One Cobble at a Time

This morning I started methodically cleaning up the things around my house that were making me depressed. It was a good start. I planned to hand Patches off to my neighbor to go to the farm/park. Then I would have 2 hours with no kids. I planned to use those hours to re-center myself. I was going to clean some things up, maybe do some writing. But then Patches clung to my leg and didn’t want to go without me. I could have forced him to go, but that would have handed a screaming tantrum to my neighbor who was planning to shepherd 4 young kids through a farm. I could have kept him home, but that would have disappointed him and my neighbor’s son. The only option that allowed for happiness was for me to change my plans and go along. So I did. It was good. I enjoyed being at the park. I enjoyed watching Patches carefully parcel out his little bag of corn to make sure that all the animals got a taste. I enjoyed visiting with my neighbor.

Then I came home. All the stresses and messes were laying in wait for me here. They are better than they were. Howard is home now. I can see that I’m digging out from under. There is progress. But all afternoon I had to hold onto patience with my fingernails lest it get away from me. It escaped several times. Each time it did I would recapture it and resolve to hold on tighter. It is not pleasant to ride the edge that way, knowing how close I am to shouting at my children. Knowing as I shout that I am over reacting. Also knowing that even on a good day I have trouble dealing with two children crying and a third yelling simultaneously. All day I’ve had this sense of too many things happening at once. The out of control feeling drives me crazy and I feel frantic to do anything I can to minimize the chaos as quickly as possible. So I shout and I make arbitrary decisions because I don’t have time or brainspace to make considered or considerate ones.

Now I am at the end of the day. The kids are in bed. Finally I have time to review, to figure out how far out of line I was. The crises I managed would have been challenging even on a good day. But on a good day I probably would have been ahead of the curve and there would not have been so many crises.

Tomorrow Patches has been invited to go to a local farm/park. I’ve been invited to go along if I wish. I don’t wish. The prospect of having several hours free of all children is more attractive to me than the prospect of going with my friend to watch our kids enjoy farm animals. I’m not sure yet whether I’ll go. I feel bad for sending my child and not helping with the outing management.

Wednesday is the cub scout Pine Wood Derby. There are people who consider turning a block of wood into a car to be a delightful challenge. I am not one of them. I do not have a table saw and sander in my garage. I don’t have that other tool which I don’t even know exists, but which would probably have made construction much easier. What I do have is a pruning saw, a sheet of sandpaper, and very tired arms. Link did most of the sanding and now he’s doing the painting. But on Wednesday is the big event where Link will be very sad to discover that his car loses to the cars of kids whose parents have power tools. Then after the chaos and emotion management of the pine wood derby, I get to go to a girls camp preparatory meeting with Kiki.

Thursday is Kiki’s big Shakespeare play. She has been working on this for months. I have to attend. I can either attend the daytime performance, but duck out to retrieve Gleek from school in the middle of it. Or I can arrange for babysitting and attend the evening performance. This is also the day I’m supposed to volunteer in Gleek’s class. I’ll probably cancel that. And Gleek has a birthday party to attend. At least I have the costume ready. Now we just have to do costume, makeup, and hair before school both Wednesday (the dress rehearsal) and Thursday (the performances.)

Friday Link has a field trip to the hansen planetarium. He informed me of this today and asked me with big sad eyes, could I please come with him? I have never been on a field trip with any of my kids. Going on field trips is supposed to be something that involved parents do, but I’ve never made space for it. Friday is otherwise empty. I could arrange babysitting and make Link very happy. But shepherding hyper children-on-a-field-trip is not restful. It is a high energy activity. I have no energy now and I haven’t even gotten to the busy part of the week.

All of that doesn’t even begin to take into account all the house and yard work chores that I want to have done. I’m tired of being embarrassed every time I look at my front yard.

I’m still on the stairs and though I’ve tried all day I haven’t managed to kick the mood yet. At least Howard comes home in the next hour.

Recently Kiki watched Tomb Raider. She was entranced. She loves the Laura Croft character and now aspires to be like her. Kiki doesn’t want to shoot guns or punch people, but she wants some of that fearlessness. She admires how Laura is very centered and confident. Laura always knows what she wants and she goes to get it.

Kiki didn’t discuss this in detail with me. She just dropped a few comments. But she also started setting her alarm to get herself up in the morning. She made a list of how she wants to run her mornings and it includes meditation and exercise. I love seeing Kiki take the reins of her life and deliberately choose who she wants to be.

The following is from Mental Tesserae “Why I Cry” I wish I’d written it. It is beautiful and so very true:

I’m standing alone in a stairwell looking down at all the steps I’ve taken.I’ve married a great man, given birth to four wonderful children,accomplished a few impressive things along the way like collecting college degrees, running half-marathons, finishing some quilts. But some of those other steps below me represent regrets – the petty things I’ve said and done, the projects I’ve started but not finished, the many ways I’ve screwed up my kids (because God knows they’d still be perfect if it weren’t for the bad habits I’ve let them develop). And above me the stairs continue to ascend with mocking regularity. I rest my arm on the railing and prepare for the rest of the climb – the next step, next day, the next batch of laundry. But for now I pause in the light of the landing that is the present moment and I take a deep breath. And sometimes I cry just a bit.

The key word here is the very first one,”Sometimes.” There are other times when life is invigorating and interesting and joyful. But on the days when life is like a long flight of stairs, this is how I feel about it.

The ice maker in our fridge leaked again. It warped the hardwood underneath it and ran down a wall in the basement. I am ready to tear off the water line and tie it in a knot. Having ice dispensed from the fridge is nice, but it is a very expensive luxury if it costs us $1000 every couple of years to sand and refinish warped hardwood floors. And we will have to live with the warped floor for 6 months to a year just waiting for it to dry out enough for the work to be done. I hate this. I hate that this is the fourth or fifth time that my plumbing has cost me over $1000 in damages. I hate that it happened on a day that was already bad. I hate that Howard hundreds of miles away and too convention exhausted to talk on the phone for long.

Yesterday Kiki was in a Mood. She was ready to pick a fight with me over the fact that I made two sandwiches for myself so I could save one for later. She didn’t want a sandwich. She didn’t even like the kind of sandwich I made. My extra sandwich caused her no inconvenience whatsoever, but still tried to pick a fight over it. She sat at the kitchen counter, a little lump of pure fury with no target. Her hairbrush bore the brunt of it and now lies in two pieces.

Today Kiki is better. Instead it was Gleek’s turn. She cried on the way to church because her legs were tired. She cried when she didn’t get to pick the bench we sat on. She cried that I didn’t have any food for her to eat. You get the idea. When it came time for her to go to her primary class, she sniffled the whole way there, but was happy after that.

Then it was Patches turn. He’d been happy all during Gleek’s upsets, but when time came for him to go to class, he bawled because he just wanted to be with me. I know that most of the problem was hunger and fatigue. This helps me plan better for future Sundays. For today I just had to tolerate being climbed all over for the next two hours by a bored and tired four year old boy. He craved the comfort of contact, but couldn’t sit still. I wanted nothing more than to be left alone and not touched by anyone.

At least Link has been in a very happy mood for two days. He is glowingly happy because I finally fixed his blankies. He’s been waiting for me to get it done for months.

Hopefully the rest of today can be a little less moody.

Today began with kitchen cleaning and french toast. It felt good to be paying attention to the needs of my house and my kids since yesterday all my attention went to my poor little story. The story is still in pieces, but I’ve begun the process of picking up the pieces and sewing them back together again. Speaking of sewing, I spent a big piece of the morning sewing a costume for Kiki to wear next week. Her class is putting on severely abridged versions of Macbeth and Much Ado About Nothing and she has to have a costume. Fortunately I had a green dress that worked with only minor alterations. I also had the pieces of a Kiki-sized cloak that only needed sewn together. Add some shiny ribbon and voila! While I had the sewing machines out, I did some other repair work that the kids have been waiting for me to do.

Now it is 2 pm and I need to be planning a lunch of some sort. Meals work better if I have them prepared before the kids realize that they’re hungry. I get really grumpy if I’m fixing lunch and the kids come foraging. Then they fill up on snacks and leave lunch on the table. This always leaves me wondering why I bother to cook at all.

This past week I have been hard at work on a story to submit to Julie Czerneda for her anthology. I hammered out characters and events and conflicts. I had reached the point where I felt like it was pretty much done. I gave it to several people to read. Nancy and Janci gave me good “tweak it here” type feedback. The third person, Chalain, dissected my 6 page story with 16 pages of commentary. When I was done reading it, I was ready to cry. I felt like crying because he was right. He’d picked everything apart and I could see very clearly that I could not leave my story the way it was. So there I was with all the pieces of my story and no idea how to put it back together again. Scattered around me all the pieces seemed to have equal value, yet they could not all fit into 5000 words.

I talked to Chalain about his review and by the end of the talk I could see where I needed to go. I get to keep the characters, events, and conflicts, but the viewpoint must change. This means jettisoning some major character development that I spent a lot of time fleshing out. So right now I’m re-writing the whole thing. I saved a draft of the other version, so I can revert to it if I want to. I probably won’t want to. By the time I’m done with this version I’ll love it as much as the other one, if not more. Unfortunately this means I am back to drafting. I was so happy to be tweaking and refining. I really hope all this effort is rewarded by acceptance into the anthology.

I’ve often listened to Janci as she talks about how her writer’s group rips apart her stories. It always sounded so hostile to me, but she always expressed gratitude that the did it. I didn’t understand, now I think I do. If the story is well made, it can’t be ripped apart. If it can be ripped apart then it needs to be made stronger. These kinds of critiques stress test the stories. No one wants to send a poorly made story out into the world. Chalain has just gotten himself permanently added to my pool of draft readers. He did me a painful, but necessary, service today.

This morning I checked comments on yesterday’s rambling entry and was informed that I am boring. I deleted the actual comment because it contained profanity. Naturally it was anonymous. I am left to wonder, if I am so boring, why was it worth this person’s time to inform me how boring I am? What did the person hope to accomplish? The answer I’m afraid is that the person is grouchy about something entirely different and is spewing the bile everywhere. The troll’s boredom is not my fault.

The first time my journal was trolled was on my fifth entry. It was emotionally devastating. This time I am able to shrug and delete the comment while wondering idly at the motivations of someone who wanders through and randomly throws stones. The troll was right, that particular entry was fairly boring. I wrote it not to entertain others, but to record for myself and to tell Howard (who is away at a convention) how my day went. Many of my entries are similarly boring to others. But then that is part of livejournal and blogging in general. Not every entry can be brilliant or entertaining.

Today Kiki, Gleek, Janci, and I had a “spa day” where we painted fingernails, put glitter on Gleek’s face, and tried out some hair treatments. The hair treatments were a highlight for Kiki. We tried out a recipe that involved glopping eggs into the hair and letting it sit for 30 minutes. Kiki happily sat to have her hair done and then insisted that I have my hair done too. As soon as the egg started to go into my hair, Kiki danced with glee. In fact all the kids found mommy with egg in herhair to be delightfully funny. I don’t know that the treatment did much for the health of my hair, but it was worth doing to provide amusement for the children.

We also fixed a yummy lunch including shrimp, chicken, and rice pilaf. Then Janci provided us with a yummy no-bake cheescake. Naturally the kids didn’t eat much of the shrimp, chicken, or rice. They filled up on cheescake and cheerios and pringles. In case anyone was wondering, Bacon Ranch Pringles are nasty. I couldn’t even finish one of them. Patches seemed to like them though. He gobbled his way through half the can. Of course he doesn’t call them pringles. He calls them Spuddies ala Over The Hedge. Spuddies are his new favorite food group and he begs for them constantly.

Patches didn’t participate in any of the spa activities, but he still had a good day. He acquired a Star Wars puzzle and I helped him assemble it twice. The second time both Janci and I sat with him in the front room and we took turns removing some pieces from the puzzle so that Patches could put them back in. It was an enjoyable diversion in Janci and my conversation.

Link didn’t participate in any of the girly stuff either. Instead he set up a marble circle on the floor of his room using yarn and tape. Then he hauled Kiki upstairs for a game of marbles. They had lots of fun. Patches wanted to play too, but they wouldn’t let him, which is why he came to me in tears saying “No one will play with me” and I agreed to do the puzzle for the second time.

Gleek had a great day. Not only did she get to paint multiple layers of fingernail polish, but she got glitter on her face. Then as soon as she mentioned wanting to play with a friend, that friend called.

It was a good day for everyone.