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Sometimes I get to the end of a day and I am too tired for clever and pretty words.
The day in list:
Everybody up
Early school drop off
Homework scramble
Kids to school
Shipping and email
Setting up Howard to work
Attend a friend’s birthday lunch
Leave early because Kiki injured herself at school
Make Dr. appt.
Arrange for someone else to do afternoon carpool.
Shipping and observing Kiki because a trip to the emergency room is still under consideration.
Go to doctor
Kiki has an acute abdominal strain. She acquired it during yoga in PE. She is now excused from PE for four weeks. We have a prescription for physical therapy, but we’re only to use it if we feel it is necessary.
Come home
Feed some Children
Solve shipping problem
Read email and learn that a beloved childhood friend is hospitalized after multiple strokes. She was a second mother to me and she’s all the way across the country where I can’t visit. I haven’t even spoken with her in years. How did I not keep in touch better?
Departed house with Gleek for choir concert
Helped set up chairs.
Was asked did I know that the kids were supposed to be wearing Sunday best? (Gleek was in a skirt, but a casual shirt.)
Drove home to get a change of clothes, kicking myself because I could have avoided the trip if I’d been paying more attention prior to departure.
Listened to an adult acapella group put in a solid performance.
Listened to an elementary school orchestra play christmas songs that were recognizable. Barely. They were cute though.
Listened to Gleek and her choir.
Came home.
Attended writer’s group because it was at my house.
Ushered kids into bed, but later than it ought to have been.

We were all in the kitchen when we heard the sound of rain pelting on the windows.
“Sounds like weather.” Howard said. I flipped on the porch light to show us the blowing rain.
“But our cat is out there!” Gleek said. She jumped out of her chair and called out the back door. Then she ran to the front door and called from there too.
“The cat is fine.” I assured Gleek. “She’s found a dry place to curl up and probably doesn’t want to come through the rain to the door. I reminded Gleek that our cat took care of herself just fine for several months while she was a stray. That’s how she became ours.

Bedtime continued, but I left the lights on so we could see the cat should she show up. She did only about ten minutes later. She was wet, but only a dash across the yard wet, not soaked by the rain wet. The cat did not much appreciate the quick toweling, but she purred for the petting. Gleek was quite relieved to know that the cat was indoors and safe.

This is far from the only instance when my kids have been worried for our cat. Sometimes she spends all night outdoors and the kids worry about her. But she always shows up, ready to purr and be in the house. In fact a major source of conflict in our house is differing opinions about how we should treat the cat.

So our wayward pet is indoors and I lock the deadbolts. No one else will be exiting before morning. I pause a moment to look out at the puddles out in the street. Raindrops scatter the reflected light from the street lamp. There is a flash of lightning and thunder rolls overhead. Thunder is not the usual music for December, but I feel happy hearing it this evening. I’m not really ready for the world to be snowy yet, but we can use the moisture. I like the sound of the rain. It feels cozy and Christmas-ish. My childhood Decembers in California never featured snow.

Earlier in the day I walked home during a light rain. It was more of a sprinkle, certainly nothing like the windy wetness outside. I like walking in the rain. It feels free. When I am in the rain, I know that I have not let the weather stop me from doing something I want to do. Sometimes a desire to not go in the rain traps me at home, which is why I feel strong and confident when I do venture forth. Out in the rain I’ve abandoned responsibility and opened up that part of myself which likes to splash in puddles and kick through piles of fallen leaves.

I was very responsible this weekend. I made sure that eight children and four adults had three meals a day for two days. I sorted invoices and attended meetings. I went to bed at night with a head so stuffed full of responsibility that it kept me awake. I wish there had been rain to listen to in those dark post-midnight hours instead of only my own breathing. I got up in the morning feeling barely rested and continued to be responsible until about the time the rain began. I don’t think it was the rain which caused me to curl up and watch TV. I was already headed there, the rain just made it feel more cozy.

The wind has calmed now, leaving the sound of raindrops falling to the ground instead of blowing against the house. My house has calmed too. Soon we will all be in bed, hopefully to sleep restfully. The weather report says the rain will be gone tomorrow.

This morning I turned on “You’re a Mean One Mr. Grinch” as background while I did the dishes. Except that song never stays as background. Within moments I was singing along. Howard wandered up the stairs and joined the chorus. Then he plugged in his iPad to play an alternate version. We sang to that one too. After the music stopped, Howard pointed out that it really is an odd addition to the canon of Christmas music. It is a song about a truly terrible person sung by a narrator who is trying really hard to be thoroughly insulting. Yet it is unequivocally Christmas music for me. This is because every time I hear the song, I remember the rest of the story. I remember that Christmas came without packages, boxes, or tags. I remember the whos hand in hand singing. Most of all I remember the Grinch’s heart, his triumphant return, and the carving of the roast beast. None of this is in the song, yet all of it is there. This is the power of story.

I started to think about it, and realized that this is true of many of my favorite Christmas songs, though for some it is not the story their writers may have intended. I remember the other times of singing a particular song. Memories return of singing when I was 10, 12, 15, 25, 38. Year after year the songs do not change, but they accumulate more meaning with every memory which is attached to them. Ten years from now this morning’s impromptu concert will be part of the grinch song. It reminds me of an essay I wrote long ago about composite memories. Love in the Cookie Dough.

The schedule for this morning was rearranged by a flat tire while Howard was on his way to the airport to drop off some friends. They made their flight, just barely. I was the back up plan and ended up following Howard home as he drove with the spare tire on the freeway. We have a new tire now, thank goodness for warranties. In the less fortunate category: An unexpected medical bill for nerve conduction testing we did on Howard’s hand last April. Insurance cut the bill in half, but it is still not cheap. The garage door needs to be fixed and so does the fridge. Fun.
In good news: The calendars will arrive tomorrow instead of Friday as I’d calculated.
This means our house has to shift over into shipping high gear, except Howard still has to do a week of comics, I have pack meeting, parent teacher conferences at two different schools, and Patch has a big book report due on Thursday. On Friday I’m fleeing the house to go to a concert with a friend and returning home to a house full of guests.
So.
Ready. Set. Go.

Over at Feel More Better, Mir Kamin has written a beautiful post about thankfulness and happiness. One paragraph in particular jumped out at me.

Life is hard. I fear for those I love, and I hurt for those I can’t protect or heal. But somehow I’ve learned that wrapping that hardship around me like a familiar old blanket does nothing but make everything worse. Some days are hard. Our heartbreak isn’t even close to being over, and there will undoubtedly be days when I do pull the covers over my head and wish the world away… for a little bit. In the meantime, just as I can’t stop the bad stuff, I can’t keep the sun from shining, I can’t stop my son from dancing into my office to make me laugh, there’s absolutely no stopping my dog from being a joyous goofball over the dumbest things (“ZOMG A DUST MOTE!!”), and there is love enough in my life to hold me up when I falter. I wish life was easier. I am grateful anew for the uncomplicated bits, when it’s not.

I love the thought that accepting we are powerless against bad things also means that we should accept the good things too.

Yesterday I was told a story about how military officers get eighty soldiers to take a shower in ten minutes using only six shower heads. It involved marching naked with bars of soap, jumping under the water, running to the end of the line and soaping while waiting for another turn under the water. I listened to this story and had the natural “glad I don’t have to do that” thought. Further stories included keeping one of the two available bathrooms unused and spotless for inspection, having a special set of never-word underwear, also for inspection. In hearing these stories I began to think about human nature, the psychology of creating a unit out of disparate people, and why individuals need to be stressed in order to forge that unit. There is the pure physical necessity. We’ve only got ten minutes and eighty people to get clean is a powerful incentive to shed the trappings of regular civilization. Necessity changes the rules. However there is also great cohesive power when a group of people experiences the same unpleasant thing, they begin to bond.

Howard and I are not military, nor are we ever likely to be, but we are definitely trying to forge a group of individuals into a unit which is capable of hanging together in a crisis. We are building a family and sometimes that requires a sacrifice of individuality for the good of the group. Unlike the military, families must sometimes sacrifice the good of the group for the growth of the individual. Yet there are things to be learned from the tactics of basic training. It is only by pushing people beyond their limits that they get new limits. There are times when the role of parent feels astonishingly similar to the role of drill sergeant.

The source of these military stories is a pair of friends who are staying with us. They are a couple who intend to have children in the future and have been quite honest in admitting that they’re watching to see how we run our household of four kids. So far they haven’t gotten to witness the melt-down stuff. We’ve been moving smoothly through our routines with the kids managing their responsibilities. Knowing that they’re observing, causes me to step back and observe too. It lets me see that currently our family runs like a well oiled machine. All the parts have roles and responsibilities. We all know our assignments and chores. Sometimes there is friction, but the system as a whole works well. This is not how it used to be. When the kids were young everything felt much more messy. Every chore was an argument. Every bedtime a battle. We built systems and they fell apart. We built new systems out of the pieces of old ones and they fell apart too. So much of the work during those early childhood years was spent trying to create family identity and patterns out of chaos. There were entire years when we went to church, not to be spiritually fed, but to teach the kids that church is what we do on Sunday. Some things came easy others felt like we would never get them right. Yet here we am with this functioning system and I can’t pinpoint when we stopped having to massively reconfigure it every three months. I’m also acutely aware that even though things are running now, there are additional reconfigurations in our future. The cool thing is that this system now has six mechanics instead of two.

I’m watching my friends too. I listen to their stories about military life and see how they work together to build a family despite the demands that military careers present. I ponder the unfairness inherent in the fact that if a heterosexual couple wants to have biological children, the woman is the only one who can give them birth, no matter how much logical or fiscal sense it might have to assign child bearing differently. I’m also thinking about the larger unfairness in family planning. There are people like Howard and I. We’ve had our babies and have moved onward to where the thought of having another baby is dismaying. Then there are other people who have yet to be able to parent despite longing for it.

I also see the ways in which larger communities also arrange themselves as needed for crowd control, people management, and (hopefully) personal growth. That last part sometimes gets forgotten in places where it should be paramount, like schools. Sometimes the systems need to be tweaked, other times they need to be completely reconfigured. Brilliant people can make a hodge podge system work beautifully, but it is best when the system is set up so that everyone does a little bit of maintenance and all runs smoothly. All of these thoughts swirl around each other and through each other, not coalescing into an particular insight or realization. Yet the patterns of flow are interesting. I shall have to think more on it.

Lois Bujold has a new book out this week, Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance. I’ve been busy reading. It is lovely to get to visit Barrayar again. The other thing that has been eating time this weekend has been squashing comment spam. However there was one side benefit. I had a random walk through my blog archive and thus re-read some old posts. I found this one particularly worthwhile. It talks about how I have trained myself to get things done by setting memory triggers and practicing them. It’s worth reading if you need more words from me today. As for me, I’m diving back into Bujold’s words.

It is 7:30 am and I am already a failure, or so my back brain tells me. It has, in fact, been telling me all about it since 1 am with a brief pause for a few hours of sleep. Some of the things I’m failing at are ridiculous. I can look at them with the eyes of logic and know that it is ridiculous, but I still feel like a failure. So I’m going to write out the list, hopefully when I am done writing it I’ll be to mock it and make the rest of the day much better.

I fail because:

I’ve been cranky at my kids this morning.

I burned Kiki’s breakfast quesadilla and had to make a second one.

I am unable to magically transport merchandise to customers without having to charge shipping costs.

I have not yet finished the cropping and layout for Body Politic, which I should have finished months ago.

My house is cluttery and dirty, I’ve known this for weeks and have yet to fix it.

There is mildew on the bathroom ceiling.

I haven’t exercised for two days.

Patch’s water cycle experiment did not work as advertised.

There are ice packs frozen solid in the door of my freezer and I haven’t yet figured out how to un-jam them from the space without leaving the freezer door open for several hours. (Edited to add: HA! Me and my hair dryer are victorious in the battle of the freezer door. Take that frozen gell packs.)

Laundry.

My average daily word count for this week is 473, not 1000.

I still have a box of pears waiting for me to turn them into canned food.

There is a box of walnuts waiting to be shelled and dried.

My office needs sweeping.

The front porch light has been broken for years and I’ve never used emotional energy and time to figure out why.

Howard and Kiki are both tired/stressed.

None of the things I write earn money in significant quantities.

It is now 9 am and I’ve still not finished nor posted this list.

I keep spending money on things.

I should be paying more attention to frugality, meal planning, chore schedules, shopping smart for the holidays.

Gleek and Patch have been squabbling an blaming each other for things almost incessantly during the past two days.

I have healthy food in my house, but I ate all the cookies instead.

I am being the best business manager I know how to be, but I am daily faced with evidence that this job could be done better.

…and because my brain is incapable of simply posting a blog without also arguing against itself for the other side, here are the list of things done right since Sunday:

Link successfully hosted a scout meeting and presented his ideas for their summer camp by handing out a flyer. This is Link’s success, I only played the role of spotter, but having this go right felt hugely important.

Gleek was invited to join a second choir, so now she has two choir practices each week until she has two holiday concerts.

We opened pre-orders on the calendar and thus launched our holiday shipping season. Also, the calendar is ready to go to print.

I answered a couple of letters.

Took the kids to see Wreck-It Ralph. (Which also cost money and I remembered how theater popcorn is made of delicious regret.)

This morning I had too many things to do and I wanted to do them all at once. I wanted to sleep, go to the gym, shower, crop images for The Body Politic, do the laundry, work on the 2011 family photo book, clean the bathroom, write fiction, write blog posts, mail packages, prep invoices for calendar shipping, and write an amazing tweet which would convince the whole world to order Schlock calendars. All of these things were fighting for priority in my head to the point where I could hardly discern what the separate items were. I ended up laying down with a notebook nearby so that I could make notes of the thoughts that surfaced from the mess. This segued right into the first item on the list: sleep. I don’t like sleeping while the kids are in school. It feels like a waste of uninterrupted time. But today I slept for over two hours. The only other thing on my list which I worked on was the cropping for Body Politic and prepping some invoices. I really hope that tomorrow is a much more effective day.

The only thing that feels like I did it right was taking the kids to go see Wreck-It Ralph. We all came home singing and happy. Then there was homework to do.

The retreat was in a house on forested land. I took my head full of stress and emotion out wandering in the mossy woods every day. Each morning, each walk, each conversation, each dinner, I kept watching and waiting for a moment. I didn’t know what it would look like or when it would happen, but I was waiting for the moment when I would think “Ah. This is why I came.” I wanted reassurance that all the emotional turmoil had a purpose, a use. I wanted to be able to see the good coming from it. I waited all week long and never had that moment. I had good memories and hard ones, but no single moment strong enough to redeem the struggle.

My house sits in a valley reclaimed from desert. I sit in my back garden looking up at the mountains and at the trees I planted with my own hands fifteen years ago. It has been a month since that retreat and I can now see the multitude of ways that the retreat has been useful. Pieces of experience are repurposed into stories. Realizations and thoughts from the retreat have sent out tendrils into my life causing tiny shifts. The effects of those shifts are only just beginning to show. Since the retreat I have had a dozen small moments where I think “Ah. That makes sense now.” Individually these moments don’t outweigh the struggle, but they continue to accumulate.

I knew this already. Even in the middle of the retreat, when I was waiting for a moment, I knew that the value of a struggle lays in what comes afterward. In the midst of my radiation therapy all I could do was manage a day at a time. Later those experiences gave me the tools I needed to help other people and survive other things. That medical struggle reforged my marriage and taught me spiritual endurance which continues to help me. I’d already learned that when I struggle to keep going beyond the limits of my strength, then for ever afterward my limitations are further out than they were before.

Today Link came home from school and described a mile run that he participated in during his PE class. It involved alternating sprints and walks. I listened to Link describe how he’d tackled the run and I heard the confidence in his voice, because he knew that he’d pushed himself to his physical limits and was surprised to discover that they were further out than he expected. He is now a person who passes others when running instead of being passed. “I didn’t know I could do that, Mom.” Link is finally seeing the value in all the sore muscles he’s experienced in the past two months.

It is hard in the middle of hard times to believe that anything good will come out of them, but growth is born from struggle.