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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.

The morning after the first solid freeze is when trees dump all their leaves at once.

Yesterday all these leaves were still attached to branches. The tree didn’t even bother to change them to pretty colors first. Green or not, they got dumped. It’s as if the tree just decided to give up on leaves.

I can feel sympathy for that today. Sometimes the effort just seems like too much and I just want to let it all go while I hibernate for awhile.

One thing after another happened all day long. None of them were unexpected things, they were just all thinky, important, and urgent. So I did not get many spaces. Instead I:

Managed school departures and arrivals for four kids.

Put together and ordered our annual Schlock thank you postcard.

Began work on the 2013 Schlock calendar, because this year we want to customize the calendar pages rather than just dropping in some pre-made calendar pages.

Did the accounting.

Met with Kiki’s art teacher to talk about Kiki and what she can do to get some scholarships.

Helped Patch assemble a display for his science fair project.

Listened to Gleek’s newly-learned, short, repetitive song about manatees about a bajillion times.

Gave Kiki the tools and materials to matte her art for an art show.

Made dinner, while simultaneously running homework time and cooking a double batch of cookies all on a deadline because we needed to get out the door for cub scout pack meeting.

Attended pack meeting.

Came home to finish cooking the cookies and realized that all the cookies are ruined because in the chaos I did not add baking soda or salt. Threw away all the cookies.

Now I am tired and feel discouraged because I made that lovely list only two days ago about how I was going to make good use of my time, but right now all I want to do is shut off my brain and stop thinking about today.

The calendar square for today is empty–no appointments, activities, or places to be. So it would seem that I could have a quiet day of writing and working. That was what I’d planned for today when contemplating the day from a week’s distance. I knew last night that my plans for today were going to require revision. The day was filled to overflowing with the sorts of emotional events which do not get written on the calendar. Many of them slopped over into today as a result of yesterday’s deluge. None of it is tragic or long-term, just the various emotional dramas that attend the process of growing up. But now I’m looking at all the other blank days on my calendar and thinking how grateful I am that they are blank, because I’m certain they won’t actually be empty.

There are at least seven different places I could start to tell a story of today. A story, not the story. This day doesn’t have a single narrative, no big event which over rides all else and becomes the focus for all the events around it. Instead I’m left with pieces of stories: The science project in process sitting in mason jars on my counter. The lost homework paper which was the cause of much drama and stomping. The forgotten appointment that I hurried to arrive late for. The pounding of my feet on a treadmill while I listened to Disney’s ultimate swashbuckling album and pondered how pirate songs were not usual gym fare. The script I read for Howard before he headed out to draw on it. The plethora of emails both business and personal along with notifications from various colleges who are trying to make me believe that they’re enthralled with the wondrous capabilities of my daughter when they’re really hoping to get some of my money. The nap I didn’t take. The dinner which is sitting in a casserole dish on the stove “cooling” while I find the emotional energy to call everyone to the table. Then there are the fragments of stories yet ahead of me: homework time, dinner, bedtime.

I would dearly love to draw all of it together, make a coherent whole. I like it when stories have themes and deeper meanings than is implied by the basic scenes. Instead I must accept that today taken by itself does not carry a full story. All of these things are threads of much larger stories which will play out over the next months and years. Some days have stories, others just have pieces of stories. So it goes.

Reminders I needed today:

Running is better than crying (exercise is the mood balancer)

Shut up and write the words (on writerly kvetching courtesy of Shanna Germain.)

My job is to love people, not fix them.

Words have value even if they only change the one who writes them.

Reminders I didn’t necessarily need today, but which are good to remember and list here for a day when I do need them:

Patterns matter more than incidents.

Courage is not the absence of fear, it is deciding to act despite the fear.

Education is not a race with limited prizes at the end.

Fall down seven times. Stand up eight. (courtesy of Janci Patterson)

Your physical spaces should reflect your priorities.

Emotions are not a problem to be solved. They are a powerful indicator that there is a problem to be addressed.

Some goals can not be reached without a leap of faith.

Find the places that fill your soul and visit them often.

I do not like having a head cold. I do not like it Sam I Am. That statement would be a lot more clever if I’d made it rhyme. Of course rhyming verse construction appears to be one of the functions shut down by having a head cold. Also shut down: prioritization, energy, and will to go do things. I not even feeling all that miserable. I keep doing mental assessments of my physical state and thinking that I should just shake it off and get stuff done. I did accomplish the important meeting of the day, take Link to check for strep (negative), and pick up all the kids from school on schedule. But right now I’m staring down the barrel of dinner, homework time, and Family Home Evening. All I want to do is crawl into bed and watch movies until time to sleep.

Tomorrow will be better. I know this. I’m not even intending to complain really. I just suspect that it will be nice to have recorded that some days are full of sloth and fatigue rather than organization and competence.