Category Archives: Feels like home

Battery status: fully charged

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I wanted this all year: time by myself. Not an hour. Days. Gratuitous, excessive amounts of time by myself. Peace, quiet, and being directed by only my needs.

Spouse combined birthday, Solstice, Christmas, and Hanukkah presents and sent me to a cabin by myself.

I almost didn’t go. I had an intensely difficult time saying goodbye to my boys, the wonderful, funny, loving little creatures whose needs and moods dictate my every single second. The amazing humans whose care is more important to me than my career. My tiny little gobs of love, running around all day and waking me all night.

How could I leave them? For three whole days?

Part of that resistance was Newtownian. We’re all still rocked, and as I said before, I’m not going to talk about it. I can’t. Part of my resistance was Puritanical. And part of it was the chorus of critics in my head, telling me I wasn’t worth a special thing. A just-me thing. I shouldn’t because it’s unseemly. It’s gratuitous. I have a job to do, every day for 24 hours a day and how dare I shirk that responsibility?

“”Who needs a whole weekend alone,” my chorus berated. “There are people without homes, without food, without basic security. There are people cold without respite and people sick and dying.

I know that. I really, really, really do.

I tried several times to cancel. Spouse wouldn’t let me. He knows I’m fed by solitude, by quiet, and by following my own rhythms. He knows I need, desperately, to create. To write, to read, to hike, to eat. And he knows that for seven years I’ve subsumed those needs to other people. Lovely people whose well-being I take incredibly seriously. Too seriously, maybe.

Since having children I have experienced more frequent and intense joy than ever before. I’ve also been haunted by a daily thought that I’m really meant to live alone and am living the wrong life.

I know that sounds awful, but it’s true. Or it was true. Since I hadn’t had solitude for more than a couple of hours at a time in almost a year, I was running on empty. I needed my own personal fuel. I can’t do my multiple jobs without energy, and I had absolutely none left. Before this trip I couldn’t figure out why I was resistant to write, to read, to exercise, to explore, to try new things.

The simple answer is that I wasn’t myself. I was a shell.

Being a shell isn’t good for anyone. It isn’t good for our families, it isn’t good for our art, it isn’t good for our individual and collective moods, and it isn’t good for our brains.

This is my seventh trip away since my first darling boy was born. Most have been short: a day or two. A conference here, a loved one’s new babies there. Two visits to a treasured friend to talk and watch movies and read books. And two solitary, see-nobody-and-speak-to-nobody-and-do-whatever-I-choose trips including this one.

A farmyard cabin. Clear air, lowing cows, croaking frogs. Nighttime fears of the sinister things that movies and novels make seem normal but are really intensely rare, ridiculous wastes of my worry energy.

I haven’t slept much. I haven’t exercised much. But I’ve worked almost non-stop on my book and on a client project that’s bringing me intellectual joy. I’ve eaten only healthful food because that’s all I brought. Despite my cravings for candy and wine, I’ve had salads and tea and barbeque field roast sandwiches. In fact, everything I brought was good for me. Two awesome books (and a chapter of a book that I’ve been meaning to read, found in the cabin’s library). A computer on which to create and learn.

I’m intensely lucky. I know that.

Good heavens, I cannot articulate how good I feel. There are now in front of me, beyond the enclosed porch on which I now sit typing, nine different tree species. Clear skies, sunshine, picturesque fluffy clouds. A chilling breeze kept somewhat at bay by a wool throw and a rumbling wood stove. Sunshine.

There’s copious sunshine at home. And blue skies and fluffy clouds and trees. But here nobody asks me for anything. No fights. No stress, no frustrations. No ups and downs. Just being. Centered, listening to my own body and brain existing.

I have to go now. I have to make the most of this time. But I wanted to say this: I wish you this. I hope you find your version of this.

When you’re making New Year’s Resolutions, if you do such things, find what makes you tick. What centers you to who you are and what you need and what makes you the most you can be. Writing down the things most important to how you fuel yourself to make it through the days and weeks is immeasurably useful.

Because I hope you find a way in 2013 to get what you need. Not every day, not in a way that overwhelms your responsibilities or finances. But push just a little beyond what you think you should do or get and bring yourself back to center. Take time off work or away from family, visit family or sleep or paint. Take a class or explore new movies and music. Once you take care of yourself you will have more to offer others. Play with your children, invest in your employer, build your company. Volunteer until you feel you’ve made more than a difference—you’ve made a mark. Write letters to your elected representatives until your hand cramps. Give others what they need.

Whatever you most value, invest in it. More than you otherwise would. Do a little too much so that you can push past the limits you’ve hit. To restore the core of who you are and what you want. This weekend cost me too much time from my family and too much money. And I know that for most people anything that costs money will be too much. But whatever “that’s all we can afford is,” do a little more. Because this weekend hasn’t cost too much, really. Throwing the money in the trash would have cost too much. Buying solitude on my own terms has been so immeasurably good for me that it exceeds the monetary and absent-mother cost by about one-thousand-fold.

I’m glad I was led outside what I felt was too much. I will not forget how this feels. I will bring to my every endeavor for the next few months the energy and passion that had dwindled as I pushed through each day, driving on fumes.

I have more to give because I was given. Because I gave myself what I actually, really needed. Tired isn’t just about sleep. Sad isn’t just about sorrow. Hungry isn’t just about food. Angry isn’t just about being wronged. All needs are about not getting enough.

It’s not enough until the little battery indicator on your soul blinks full that you’ve had enough.

I’m getting there. And soon I will share my recharged self with two little guys and a big guy and a community and a nation and a planet who all really deserve the best I can give. Something I can now offer.

I wish you more than enough now, next year, and always.

Twas the Night Before Solstice

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We generally celebrate the winter solstice in a few ways, but I’m looking for ideas to add to our list.

On the shortest day of the year, December 21, we try to focus our celebration on food and on light.

We try to wake before dawn and walk the neighborhood with flashlights to greet the faraway sun. We also do this after dinner so we can help the sun get stronger for the next day. Every bit of light helps the sun get the idea of coming closer, bigger, and warmer, right?

During the day of the solstice we make and hang pine cone feeders for the birds and squirrels (shortest day means less time for them to find food). We bring food and toys to the animals at the local shelter. And we bake throughout the day and eat our warm goodies outside. A short, cold day means we need as much vitamin D as the sun can dole out.

And because Spouse and I agree we want to spread the gifts as much as we can through December, we exchange a few gifts on Winter Solstice. The small stuff comes during Hanukkah, other small stuff in Christmas stockings. Our real gift, if there is one, comes on Solstice.

So that’s it. Walk with lights, give animals food, bake, and exchange gifts.

Feels a bit anemic, though for a day that needs some extra warmth. Do you have something special for solstice (or Christmas Eve, for we’ll willing steal from that similarly “on the verge of” December holiday)? Anything you think we should add to our Solstice traditions?

Glory be.

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Oh, gentle readers, winds of change are blowing through Chez Naptime. The chaos and the panic and the frustrations are lately vacillating toward harmony.

Not quite sure when it started. This summer was an intense sibling phase of aggression, retaliation, and nastiness. Neither child seemed to have simultaneous good moods, and without fail the grouchy one would turn the other into a screaming jackass within a few minutes of waking. I cannot articulate the stress caused when one child intentionally hurts his brother just to stop morning cheerfulness that he did not share. My days began at least six days a week with children screaming and crying by 6:30. Screaming the rage of being injured for being happy. Sobbing with the broken heart of being thwarted. And the other guy crying because his brother dared enter his Lair of Grump. Beginning before 6:30 and continuing for 13 hours.

I often wondered if it would ever change. If I was doing something wrong. If my readers lied to me that the boys would eventually play together. Heaven knows they mostly fester and erupt together. Blech.

A few days of early Fall showed promise. Their good moods coincided and they treated each other with care and gentleness. They talked, they negotiated. They acted as though they were on the same team.

But those days were still rare. Once a week, perhaps, mornings started well and the boys sided with rather than against each other. For a few hours in some cases.

And lately it happens more often than not. Good moods all around. Or, even better, a cheerful brother persuades a grump to his side of happiness and play.

Yesterday, walking home from school, the little one wanted to roll his softball down the sidewalk. I balked, saying that rolling into the street was going to be too frequent.

But Peanut, my increasingly personable six-year-old, offered a solution: he would run ahead and block the ball from going into the street. A lovely offer. I figured, based on two years of experience with their dynamics, that he was going to use the opportunity to take the ball for himself. But he didn’t. He didn’t take the ball or play keep away or tease or race the little guy. He played shepherd. He played backup, helper, and understudy instead of domineering and impatient first string.

So for a mile, the two-year-old rolled the ball down the sidewalk and his brother helped him. When the little guy screamed in desperation because his brother had picked the ball up, Peanut explained when he was doing and offered to hand the ball over or to roll it to Butter. The older guy was cheerful. He was patient. Butter quickly caught on that he was getting to play with the best side of Peanut, the side that only six- and seven-year-olds get to see.

It was an absolute joy to be with them. To watch them play, to help navigate only rarely. To see how kind they were and how much fun they could have together. To watch the beaming faces of passersby who caught the boys’ infectious laughs.

I want to cry at how lovely it is when they get along, and I know the tears stem from released tension at not having my shoulders up around my ears for 13 hours a day. What a relief to see them both at their happiest. To observe them bringing each other to higher levels instead of trying (often in vain) to gently interrupt their knocking each other down.

Sleeplessness seems less painful. Messes seem less important. Frustrations seem less debilitating. Anger seems a distant memory.

Because they’re being kind. My children are being kind. To each other. Consistently. For the first time in two years.

Thank you, Universe, for this interlude. I know it will shift and change. I know there will be setbacks. I know Age Three will nigh on kill us all.

And now I know how good things can be.

I had no idea. Parents who aren’t stabby by breakfast every single day, I now see that you’re not crazy.

I’m even rebranding our annual Holiday Apathy Gathering as an annual Low Expectations Holiday Party. (Crud, I have to get on planning that and inviting people…) Because I have no meh left. My inner Eeyore is on vacation and my heretofore secret Tigger is on the prowl.

So watch out. I might just pounce holiday joy and effervescence on ya. I have to. I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart.

Where?

Shhhhhh. That’s too loud.

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A strange calm has come over neurotic me and I don’t trust it.
In a few days I turn 40. I expected crises of self, of life choices, of personal demons.

But they’re not here yet, and I don’t think they’re coming.

Almost all of the past year has been clouded by selfhood panic. (Lest that seem dramatic, one month of every quarter of every year of my life has been in that same category. So while it was a marathon session of exploration, longing, and frustration, a year of existential melancholy was still within the realm of my normal.) I spent the year mourning decisions long since irrevocable. Convinced of terminal failures of self and of dreams. Planning the next month, year, and decade. Revisiting the knowledge that there are no right answers and beaten down by the perception that mine are all wrong answers.

I’ve been poring over psychology books to try to tame perfectionism, gain perspective about parenthood, manage expectations, soothe wanderlust, and jump start solutions. I have notebooks full of exercises to reveal my true passions, potential paths toward happiness, and actualizing mantras.

It’s like binging on every Oprah magazine ever published.

This process of self discovery has been going on, in stops and starts, for sixteen years. I remember the first book I bought, too, when a series of massive roadblocks thrown up in my path made me crumple, defeated for the first time in my general pattern of goal-oriented, driven pattern of achievement. The death of, “I know what I want so I will charge toward it full force; I’m choosing to change direction and will charge toward the next thing full force…” rocked me to the core. And I’ve been foundering for most of my adult life.

So a milestone birthday should really freak me out.Why isn’t it?

Because the notebook is working. The “find the person I’m meant to be” stuff is netting out results I’ve always known, and that is more reassuring than I thought it would be. And maybe feeling less lost because I’ve been found all along is part of my existential calm.
Perhaps it’s watching how normal my crises of selfhood are just makes me feel comfortable to freak out amongst friends.

But over the past few years, two realities came to me thanks to personality assessments. One was borne of end-point confusion over how to handle my son. The other lucky is happenstance thanks to a book I flipped through at someone’s house.

What I found actually shocked me. It shouldn’t have. I know I’m an extroverted INTJ. I know I’m a red yellow. I know both my son and I are highly spirited. Name the assessment and I can tell you my score.

But perhaps I’ve missed the forest for the trees. I thought everyone abandoned their shopping cart and ran out of stores when the overhead pages to the deli got to be too much. I thought all humans absolutely lost their ability to think straight when three children are laughing and jumping joyously and safely nearby. I believed everyone could taste the hint of mold in that batch of soda. I thought that when trying to cook with two small children clamoring to watch all moms flipped from Hercules to Medusa if an additional person then quietly asked where the car keys are.

I hit sensory overload with too many stimuli, and I thought that was normal.

It is, of course. But my Too Much, as with about twenty percent of sentient creatures, hits way earlier than for others. Sensory input (sights, smells, temperature, sounds, complex combinations) often feels a lot like constant panic to me. What some people find fun I find physically stressful.

And I didn’t really notice until I became a mom, in part because I could follow my own needs before I was a mom.

I’ve written about how I used to retreat to the corporate bathroom when work got too stressful. And how I need days to calm down after a party. Not because I don’t like work or parties. Because it takes all of my energy to function in intense situations and it takes a lot of solitude to get that energy back.

Turns out that highly sensitive people feel that way, too.

[Note: I refuse to use the acronym HSP or the phrasing that makes being sensitive to stimuli seem like a diagnosis. Hating loud sounds and bright colors and intense smells, and feeling that daily life is unbearably chaotic does not make me a clinical type. It’s who I am. Finding out it’s a category of personality helps me frame my reality differently. But I refuse to label it. Labels simultaneously feel like condescension and crutch.]

The remedies for those who process sensory information differently make sense, but are laughable to a full-time parent.

Take frequent breaks in a quiet, calm environment.
Take time off at least every three months.
Keep healthy calorie intake steady through the day.
Keep lights and sounds low.
Avoid caffeine.
Get lots of sleep.
Wear noise-reducing headphones or earplugs.
Have a space in your house to which you can retreat when overwhelmed.

Bahahahaha ha ha ha ha! Let me go propose that list to my children so we can all laugh together.

As reassuring as it is to find that my reactions to stimuli are actually different from others’ and that there is a simple and normal reason I process input the way I do, this information initially felt as though I’m destined to be a bad mother. I don’t want to play for long periods of time. I don’t want to scream and sing and jump and run wild. At times I want it quiet, and I get overwhelmed in a lot of very typical situations. I Capital-N need to be alone.

Sorry, but none of that fits with what I think a successful mom is.

The intense, complicated, chaotic, or new situations that make me feel overstimulated are pretty much the default of parenthood.
So I’m naturally built to be overwhelmed by and upset by parenting?

That’s a problem, yo. Because I chose to stay home to raise amazing human beings. I chose to redirect my creative and intellectual energies into enjoying, teaching, and modeling behavior for my kids. So I need to not be daunted by the hourly realities.

Since I stumbled upon this information I’m much more gentle with myself. I choose to lock myself in the bathroom during tantrums where I’m being physically assaulted. I choose to gently tell the boys that I love them and support their feelings but need a time out when their screaming and crying overwhelm me. I choose to take a break from their really raucous play to get caramel a glass of water, which reminds me to take a deep breath and functions as my moment of restorative calm.

And now building and accessing those small escape valves doesn’t feel like wanting to escape my kids. It feels like giving myself what I need to stay engaged with them.

If you frequently feel overwhelmed in your day, check out this site by a researcher who studies sensory-processing sensitivity. There’s a quiz for adults and for kids to assess highly sensitive processors. There’s information including books.

Information abounds online, including a discussion at mothering.com of moms who are dealing with the love of children and the tendency to be rocked by the noise and sounds and colors and smells of semi-public life. That’s what a family is, right? Living with people eliminates privacy. Living with small children makes restoring a sense of intact and independent self almost impossible. That feels really good when the family rings with love and joy and laughter. And yet it’s a challenge for highly sensitive parents even if blissful all the time. (Shocking revelation to the childfree: it’s absolutely never blissful all the time.)

I’m guessing if you’re easily overwhelmed, you already know it. And perhaps I am the last mom on the planet to realize why I’m so rocked by the rather simple realities of parenting. Or to acknowledge that the too much of our family life is actually just too much as defined by my brain. And that I can find positive ways to handle it.

I’m awfully relieved to find out that I don’t hate parenting. Can you imagine the burden of investing your entire life in your children for seven years and thinking that you secretly hate parenting? It weighed pretty heavily on my self-esteem.

I already knew that I can’t calmly, patiently, and lovingly handle fourteen hours of my children without breaks. Now I have permission, it seems, to acknowledge that I actually can’t handle an hour without a small break.

That knowledge feels like power.

That power feels like permission to breathe.

And my, a long deep breath and a glass of water feels really good.

Really good.

Hoardy? Me?

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(No, the title is not a reference to The Bearded Iris‘s twittery use of “whorety” for forty, though I love that. Can’t wait to turn whorety next month. But this is about being hoardy. Read on.)

A post at Big Little Wolf’s Daily Plate of Crazy had me thinking. She asked how we draw the line between collecting and hoarding. The clinical definition specifies that to be a hoarder you have to collect so much and be so unwilling to shed anything that you can’t maneuver in your house.

No problem. I have lots of space.

I used to be a collector. I treasured bits and pieces of my personal history, my family’s mementos, and objects that held special importance.

But after the fire, I changed. I still like to collect and to cling. But after a few months or years, I call treasures “clutter” and shove them all into the donation bag. I put into the garage sale pile things that should be important to me.

But they’re just things.

I learned what it means to keen for lost belongings and to forget them relatively quickly. I have found small bits of what I thought I lost and mourned as deeply as I thought possible for what I would never get back.

Because what you really lose in catastrophe is a sense of safety. Of permanence. Like nothing else, a home-demolishing fire teaches you nothing is forever. Especially stuff.

And I can tell you: what I cling to now—what I cannot live without—is memories. Even if they’re not permanent, and even if they change before I can document them and certainly each time I replay them, memories serve as a lasting link from who we were to who we are.

I don’t need stuff to remind me. I treasure words, I love photographs. But I need neither to remember who I am and who I’ve been.

I joked at Daily Plate of Crazy that maybe I’m so willing to toss what I collect even while longing to hear the stories behind friends’ collections because the adventures my tchotkes represent aren’t adventuresome enough.

Maybe if I lived large and loud I’ve have bigger memories and a better collection.

But it’s not true. No matter how I live it feels large. And I preserve the memories the best I can.

And I just don’t need to keep the dust-collectors to hang on to what I want to remember.

Every day miracles for once in a lifetime

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Remember when I asked you to send your thoughts, prayers, and good vibes to my friend? I promised you an update on his battle.

Here’s an update, in his words.

Go read this post. I don’t bandy about hyperbole often, but it is a breathtaking story of heart and humanity.

Look, aphorisms are cheap and annoying. But genuinely good friendships are something into which to pour your every energy. Use whatever words you want but send to some lovin’ to your friends.

And, as you did when I wrote a weepy plea for your thoughts, send a little love to my friend.

Nature or Nurture

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My son’s a genius, and I think it’s because I’m so awesome.

Really.

Look, I’m the first to assert that serial killers, bullies, and medievalists are the fault of their parents. So may I take credit for the following?

Peanut and I were talking last night, in a rare moment of the-toddler-fell-asleep-early-and-we-can-take-a-breath-and-have-a-normal-bedtime bliss. We talked about the Universe’s vastness and how the outrageously ginormous solar system is relatively diminutive. We talked about the SETI Project and ways they’re listening for life beyond the planet. We talked about how life elsewhere might look like germs or octopi or monsters, and my brilliant six-year-old interrupts me.

“Mom,” he says. “If we find something out there, if it’s germs or aliens or fish, they’re going to think *they* are people and that we are aliens.”

My dear, sweet, amazingly empathetic six-year-old: you just surmised, all by yourself, what I hoped to teach you over the course of your young life. Look at the situation with someone else’s eyes.

I marveled at his revelation, and, for good measure, threw in a bit of “that’s why when we think of ‘other’ people from another culture or country or who look different, we need to remember they’re people, too, and we need to see things their way.” But I didn’t need to. Because I’ve already done such a good job that he’s wise beyond his years in such matters.

My work here is done, people. I think I just earned a leisurely evening of confections and John Hughes films for my awesome luck parenting.

Plug for new blog

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In my massive 2012 self-rewrite, I have decided to split my creative tasks a bit. The big piece of my reorganization involves more fiction and academics. Less client work. Less social media. Less of the stuff I don’t need.

I’m also honoring my split personality by giving each of the voices in my head a blog. (I’ll begin with just voice-amplifying blogs, because some of the people in my head are just horrible and don’t deserve to have any more power than they already do. In fact, drowning them out with productive, creative, awesome work is a damned fine reason for another blog.)

Check out my other side, the logophile who rarely mentions children. (Except for the fact that they inform who I am and what I write, research, and read. You know: the little things.)

Find my professional, less frazzled writing persona over at ChristineHarkin.com. Lots of glitches still, including evidence of the egregious mistake of having register.com handle my domain. That mistake will soon be remedied (and if you’re curious about who should register your URL, check out this review at LifeHack, which I found after hating register.com. Lesson learned, again: do not search Google for tech stuff. Search Google for reviews of tech stuff and trust only established experts.)

Anyway. Follow and comment and join the Me who is creating a space for Me now that I know more about Them and how wonderful and self-eroding They can be if I don’t force my way into some personal headspace.

Boxing Day

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This year, Boxing Day might be my favorite holiday. (It always creeped me out before, hearing the inaccurate history of the day as based in a tradition of boxing children’s ears so they’d remember the day. Terrible. And, as I said, inaccurate. Sticks with you, though.)

Christmas was delightful. Morning at home in a slow frenzy of buckwheat pancakes, unwrapping, and play. Afternoon with family. And evening with more family, pausing, as we chased after a Tasmanian Devil toddler, to chat with dear people we haven’t seen in longer than we’d like. Kids were wiped and went to sleep easily.

Today, though, was heaven. The kids had enough newness in the living room that they played without tormenting each other. The bigger one was so involved in projects that he didn’t scream when the little one drew near. The little one had so many things to investigate that he didn’t tail the bigger one. And they both left me alone to do my thing: cooking and Internonsense. When they wanted me, it was for play. And it was every 10 minutes instead of every single minute of thirteen straight hours.

I didn’t even care that the toddler didn’t nap.

The day went by at regular pace, a shocking rarity in life with two small, energetic, opinionated, frenetic little destructive forces.

Regular pace. Like, recognizable as an actual day. Not sped up in hyperdrive, nor tortuously slow. No freakish stops and starts, the likes of which dominate my at-the-whims-of-everyone-else life.

I barely knew what to do with myself.

Mmmmmmm. Regular speed. It’s been years, but you feel like home.

GASP! Hackermom Finds the Mothership!

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This is an idea whose time has come. A creative-women-who-are-also-moms hackerspace. A studio where women can explore individual and collective projects, feed their creative side, express themselves among a community of similarly driven women? With childcare? Shut the front door.

And excerpt from their site:
“Life with young kids can be an isolating state and a fractured existence. … Mothership HackerMoms evolved with babysitting as an integral part of our creative process, giving us the time and space to work. Traditional moms groups tend to be about the kids. We are here to first support the mother, her identity as a powerful creator, woman, explorer, entrepreneur, the artist of her life and of family life. We want to model active creative lives for our kids to learn from, so it’s important for them to be present with their projects, too…. If we don’t support this playful creative self, we risk burnout, depression, and 2-yr-old-level temper tantrums. It’s a use it or lose it philosophy to motherhood sanity. All work and no play makes mom a dull mother, lover and friend!”

I have thought many times as I walked past one particular empty office space on my favorite path that it would be cool to open a creative spplace ace for women who just need a proverbial Room of Their Own. Where they can paint and write and build and compute and cogitate and congregate and communicate. Did I mention the childcare? And not in a “pawn your kids off and get them out of your hair” kind of way, but in a “someone to keep them safe near you while you do your art or intellectual thing.”

The simple fact that these women exist makes me happy. These are my peeps, yo. I must go find them and join. And tell you about it so you can do the same thing in your ‘hood.

I must go learn more. I will report back. Because every town should have a hackerspace for artists and especially a hackermom space. If you are a wealthy philanthropist or investor who wants to see the amazing benefits of such a space, send money. To Mothership Hackermoms. Or me. With enough money I’ll open a hackerspace for creatives, too.

But for now, they are it. Huzzah.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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There’s an otter in Lake Anza!

Otter being all goofy in Lake Anza, Tilden Regional Park

Park Rangers told us the otter was in Jewel Lake earlier this week after we mentioned watching it play and frolick and whatnot. Probably changed locations to get farther from the t-u-r-k-e-y-s that hang out behind the Little Farm. Little does the otter know, turkeys in Berkeley are safer than most this week.

Happy Pumpkin and Potato and Chestnut and Salad and Bread and Dessert Day!

Lazy Sunday

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We slowed down a bit this weekend for a visit from adored family and for an autumnal art project. It took hours to walk at toddler pace to the grocery store collecting leaves, but when we suspended two dozen grape, maple, and sycamore leaves from the living room ceiling, the result was magical.


Autumn is here...the living room is a vast leaf-y landscape

The trip also harnessed the energy of the wee ones, who seemed more mellow after their sensory walk.


Thank you, neighbors, for the chicken rest stop.

Five Years Cancer Free

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Regular readers know that I have often posted about my desperate intellectual infatuation with the literature of David Foster Wallace. And an occasional video from an awesome band who created a beautiful in memorium piece for him.

This new homage to Wallace is just freaking awesome.

…

Happy anniversary to me. And here’s hoping everyone else who has gotten or will get a cancer diagnosis lives to find some joy. In something. Anything. I’ve found an awful lot in five years. And a geek-fest homage to my favorite book is delicious icing.

Now rejoin your life, already in progress

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Ah, yes. The Mother’s Day pretending.

Advertisements claim it’s a magical day of appreciation and breakfast in bed. They are, of course, selling something.

Spouse pretends it’s going to be a happy day of family and bonding. And so it is. Sort of.

Peanut pretends it’s a day like any other. And so he yells at people for imaginary transgressions, threatens his brother with bodily harm for watching big kid play, sits next to me for long stories, jumps screaming from the furniture, uses enough tape on a variety of projects to seal the Grand Canyon, and smiles and whines and snuggles and orders and dances and sneers and kisses.

Butter pretends it’s a day like any other. And so he squeals with delight, toddles after his brother, cries when walloped by said brother, plays harmonica, parades through the house with prized possessions, unloads the drawers and cabinets he can reach, whimpers to be held, pulls my hair, kisses my nose, puts cold hands on my belly, bites my face, kicks my hands, and twirls my hair while sucking his thumb.

And I find that Mother’s Day is a microcosm of our lives as we’re living them. There are still dishes and laundry, there are laughs and frustrations, there are tickles and tantrums, there is extreme claustrophobia and hopes for the future, fears and silliness and satisfaction and dread and anger and fun.

It is, I guess, what you make of it. Within limitations. So I have a choice: focus on the limitations or make something of it.

“If you focus on results, you will never change. If you focus on change, you will get results.” ~Jack Dixon