First day back to routine

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I stared blearily at the clock. 6:30. It was beeping at me. Oh. That’s right, the kids have school. How do I do school mornings again? I was pretty sure it started by me getting out of bed and stopping the beeps. Thus our new year began with me pulling out memories of how to run school mornings which felt crinkled and ages old.

Thus our new year began. I know that technically the year is already three days old, but I never feel like it is the new year until we’ve re-established our routines. I’m not sure we’ve quite succeeded yet, but the creakiness of the morning has given way to an afternoon that has a familiar shape to it.

The first work week of a new year is always gobbled up by accounting and beginning of the year to-do lists. The deluge of book keeping isn’t depressing me this year because I remembered to expect it. This year I’m also trying to settle new habits of thought into my schedule as well. So far it is working, but I still feel like I’m wearing a cloak of these thoughts rather than residing in them as if they were my skin. I’ll get there.

I hit one of the first challenges to my new frame of mind. Kiki is struggling with her class load this year. Instead of stepping up and getting the work done, she has grown to depend upon me organizing and enforcing work. This pattern was necessary last Fall when she was truly drowning. Lately, she has plenty of time but tends to avoid work until I prod her. Then she gets grouchy at me for reminding her that homework exists in the world even if we don’t want it to. Kiki is aware of the illogic of her behavior. She is honestly sorry even while she flops into a heap of “I can’t do it” and waits for me to make her. I feel frustrated with her, but compelled to keep pushing because I can’t let her short-sightedness damage her long-term future. So we run in little codependent circles which do neither of us any good.

This is where my new parenting focus and new thought patterns helped me. I was able to see the pattern and pick apart the errors in my own thinking. My false thought was this: “If I don’t help her, she’ll fail. Then she’ll feel even more helpless and depressed. It will spiral downward from there.” The truth is that Kiki is stronger and smarter than that. She might fail a little, but then she’ll dust herself off and figure it out. Instead of being her safety net and task master, I need to be her resource which she can tap for help at times of her own choosing. I need to be more hands off. Which frightens me. Because she could choose avoidance and depression instead of work and confidence. Finding the right balance is going to be tricky. The good news is that I can share every one of these thoughts with Kiki. I can tell her exactly what I am trying to accomplish. Together we can find the best balance for us both.

Balance, that is what I’m striving for in this new year. Along with it I want to find measures of peace and joy to go along with the feeling of purpose that carries me forward. The year started creakily, but I think we’ll all limber up and make it a good one.

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New Year’s Eve at Chez Tayler

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At 10:30 pm it was just me and the cat. The two teens in our house had scattered for parties with friends. Howard was also out. The younger two were abed and asleep. I was pretty content, particularly when the cat decided that our house needed a vigorous defense against the ravages of hair bands. Only she got embarrassed if I watched her play, so I had to snicker quietly.
11:00 Howard came home. He’d been having fun, but decided that he wanted to come home and be with me.
11:10 Link came tromping through the back yard. He’d also had a great time but said “I decided to spend New Year’s with my family.” The three of us sat down to play a game of Poo, which is a card game about monkeys who fling. (I can now honestly say that I got Howard monkey poo for Christmas.)
11:40 Kiki came in through the front door. She repeated Link almost verbatim “It was fun, but I decided to spend New Year’s with my family.”
So we played Poo until the fireworks let us know that the date stamp had changed over.

I think this counts as a family win.

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New Goals (But not necessarily New Year’s Resolutions)

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In the past 10 days I have had a series of introspective realizations. These thoughts very naturally to the formation of new goals. The little non-conformist voice in my brain says “We can’t make new goals now. It’s New Year’s Eve. Everyone is making new goals.” But I have the goals, and they are exactly what I need at this point in my life. It would be foolish to squelch or delay them out of an impulse to be different. These goals are not things that I will be putting on my To Do list or pushing myself to complete. I can’t complete them, not in the sense that they’ll be done forever. This makes them a very different sort of goal than I am used to making. There will be no progress to track, no self-applied pressure. These goals are merely a little mental sanity check of five things that I will perform each day in an effort to be conscious of the good and enjoyable things in my life.

My five daily things:
1. Read Scriptures/say prayers. I am specifying no particular amount nor am I requiring myself to always ponder deeply. But for at least a few minutes each day I will be present to and address my sources of spiritual direction.

2. Small happy conversations/thoughts. Included in this goal is my plan to have at least one non-business related, happy conversation with Howard each day. It can be very short. Also included is the effort I blogged about recently where I consciously find things currently present in my life which are opposite to my worries.

3. Do something each day to improve my health and physical fitness. I have a format for this which seems to be working. My slide into stress was accompanied by a weight gain. It isn’t much of one, but the reversal of this will do much to help me feel in control of my life.

4. Spend some time each day being a writer. This might be only five minutes where I consciously ponder a plot point. The purpose is to create a space during which I at least glance into my cupboard of writing thoughts.

5. Spend a couple of hours each week working on a project which makes me happy and can not possibly earn us money. Hobbies exist to make life joyful. I haven’t made space for mine in over a year.

If I miss something on the list on an individual day, that’s fine. I have no intention of keeping score. I probably only need the daily mental review of the list long enough to make space for happiness part of my daily life.

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Pondering next year’s calendar

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The calendar lay across half of my kitchen table. Around it were multi-colored pens, my planner, a schedule from the school, and last year’s calendar laid partially across the top. The time for my annual switching of the wall calendar had arrived. All the various notes and plans made for 2011 were dutifully recorded in the color of the family member to which they applied. I stood back and surveyed next year laid out before me. It didn’t look too bad, but there were big events not on the calendar because the dates for them are not yet fixed. Howard and I had a long conversation about this just after Christmas. We mentally juggled book production and release schedules against the fixed commitments on the calendar. Some side projects were approved while many were tossed in the “not this year” file. The resulting plan for next year is busy, but hopefully only crazy in a few spots.

My fingers traced across the calendar as I mentally marked our tentative press and shipping dates for the two books we plan to produce next year. My hand hovered over June and July which look empty on the calendar, but which I know will be full of preparations for GenCon and WorldCon as well as book production. I thought back to a piece from I book I’ve read recently. It talked of an old Jewish man who never made any kind of appointment or plan without speaking the words “God Willing.” For the man this was not a fatalistic prediction that the plan would fail, but rather an acknowledgment that no mortal being is in full control of his life. Many things may happen between now and next week to make a dinner date impossible, he speaks the words so that he will not be angry or frustrated if some other event intervenes.

I press my hand flat against the calendar. I have planned next year. It is a good plan. I have built in more flexibility in the months. I have place space for happiness to dwell in each day. I intend to hold this schedule loosely and not panic when it inevitably has to shift or change. God willing, this is how 2011 will be. If it turns out differently, and it almost certainly will, then I will try to trust that there is a bigger plan with pieces that I can not see.

The calendar now hangs on my wall. I’m ready to proceed.

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Gleek in Flight

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“No, it’s okay. I can do it myself!” Gleek says firmly. The attendant releases his hold on the bungee cord and Gleek proceeds to shift her body to increase her bounce height. She is safely tethered between two poles above a trampoline, but I can see the slight uneasiness in her face. This “sky flight” looked so much easier from the mall floor when she decided to spend five of her precious Christmas dollars. I see her shift in the harness, uncomfortable, but not willing to let that discomfort prevent her from doing the tricks she wants. Bounce by bounce she goes higher until she dares a flip. Her hair flies back to reveal her triumphant grin.

My body moves in sympathy with her bounces, as if I could somehow help from my seat on the bench 20 feet away. I don’t mean to do it, but some part of my brain knows that if she would only shift just so, her bounces would be higher. My muscles flex in a vain attempt to telegraph motion to her. Gleek soars into the air again, flipping, bouncing, only occasionally glancing at me to see if I am watching. This is what she needs from me, a witness to her efforts.

Sometimes Gleek’s motions go wrong, killing the bounce. She jiggles on the ends of her tethers, trying to regain lost momentum. The attendant reaches to help and Gleek waves him away, just as she waves away help both at home and at school. I’d watched this guy with the other kids. He pulled on the bungee and they flew much further than they can get by their own weight. He keeps his hands by his sides and watches as Gleek builds her own bounces. I still my body yet again.

When time is up, she comes back to the ground both glad to be done and wanting more. We gather her purchases and collect her shoes, mall trip complete. Then we head out into the bright world to find a new challenge for me to witness.

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Reorganizing my office, my computer, and my brain

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After a 5 day holiday hiatus, I have resumed my office reorganization project. This time I’m tackling digital files. I need to make space on my primary drive so that I can be working on two Schlock books in parallel. (An amusing coincidence: one of the books will be titled Massively Parallel.) My computer is out of date and needs replacing. This is item number one on the list of Things to Do Once We’ve Opened Pre-orders and Have a Buffer of Money Again. Until then, I shuffle files, burn data to disk, and make dual back-ups on external drives.

On it surface this data shuffling does not seem to do anything to forward my office reorganization, but this reorganization is not only about optimizing my physical space. Even more important than making the things I need easy to find is the mental process of looking at exactly how I work. My work processes have grown in response to necessity, usually in the urgency of the moment. After that I was a bit afraid to mess with a system that was working in the middle of a crisis. (Something always felt like a crisis) Now I am questioning if some of the way I work is helping to create a feeling of crisis where none needs to exist. This is similar to the mental adjustment I’m attempting to make in how I worry about/ trust in my children.

It is time to reorganize, re prioritize, and re-evaluate. I know what my goals are, they haven’t changed any, but my mode of travel needs to improve a lot. The physical organization let me see that mental organization was necessary. The mental organization is helping me see how the physical organization can work even better. In the end I don’t know that I will reach any of my goals more quickly. That’s not the point. The point is to be less tired and more happy as I travel.

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Relaxed day in limbo land

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The week between Christmas and New Years is always a sort of limbo. All the big events of the holiday season are complete, but we can’t yet return to normal because the kids are still out of school. Add to that the fact that the holiday provided me with space to unpack and reorganize all my thoughts. I now have plans I want to implement, but they need to be built into “normal” and so must wait for normal to arrive before I can fully see if they will work.

Despite being in limbo, today was a good day. It was not as focused as I’d hoped it would be, but I still got all of the necessary tasks done. The kids played more video games than I probably should have allowed. Perhaps tomorrow I will require more cleaning.

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Seeking bright things instead of dark

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For months now I have been swimming in fear. Or perhaps a better description would be wallowing in worry, because swimming implies movement and possibly gracefulness. I don’t feel like I’ve moved at all. I’m still stuck in the same emotional morass. Some of the worries have revolved around business or financial fears, but mostly I have worried over the children. These worries have worn tracks in my brain so deep that it is hard for me to believe that my kids could travel by any other path than the one I fear most. Then I spend emotional energy trying to figure out how I can heave them out of this dangerous path. I’ve also spent time feeling guilty because I’ve been more worried about one child than another, as if the lack of worry somehow demonstrated a lack of love.

I’m tired of wallowing. I want to wash off and do something else with my mental energies. I’ve devised a means by which I can consciously re-train my mind into new habits. I intend to spend some focused time each day thinking of qualities that my children already possess which are opposite of my fears for them. (The “already posses” is critical here. This is not about me creating, but about me recognizing.) I will try to find specific actions made by the child within the prior 24 hours which demonstrate those qualities. For example: If I worry that a child will cave to negative peer pressure and bullying, I will counter the fear by remembering the rainbow socks she wore even though some other kids thought they were odd. I will follow that up by remembering how my daughter did not care about other opinions because the socks made her happy.

This process will teach me to look for and witness the bright, wonderful, and strong things about each of my children. It will teach me why I don’t need to be so worried. A natural effect of me noticing the good qualities will be that I react more to the good things. This isn’t part of my conscious and careful plan, I always react to what I see, I just intend to notice different things. I believe that my increased response to positive things will in turn have an effect on my kids. Children thrive on attention and response. They instinctively increase behaviors which earn them attention and responses. My reactions to the strong, bright, good qualities that they have will encourage them to grow in those ways–just as a seedling turns toward the light.

Their growth will be a happy side-effect, but it is not the point. My focus is on changing me, not them. I’ve been exactly backward in my thoughts lately. I was racing around a maze, trying to brick up all the dark alleys. Instead I should have been working on making the bright and beautiful paths easy to find and follow. I do that by traveling them myself. In the end my children must make their own choices. They will not always make the choices I wish they would. But I need to feed my trust in who they are so that I can watch and love without so much fear.

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The Nativity, Beginnings, Middles, and Faith

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Shepherds, wise men, angels, Mary, and Joseph, they all rejoiced at the birth of Jesus. They all came from cultures which prophesied and awaited the coming of the Messiah who would save them all. I wonder how dismayed they were to wake up the next morning and discover that there were diapers to be changed, sheep to be fed, and normal life to be lived. The birth of Christ was a long-awaited moment, but it was only the beginning. Years of work and preparation were necessary before the true work of the Messiah could be done.

I am in the middle of raising my children. This Fall has been a tumultuous one, not in events, but in emotions. In no measurable way am I at the culmination of anything, nor at the beginning of something else. It would be nice to have a clear marker on the road, what I have instead is Christmas. I stare at the porcelain nativity scene and look at the baby. I look at the Mary in blue, so serene. They are frozen in the moment of joy, which turned out to be a brilliant moment at the very beginning of a long hard path. But once the path was done, not a one of them would regret it.

I’ll take Christmas as my marker. The fact that I’m here means that 2010 has passed and somehow we all survived. More than just survived, we have grown. I will photograph many things tomorrow and years from now I will look back and be able to see the whats and whys of where we are. I think I will look back and see that this Fall and this Christmas were a beginning. More importantly I’ll be able to see what was begun and why it matters.

I don’t think the real Mary was quite so serene as my porcelain one. She had just been through labor, not the medically-assisted, epidural-ific version of labor that I have experienced. She did natural childbirth. In a stable. With no doctor or nurse, or anyone but Joseph nearby. She must have been frazzled, sore, and high on endorphins. She knew she was at the beginning of something, all new mothers do, but what measure of terror she must have felt when contemplating the path before her. Perhaps she did not experience the Nativity as a moment of pure clarity and beauty, but rather as a muddle which only made sense later.

I think I can have faith in that. I can trust that it will make more sense later when I am not in the middle of so many things.

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My holiday from urgent tasks

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Yesterday morning my life was awful and impossible. This evening life is good and happy. Since nothing much has changed in the last 36 hours I am reluctantly forced to acknowledge once again that my emotional state is prone to fluctuation and therefore not a good short-term measure for my quality of life. What is valuable is taking an after-the-fact look at the specific complaints I listed as to why my life was impossible. The analysis is not surprising. I am not spending enough time on activities which replenish my emotional well-being. I’m not just talking about “taking time out for me” because some of the things I find most fulfilling are when I spend time deliberately helping someone outside my immediate family. Other soul-filling activities are actually a lot of work, (gardening, writing, family photo books) but the work I spend on them makes me feel like my life has value in a way that I can see and measure. I can see the weeds pulled, the words written, the pages finished. It is kind of hard to quantify “parenting” particularly when it is like the air I breathe, omnipresent and invisible.

The holiday has created a little space where many of my other responsibilities are held at bay. It is rather like one of those lulls in the crashing waves where the ocean pulls back leaving me standing ankle deep in wet sand. There are no packages to ship, emails to answer, tasks to complete, because most everyone else is also on vacation. The schools have backed off as well. There will be homework to manage next week, but this week is clear. The waves that have pushed against me and occasionally swamped me have retreated for a moment. In this space I organized and sorted and discarded. Mostly this is a physical sorting as I discarded years of old papers and garbage. As I sorted through piles, my brain also sorted. I dredged up old memories and then filed them away in new places. As I organized, I began to picture how my physical spaces need to be arranged so that I can accomplish the tasks that are in front of me. But I tried not to think too much about the tasks themselves. Tasks have dictated the order of my days for more than half a year. The biggest value in this holiday space is the freedom from urgency. I have time to consider what is important to me rather than what must be done right away to prevent an imminent crisis.

My space will only last until Monday. I can see the urgency swelling like a large wave gathering momentum to crash across the shore. A part of me wants to start preparing now, hurry and complete a dozen small chores so that they’ll be out of the way. Instead I am doing the mental equivalent of wiggling my toes in the sand, looking at the sky, and taking a deep breath. It is good to take time off from battling the waves to remember that I like the beach.

Before Monday arrives I intend to have a plan. It needs to be simple and low maintenance, but I need some structure which demands that part of each day is given over to things which are important even though they may not be urgent.

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