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The first stages of clearing out are easy. That is when I find all the things which fall into the “why do I even still have this thing” category. The early stages are satisfying, I quickly create large piles of things to throw out or give away. The result is easily visible space created in my life. Then there are the things which still carry a whisper of the importance they used to have, or are attached to a memory. Most of those go as well. Or they are kept and put in a place where the memory can be kept safe. After that it gets complicated and/or inconvenient. In order to unload chemicals, paint, oil for a car we no longer own, I have to look up proper disposal locations and costs. We want to replace some large and heavy hardwood furniture, which means figuring out how to transport the old furniture to either a consignment shop or donation location. (And it means going through a mental process that makes it okay to let the furniture go.) Then there are the papers/photos/mementos. These things must be sorted for personal value and historical value. That sorting is mentally exhausting work.

And yet, I’m beginning to see space open up. This space is going to be crucial in the coming months when I begin tearing apart portions of our house to make them better. The space is also crucial in allowing us to grow forward without being buried in who we used to be. Bit by bit. Corner by corner. Category by category, I am making our lives better.

The house feels empty and today felt long. I can feel the absence of my 20 year old son. It happens dozens of times all day. At the grocery store when I don’t buy an item which we stocked because he likes it. In the house when the floor creaks and it isn’t because of his footsteps. When I do laundry, because I discovered a load of his clothes still in the dryer which I’ll need to deliver to him later in the week. I have lots of feelings about him living elsewhere, but I try to land on enthusiasm for the things he’s going to get to do.

We remembered how to do the morning off-to-school routine. Some years I have to struggle to remember how it goes, but this year it all fell right back into place. And college girl, who is finishing her last semester from home, fit right in to the patterns. Then during the day she undertook several household projects that would not have been completed today if she weren’t here. Howard’s office is being rearranged so it can function as studio space for two artists instead of just one. They’re both quite excited about it.

I had more trouble picking up business tasks. I had to take time looking at all of the work tasks and re-establishing urgency and priority for each one. So many things got shuffled to the side during the holiday shipping rush, holiday, and then getting my son settled at school. But I made a start on getting things done. I’ll do more tomorrow. Slowly but surely I’ll knock tasks off the list.

All things considered, this feels like the true first day of the New Year. It was the first day when we began to establish patterns that we’ll try to hold onto. I’m reluctant to draw any conclusions about the coming year as a whole based on results from today, but today was good.

I began 2017 with trepidation, as I said in my New Year Ahead post on January 1st. In some ways I met the goal of that post: to grow my heart. In other ways I could have done better. I do know that I reach December of 2017 feeling worn out and battered, which was discouraging. Politics and the world at large felt like impending doom all year, but on the home front everyone was doing better. We weren’t “all better” but everyone was growing which was a nice improvement over the shrinking several of my children did for a couple of years. Unfortunately growth is always a thing of fits, starts, and backward steps. We hit a harder patch in November/ December, which had me counting down toward the day when 2017 was over. The week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve was a gift that granted me a measure of calm, clarity, and perspective.

2017 is complete. The beautiful things about it are safe in treasured memory that can’t be damaged by anything in times to come. The things that were hard about it, I can mine for lessons, then let go. Which leaves me looking forward.

I have things to build this year. Most of my Christmas gifts were power tools and related paraphernalia. We have some home renovation that needs to be done. I’ll be doing some of it myself. These physical renovations are an external manifestation of emotional and family dynamic renovations. We have changed who we are, and we are still changing, it is time to alter our living spaces to match. And changing our living spaces assists us in the work of re-defining who we are and how we see our lives.

Yesterday I wrote a post about the end of 2017 and someone asked “I thought this year had been better for you.” It was and it wasn’t. But most of the reasons it wasn’t have to do with my anxieties and my emotional reactions (or over reactions) to events that occur. Additionally, I think I let the weariness of November/ December color the year too much. After all, it was a year that included all the brightness and joy that was my trip to Europe. And I finally delivered all the Planet Mercenary packages, I have to remind myself the magnitude of that success, because my brain is more inclined to focus on how afraid I was during every step. Afraid I’d do things wrong. Afraid the shipping funds would run out. Afraid that it wouldn’t get done in time. And then there was all the anxiety related to national events… Viewing 2017 through that haze of anxiety colors everything.

I make my life harder than it has to be, because of the quantity of energy I spend on being afraid of (and preparing for) things that haven’t happened and might never happen.

Of all the things in my life that need to be fixed, that is the largest one. I want to build a life with less anxiety in it. To do that I have to change habits of thinking. I have to change my physical spaces. I have to get rid of the detritus of past selves which aren’t letting me clearly see what is needful in my life right now. Attempting to reduce my anxiety is a project that will spawn a hundred projects, some new, some already ongoing. I’ve cleared away the memories contained in the blog books. I’m now clearing the happier moments of those years by creating matching family photo books. (When I’m stressed, I write words to sort it. The happy moments are more likely to get recorded in photographs. There are hundreds of tiny, happy moments even in the hardest of years.) I’ve already been sorting and discarding old stored things from my house.

I’m not going to try to do a massive grand renovation. I’m going to do a hundred small construction projects. I’m not going to “hit the ground running” or plan to go fast. I’m going to make small, consistent, persistent changes. I’m going to change my surroundings to remind me of those changes and to reinforce them. I will spend this year building: physically, creatively, socially, and in my community. It is time to roll up sleeves and get to work.

Each year I take the blog posts from that year and turn them into a paper book that I can sit on my shelf. I like doing it, and it helps me to have physical evidence of the fact that I do write a lot of words in a given year. Except, I hadn’t made one since 2014. Nor had I created the annual family photo books. I’ve been so far under water, nearly drowning, that I couldn’t face going through the words and pictures from those years. I did not want to live them again. Until, suddenly, this past week I did. Somehow as I neared the end of 2017, I wanted to clear all of that away, put it to rest for good. So in less than 7 days I put together books for 2015, 2016, & 2017. Going through quickly gave me the benefit of some additional perspective. I have a lot more compassion for past me than I did before. I’ve spent weeks feeling like I failed at parenting in dozens of critical ways. After three years in review, yes I failed at some things, but not the biggest ones, and I never let failure stop me from trying to do better. Which is the true measure of success: don’t let failure be the last thing you do.

This past year has been one of finishing up. We finished up Kiki’s college education. We’ve finished up Link’s residence here in our house, launching him into his next life stage. We (finally) finished up the Planet Mercenary project and the seventy maxims project, which represents massive effort and success on my part. I rescued both of those from failure, and was rescued from my project failures by amazing collaborators. The biggest thing I want to finish up before the end of 2017: I would like to cap off and close the five-year-long chapter of my life where my daily existence was dictated by mental health crises. I want next year to be different. Finishing off the books felt like a step toward that.

While I was making the books, I also made a list summarizing my parenting experiences in the past five years. (For the entirety of which, with only brief respites, I always had 2-4 children in crisis.)
2013 Transitions and meltdowns
2014 Melting down and getting smaller
2015 Pit of despair and shrinking
2016 Stabilizing and grieving
2017 The intensity knob went up to 11 and I got transitions, meltdowns, despair, grieving, and (miraculously) enough growing to counter balance most of the rest.

This was a year defined by anxiety and fear. I want something else now. But I wouldn’t give up the growth that happened this year, and the growth was a direct result of everything that came for all the years before. So thank you 2017 for existing. I now release you, and turn to move forward.

I don’t know how it works, and it isn’t guaranteed to always work, but somehow Christmas is beautiful and peaceful even when the run of days up to it are an emotional roller coaster. When I view the day through the lens of my religious beliefs, the day is blessed. It is specifically granted an extra measure of peace, particularly when I’ve been praying for exactly that. From a more earthly viewpoint, Christmas is a collaborative creation of all the participants. We create it for each other, and in a house where people have been thinking and planning carefully for weeks, the creation is beautiful.

Christmas comes as a candle flame in dark midwinter. It brings light and warmth. And it never hurts to have a cat to oversee the unwrapping.

We don’t always know that we have expectations about things until they unfold differently than expected. I never once sat down to picture my daughter’s last days of college. I certainly would not have pictured me spending two nights camping on her apartment floor so that I can assist with final clean up and, more importantly, function as an emotional support for a young woman with a raging head cold who has to face the final exam for a class that has thrice given her massive, can’t-breathe, panic attacks. My daughter has become so thoroughly adult in the way she faces her troubles, that I have to tell her it is okay to get some hand-holding right at the last exhausting bit.

The walls of the apartment bedroom are bare now. We took down the posters and the forest of stick-on wall hooks that used to host hats, calendars, whiteboards, and other life paraphernalia. What remains are white walls and a pile of boxes in the corner, each labeled with where they will go to be unpacked once we’re at home. My house is “home” now when she speaks. For a long time “home” was her college existence, but now it is my house again. I’ll be glad to fold her back into the patterns of our family.

For two weeks I’ll have all four, then we’ll launch our son who is desperate to find a home that isn’t my house. My house isn’t home to him, he tells me. I nod and understand that emotionally and developmentally this statement is exactly as it should be. I save my crying for when he is not around to see it. I’ve spent the vast majority of my adult life sacrificing to create a safe and nurturing home for my children to grow inside. I know that pushing off and pushing away is necessary. I still stagger a bit from the force of it.

I didn’t picture sleeping on an apartment floor. And I didn’t picture being told “this isn’t my home.” I didn’t picture a teenager with scratched up arms. I didn’t picture home schooling.

I also didn’t picture a teenage daughter who squees out loud with delight over her pet snake and little growing plants. I didn’t picture the way that my oldest tousles the hair of my youngest, or the way he puts up with this irritation because his sister can get away with it. I didn’t picture the comfort of warm hugs from sons who are half again larger than I am. I didn’t picture the hundred daily ways that Howard and I look out for each other and support each other.

I wonder what I did expect since the vast majority of my life seems like a surprise to me.

Tomorrow by 1pm all the boxes will be in the car and the three hour drive will begin. It will be the last fetching-home-from-college for this daughter. We’ll all come back for the graduation ceremony in spring, but that will be a vacation trip, not a life-altering transition. We’ll disperse her belongings and mingle them with our household. She’ll have a safe haven while she builds toward her next launch. But first she gets to rest. We have a holiday to navigate, and some shared family experiences to create. Two weeks of welcome home and farewell mixed in holiday colors.

Once I’m home, I’m back in the middle of it, so there is a part of me that is grateful for the space and distance created by waiting in my daughter’s apartment while she completes finals. I made plans for how to use the space. I may still do so, but the largest part of today went to sleeping. I can only partly blame the too-thin foam mat which disrupted my sleep last night. I arrived tired. It is not a waste to use time for sleeping. I have to remind myself of that.

I will be glad to go home. I will settle back in to my regular round of comforts and obligations. I will sit on my couch and stare at the bare studs of an incomplete construction project. I will make plans for getting that project complete, or for earning the money to pay for the project to be completed. I will plan for Christmas and for taking my son shopping to outfit his dorm room. I will plan for home schooling next year. I will plan for cleaning and cooking in advance of the holiday.

And, inevitably, my plans will not turn out as I expected. I will adapt and learn to be happy with things as they are even when they’re not how I thought they would be.

The first half of December breaks my brain. I know this. It happens every year. I blame it on the holiday shipping, and it is true that I ship out ten times more packages per day than at other times of the year. However it is also that I’m holding in my head all the holiday gift planning. I’m deciding whether or not to do Christmas cards or neighbor gifts. If I do them, I have to select recipients since I know and care about more people than I have the time or resources to give individual attention to.

This year I’m responding to some of the stress by doing a culling of belongings. Every thing I give away is a thing that I will never have to track, clean, or pay attention to again. And we really do need to pare back in advance of our hoped-for remodeling next year. (We desperately want to do the remodel, we don’t know if we’ll be able to fund it.) I’m working on carload #4 that is bound for thrift stores.

And then there is the emotional sorting. My oldest is moving home to stay. My second oldest is moving out and says he doesn’t think he’ll ever move back, which may be true. As part of his moving out, he’s doing some of the emotional push-pull on his parents that many kids do when they’re preparing to launch. It throws me off balance. And then off balance again when I realize that my third child is sinking into depression again, the kind that gently seeps the joy and interest out of everything. So she and I have to do something about that, but neither of us knows what yet. My youngest has one week to do enough work to prevent failing in one of his classes. His home school needs do not slack off even with holiday shipping. Though we’ve made a decision to take a break from all school things when on campus classes cease. We need a space free from tracking.

There are half a dozen blog entries I’ve partially written about the things summarized in that last paragraph. I can’t seem to clear enough head space to find the words. Instead I’m left with a day like today where I don’t want to waste the day, but I don’t have enough energy to dive into a project. I wish I did have that energy. There are so many projects that need done.

Number of days ago that the assignment was due: 27
Number of times I sat down with my son to attempt to do the assignment: 4
Number of times son attempted to communicate with the teacher: 5
Number of answers we got from the teacher: 2
Number of times that the teacher’s answers provided the necessary clarification: 0
Number of frustrated conversations with my son where we try to figure out why his brain locks up and literally won’t allow him to write any words: 3
Number of words written as of this morning: 0
Reasons why I’m worn out: all of the above + 1 teen girl whose depression is intruding again + son who moves out in three weeks and is having emotions about it. Also see holiday preparations and financial stress.

My day started out well, but around noon I started to feel muddled and unfocused. I had trouble concentrating and I couldn’t find my notebook. Several years back I adopted a one notebook approach to journaling. Any type of notes I need to write down all go into the same book. So scribbled notes about merchandise for Schlock mystery boxes sit right across from an extended journal entry where I’m sorting my brain. It is a system that has worked fairly well for me. Of course there is one significant drawback, as evidenced when I couldn’t find the book today. I’ve never truly lost one of my notebooks before. I might be uncertain where exactly I placed it, but I can usually lay my hands on it in five minutes or less. My brain knows the book is important and does a good job of indexing when and where I set it down. Today I couldn’t find it. I did my usual finding steps, and it didn’t turn up. I even drove over to the warehouse, but it wasn’t there either. I had a clear memory of using it on the day I took my daughter back to school, but not since then. I’d forgotten that I spent a portion of Tuesday sitting with Howard in his office and apparently left the notebook there.

Even with notebook in hand, I still felt a bit muddled so I went and took a shower. That was when I realized why. My head was full of a dozen sorting and organization projects. Trying to hold all of them and prioritize them and their steps was breaking my brain. So I flipped open my (thankfully located) notebook and began to write. Two pages of closely written notes later, I feel much more clear. The amount of organizing I’ve outlined is enough for several months. But now that it is all on the page, I can see which projects need to come before other projects. Hopefully that will be enough to let me get started. Unfortunately many of them are out in my unheated garage, and it is December. But I need to get at least some of them done because I need to re-locate the Christmas decoration storage to the garage instead of taking up space in my daughter’s closet.

It isn’t convenient that my brain picked now to mentally reorganize all of the things. We’ve just hit the big shipping season. As people are purchasing for the holidays I end up shipping out 10-20 packages per day. I’m grateful for every package I send out. They pay for January and February bills. Sending them takes time. I also have layout and design work for publishing projects. Those things have to come first, no matter how much my brain wants to just dive into organizing all the things. I may be able to sneak in both, but it means I need to be motivated and get moving first thing Monday morning. And I need to not allow home school to sap all of my project energy. While simultaneously not allowing home school to slump and not get done. It’s going to be a busy week.

I had a women’s lunch today with extended family. It was hosted by the woman who is the closest thing I have to a mother-in-law. She’s the woman who all but adopted Howard’s younger brothers after their mother died. And while she was adopting people she extended that adoption to Howard even though he was already in college. At least once per year she hosts this lunch to gather daughters and daughters-in-law so we can sit around a table and catch up. I love these lunches. I love these women. They’re so good, and work so hard serving their families and communities. We went round the table giving a summary of how all our kids are doing and a status report on our lives. There is no pressure or competition to make our kids sound good. In fact, we’re just as likely to spend time talking about the struggle we’re having with a particular child mixed in with loving descriptions of why that child is amazing (and driving us crazy).

Most of the women are stay-at-home mothers with husbands who earn the household income. I might be the only exception to that. In other years I’ve included information about my work in my status report. This year it was nice to be in a space where I could set work aside and just talk about my kids in detail to people who were actually interested in all those details. I’d had a similar realization talking to a friend only a day earlier. My brain is filled up with minutia about my children and most of my conversations aren’t appropriate venues for airing that minutia. It was incredibly healing both yesterday and today to share a small detail and to have the listeners react in a way that shows they know exactly what that small detail means to me in my life. They rejoice for my kids accomplishments and grieve for their struggles because they know and love my kids. Professional spaces don’t give me that validation, not about parenting. And parenting spaces don’t comprehend how to validate my professional pursuits.

After the lunch was over, I thought about all the things we shared across the table. There were so many similarities between our children and their struggles. Possible solutions were offered and ideas were exchanged. I realized that what I’d attended was a small-scale professional conference between women who take their parenting seriously. Networking between parents is every bit as critical as networking between professionals working in the same field. Sometimes the village necessary to help raise our children is right around us, other times we have to seek it out and work to maintain it. Naturally this lunch was also a meeting of family, women who have known each other for decades. We have watched each other grow up, get married, manage toddlers, and now begin launching oldest kids into adulthood. These are my sisters though I have no genetic relation to any of them. I’m so grateful to my friend, the adopted sort-of-mother-in-law who knows it is important to schedule these annual lunches.