Self

Noise and Motion

By / January 3, 2014

I don’t pause enough. The minute I finish a task, I check in to social media sites, I read blogs. These things represent a break in my day and taking breaks is a good thing. Except I rarely eat without also reading. Somehow there is a piece of me that is convinced that we need some sort of input all the time. I can’t do one thing if the task allows for two things. Again, this is a useful way to accomplish more. The trouble comes when I am constantly inputting things into my brain and never leaving time for them to percolate and process. There need to be times when I am doing one boring thing so that my brain has a chance to quiet.

I haven’t been sleeping well. This is sad and strange because during the holidays is one of the few times when I get enough sleep on a daily basis. My usual schedule has me running at an hour-per-day sleep deficit which I try to catch up on Saturdays. This past week I’ve gotten eight or nine hours per night and still been tired the next day. It is like the anxiety waits for me in my subconscious and disturbs me all night when I’m supposed to be resting. I’m restless, I wake often, as if unremembered things chased me through my dreams all night. This particular pattern is a familiar one and I know the cure. I need more exercise during the day. If I break a sweat during the day then I don’t at night. It is some sort of weird conservation of sweat I guess.

This evening I was at loose ends. My work brain had shut off for the day. There was nothing I particularly wanted to read or watch. I knew that I wasn’t likely to sleep well, particularly since I have a driving day tomorrow and the night before a driving day is almost always an anxious one. I wanted to be distracted, to not have to think about the work I felt I should be doing or the long drive tomorrow. But as I was preparing some food and pondering my current lack of book, I realized how seldom I allow myself to be alone with my thoughts. I thought about this lovely video poem I discovered several years ago on How to Be Alone. Then I sat down and ate with just my thoughts for company. I noticed some things out of place in my house and decided that my next hour would be spent putting them in order. It took two. I made the work more energetic than strictly necessary, so that it counted as light exercise. During the work I did not think of anything in particular. In fact, mostly I thought of nothing. It was a good rest for my brain that thinks of things far too much.

I should practice this more often, focusing on one thing instead of always seeking out more. I don’t know if the work and quiet was sufficient to provide a better night’s sleep, but it certainly provided a better evening than I otherwise would have had.

New Year’s Intentions

By / December 30, 2013

We talked for two hours, my sister-in-law and me. It was the first chance we’ve had to sit down and visit in almost a year. Both of our families have been in transition, stressed, hers more than mine. We both pulled inward and just managed the things in front of us. And we’re both poised on the edge of a new year which looks like it will contain more stability. I’m still not placing too much hope on that. I’m not looking too far ahead. I glance through the year so I can see the shape of the calendar, but then I focus only on the next few days.

Yet, unintended, I find I have concrete wishes for some of the ways that I want this next year to be different. I don’t like New Year’s Resolutions. I always have dozens of goals in progress and to attempt to renovate my life in a flurry of January goal setting sounds like a recipe for failure. Wishes is a good word, because goals are concrete and measurable. They are things which end up on my task list and which I then am assigned to complete. Some of these wishes have manifested small related goals, but mostly they are prayers for the general emotional content I’d like for this year. They’re the rough sketch which will change when it gets set into firm lines.

I would like to be more social this year, to unfurl where last year I pulled in.

I would like to leave the writer cupboard in my brain standing open because I’m digging into it often enough that closing it does not make sense.

I would like to continue to renovate the physical spaces in our house, knowing that this renewal is symbolic for the emotional renovations in our family.

I would like to spend more time happy and less time afraid.

If I want these things, I will need to make goals. Little goals, because big goals often fail, but a small well-designed goal can fit right into the life I already have. Small goals often feel like they are accomplishing nothing, but over time they transform. Rather like noticing today that Gleek’s teeth are almost straight in her braces, when they were extremely crooked last March. Small changes applied over time are what transformations are made of.

Snow Falls Again

By / December 22, 2013

Snow is falling today. Each flake is tiny when landing on the ground, but they have been falling all day. They land on the piles of snow which still have not melted from the snow storm before this one, or the snowfall before that. Most winters the kids are hoping we’ll get some snow in time for Christmas. This year it has been on the ground for weeks. I stepped outside in it, to feel the hush which always comes with snowfall.

Then I thought back all through the year to another day when snow fell, way back on February 9th, when I wrote another post that talked about snow, but was really about many other things. I read that post today while I was gathering information for the 2013 Tayler Family Photo Book. When I wrote that post I was at the beginning of my year. I’d had a hard week and knew there was quite a bit of emotional sorting yet to do. The week was harder than the post makes clear. At the moment of that post I did not know how long that sorting would take or how complex the emotions would become. I look back with sympathy for my past self. It got so much harder in the next couple of weeks. Then it got harder again before it gradually became easier. It is now December and we’re not done sorting yet. Reading that post makes my heart hurt and I realize how very emotional the process will be when I begin pulling together my annual book of blog entries. It will dredge up all the memories of the hard things which happened this year. Part of me wants to just close the door and move on. We’ve made our shifts, transitioned into a new familial life stage. Next year might be a time when we can just settle in and be glad. I would love that, but I have to finish this first. I have to read through it all and remember it. In that process I will be able to let go some of the trapped emotions that are attached to the events.

Snow is falling, illuminated by the Christmas lights on our front yard tree. I don’t know what the weather will be for the rest of this winter. Perhaps it will all be as snowy as the past few weeks have been. I hope that the emotional weather for next year is not as tempestuous as the year just past. It seems logical that it would be, but I can’t control that any more than I can dictate to the sky whether it should snow. All I can do is clear away the snow that has already fallen so that I am better able to handle what ever comes next.

Thinking About Cultural Heritage

By / December 19, 2013 / 3 Comments

I am an American citizen with fairly standard-issue Northern European mixed heritage. This means that sometimes I feel boring, or like I don’t really have a culture to call my own. That is an illusion created by the fact that my culture is everywhere. I am represented in every book I read, every show I watch. I spend the vast majority of my days swimming in my traditions and culture. They are as pervasive as the air and I pay them about as much attention. This means that I do not truly understand when someone else has a driving need to connect with their heritage and a vital need to protect it from absorption and dilution. I can intellectually comprehend, but I’ve never been alienated or separated from my culture of birth. I don’t have that emotional experience, which means I should listen carefully when those who do have it, choose to speak in a forum where I can listen.

I do have one aspect of my life that is non-standard. I’m a born and raised member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, commonly known as Mormons. On my mother’s side I am steeped in pioneer heritage, stories of people who trekked across the wilderness in order to build a place where they could practice their beliefs freely. That heritage is praised and used to shape modern LDS culture. On my Dad’s side is a conversion story, which is also a strong part of LDS culture. We love stories of people changing their lives in response to personal spiritual experiences and exercises of faith. My childhood is steeped in this culture and my adulthood continues to be, because I choose it, even though there are aspects of modern LDS culture that trouble or annoy me. Note that there is a difference between the doctrines of the religion and the culture that forms around them.

Any time there is a news article or media event that throws general attention on the LDS faith, I feel anxious. Often the attention is neutral or positive, but I still feel cautious anyway, as when I heard about Book of Mormon the Musical. I did not know whether that play would accurately represent my faith or culture as I experience it. Logically, I knew that a misrepresentation would not do me any harm, but I paid attention anyway. I pay similar attention to any other news stories relating to Mormonism. I worry that people will make assumptions about who I am based on what they think they know about my faith and culture. I know that there are some people who will automatically be antagonistic toward me because of it. Yet I skip most of that negative attention, because my sub-culture does not show on first glance.

Then I think about what it would be like if my Mormonism were written on my face. What if, like the Jewish people in Nazi Germany, I had to display my cultural alignment for all to react to every time I went out in public. When I imagine that, I begin to understand what it is like to be a person of color in the United States. Then I begin to understand why the “It’s a culture not a costume” campaigns matter. Some people are not given the option to blend in. They have no choice but to stand out wherever they go and that makes them a walking target, not just for hateful things, but also for people like me, who mean well, but are still fumbling around trying to understand. I don’t understand. I haven’t lived it. This means that I should listen on these issues more than I should speak. I should give my attention to when people tweet about Being Black on University of Michigan campus (#BBUM) and the twitter hashtag #IAmNotYourAsianSidekick. And if I’m tempted to think the issues are being blown out of proportion, I should remember to do a comparison of the google image searches for Caucasian and Asian. Then I should think about how I would feel to have my heritage represented by such a search.

We are all products of our cultures, and one of the aspects of white American culture is to assume that our experience of life is what everyone gets. It is not true. Life is not fair. We all have different difficulty settings and if we’re aware of that, then we have a chance to see all the people around us as equals who are shaped and made interesting by their cultural heritages.

Tracking All The Things

By / December 18, 2013 / 1 Comment

My brain tracks things. It does it automatically, sometimes without my consent. I’m not sure when it started. It is possible that I’ve always done it. I know for certain I’ve been at it for at least the past decade. This capability is, mostly, very useful. It is the reason that I am able to run so many projects in parallel. It is the reason that Howard and I hit deadlines and one of the reasons we’re able to make a living at what we do. I love my ability to track, but there are times when it is problematic.

Just last week I was out to breakfast with my friend Mary. She told me about some upcoming tricky scheduling between a work event and a family event where she had to travel extensively in between. During the conversation, I felt my tracking brain click on and I knew that some part of my brain would be paying attention to whether Mary was able to make her tight connections. There is no point to me tracking that information. Mary is a grown up. These are her events, not mine. And there is nothing that I can do to affect the outcome. My life would be more contented and less stressed if I could spend that day happily oblivious to Mary’s travels. And I’ll probably spend most of that day not thinking about it. But at least a couple of times, my brain will ping “I wonder if Mary made her deadline.” and then I’ll go check.

This happens to me every day. My brain pings me about a dozen things that it has chosen to track. Was there a follow up to that internet kerfluffle? Did so-and-so manage to make that souffle? Don’t we need to start scheduling that meeting for that project which is three months down the road, but we need to start now? I haven’t seen a schedule from AnyCon yet, I should email and check. I’m constantly thinking of things before the people, whose jobs the things are, have had a chance to think of them. I do my best to reign it in and make sure that my tracking does not adversely impact others. The good news is that while I can’t stop my brain from pinging me, I am not compelled to follow through on the pings. I can answer a ping with “That’s not really my business” and move on with my day. That thing is likely to ping me again until the deadline is passed, but each time I can dismiss it or act on it as seems appropriate and logical.

Unfortunately in the parenting arena things get murkier. It is easy to see that my friend’s travel plans are not my job. But what about my child’s homework? Obviously the child needs to do the work. Obviously it is my job to teach kids how to face homework and get it done. Obviously young children need an adult to help them track and teach them how to track. Obviously children under stress need more help than usual. But there is an area where things are much less obvious. I have to figure out at what age I step back and let the kids track their own things. The ages differ according to child, previous experience, and ongoing stress level. I’m really good at stepping in and giving lots more help. I’m much less good at stepping back. If I know what the assignments are, I want my kids to snap to it and get it all done because then those assignments will stop pinging in my brain. What my sixteen year old needs right now is space to sort and track his own assignments. He needs to find his own ways of getting things done. His ways are not my ways and that makes my tracking brain crazy. It pings me all the time about his work, and my job right now is to tell it to shut up, because tracking is his job, not mine.

The good news is that eventually my tracking brain will recalibrate. My college kid is home now and my tracking brain is treating her like any other visiting adult and not trying to track all of her tasks and things. Though I don’t ask for details about the work she needs to complete while she is here. Details are hooks on which my tracking brain gets caught. On the whole I suspect that this aspect of how my brain works is outside of normal, but it is more of a benefit in my life than a detriment, so I’ve just learned to manage it.

Contemplation in the Christmas Season

By / December 14, 2013

We have reached that point in December where life has slowed down enough for me to contemplate all the things I would like to do as celebrations of the season, but which I’m not likely to actually accomplish. I love the idea of a daily quiet contemplation where I light a candle and spend some time just sitting with the Christmas tree. I feel peace in those moments, that peace is the point of Christmas for me, connection to a natal event long past, connection to loved ones in the present, and expressing appreciation for all of it. I dearly want to carefully contemplate and select gifts for all the people in my life. I want to write handwritten notes. I want to give out tokens of appreciation. The reality of my holiday is that I might have a contemplative moment once or twice per week during the first part of December.

Only ten days remain between now and Christmas. In order to give gifts to everyone who matters to me, I’d need to sit down and make massive lists. I’d have to live by those lists and scramble to assemble and deliver everything. That effort would completely obliterate my attempts to find peace and contemplation during the holiday season. The two desires for Christmas celebration are mutually exclusive at this point. So I am going to do what I always end up doing, I’ll muddle my way down a compromise path. I’ll give some gifts, but not others. I’ll write some notes, I’ll give some tokens. Then I’ll hope that my neighbors will not feel slighted when I don’t make plates of treats to give away. I’ll look at the few Christmas cards on my wall, remember the years when the wall was covered, and know that this is the natural result of me being too busy to send cards out any time in the past five years. I still love both sending and receiving cards, but something has to go.

Our church Christmas party was tonight. It was a lovely event, good food, good company. The program was brief, but heart warming. It was a good balance of all the things a Christmas party needs to be. Howard, Link, and Kiki left early because they wanted to get back to the game they were playing together. Gleek and Patch played running games with all the other kids. I visited with a few friends, had one really important conversation, and then stood off to the side and observed. There have been times when I was fully invested in my community of neighbors, when I had important things to talk about with all of them. Lately I drift through, touching down in the community only lightly. I feel bad about that, because I know that it is my choices that keep me adrift. I would be more connected if I did things like making plates of treats for neighbors, or went out of my way to have conversations with people I have not spoken to lately. I have not given very much to my neighborhood community in this past year, all of my energy went into family, business, and keeping promises made to backers and customers. At some point in the future, maybe next year, I’ll connect with my neighborhood again. I do what I can and what I feel inspired is most important at the time. I did not spend this year wrongly.

We have one more week of school. During that week I need to help my two youngest kids select and acquire presents for their siblings. There are other holiday essentials to be planned and brought to fruition. And of course there are piles of homework that I get to guide my youngest into completing. It is plenty to track, but tonight I have a Christmas tree in the dark and a quiet hour to feel calm. It is well.

At The Therapist’s Office

By / December 29, 2014 / 1 Comment

I sat in the waiting room of the therapist’s office while she escorted Gleek back to get set up. For a moment it was just me, a pair of couches, and a television which was off. The emptiness of the space felt peaceful to me, but in a moment the therapist would be back to ask me how things are going. She likes to check in with me before spending the bulk of the hour with Gleek. I wasn’t sure what to tell her because my head felt like a storage unit packed full of furniture. I knew there were thoughts about Gleek in there somewhere, but I was going to have to pull some other stuff out before I could get at them.

I ended up speaking a lot more about Link than about Gleek, because thoughts of Link were in the front of my brain. He was the one who’d just finished a really rough week. I know it could have been much worse, but I still felt a little heartsick and helpless at times. That is part of the experience of parenting. There are times when I want to help, but I can’t or I shouldn’t. Sometimes it takes all my strength to not interfere. I met with a school administrator about Link last week. She asked how he’s doing academically. Glancing at his grades, he’s fine, better than he has been in years. Only, I’m having to work really hard at making sure that he’s tracking all his things and I feel like I’m always telling him to do things he’d rather ignore. This too is part of parenting.

The therapist was kind and listened to all the things I had to say, which is her job. Some other trip I’ll have thoughts about Gleek to share. Right now we’re all still getting to know each other, the therapist and I. Perhaps listening to me talk about a different child is actually helpful for her to form a picture of how our family works. Even if it is not helpful to her, it was helpful to me. I could have rattled on for a lot longer. I didn’t though, because I felt wary of using up time that belonged to Gleek. These are her therapy sessions, not mine. Gleek likes this therapist. The office has a sand table and a room full of story props, so Gleek can tell stories. The therapist learns something from these stories, because after this session she sent Gleek home with some things to work on. Mostly being calmer and slower. Over time we’ll establish a familiarity with therapy and hopefully Gleek will gather tools she can use for the rest of her life.

The waiting room was empty while I waited for Gleek. No other clients came in while we were there, so I was spared from looking at some other child and pondering why this young one was so troubled as to need therapeutic intervention. There was no other parent there to look at my daughter and wonder the same thing. Years ago I wrote in a blog entry that I never wanted to be the reason that Gleek needed therapy. Now I drive her to her appointments. The fact that I’m not the right person to help her untangle some emotional things does not mean that I caused those things. It is not my fault even though Freud instilled the field of psychology with a strong impulse to look to the parents, particularly the mother, when a child is struggling. I tell myself these things, trying to make peace, trying to make all of this routine–just a thing we do. But the truth is that sometimes I blame me. Deep in my heart I count the things I could have done differently. I map the paths I maybe should have chosen. I know the things I feel I ought to have handled better. Taking my child to a therapist forces me to confront all of that and deal with it. Which is also a good thing. Good is not the same as easy.

Things are good right now, and they’re aimed at better.

Life Shift: Moving Into the Warehouse

By / November 3, 2013 / 2 Comments

The night before the move I lay awake in bed cataloging the things I should have done to get ready, but didn’t. It was Schlock Warehouse moving day and I was not prepared. I know how to ship. I know how to run a shipping event. I know how to manage having inventory in storage units and the work station in my basement. But beyond broad strokes of knowing that I needed a truck and people, I didn’t really know how to proceed with moving. The truck was a source of stress, I’d never driven one before and the thought made me nervous. Once I survived driving the truck,I was going to have to provide instructions to a moving crew when I didn’t know the most efficient ways to work. I worried about these things the night before, or at least part of me did. The larger part was calm, because one thing that many shipping parties has taught me is that the Schlock volunteers are smart, helpful, and innovative. They solve problems when my brain is too tired to figure it out. This move was no exception.

These were the two storage units. They were thirty feet deep and each of those cardboard boxes represents 40lbs. We haven’t done the exact math because there are a lot of boxes and we were all pretty tired by the end, but our ballpark guess is that we schlepped 8-10 tons of things. Those are literal tons, meaning 16,000-20,000 pounds of stuff. On the first load we had to pull some boxes back off of the truck because it was riding too low. I wish we’d gotten a picture of that. Not a good thing when the wheel well is touching the top of the wheel.

This is the space we had to move into.

I measured it. It is larger than the combined space in both our storage units. The office space is larger than my office and shipping room in my basement. Yet at 1am the night before I was convinced that it was not all going to fit. That fear lingered through the day, mostly because all day long I had to make decisions about where things would be put. The decisions felt crucial and irrevocable because we were so tired that I could not picture rearranging things later. I felt like I had to get it right, which I didn’t really. I just had to get all the things into one place so that I could begin to see how it all works. This is one of the reason I’m so very grateful for the helpers we had. They were my auxiliary brains and thus able to tell me everything was just fine.

The first merchandise moved into the warehouse prior to moving day, thus demonstrating that we are able to receive deliveries.

This same truck driver has delivered to our house on more than one occasion. He was pleased to see our new facility and admired our giant roll up door.
I love the great big door. We could back the truck all the way inside.

The other reason I need helpers for these big Schlock events is because they make me laugh. We loaded the truck with the musical theme from Tetris playing on some speakers while making jokes about things fitting. Later there was the Angry Birds theme with matching jokes. My helpers are always glad to come and I always owe them far more than I ever feel able to pay back. They come, and because of them I can do work that I would never be able to accomplish by myself. They make what we do possible and they keep me sane when my brain wants to tell me that I’m ruining everything.

We emptied the storage units. There is left over garbage in them that I need to clean out.

Then I’ll need to sweep and go inform the office that they’re available again. It feels strange to see them empty like that. This morning I saw the matching padlocks sitting on my kitchen counter and I had a moment of panic “Oh no, I forgot to lock up the storage units!” But then realized that I would never lock up those units again. We’re done with that part and moved on to the next.

Even more strange was walking into my downstairs shipping room which is now half empty. We ran out of time with the truck before we completely cleared the shipping room. Which was fine, we were out of energy too. What is left are odds and ends that I can move at my leisure. Except it won’t be at my leisure, because I had a moment of panic standing in that half empty room.

I went to Howard and cried “I broke it. I broke the system I’ve used for shipping for the last seven years and I’m terrified that this will destroy everything.” Of course it won’t. The new set up will, obviously, create new problems especially at first, but it will be better in a hundred ways. The biggest is one that became clear after Howard commented.
“At least now the light will be off in that room. You always left the light on in your shipping room. I never understood that.”

It took a few moments of thought for me to figure out why I did that. On the occasions where I walked out of the room knowing I wouldn’t be back for awhile, I turned off the light. That was rare. Usually I stepped out for a moment, or got called away, or paused what I was doing and intended to come back. The light stayed on because I was always about to ship, in the middle of shipping, or not quite done shipping. That was the problem. I was never done and the shipping/convention prep work spilled all over the living spaces. It won’t be able to do that anymore. I’ll have to decide to go work and decide to lock up to come home. This is good. I am looking forward to it. However, it represents a fundamental shift in my life and a part of me is terrified that I’ve broken everything and we’re all doomed as a result. That part of my brain wanted me to jump in the car and drive to go check on the warehouse at 10pm last night. Just to make sure everything was okay.

Everything is fine.
All the merchandise fits.
I didn’t crash the truck.
The helpers were amazing.
And I’m not nearly as sore as I expected to be today.

That last part is good because I’ve really only begun working. There is still stuff to move out of my house and there is lots to organize over at the warehouse. Some of the organization need to happen pretty quickly because there are packages to mail.

What With One Thing and Another, Saturday Passed

By / October 26, 2013 / 2 Comments

One of my favorite moments in the book The Princess Bride is the part where the boy’s father (yes it is a father in the book, not a grandfather) skips a bunch of boring text by simply saying “what with one thing and another, three years passed.” This was not one of my favorite moments when I was reading the book for the first time (after having fallen in love with the movie.) It became a quiet favorite moment many years later when I realized how very useful that storytelling trick is. I can skip the boring bits, simply skim over them, and get back to the important stuff. The only trouble is that no one but me knows I am making a clever reference when I use the phrase “what with one thing and another…” It is not highly quotable nor memorable to most people. It blends into the text of the things I write and no one gets to share a little smile with me and think for a moment about Wesley, Buttercup, and how for about a year when I was twelve I really believed that there was an S. Morgenstern and that I could find an unabridged copy of The Princess Bride. Which means that William Goldman’s own little joke worked on me, so perhaps it is fair to hide a sly reference in my words that no one but me will get. Except you, because you’ve read this, and now you’re in on the joke. It isn’t a big joke, just a little one that makes me smile inside.

What with one thing and another I haven’t had a proper Saturday for a month. The past three were variously disrupted with interesting things, all of which dictated my schedule. This morning dawned with nothing on the calendar and only a list of house things which I’ve been wanting to complete, but haven’t had time to do. So naturally I slept late. Because that is the proper beginning for a Saturday. Then I marshaled my forces (the kids) and compelled all of us to go outside where we made the front of our house look like maybe someone lives in our house. We also harvested walnuts from under the fallen leaves and pears from where they’d fallen on the ground. I discovered that there were still grapes hiding among the vines so we picked those too. I’ve been ignoring these fall things because I was so busy. I didn’t have time to do anything else, or so I thought.

There are many jokes about working for yourself. “Best thing about working for yourself is that you only have to work half days and you get to pick which twelve hours.” It is the sort of joke which is funny because it rings of truth. In theory our lives are supremely flexible because we set our own schedule. In reality there are hundreds of constraints telling us what must be done, when it must be done, and how it must be done. Work and family things don’t blend together, but they do tangle up and often interfere. One thing that has surprised me in the past year has been the re-emergence of Saturday as a housework day. Back when I was not working at business and was instead working on keeping house and raising small children, I used school-free Saturdays as a time to set the house in order and to teach the kids about housework. Then everything got muddled up with work spilling everywhere. But lately I put down the majority of the business work on Friday afternoon and don’t pick it up until Monday morning. It creates a space where I can look around me and realize that I want to sweep the front walk because those grass clippings have been there for two weeks and they’ve clumped up against the front steps so that everyone tracks some into the house. It is the sort of little task which theoretically should just get done in one of the spaces of the days, only the days keep running out of spaces. Or I run out of energy. Often the latter.

I picked up the pears by myself, crouched under the low hanging branches, not willing to kneel lest I discover my knee in the midst of mushy rotten pear. My hair often caught on branches over head, pulling strands loose and occasionally depositing twigs. One of which I discovered later when an acquaintance stopped by, and mid-chat I touched my head to realize that perhaps brushing my hair after the pair project would have been a good idea. The acquaintance was too polite to mention my birdnest-like hairdo, so I just put my hand back down and ignored it as well. Half of poise is deciding that these things are irrelevant. Before that conversation, there were pears, and I was by myself picking them up carefully because wasps like rotting pears and I do not like getting stung. The sun filtered through the yellow, orange, red leaves above me. Sometime next week all those leaves will be on the ground and finding the pears would be much more difficult. My back was aching because I’d done more physical labor that day than I’ve done in quite a while. I was glad because sleep has been elusive as my brain ran overtime considering projects. Devoting myself to clean up and harvesting was setting me to rights in more ways than one.

The kids complained as they pulled the husks off of walnuts. They don’t even like walnuts much and they’d already done quite a bit of work. Though Gleek admitted to enjoying the “cute little worms” she sometimes finds in the husks. The kids don’t even like eating walnuts much, but I do. I sneak them into cookies sometimes or crumble them on my salads. I give them away to neighbors. The walnuts are quite a bit of work because once the slimy husk is removed there is still a shell to crack and the nutmeat to pick out. Lots of packaging and work for something so small, yet having the tree makes me happy and I like having food that grew in my yard. Perhaps I should instead have made the kids help me with pears. They love to eat pear butter, except wasps would have led to kids not helping at all.

The harvesting activites have added to my list of projects for next week, yet they have lowered my stress level by reminding me of things that I love. I can see it in my thoughts and manifested in this post where I abandon the tightly focused presentation of small ideas and instead am content to drift from topic to topic. The whole thing is really one long digression, but then the title of the post should have been a clue. What with one thing and another Saturday passed, which means that this whole post could be skipped by those who just want to hear news of projects. The day was a pause, a side note. It did not forward the plot. The fact that I wrote it makes me remember why I wanted to find that mythical unabridged version of Princess Bride. I knew that the things which had been cut were probably boring, but I still wanted to see them. It was during the same era of my life that I read the 1500+ page unabridged Les Miserables and was fascinated by its meanderings. Sometimes the pauses and the digressions are the point.

Things Falling Into Place and Psychology

By / October 24, 2013

It has been two weeks of things falling into place. The first warehouse I toured turned out to be the one we needed. The lease was signed two days later. Business insurance looked to be complicated, but then it wasn’t. An appointment got cancelled in the middle of a busy day. I thought I’d have to spend time waiting around for a delivery truck, but the shipment of Tub of Happiness got held up in LA and won’t arrive until next week, which is far more convenient. The psychiatrist’s office had to reschedule Gleek’s appointment for several weeks later, which gave just enough time for the school year to settle in more. We have things to discuss. Then at church a conversation with Gleek’s youth leaders led to a recommendation for a therapist who does art therapy. Gleek’s first appointment is next week. I could continue the list. Last Spring was full of turmoil, road blocks, and struggles. During those struggles we laid lots of ground work and things are falling in to place now.

Today was the meeting with Gleek’s psychiatrist and next week is her first session with a new therapist. I feel very ambivalent about both of those things. There is a part of my brain that wants to argue about expense and effort. She’s doing really well right now. She’s mostly happy. She’s got straight As in school. Okay, I’d like to see her socializing more with people face to face instead of online, but surely we don’t need a therapist for that. These thoughts burble in my brain, trying to get traction. Yet I know that Gleek has lots of things to learn about how to handle her stresses and emotions. Things are good now because she’s not being challenged. She is not under stress. This means that now is the time to be working on things so that when the next stressful time hits, she has skills to manage it. It is logical. I’m pretty sure this is the right course, but I don’t want to do it. Therapy is hard. We have to face things instead of letting them slide. Surely I have enough projects going on without adding another one. Yet I can’t but think that so many of the other things are going so smoothly to make space for this and for things like this.

Gleek is not the only one with things to work through. Her struggles last Spring significantly undermined my confidence in my parenting. The attendant therapy sessions did not fix that, because over and over I was shown how things I was doing fed into and exacerbated Gleek’s stress. The biggest change that took place was in me. I shifted my management of things, set some new boundaries, and rearranged schedules. Then the troubles evaporated, which is good, but I wish I could feel like they went away because Gleek learned something rather than because I did. Of course if I was the one creating the problem, then maybe it isn’t laying in wait to ambush us. Maybe it is actually solved. Any time a child is in crisis, psychological experts look to parents as part of the solution. Unfortunately finding solutions also creates guilt, because I didn’t figure it out sooner. If only I’d been better. If only I was able to be consistent instead of letting the rules go blurry and putting them back later. If only, if only, if only. Those “if onlys” don’t help, but I have to see them and work through them in order to get rid of them.

The take away from the consultations this week is that Gleek needs more stress in her life. She needs the good kind of stress where she goes to an activity, tries new things, and meets new people. Gleek is happy about this prescription because she wants to take a gymnastics class. So I’ll add that to my list of things to set up. She’ll be less happy about the second half of the prescription, which is to limit her time spent in electronic worlds on the computer. She needs time to be bored and to find good ways to stop being bored. Fortunately adding fun activities will cause the second to happen very naturally.

The good news is that I don’t have to create an extensive plan and execute on it. I just need to figure out what comes next and do that. For tonight, it means putting kids to bed. Tomorrow I’ll be spending my morning work hours setting up utilities for the warehouse. After that I’ll be crafting the Kickstarter information or pounding my way through some book layout. The good news is that tomorrow is both Friday and the end of term, so the kids are all pretty much homework free for the weekend. Step by step we do all the things, working and guiding things so that they fall into place.