that my next hour would be spent putting them in order. It took two. I made the work more energetic than strictly necessary, so that it counted as light exercise. During the work I did not think of anything in particular. In fact, mostly I thought of nothing. It was a good rest for my brain that thinks of things far too much.

I should practice this more often, focusing on one thing instead of always seeking out more. I don’t know if the work and quiet was sufficient to provide a better night’s sleep, but it certainly provided a better evening than I otherwise would have had.

Finding My Work Brain

By / January 2, 2014 / 2 Comments

I found my business brain this morning, which was a relief, because I haven’t been able to access focused business thoughts since some time before Christmas. I think the holidays exude a brain fog and encourage me to step outside of all my usual patterns. Which is a good thing. Breaks generally are, however it is a relief to find my rhythm again. I pretty much only have today before I hit weekend, more family visits, and taking Kiki back to school. January 6 our normal schedule begins in earnest.

I’ve spent lots of time with family in the past few weeks. Far more than I have for a long time. It was lovely to discover that seeing my extended family was relaxing and enjoyable rather than adding stress. This makes clear exactly how stressed I was for the prior eighteen months when visitors always added stress. I’m ready to engage socially again. Just in time, since I’m headed out to ConFusion in only two weeks. They’ve given me programming that I’m excited to be part of. I’ll detail that in a different post.

For today I plowed through accounting work and shipping work. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to find my design brain for a while and make progress on Strength of Wild Horses and on preparatory work for Massively Parallel. After that I need to find my editing brain and get to work on the challenge coin pdf. Huh, it sounds like I’ve got all sorts of brains buried in the clutter around my house, which creates an amusing mental picture and accurately describes how things feel.

Writing and the New Year

By / January 1, 2014

With the new year, when so many writer friends are listing their 2013 stats and their 2014 goals, I find that my brain is dwelling on the thought: I could just go do something else. Surely I’d be happier if I tried using my spare hours as hobby time instead of shoehorning writing into my schedule. Writing certainly hasn’t paid any bills for me. If I count the expenses of traveling to conventions and the expenses of printing, I’ve spent more than I’ve earned.

This is not the voice of despair, or at least not the typical despair. I do not feel bleak or sad. Tired, yes, but not overwhelmed. It feels more like temptation. As if something is trying to lure me down a seemingly easier road.

It is a lie. The easier road is illusory. I’ve tried to give up writing before. Both times it came back. I’m 10,000 words into a novel I should finish. Short stories are percolating in my head in a way they haven’t done in years. I have another novel waiting after the first. I still have to do fulfillment on my picture book Kickstarter. I’m headed to ConFusion in only a few weeks where I’ll wear my professional clothes, teach, and re-connect with many of my writer friends.

Perhaps I should take up some soul-filling hobbies. That would be good for me. I spent the last year emptying myself out to answer the needs of others. Something needs to come and fill that space. I think I am afraid that working at writing will be a further drain rather than restorative. That fear is wrong. It would take more work to stop writing. I could stop writing if I put deliberate effort into doing so. I’d have to pull my brain away from it. I’d have to re-wire my coping strategies. I’d have to carefully weed writing out of my life and social contacts; stomp it down when it popped up, again and again. I don’t think I should do that. I think I need to tell these stories even if I only have an audience of one. Even if the only purpose is for me to sort myself. I think once I’m writing regularly I’ll remember that writing fills me. I’ve only forgotten because I’ve put so little effort into writing during this past year. All my effort went elsewhere.

My plans for this coming year are beginning to coalesce, but I’m reluctant to turn them into lists. There will be plenty of time for lists and business. Right now I’ll be content in the contemplation that this might be the year when I finally learn what it is like to leave the door to writer part of my brain open because I’m using it so often.

The Beginnings of Things

By / December 31, 2013

I’ve you’d asked me at Thanksgiving how I expected to spend the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, I would not have answered “sitting in a freezing cold horse arena watching Gleek have her first riding lesson.” Horseback riding lessons were not even on my radar as a possibility back then. I watched Gleek attempting to post and succeeding for short periods of time before losing the rhythm. I listened to the teacher explain how she needs to control her body and also how the teacher spoke to the horse. I realized that teaching a fractious horse is probably not much different than teaching self control to an impulsive young girl. This teacher will be good for both. So each Tuesday afternoon we’ll be travel ling to the horse barn. I will sit, maybe write. Gleek will learn.

We don’t know yet whether riding horses will be something we do for a while and then move on to other things or whether we’ve just opened a door into an alternate future. The same is true of Patch and his cello. His first official lesson will take place next week, but yesterday his cousin sat down with Patch and gave a basic lesson in bowing, plucking and music theory. The fact that Patch paid rapt attention for more than ninety minutes suggests that he’ll like playing cello. Again, we have to wait and see. My focus is on providing opportunities for the next several months rather than on planning futures.

New Year’s Intentions

By / December 30, 2013

We talked for two hours, my sister-in-law and me. It was the first chance we’ve had to sit down and visit in almost a year. Both of our families have been in transition, stressed, hers more than mine. We both pulled inward and just managed the things in front of us. And we’re both poised on the edge of a new year which looks like it will contain more stability. I’m still not placing too much hope on that. I’m not looking too far ahead. I glance through the year so I can see the shape of the calendar, but then I focus only on the next few days.

Yet, unintended, I find I have concrete wishes for some of the ways that I want this next year to be different. I don’t like New Year’s Resolutions. I always have dozens of goals in progress and to attempt to renovate my life in a flurry of January goal setting sounds like a recipe for failure. Wishes is a good word, because goals are concrete and measurable. They are things which end up on my task list and which I then am assigned to complete. Some of these wishes have manifested small related goals, but mostly they are prayers for the general emotional content I’d like for this year. They’re the rough sketch which will change when it gets set into firm lines.

I would like to be more social this year, to unfurl where last year I pulled in.

I would like to leave the writer cupboard in my brain standing open because I’m digging into it often enough that closing it does not make sense.

I would like to continue to renovate the physical spaces in our house, knowing that this renewal is symbolic for the emotional renovations in our family.

I would like to spend more time happy and less time afraid.

If I want these things, I will need to make goals. Little goals, because big goals often fail, but a small well-designed goal can fit right into the life I already have. Small goals often feel like they are accomplishing nothing, but over time they transform. Rather like noticing today that Gleek’s teeth are almost straight in her braces, when they were extremely crooked last March. Small changes applied over time are what transformations are made of.

Boxing Day and Organization

By / December 27, 2013 / 2 Comments

I like boxing day. I don’t know what the actual cultural traditions are around the day. I know it falls on the day after Christmas and is British in origin. I have a vague notion that it was the day when wealthy gentlemen would box up gifts and goods to distribute to their less-well-off tenants. Thus Christmas was full of new things for the gentlemens’ families and boxing day was focused on charity. Or, if you were one of the poor, then boxing day was the day of new things.

For me, boxing day is when I clear away all the boxes and accumulated packaging. Many of those boxes get filled with things we don’t use or need anymore. I took a car load of things over to a thrift shop to donate. By noon tomorrow I’ll have accumulated another car load of things. It is amazing how much stuff just sits in the corners of our house, unnoticed and unneeded, but never cleaned up because it isn’t really in the way. Except it is. Because those corners and storage spaces need to be cleared so we have places to put the things we actually use. It is time to clear away all the accumulated stuff from this past year when I did not have the brain to sort. As an example: the shelf in my laundry room where I shoved outgrown clothes until I had time to give them away. The shelf was over flowing, so I filled a big garbage sack and gave the things away. There are lots of spaces like that. Flat surfaces covered in random things because I needed a place to put them down. This week I am clearing them off.

I am also helping the kids tackle their rooms. Link doesn’t need any help here. In the past year he has sorted through his own things and gotten rid of the things which are no longer relevant to him. Patch has a harder time with this. Sorting is overwhelming to him. So we started with a garbage bag and a donation box. Then we picked one spot in the room and began. Once we got rolling, Patch quite enjoyed the process. He liked being able to see how much space he has. even better, he can find the things that he really wants, instead of them being buried under trash and old stuff.

Gleek’s sorting is going to take a lot longer. She has always been an accumulator of small things. Sorting is not just a matter of things she wants and things she doesn’t. Instead we have to dig deep and find all of the stashed rock collections. There are half a dozen purses, each with a similar collection of useful items such as pens, Carmex, pretty rocks, shiny things. The purses must be emptied, the contents evaluated. Each purse considered. Sorting Gleek’s room gives both her and me decision fatigue. I really long to just tear through it when she’s not there. That is what I would do when she was younger and the result would be multiple garbage bags full of things that Gleek never even missed. At younger ages that was appropriate, but now Gleek needs to learn to organize her own things. This is particularly true because Gleek’s collections are one of the ways that she manages her anxieties. Learning how to keep the collections under control is a critically important life skill for her. More important, facing the collections also brings up the associated memories and she has time to process them again when she is not under so much strain. I can see these memories wearing on her. She gets slower to answer my “what shall we do with this?” then she says she doesn’t want to sort anymore. So I bring us to a stopping place and we stop. I have this space between Christmas and New Years when business things are slow. The internet is slow. I can focus most of my energy on putting my house in order. Gleek and I can afford to do a little bit each day.

Going through my room and my office was a lot more fun. In those spaces I can make rapid fire decisions. This stays, that goes. This newly cleared drawer can be re-purposed for something else. When I am done the clutter is cleared away and the surfaces are ready for dusting. And I have boxes and bags of things ready to be given away. I like donating things. I’ll never have to clean them up again. We have an unusually large amount of stuff to donate this year. I believe it is the result of our year of transition. We all changed this year and so the stuff we want and need is also different. We’re re-shaping our spaces to better reflect who we are now instead of who we were.

By the new year our house will be much more organized. It will finally have joined us, prepared for the next phase of our lives.

Christmas

By / December 25, 2013 / 1 Comment

Gift giving was tricky this year because our kids do not really need more stuff. They like having new stuff, but there wasn’t much that they longed for or actually needed. I think this speaks well to how our lives are going lately. Yet Christmas morning without gifts for them would have been a sad experience for us all. Howard and I were stumped until we realized that the best gift we could give our kids was an open door. We picked something for each child that made possible something that was previously out of reach. Kiki got a scanner/printer for her use at college. Link got an old used laptop which will allow him to learn programming at home. Gleek gets to try out horseback riding lessons. Patch got a cello and lessons to go with them. There was an array of other smaller things, many of them designed to make us all laugh. Laughter at the present opening is one of the best things about the holiday.

I hope that you found laughter and new possibilities in your holiday celebrations as well.

Friendships

By / December 23, 2013

I’ve been thinking about friendship today and loneliness. I have many people that I consider friends. The would, and have, dropped everything to come help me in a time of need. I would, and have, dropped everything to help them. I am richly blessed to know so many good people. Yet most weeks I don’t see or speak to any of my friends who don’t live in my house. I tweet, comment, and generally interact online with all sorts of lovely people on a daily basis, but that is not the same. I attend church every week, but often I sit by myself and only engage in a few sentences here and there with my neighbors. I used to have a group of friends who gathered every other week for a girl’s night, but then half of them moved further away and the rest of us had our lives shift. We don’t meet anymore. For several years I had regular handwritten correspondence with some of my friends, but that dried up this year too. I stopped having the energy to reply.

I didn’t notice as all of this was happening. I’ve been turned inward this year; very focused on family, business, and emotions here in my house. But somehow I’ve come to a place where my in-person interactions with friends have dwindled to scattered lunch appointments. I did it to myself. Some of it was necessary because I had to conserve my resources of energy. But I’d like next year to be different. I’d like to be around friends more often. I just need to remember how that works and how I make it happen.

Snow Falls Again

By / December 22, 2013

Snow is falling today. Each flake is tiny when landing on the ground, but they have been falling all day. They land on the piles of snow which still have not melted from the snow storm before this one, or the snowfall before that. Most winters the kids are hoping we’ll get some snow in time for Christmas. This year it has been on the ground for weeks. I stepped outside in it, to feel the hush which always comes with snowfall.

Then I thought back all through the year to another day when snow fell, way back on February 9th, when I wrote another post that talked about snow, but was really about many other things. I read that post today while I was gathering information for the 2013 Tayler Family Photo Book. When I wrote that post I was at the beginning of my year. I’d had a hard week and knew there was quite a bit of emotional sorting yet to do. The week was harder than the post makes clear. At the moment of that post I did not know how long that sorting would take or how complex the emotions would become. I look back with sympathy for my past self. It got so much harder in the next couple of weeks. Then it got harder again before it gradually became easier. It is now December and we’re not done sorting yet. Reading that post makes my heart hurt and I realize how very emotional the process will be when I begin pulling together my annual book of blog entries. It will dredge up all the memories of the hard things which happened this year. Part of me wants to just close the door and move on. We’ve made our shifts, transitioned into a new familial life stage. Next year might be a time when we can just settle in and be glad. I would love that, but I have to finish this first. I have to read through it all and remember it. In that process I will be able to let go some of the trapped emotions that are attached to the events.

Snow is falling, illuminated by the Christmas lights on our front yard tree. I don’t know what the weather will be for the rest of this winter. Perhaps it will all be as snowy as the past few weeks have been. I hope that the emotional weather for next year is not as tempestuous as the year just past. It seems logical that it would be, but I can’t control that any more than I can dictate to the sky whether it should snow. All I can do is clear away the snow that has already fallen so that I am better able to handle what ever comes next.