Family

Sycamore Grove

By / June 23, 2014

I knew this park. I ran cross country loops in it. I remembered many trips here as a child. So when I saw the lines painted on the pavement say 0.0mi in the direction we were going and 2.5mi in the opposite direction, I thought it indicated a loop. I remembered wrong. This is a park trail with a pick up and a drop off. We were nearly at the far end of the park when we figured it out and turned to come back. So we went twice the distance planned, but I’m not really sorry.

“What is at this park?” the kids asked me as we were driving over.
“Trees and a walking trail.” I answered.
“Sycamore trees?” Link asked.
“Well, the name is misleading, mostly there are other kinds of trees.”
“Can I run on the grass?” Gleek said.
“It doesn’t have grass. At least not green grass. It has some yellow grass and some dirt.”
“Sounds boring.” Patch said.
I thought about it. Yes Sycamore Grove is boring. Half the trips there as a kid started with me wondering why we had come to this place of scraggly trees and dry prairie grass. I’d always figured it out by the time we left. If there was water in the arroyo, I figured it out sooner. If not, then it took a little longer.
“It might be boring.” I said, “But I think you’ll like it.”

So we began to walk. I mentioned that I’d run cross country races along this trail. Naturally this prompted Gleek and Patch to have a race. Patch won by quite a large margin, which made Gleek mad. She hasn’t been as active this past year and her body has changed shape. She was surprised that he outdistanced her. She huffed off down the path far ahead of us, angry. I hoped she would walk it out rather than maintaining her early-teen snit. She did. The last of her anger went away when we found the snake.

He was a beautiful California Kingsnake, about three feet long. We didn’t know what kind of snake he was until we looked him up later, so I declined to let the kids pick him up. They were sad, because he really was beautiful. Instead we watched him until he disappeared into the grass on the far side of the path.

We saw a western bluebird, woodpecker nests, the snake, several stinkbugs standing on their heads, a swallowtail kite hovering to look for prey, active ant hills, a cottontail rabbit, and a host of smaller birds. Then there was the turkey momma.

Who tried to lead us away from her babies.

We made our way back, footsore and tired. But all the kids agree that it was worth seeing. We were the last ones out of the park because of my miscalculation with the trails. The ranger was waiting to close the gate behind us.

I hope that some year we can come back to Sycamore Grove when there isn’t a drought. I’d love to share pollywog catching with my kids too. For today, this was good enough.

Visiting

By / June 22, 2014

The longer I stay in my home town, the more people I think of that I’d like to spend an hour talking to. I’d tucked the memories of all of these people into a back corner of my mind. They were hugely important during my growing up years, but I went far away–in age, need, and physical distance. One thing I’ve learned about friendship is that even if I am not actively friends with someone now, that does not devalue the friendship that was. Yet being here in my parents’ house opens all those stored memories. I start wondering about these people who mattered so much to me in my prior life. The thing is that to truly re-examine all these dusty relationships, I’d need more time. I’d need several hours of visiting time for each person and then I’d need alone time to process before being ready to be social again (introvert here.) There are at least a dozen people I can think of off of the top of my head. Each of them matters, but I do not want to spend another two weeks away from home. So what I’ll do instead is visit with one or two people that I’ve kept in touch with through the years. And I’ll pack the rest of the memories away and go back to my life.

I did make one very important visit. I stopped in to see my Grandpa.

He wasn’t really there. I’m certain he has better things to do than to hang out in some mausoleum. But it is a place I can go to think of him. I was going to bring a flower, but Grandpa wasn’t much of a flower guy. Instead I brought him a piece of wood, some nails, and utility scissors. He was a man who took things apart, made things, and fixed things. He’s better remembered with tools than with flowers.

Link went with me. I invited all three kids, but Link was the one who decided to go. After I arranged my things in that silly narrow vase that they put out for memorial offerings, I noticed that Link had tears in his eyes. Something about the place, the solemness of it, and seeing me put tools out for my Grandpa, touched him. He realized that I continue to bear great love for this man that Link only met as a baby. I told Link a story or two, a brief summary of who my Grandpa was to me. Link is now interested in seeing the house that my Grandparents shared. It is sort of on the way home, but it would add three hours to our travel time, which is already long. I’ll have to decide if additional visiting is worth the extended trip. I’d love to visit the house too. I’m certain additional memories are stored there.

We came home and sat down to visit with my Grandma. She’s already got a reserved spot next to Grandpa, but I’m in no hurry for her to occupy it. I’ve written about my Grandma before. She is less focused than she was four years ago. Since then she’s broken her hip, recovered, and acquired a walker. Mostly her thoughts circle around making sure everyone gets enough food, checking the mail, and watching out the window to tell me that the folks across the street who’ve torn up their yard are doing it wrong. Sometimes her thoughts do wander through memories. Then I get to hear fragments of stories and I catch them as they go past. Today something reminded her of the house fire which happened the year I was a freshman in college. Grandma and Grandpa watching my two younger sisters when the fire happened. Grandma mentioned seeing the fire in the front room and mentioned how scary it was. “I kept telling that man to break the glass and get the fire, but he wasn’t doing it. They put that stupid mask on my face. Then they made me go to the hospital. I didn’t want to go to the hospital. I wanted to stay and tell those firemen what to do. But they made me go.” I suspect they only succeeded in making her go because Grandpa needed to go to. They were treated for smoke inhalation, but were fine. Then the next sentence we were back to talking about fatigue and whether she had time for a nap before dinner.

I’ve done so much visiting this trip. I’ve seen places and people. I’ve sorted through memories. Tomorrow I’m going to raid my mother’s boxes of photos to see if I can find some duplicates to take home with me. I don’t have that many pictures of myself as a child. For every visit I’ve accomplished on this trip, there are ten more that I’d like to do. I have to choose and I choose going home, because visiting is nice, but home is better.

Switching Vacation Gears

By / June 19, 2014

This is a vacation in three parts.

Part one: The family reunion
Part two: The outing days
Part three: Staying with Grandma

Today is the transition into part three. This is fine, because the kids are ready for things to be quieter for a time. So am I. The sunburns from the beach are peeling and we’re all a bit leg sore from walking in the Aquarium and then the woods.

Starting tomorrow the primary goal is to be at my parent’s house and spend time with my 94 year old Grandma. We may do short outings in the afternoons, little things like going to the park, but I expect the kids to be very ready to go home in a week. I’m ready now, though I’m not finished with the things I need to do here.

Snippets from a Day at Monterey Bay Aquarium

By / June 17, 2014

I still love jellyfish. We walked into the room with the stinging nettle tank and I began to cry. A few years ago I wrote a post explaining my love of jellyfish. Those reasons still apply. It was powerful to stand in front of that tank with Link, who is now taller than me. He remembers the jellyfish too, but his memory is a mild nostalgia. He was glad to see the aquarium again though. All of it.

***

Gleek continued her habit of communing with animals. She had a penguin following her fingers to the point that it toppled off the rock where it had been perched. I caught it on video. Gleek also figured out how to get the bat rays to surface and come close where people could pet them. She also coaxed them to hold still for a minute instead of swimming past.

***

Gleek goes through exhibits very slowly. She wanted to really absorb each tank. Patch skims more lightly over everything. Fortunately there were enough hands-on activities that engaged Patch’s interest. So he’d play with the lever that let him bury and unbury a plastic flounder while Gleek would stand with her hand to the glass of a tank focused on the fish inside.

***

Link, being sixteen, and with a cell phone in his pocket, made his own way through at a pace that was not dictated by his younger siblings. Any time my mom sense got to tingling, I’d text him and he’d either rejoin us, or tell me where he was.

***

I’ve fallen in love with the map and GPS features of my phone. I’ve traveled all sorts of unfamiliar cities and routes in the last few days. I haven’t felt lost at all.

***

They handed us a map as we walked in the door. It was bewildering, just shapes and labels on a piece of paper that intended to communicate where things were, but at first we had no context for any of it. I kept all the kids close for that first hour, worried that someone would get lost in the crowd. Then we began to know the lay of the land. We correlated places we’d visited with the labels on the map. My kids settled in to their usual museum behaviors. They wandered within an exhibit, but we only move onward to the next space together. The kids watched for me as much as I watched for them. By the end of the day, we’d been all the places and the aquarium did not feel so bewilderingly large.

***

I’ve added leaping blennies to my list of world’s cutest fish. I didn’t really have such a list before today, but I was so charmed by blennies that I guess I need one now. I found a video of them on youtube, because you have to see them jump to appreciate them. Listening to the audio, I’m pretty certain this video was shot at the exact same tank in the Monterey Bay Aquarium. You can hear the penguin feeding time in the background. Blennies are like adorable pinky-sized aliens who live on our planet.

***

The minute that Gleek saw a sign for cuttlefish, she announced how cute they are and how much she loves them. I’d no idea that she even knew what a cuttlefish is. Yet before the end of the day a stuffed cuttlefish came home with us. (Patch acquired a small blue octopus. Link requested that his souvenir money be put in the family fund that is saving up for a Wii U.)
Cuttlefish are indeed cute.

They are particularly cute when they use their little tentacles. Perhaps there is a second resident on my newly created list of world’s cutest fish.

***

Going to the aquarium was expensive. The tickets have to cost so much to pay for all the maintenance. And when you see a giant sunfish, bigger than a person, swim by only inches away, the cost doesn’t seem to be quite so much. The accounting part of my brain keeps counting that cost. Yet had we decided not to go, I would be regretting it in the same way I still wish I’d jumped into the waves on our beach day. I can’t remember who said it, but building a good life is picking the right regrets. Pretty sure we picked right today.

Adventures in Tax Payments and Family Travel

By / June 16, 2014

We’ve been self employed for years, but we’re set up as a corporation, so mostly we’ve handled tax payments through withholding. Then our tax accountant told us about a different way to handle things which saves us money. It all makes sense, but it means that this is the first year that I’m paying estimated quarterly taxes. The first payment was due April 15, so I thought the second payment would be due July 15. Nope. June 15. I discovered this fact because fellow self-employed people were complaining on twitter. I confirmed it and then realized I was presented with a problem. All my accounting things are in Utah, including my checkbook. I am in California for another week. Truthfully it all could have waited a week. The government would probably not have argued with me if I willingly made payment before they had a chance to notice that it was late. But I don’t like to be late on this sort of thing. It makes me anxious.

This sort of thing is exactly why we planned this trip with Kiki going home to hold down the fort. She flew home this morning, which meant that I could call the house and walk her through the process of finding and filling out the necessary payment coupon. Howard was at home to sign the check. (I suppose if Kiki had not been there, I would have walked Howard through the process, but Kiki is really good about going into assistant mode these days. Howard’s assistant mode is really rusty. The dynamic feels backward.) I had the money ready and waiting because of the past few months of careful budgeting. In a way it was all reassuring. There was a problem, an important thing that was left undone, and then thirty minutes later the thing was done. It makes me feel like I might be competent at least a little bit.

I’ve spent some time looking at how I arranged this trip and examining why I made the choices that I did. I’m rarely certain that I’ve chosen right because I can see so many other options. Howard stayed home, which is the lowest stress option for him. It allowed him to recover from being sick and hopefully will allow him to rebuild the buffer. Yet I know that he misses out on some of the bonding which happens with a family trip. Much of that bonding occurs precisely because the trip is stressful. Less stress = missed shared experiences. I can’t see a way to have both. Knowing that I was sending Kiki back to manage the online store was the only way I could feel good about being absent for so long. The last time I spent two weeks away from home it was 1999 and we didn’t have a time-dependent home business. Even there though, I wonder how much of my decision making is driven by unreasonable anxiety. The world would not end if packages waited an extra week. So many of my urgent business tasks are far less urgent than they feel on a daily basis. It is only when I put myself in a position where I can’t jump and solve an issue at a moment’s notice that I’m aware how much of my day is spent jumping to solve issues as if they are emergencies. On this trip I jump and then don’t have any of my tools, so the next few minutes are spent explaining to myself why it will all be fine anyway. So far I’ve been gone for five days. There have been some lovely, long relaxed hours. There have also been hours where my brain jolted with adrenaline five or eleven times because of things remembered or half-remembered that for an instant had me convinced that disaster would result because I could not manage them right away. Those were not my favorite hours.

As of today the reunion part of the trip is over. Most of the relatives have departed home. My parents are off to Hawaii for their golden honeymoon. My sister has settled in to be with my Grandma until Thursday. Then we’ll trade off and I will stay with Grandma until my parents return the next week. That makes today the settling-in day. It is the day when I let the kids watch too much TV and play too many video games. I breathe deep and decide how I am going to spend the time between now and the day when I’m on duty to take care of Grandma. It is the day when I talk Kiki through the business processes that she’ll manage while I’m away. It is also the day where I think through how I arranged this trip and face my guilt that I put Howard and Kiki at home to work while I’m away with the other three kids. I picked the option with minimal work disruption instead of maximal family togetherness. I have to think about that choice. Because there need to be times when I arrange it the other way around. Of course, I could have just said no to the entire trip which would have resulted in zero life disruption and zero extended family togetherness. We all would have missed much with that choice.

I have more thinking to do, but after today we’ll have several outing days in a row which will likely interfere with the thinking. That in itself might be a good thing, as I probably think too much. For today, the kids are playing with cousins, Kiki traveled home safely, Howard is no longer alone in the house, and the taxes are paid. I’ll count that good enough for now.

Golden Anniversary

By / June 16, 2014 / 1 Comment

It was like a wedding reception. My sister-in-law had set up tables covered in memorabilia. There was an honored place for the bride and groom. Tables were arrayed for dinner. My nephews were the waiters. Yet there was very little of the tension that accompanies a wedding. Instead of being newly related and trying to find balance with each other, we were all long-familiar. We’ve worn off the edges and know how to bend around, and love people for, their quirks.

I did not get to attend my parents’ wedding. They held it ten years before I was born. Yet if I only got to pick one, I definitely choose their 50th anniversary celebration instead. We got to see both my mom and my dad in their youth and then we remembered the life they built together and how the rest of us joined it one by one. Reaching the 50th anniversary was the excuse, but the reason for the party was to celebrate our family.

I didn’t expect to cry, but I did. It was the little things that hit me, like this picture hanging from a little tree. I hardly recognize that young couple as my parents, but I remember that quilt. It perished long ago, but I remember laying on it as a little girl and thinking it beautiful. Photo after photo opened pockets of memory, things that I had forgotten about who I was as a child and what my family was like as I grew up. I’m still thinking about all of it. I’m still looking around the town where I grew up and thinking about that too.

We hadn’t intended to have a big party other than to gather the siblings together. My sister-in-law did most of the work for the party and provided her own crew. It was a huge gift, not just to my parents, but to all of us. It is not that having the event changed anything, but it showed us what was already there and had been there for fifty years. When you live inside something, it is hard to see it until there is an event to make you sit up and notice.

My parents sat together as their grandchildren sang to them. They held hands and my dad cried until one of my young nieces ran up to him with a paper napkin and shoved it in his face. Then we all laughed. They were beautiful, this family I came from is beautiful. It has been fifty years in the making and we’ve barely begun.

Final Days of the School Year

By / May 27, 2014

I’ve been watching the approaching end of the school year with anticipation. Yesterday I wished that we could just switch over into summer mode. It always feels unfair to have Memorial Day weekend to make clear what summer will be like and then to require one more week of school. I admit I was not thrilled when I had to roll out of bed at 6:45 this morning. But then we gathered in the family room for the brief prayer and scripture study we do on school mornings. The kids were curled up in blankets, half asleep, as usual. I looked around and counted to four, not three as I have for most of the year.

I felt it again as I drove Link to school. I’m going to miss the patterns and structures of this school year. Having a reason to pull everyone out of bed at the same time gives focus to my days. I’m going to miss that. Sure, we’ll be back to that schedule in the fall, but I’ll also be back to counting to three instead of four, since Kiki will be back at college. This past month with her woven into the patterns of daily life has been lovely.

So I’m going to try to savor this week as much as I can. I have four days then we’re launched into summer where the structure is all of my own making. I both love that and struggle with it.

Tayler Family Photo Books

By / May 25, 2014

One of my Sunday activities is to work on the annual Tayler Family photo book. In theory, I will sometimes have Sundays where there is no work to be done. We don’t generate family pictures and events every single week. The reality is that I have months at a time where I don’t work on the photo books at all. Then I spend the rest of the time trying to catch up. I began 2014 with both the 2012 and 2013 books incomplete. This is a byproduct of all of the many emotional events of 2013 during our year of transition. I just didn’t have the focus to work on it. When I did find the focus again, I decided to work chronologically. Besides, I knew that the photos and family stories of 2012 would not have huge emotional landmines waiting for me.

I finished 2012 a few weeks ago and began working on 2013. There is so much family story that is not in the photo book. I don’t have any pictures of the hard bits of last year. I don’t have pictures of Kiki’s birthday being unfortunate. I don’t have pictures of my stress, or any of the other hard things that happened as we adjusted and learned. I really expected that as I put pictures into place, my mind would fill in the gaps. That I would spend my time working on the pages re-living the emotions I felt at the time the pictures were taken. Instead what I have is a highlights reel from that year. I have a record of the moments when we laughed together, when we took trips, when Mom made all four kids stand together and smile for the camera. It is a record of all the good bits. There were a lot of good bits. That version of 2013 is just as true as the harder one. The hard things do not eliminate the joyful ones unless we choose to only remember the hard things, which is kind of what I was doing.

Once I’m caught up on the family photo books, my next Sunday activity will be to put together the One Cobble at a Time book from 2013. That will have a more even mixture of the hard things and the bright ones. I expect to re-experience some hard emotions as I put the book together. But I could be wrong there too. It is possible that most of the emotion will have attenuated to only a whisper of what it once was. That would be nice.

I’ve been making annual photo books since 2007. They’re my version of our family life together. At first it was to give the kids story books about themselves. They still serve that purpose, but they also exist because I like making books. It makes me happy to see pictures and words gathered together so that people can enjoy them. At some point my kids will make homes of their own. They’ll get copies of the photo books to take with them, probably digital copies, since there will be quite a stack by then. What happens to them eventually is less important than the fact that making them and having them brings me joy. That seems like a good use for Sunday afternoons.

Kiki’s Birthday

By / May 16, 2014

I failed at birthdays last year, which is sad because all of my kids hit significant milestones. Gleek turned 12, Patch 10, Link 16, and Kiki 18. All the birthdays hit in the midst of other things and though I wanted to give them full attention, I just didn’t have that. The one I failed worst was Kiki. When I look at all the things going on at that time, the failure is understandable. I had all the end-of-the-school-year stuff. I had meeting after meeting about Gleek to make sure that we had her anxiety under control and things set up properly for the next year. I’d just sent The Body Politic off to print. We were expecting the coins the next week. I had relatives incoming for Kiki’s graduation. There was also the trecherous emotional terrain we were marching through having our first child graduate and be college bound. I wasn’t entirely stable. I careened through that month just trying not to crash. Then two days before the birthday, my hard drive failed and I had data loss. Computer failure is always massively anxiety inducing and I was already maxed out. So, yes, completely understandable that the birthday did not go as we would have hoped, but still painful.

I remember talking with Kiki about having a low key birthday and thinking it would be okay. We were getting her a laptop for her combined birthday/graduation present. It was the largest and most hoped-for present she’d ever gotten in her life. We went on her birthday to pick it out, but it had to be configured, so she did not get to take it home and play with it on her birthday. If I’d thought that through I would have realized that computers are rarely things to walk in and take home. I’m pretty sure that Howard took her out for sushi that birthday afternoon. So it is not that we deliberately ignored her, nor that we forgot. I thought it was all good. But she was sad, because most of the day had been just a normal day. Then at bedtime Patch had a meltdown because he hadn’t given her a present and it was really important to give her a present because she was leaving and her leaving was sad. Patch’s meltdown reminded Link and Gleek that they felt the same way. So I piled the three younger kids into the car and took them to Walmart to buy presents. I guess Kiki was in the shower or something. Somehow we left the house without her knowledge.

Though I would have liked to have done the shopping trip earlier (ahead of time, instead of late) as I walked with my kids through Walmart, I realized this was exactly what they needed. I watched them as they looked at towels, mugs, etc. Looking at these things, they were actually picturing Kiki at college and thinking about her there. They each selected a thing that they thought she would use and appreciate. Then each one knew that their sister would be taking something that they had selected for her. Much love went into the selection of those gifts. Every bit as much as if they’d shopped earlier, though for obvious reasons advance shopping would have resulted in a different birthday experience for everyone. When we arrived home we had a 10:30pm “patch up the feelings” birthday party. There were smiles and hugs. Kiki was touched that we’d disrupted bedtime in order to try to make the birthday more what it should have been. It was definitely not the 18th birthday that Kiki emotionally needed.

There were about two weeks between Kiki’s birthday and her graduation. I gave her a small gift on each of those days. I called it eighteen days of celebrating Kiki. We both knew it didn’t erase the birthday that wasn’t what it ought to have been, but it let me show that the hard day was not for lack of caring. I don’t know if it really helped or if she was humoring me.

This year is different. Kiki really doesn’t need more than a low-key birthday. She went to a movie with Howard. I fixed her lunch and took her shopping. She got plants; a philodendron from me and a little bonsai tree from Gleek. Link gave her the stuffed portal cube that he had. Patch gave her books. Howard gave her an easel. It was still more cobbled together than advance-planned, but the key is that she never felt ignored nor neglected. Not once. Not only that, but I was able to tell her about my (failed) quest for a lucky bamboo plant. It was a story that demonstrated that I’ve been thinking of her and her birthday for over a month in various bits and pieces. (This is usually true. I think a lot, but actually pull things together just in time.) The love is no different between this year and last, but the emotional needs and capabilities vary greatly. Last year Kiki was looking ahead to leaving home and needed evidence that she was loved and would be missed. This year she’s just arrived home and had seen in a dozen ways how glad we all are to have her here. Different year, different emotional needs.

Kiki and I talked about last birthday and this birthday. I don’t believe any hard feelings linger. But I did have a moment of being appalled when I remembered the scrambled 10pm shopping trip. I’d actually forgotten that part until Kiki mentioned it. It is one more evidence of how insane last year was. I’m so glad to be in this year now. I’m also glad that I don’t have to figure out any more birthdays for a while. They’re hard to get right.

Despite it all Life is Good

By / May 6, 2014 / 2 Comments

It feels like the kids and Howard are always extra rambunctious or grouchy on the days when I am tired. Those are the days where I drive up to my house and see the scattered pieces of some broken plastic toy across the pavement in front of our house. Then I remember that Gleek and some neighborhood kids had made a game of smashing the thing and they’d wandered off leaving the pieces. Of course they didn’t clean it up. Cleaning up rarely occurs to children and only sometimes to teens. Cleaning up becomes automatic for people who’ve been in charge of cleaning up long enough to know that life is better if the work is done first. The garbage cans were out by the curb too, waiting for me to bring them in. I looked at these small tasks, only a couple of minutes each, and realized that it fell to me, not to do the tasks, but to make someone else do them. The tiring part is that making someone else do them takes longer than doing them. It takes more energy too, but I simply can’t do all the tasks all the time. I have to make sure that others do them enough that they learn the “clean up the messes” impulse that they’ll need for the rest of their lives.

The house is a wreck, of course. I have been busy over the last month. We had vacation, then a major convention, then the Strength of Wild Horses shipping, then fetching Kiki from college. I haven’t had time to do things nor to make others do them. So I haul the kids from their games and require them to carry in the groceries that I fetched from the store. Then they eat the dinner I provided by spending $5 at Sam’s club for a rotisserie chicken. Not exactly home cooked, but more suited to our newly frugal budget than ordering pizza. The budget is new too. I remember how it goes from the years when we first launched into cartooning full time. But the habits are rusty and I’m still figuring out how they fit with the newer configuration of our lives. Back then I had time to bargain hunt for the cheapest whole chicken available and then to roast it myself. I work differently now and my solutions must be different.

Howard is having a rough day. He alerted me to the fact via text while I was still at the store. I look around the chaos of the kitchen, dirty dishes everywhere, kids wandering around and squabbling while they serve themselves food. I try to gently correct the rudest interactions and remind them that they can speak kindly to each other and still get the outcomes that they want. The kids listen. Maybe it will take this time. Probably not, but it is like making them clean. I have to keep modeling and reminding so that they can practice the empathy for others that they’ll need their whole lives. The chaos in the kitchen is perfectly calibrated to punch all of Howards anxiety and stress buttons. I am not surprised when he disappears back to his office, it is good of him, because he chose the kinder and more empathetic disappearance rather than venting his stress out loud. I am sad that he’s having a rough day, not just for him, but for me. When I’m tired and he’s happy, then I’m not so tired. That’s the truth of hard days. It is not that my family saves up chaos and grouchiness for the days when I’m tired, it is because I’m tired that everything feels extra grouchy and chaotic. Even things that would normally be fine.

I load the dishwasher, because that makes the kitchen better. The kids eat and are re-directed toward their evening homework activities. In the wake of all that, there is some quiet and some order. I sit facing the cleared counters, my back to the rest of the house. I’ll deal with the rest tomorrow. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have a full night’s sleep instead of the insomnia I had last night. Tomorrow I will do the laundry and vacuum, or make one of the kids do those things. For now, I will rest as much as I can. And I will remember how very fortunate I am to have all of these things which sometimes make life feel chaotic.