Day: April 1, 2009

One of the hazards of my existence are the Howard/Sandra emotional stress feedback loops. It goes like this. Howard is stressed because of the amount of work he needs to do. Sandra is stressed because of the amount of work she needs to do. Sandra is also stressed because she is worried about how stressed Howard is. Howard gets even more stressed because his wife is overstressed and not handling things well. The additional stress radiating from Howard, piles on top of the stress from Sandra, and the circle continues until we manage to get enough work done to unravel the mess. Or until someone collapses into a ball and cries. (By someone, I mean me.)

BUT, occasionally out of the feedback loop mess, a miracle occurs. Sometimes seeing the stress of the other person causes us to kick out of our own stress. This happened last night. Howard was so stressed that at 8 pm he decided he needed to escape the house. He also decided that he needed to spend time being a Daddy in a place where there were no business distractions. So instead of putting the kids to bed at a reasonable hour, Howard packed up the three oldest and took them to the movies. It was the right choice. Kiki, Link, and Gleek had all been sad that Patch got to see the movie last Friday. They danced with delight at getting to sluff bedtime.

Once Howard left the house, everything was quiet. I looked around at the cluttered mess and realized that if it was still cluttered when Howard came home, he would walk back in the door and just pick up his load of stress. The house needed to be different when he got back. So I set to work. I picked up, vaccumed, dish washed, swept, and laundered for a good ninety minutes. The house was transformed into a place of order. (So long as you don’t examine the closets too closely. Shh!) When I began the task, it was just another thing on my list to get done. But as I got working, I found that my own mood lifted. I felt great and so I did more cleaning than I had originally intended to do. When it was all done, and the house was still quiet, I sat down. I felt so happy and peaceful. It was as if I had cleaned up all the stress and put it away with the clutter.

It worked too. Howard came home and the surprise of clean house prevented him from picking back up all of the stress. Today has been so much better than the last few days. Howard and I have both been very busy, but it has been the happy-invigorated busy rather than the I-dare-not-stop-or-it-all-will-fall-apart busy. Also, the more I work on the XDM project, the more I love it. This is going to be a fun book. Today is a good day.