Month: February 2009

I have a houseful of people. This happens fairly frequently as various family events occur locally and my family needs a place to stay. I love that being in a central location means that I get to see most of my family frequently. The down side is that, being an introvert, I start feeling overwhelmed by the sheer quantities of people and noise. Then I go hide in my room for awhile. Fortunately most of my family are also introverts, so no one gets offended when I hide, they all understand. In fact, they do some hiding themselves on occasion. I just find it hard to feel like a good hostess when I am hiding from my guests.

In the chaos of today, I forgot to monitor Patch. Of all my kids, he is the one with the strongest need for silence and the lowest tolerance for chaos. He loves to have friends or cousins over. When they come, he will play very happily right up until he melts into a puddle of abject sadness over some small incident. This happens when his tolerance for noise and crowds are passed. Sometimes he can sense the need in himself and he will seek out a quiet place to play. Other times he’s having too much fun to stop himself before the tantrum arrives. This evening I recognized that he was in need of quiet. I took him to my room and the two of us had a quiet time together. We talked about needing to be away from people, about needing calm. I think Patch was relieved to know that both Mom and Dad have the same need. Even better, he was glad to know that if he ever needs an empty space, he can come to us and we’ll make one for him. He sighed with contentment and lay his head on my arm, hugging it tight. I hugged him tight too and we lay in the quiet for awhile.

Final stages of book layout + family in town = no brainspace for blogging.

This evening I opened my door to discover my parents standing on the front doorstep. I knew they were coming, but didn’t expect them until tomorrow. The mix-up was due to my own faulty internal math. It went like this. “Parents are leaving their house on Tuesday. They’ll spend a night on the road. This means they’ll arrive on Thursday.” Somehow my brain skipped Wednesday in the calculation. Anyway they’re here now and they’ll be staying for a week. The kids are all thrilled. Having Grandma and Grandpa just show up is about the coolest thing ever.

I heard the meowing through the heating ducts. This puzzled me quite a bit since I’m allergic to cats and we have never owned one. Then I realized that the meowing was merely resonating in the heating duct and was in fact coming from outside. The vocal cat in question must be underneath our back deck, up against the wall of our house. I could tell because I was in the unfinished basement storage room. This was the point where I went rushing upstairs and threw on my coat because I’ve been hearing the same meowing sounds off and on for over a week. When I’d heard it before, I’d been standing on the deck in question, but unable to locate the noise. The poor cat was stuck under our deck for at least a week. I suspect that the crack it had wiggled through then froze over, trapping the poor animal. I had to pour hot water over the hose hatch to get it to unfreeze enough to let the cat out. I’ve never seen such a grateful and friendly animal. She is skin and bones. She must have gotten adequate water from the melting snow, but she was starving. I fed her tuna for starters because it was the only thing I had, but we switched to dry cat food as soon as I could acquire some from a neighbor. The cat was as hungry for touch as she was for food. She kept walking away from the bowl to be petted and if I walked away, she followed me. (I’m not actually sure the animal is female, it could be a neutered male.)

Unfortunately my allergies quickly started acting up, so we transferred the cat, the bowl of food, and an old towel to our sunny front porch. Kiki has been out there with the cat for over an hour. The cat is completely uninterested in leaving the porch and is very interested in coming back into the house. This animal has obviously been someone’s pet, but either got lost or abandoned. This same cat came begging to our back door several times last fall, so she has been on her own for awhile. Now the kids are all hoping that we get to keep the cat. I’m holding the “we need to ask around for the owner” line, but I honestly don’t hold out much hope for finding the owner. We may have acquired a cat. Not something I had on my list to do today, but I couldn’t leave the poor thing trapped. Then having rescued it, I could not fail to feed it.

This picture does not show how skinny this poor cat is. When you pet her you can feel every rib and every vertebra.

I’ve been in a funk for nearly a week. It is the low-level kind of a funk where I still function. No one but me can tell that I have the funk, but it sucks the joy out of just about everything. I felt like hiding from everyone. I felt like cutting my hair or dyeing it. I even did research into seasonal affective disorder and matched my feelings to the symptom list. I kept trying to wrap my head around it, re-frame it, describe it, talk myself out of it. None of that worked well. I was fairly certain that a large part of the problem was that I’d overdrawn my emotional reserves for several weeks in a row. But I was having trouble figuring out how to put anything back in.

And then I went to church. I wasn’t expecting church to help much today, because I spend the first hour wrestling with my own kids on a bench and the second two wrestling with an entire class of active four-year-olds. I was expecting church to be draining, not filling. The opposite occurred. I found myself filled with energy and hope and happiness, because I knew I was in the right place at the right time for the right reasons. There is one child in my class who has the same high-energy and distractibility of my Gleek. Handling him takes all of my attention, but it is well within my capabilities. He is the reason I was put with that class. I can give his mother, my friend, a break from managing him. I can give that same break to the other mothers as well. I know how desperately I needed that break sometimes when all my kids were home all day. I came away from church exhausted, but happy and peaceful.

There have been times in my life when I have routinely come home from church wondering why I bothered to go. Those were the years where I attended merely because I wanted my children to learn that church is what we do on Sunday. Sometimes there were years when church was my respite, my break from the rigors of 24/7 mommy duty. Now church is my chance to give to others the gift that I already received. No matter what, I’ve known that attendance at church is right for me and for my family. And even on a day like today when I did not get to listen to much of what was said there, I still come away more whole than I was before. Now that I am home it is like my head is clear and I can see the things I need to do to refill my emotional reserves. I can also see that the refilling has begun, I just need to keep up the good work.