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Final stages of book layout + family in town = no brainspace for blogging.

This evening I opened my door to discover my parents standing on the front doorstep. I knew they were coming, but didn’t expect them until tomorrow. The mix-up was due to my own faulty internal math. It went like this. “Parents are leaving their house on Tuesday. They’ll spend a night on the road. This means they’ll arrive on Thursday.” Somehow my brain skipped Wednesday in the calculation. Anyway they’re here now and they’ll be staying for a week. The kids are all thrilled. Having Grandma and Grandpa just show up is about the coolest thing ever.

I heard the meowing through the heating ducts. This puzzled me quite a bit since I’m allergic to cats and we have never owned one. Then I realized that the meowing was merely resonating in the heating duct and was in fact coming from outside. The vocal cat in question must be underneath our back deck, up against the wall of our house. I could tell because I was in the unfinished basement storage room. This was the point where I went rushing upstairs and threw on my coat because I’ve been hearing the same meowing sounds off and on for over a week. When I’d heard it before, I’d been standing on the deck in question, but unable to locate the noise. The poor cat was stuck under our deck for at least a week. I suspect that the crack it had wiggled through then froze over, trapping the poor animal. I had to pour hot water over the hose hatch to get it to unfreeze enough to let the cat out. I’ve never seen such a grateful and friendly animal. She is skin and bones. She must have gotten adequate water from the melting snow, but she was starving. I fed her tuna for starters because it was the only thing I had, but we switched to dry cat food as soon as I could acquire some from a neighbor. The cat was as hungry for touch as she was for food. She kept walking away from the bowl to be petted and if I walked away, she followed me. (I’m not actually sure the animal is female, it could be a neutered male.)

Unfortunately my allergies quickly started acting up, so we transferred the cat, the bowl of food, and an old towel to our sunny front porch. Kiki has been out there with the cat for over an hour. The cat is completely uninterested in leaving the porch and is very interested in coming back into the house. This animal has obviously been someone’s pet, but either got lost or abandoned. This same cat came begging to our back door several times last fall, so she has been on her own for awhile. Now the kids are all hoping that we get to keep the cat. I’m holding the “we need to ask around for the owner” line, but I honestly don’t hold out much hope for finding the owner. We may have acquired a cat. Not something I had on my list to do today, but I couldn’t leave the poor thing trapped. Then having rescued it, I could not fail to feed it.

This picture does not show how skinny this poor cat is. When you pet her you can feel every rib and every vertebra.

I’ve been in a funk for nearly a week. It is the low-level kind of a funk where I still function. No one but me can tell that I have the funk, but it sucks the joy out of just about everything. I felt like hiding from everyone. I felt like cutting my hair or dyeing it. I even did research into seasonal affective disorder and matched my feelings to the symptom list. I kept trying to wrap my head around it, re-frame it, describe it, talk myself out of it. None of that worked well. I was fairly certain that a large part of the problem was that I’d overdrawn my emotional reserves for several weeks in a row. But I was having trouble figuring out how to put anything back in.

And then I went to church. I wasn’t expecting church to help much today, because I spend the first hour wrestling with my own kids on a bench and the second two wrestling with an entire class of active four-year-olds. I was expecting church to be draining, not filling. The opposite occurred. I found myself filled with energy and hope and happiness, because I knew I was in the right place at the right time for the right reasons. There is one child in my class who has the same high-energy and distractibility of my Gleek. Handling him takes all of my attention, but it is well within my capabilities. He is the reason I was put with that class. I can give his mother, my friend, a break from managing him. I can give that same break to the other mothers as well. I know how desperately I needed that break sometimes when all my kids were home all day. I came away from church exhausted, but happy and peaceful.

There have been times in my life when I have routinely come home from church wondering why I bothered to go. Those were the years where I attended merely because I wanted my children to learn that church is what we do on Sunday. Sometimes there were years when church was my respite, my break from the rigors of 24/7 mommy duty. Now church is my chance to give to others the gift that I already received. No matter what, I’ve known that attendance at church is right for me and for my family. And even on a day like today when I did not get to listen to much of what was said there, I still come away more whole than I was before. Now that I am home it is like my head is clear and I can see the things I need to do to refill my emotional reserves. I can also see that the refilling has begun, I just need to keep up the good work.

The other day I was putting something away in our coat closet, when I realized that the though of just stepping inside the closet and closing the door was very appealing to me. Similarly, several times this week I’ve come home from some errand and spent a few minutes just sitting in the car. Sitting in the car is quiet and no one needs me to do anything. The feelings did not make much sense, because while my life this week is busy, my life is always busy. If my life is ever not busy, I’m sure I find a way to make it busy because I like having many things to do. The busy-ness of this week is no more stressful than the busy-ness of any other week. Nothing is high stakes. Nothing is particularly urgent. It is all the one-thing-after-anotherness of daily living.

Last night it really clicked for me why I have this desire to hide in the closet. I have been stretching myself and meeting needs without taking time to do the things that make me feel whole. Or rather, I’d somehow disconnected the emotional rewards from the things that make me whole. I was at a discussion group last night with five other mothers. I’d been asked to talk about my writing projects and how doing them is a help to me and to our family. As I began, I was not quite sure what to say because lately it has all felt like necessary business rather than soul-healing enjoyment. It was so good for me to be in that discussion, to see the things that I do through these other pairs of eyes. They asked how I find time for the blogging I do, and I did not have a ready answer. All of the writing and blogging have become so much a part of my life that I do not even see them as unusual. But to these other women, it was unusual. And realizing that, I was better able to see once again how much I love what I do. My blogging and my fiction are turned to many purposes in my life and in the lives of others, but first and foremost they make me whole. Somehow I had disconnected that. Now I just need to hold onto it. I need to remember that my writing has intrinsic value to me no matter what anyone else thinks of it. Sometimes my desire for affirmation leads me to seek from others the approval I should be giving to myself. And this does not only apply to writing, but to any activity which makes me whole.

I am a goal oriented person. I like to have goals and track progress on them so that I can see how far I’ve come and how far I’ve got to go before completion. One of the best ways I have found to track a goal is with a chart. One or two goals with one or two charts are not a problem. I can wrap my head around that. The problem arrives when you add in the fact that I am the mother of four children. Children are highly motivated by being able to see progress on charts. Teachers are also motivated by being able to see progress on charts. The result is that many goals are set for many children and many charts are given out. The task of chart management falls to me.

Right now I am tracking progress on the following charts for the following people.
Me:
A fitness graph to motivate me to be more healthy
A scripture study card to mark off chapters as I read them.

Kiki:
Personal Progress toward a church youth group award. Kiki does the actual writing, but I participate in the prodding to remind her to write.

Link:
A chore chart for the Family Life merit badge
A fitness chart for the Fitness merit badge
A homework log which records his daily efforts and is turned in monthly
A home reading card on which we mark off books as he finishes them.

Gleek:
A weekly homework log with numbers of minutes read
A home reading card on which we mark off books as she finishes them.
A Faith in God booklet for a church award
A piano chart to motivate her to practice piano

Patch:
A reading card on which we mark off books as he finishes them.
A reading chart that we mark every time someone reads with him for 15 minutes

Family:
The family calendar to track all the scheduled events
The chore chart which theoretically puts kids in charge of their own chores, but which has been languishing lately
The Family Home Evening chart which lists assignments for the week

Fortunately Howard does all of his own goal setting and chart keeping. The kids are moving toward this as well. I don’t do much in the way of chart keeping for Kiki anymore. But in the mean time I am feeling a little buried in charts and I feel guilty when I miss updating one often enough. There would be even more charts, but I have declined to participate in some optional programs that the school offers. Link will not be getting the 5th grade American History award because I simply don’t have the time or energy to make him memorize the Declaration of Independence, Preamble to the Constitution, or all of the names of the presidents in order. Gleek will not be getting the second grade school wings because I don’t want to struggle to get the necessary perfect attendance months, non-tardy months, or additional assignments necessary. If these awards truly mattered to my kids we’d struggle for them, but I’m glad to just let them slide. Most years are not this chart heavy, but for some reason this one is.

In many church meetings the speakers and teachers invite the congregation to extend themselves further, to set goals and stretch for them. There have been times in my life when I needed those admonishments. Right now I need lessons in how to not over extend, how to cut back, how to trim out the excess. Because I think I’ve got that “extend yourself” thing nailed for this year.

When Howard asked me what I wanted for my birthday this year. I answered that what I really want is to not feel stressed about bills. I would much rather have the money than presents this year. It is a true statement and yet I was still worried that I might feel sad or depressed when the day of my birthday arrived and there was little to mark the occasion. Howard fixed that quite effectively. He created a facebook event and invited lots of people to my virtual birthday party. The party isn’t fancy. Mostly it consists of people emailing me to wish me a happy birthday. It is really hard to feel depressed when my email box is buried in messages celebrating the fact that I was born 36 years ago today.

All of this started me thinking about gifts. Sometimes there are things that I want, a book, a movie, clothing. Sometimes I want these things very much. Usually when this is the case I arrange to acquire the things. But what I want from a gift is not really the thing in the package. For me the real gift is the acknowledgment that I matter, that I am valued. The thing in the package is a symbol of that, but isn’t strictly necessary. This year Howard gave me a marvelous gift. He wrangled a bunch of friends to reach out to me. He planned it all himself without me having to put forth any effort at all. Because of that it matters even more.

This month has been like one long dolly zoom. A dolly zoom is one of those film shots where the camera zooms in closer while simultaneously being moved further away. The result is that the center of focus appears to remain motionless while everything else drops away. The fact that it is still January is that motionless center. It seems like I keep checking every day, multiple times, and yup Still January. Not Spring Yet. Still Cold. Everything else is moving fast. Events and weeks rush by so that I don’t have time to see them clearly. I hardly have time to look forward to something before it becomes a week ago.

But eventually that dolly is going to run out of track. Then we’ll be in February.