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The pavement was warm beneath my bare feet. Eighty seven degrees makes for nice pavement. Weather reports told of coming hundred degree days when the walks and street would be too hot. Then I would either have to wear shoes or jump my way over to the soft grass. I walked my garden, the space for vegetables, the lawns, the weedy flowerbeds. I’d not had much time to look around and plants were thriving, mostly the grassy ones, but in between I could see the things I wanted. I leaned over and pulled one clump of grass and then another, until I’d spent an hour on my knees and one small bed was cleared. If I could only spend one hour each day, my gardens would be lovely. I can’t be certain I’ll have that hour, or that during that hour I’ll have the energy, but the one cleared bed represents progress, a step in the right direction.

My to do list shows similar progress. I’ve crossed off two dozen things today and added twenty. This means that my list is a tiny increment smaller than it was before. I’m beginning to complete things. That feels very good.

My mailbox is full of email to answer.
My task list is full of things I did not do yesterday or the day before.
My house is full of people.
My desk is covered in papers.
My laundry baskets are full of clean clothes to put away.
My garden is full of weeds.
My calendar is full of appointments.
My kitchen counters are spotlessly clean because of all the things I have to do, dishes is the one that my brain seized upon to do very thoroughly. I’ve also sorted the pencil drawer, and sorted the mess of random things at the end of the kitchen counter. I wish my neurotic attempts to assert control over all the things would manifest in a way that actually removes tasks from my list and emails from my box. Instead I just have to give up for the evening and try to reboot my brain with sleep. Hopefully it will function more effectively tomorrow.

I need to figure this out, because part of what is manifesting is my regular summer reaction to the lack of solitude. It hasn’t been as bad this year because the kids have leveled up in entertaining themselves quietly and in foraging. Yet I still need to figure out how to induce one of those days where I do all the things and create spaces. It would be lovely if tomorrow were that day.

Today began with me getting liquid nitrogen sprayed in my face and ended with me owning a new car. The actual details are much more mundane than the story that sentence promises. Surely such a sentence demands details involving villains, sharks with lasers, escapes from certain death, and probably an explosion.

Instead I went to the doctor’s office because there was a spot on my face that probably wasn’t anything, but sometimes I worried that it could be something, so I made the appointment. The doctor agreed that it was likely nothing cancerous or dangerous, but recommended we freeze it so that it would go away and stop bothering me. So we did. It stung quite a bit, but the doctor was very careful not to get any in my eyes.

The new car was completely unrelated to the liquid nitrogen. It was the right time and so Howard and I spent several hours debating options and then waiting for paperwork, after which I drove home a white Mazda 5. I need to name it something interesting before it acquires a boring label instead. The car loan gods smiled on us and we ended up with 0% financing. So that was a nice part of the day.

The first thing I did in my shiny new car was buy groceries. Life is so much boringer than stories. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that sharks with lasers are much more enjoyable when watching them than actually experiencing them. I’m sufficiently tired after my ordinary type of day.

Somehow I arrived at the evening of this day and I can not properly account for the hours. I must have done something, hopefully it was useful. Yet the only things I can really pinpoint as having completed are going to a dentist’s appointment, answering some email, and taking Gleek to get her hair sheared off into a pixie cut. Gleek loves the cut, says it is the first haircut she’s had that feels like her, and swears she’ll keep it that way forever. Kiki also loves it. Patch and Link are not so thrilled. I’m fascinated to watch the conversations about gender norms unfolding between my children. I’m also thinking about what it says about our culture that getting a haircut qualifies as a daring thing to do. This still does not answer the question of where did my day go. I’ve had a really focused and effective week. I suppose that had to fall apart sometime.

Yesterday the advance copies for The Body Politic showed up. Five shiny books which herald the coming of five thousand more in about four weeks. The arrival of advance copies means it is time for Howard and I to shift into book pre-order mode. Then there will be book release and shipping. It says something about how life has felt lately that contemplating a book shipping actually sounds relaxing and familiar.

For now I think I need to declare myself done attempting to work today and begin my weekend. Hopefully I can wake up feeling ready to do all the things.

I stepped outside my house and into the peace of my garden. Yes it has areas where the grass has grown waist high. No there are not nearly as many blooming plants as I would like, but it still breathes peace into me. This is my place and it has nothing to do with packages or emails.

Howard and I were short with each other yesterday. In hindsight I see that he was anxious about this trip. His last writer’s retreat was difficult for many reasons, one of which being that he was not prepared. It makes sense that his back brain would drive him toward extra preparedness. I, on the other hand, was still trying to finish up the last of the coin shipping and also trying to gather all the threads of things that need to be done before my departure next week. We frustrated each other without meaning to do so. Then at the end of the day we talked it through a little, carefully though. The trick is to let each other know the shape of the anger without creating more. Tonight none of it feels quite so urgent and I wonder why I got upset.

I scroll back through my blog entries and they are full of shipping updates for the past weeks. This is an accurate representation of how my life has been. I hope to be able to reclaim it, to have time for slow thoughts, to really see my kids. They’re around me all the time. I answer queries and help them solve problems. Yet when I get absorbed into weeks of work urgency I don’t really see them when I look at them. My brain is holding on to the work thoughts instead of focusing on the kids. Tomorrow is Saturday and I’ve closed down work for the week. I’ll pick it up again on Monday in a mad rush to complete things before I leave, but Saturday belongs to my kids and my house. Sunday I hope to rest. Resting would be lovely.

Of course I have to remember how to do it. I’ve been doing one thing after another for so long I hardly know how to stop. Perhaps I’ll figure it out this weekend.

“What have you got to do today?” Howard asked me first thing in the morning. He was headed for the shower and knew that his day was full of completing the last pieces for The Body Politic. There were words to write and pictures to draw; he was the one who had to do it.
“I don’t know.” I answered, not because I lacked for things to do, but because on a Saturday morning when I’ve finally cracked my eyes open, the one day a week when I get to sleep late, my brain does not immediately present me with my list of things that must be done. Truthfully I doesn’t on the other days either, but there are auto-pilot patterns to follow until my brain comes online with a plan for the day.

I am tired, worn from being the keeper of the schedule all week long. I track all my people, all their appointments, many of their tasks. I track more than I should, but it takes conscious effort for me to let go of things once my brain has flagged them as important or as likely to turn into a crisis if they aren’t managed well. On Saturday my alarm does not go off. Instead I lay in bed until my eyes open of their own accord. I’d like to spend the whole day free of assignments, but the week spills over and the weekend becomes the time when we do all the things that there was not time to do on the other days. For the past several weeks my Saturdays have been full of events and appointments, today was blissfully clear, a blank square on the calendar. It meant that my approach to the day could be free form instead of focused.

In the end I worked harder today than I have on many of the weekdays. I wrangled the kids into doing housework and I did a lot of it myself. The clean clothes are tucked safely into drawers instead of heaped in baskets. Rooms got vacuumed and I removed bags of trash from various corners of bedrooms. At one point Gleek complained about my decree that screens were to stay off until noon. “But Mom, if we all work until noon there won’t be any work left to do.” I wish child. The more I clean up, the more I can see that still needs to be organized. I could use a half dozen more Saturdays all in a row. I don’t get them. Not for quite a while. Summer will provide an unending stream of Saturday-like days during which my kids will need to do more housework. They’ll also be in the house making messes far more frequently. And there will be the influx of lunches to make.

Before we embarked on all of the cleaning, I put a reward at the end of it. I bought tickets for us all to go see Iron Man 3. It was a worthy reward and a nice way to end the day. Now the kids are in bed and I’m sitting on the couch alternately pondering plot points from the movie and all the things I’d still like to accomplish in my house. When Monday comes we’ll be back to school and business priorities. Someday I’ll get the flowerbeds weeded and the trim painted for our front room, but probably not this week.

Next Saturday I’ll be at LDS Storymakers conference. It is an event that I enjoy, but I’ll confess that I’ll miss having a free Saturday. This one was so very nice.

I suppose I should count it as a blessing when inconvenient things happen in the most convenient way possible. As an example, our Chevy Venture broke down this morning. Howard and I were on a run to Sam’s club together to confer about patio furniture. We stopped for gas, but when Howard turned the key to restart the car, nothing happened. The same nothing continued to happen the next twenty times as both Howard and I kept trying. We ended up pushing the car into a parking space and calling a neighbor to come retrieve us so that Howard could get back to work while we considered what to do.

In the end the car was towed to an automotive place within walking distance of our house. They determined the starter motor had died. An hour and $525 later, we have a functioning vehicle again. It was inconvenient, and more expensive than I wanted it to be. It also underlined clearly that our van is pushing twelve years old and 100,000 miles. It is show its age and moving out of the realm of quirky and into being unreliable. So I’m contemplating the further expense of replacing it. Not something I really wanted to do this year. But it didn’t break down in Goblin Valley last week, when we were 150 miles from the nearest tow truck and automotive repair shop. It didn’t leave my seventeen year old daughter stranded and in need of rescue. It didn’t fail on a day when I needed to rush down to a school to help with a child emergency. It even failed early enough in the day that I was able to arrange alternate rides for my kids after school, and I had the car back before the time that Patch and I picked for his special Mother son outing. The inconvenient thing happened as conveniently as possible.

Similarly, we’ve incurred quite a few extra expenses this month. The process of evaluating Gleek has not been covered by health insurance, nor will her therapy appointments be. Howard’s visits with a psychiatrist for depression have also not been covered. Link and Kiki both had minor medical issues requiring visits and lab work which are somewhat covered. Gleek got braces. The car needed repair. Our vacuum cleaner died. Sometime in the next month or two Kiki’s college is going to start asking for payments against her tuition and dorm registration. Yet, we have the money to cover all of this. It arrived before all of this did, in a completely unexpected level of success during the challenge coin kickstarter. My ballpark mental math says that even with all the unexpected expenses, we’ll be in better financial shape than we were before the kickstarter. Though I will be happier when the flow of bills and money has settled down enough for me to really see what is going on.

Patch and I were able to go on our planned date this evening. It was a special outing that we’ve been planning for a week because he needed it. So we went to see The Croods, which we’d both seen before, and out to sushi. It was a lovely time that I’m extremely grateful I did not have to reschedule at the last minute. Now I have to start shopping around and considering options for a replacement vehicle. I’m not looking forward to having payments again.

I’ve been extremely focused in the past few weeks. I have appointments to keep, assignments to get done, and deadlines to make. In addition I’ve been deliberately shifting some of my parenting tactics to meet the shifted needs of my kids. All of this requires my attention and energy. I run out of both long before I run out of things that require them. This is the reason that I’ve been culling all the non-essentials out of my schedule. I have enough hours for them, but I must conserve my energy against a surprise draw. Conflicts show up without consulting me to find out when it might be convenient.

The good news is that the term finally ended last Friday. We are done with the last scramble to get things turned in. Patch has a big report due next week, but then we’ll have Spring Break, a whole week with no new school things to track or react to. It will be a good thing, especially considering I tend to land on the shores of Saturday gasping for breath and needing the extra space. After the break I think things will be better. We’ll all be rested and ready to tackle the seven weeks to the end of the school year. Or so I hope.

Things feel pretty good right now. I’ve had a nice slow Saturday during which I got some things done and not others. I still have Sunday ahead of me before I plunge into Monday. Hopefully I can stock up enough rest and willpower to last me through next week.

Howard sent me home from church early. “Go sleep,” he said over my protests of a post-church meeting. He informed the other committee members that I would not be there and that I would be unavailable for any committee work until May. I came home and slept as ordered. Ninety minutes later Howard woke me up to eat food, after which I slept for another three hours. This is a measure for how sleep deprived and worn out I’ve gotten over the past couple of weeks. I was on duty every minute of every waking hour either managing something, planning to manage something, or preparing so that managing would be easier the next time around. In order to help Gleek and Patch I’ve had to seriously step up my parenting game. Other things have to go. I can’t do it all. I will break.

Excusing me from committee work is part of that effort. Howard did it for one committee. I emailed for the other. I’m pulling in on the internet as well, reading less, visiting fewer places, conserving my energy for things that matter. All of this reconsidering led me to rearrange my plans for
Strength of Wild Horses. I’ll still be running a Kickstarter for that project, but Angela and I will do the art creation and book layout first. When we’re all ready to go, then we’ll run a Kickstarter to fund the printing costs. Once I made the decision it seemed obvious to me that this is a much lower stress way to arrange the project. I wish I’d seen it two months ago.

Having removed some things from my schedule, I also have to add something: exercise. It got lost somewhere and I need to put it back.

The last two weeks required lots of emotional energy. I’m hoping this week can be more calm.