Uncategorized

Soon to be Summer

We’ve reached the point in the school year where it is essentially over. My two teenagers will still go to the school buildings for four more days, but those days will be filled with administrivia and a last minute test or two. They’ve managed to not fail classes, which wasn’t a certain thing a week ago. This not-failing is because of a last minute scramble to turn in work which somehow didn’t get done or turned in earlier in the term. Four days from now we embark on summer.

I know some families whose summers are filled with extra trips and outings. They strive to keep their kids busy and engaged. This summer is packed to the edges with work for Howard and me. We will sneak in family activities around the edges, but for the most part summer for our kids means lots of free time rather than lots of structured activity. July will have some school in it, because both of my teens are doing some independent study work. I’ll probably reinstate my rule from last year where I don’t police screen time as long as the kids spend a pre-agreed amount of time either learning or making before they screen. But that is the limit of structure that I believe I can sustain while also sustaining the quantity of business tasks I need to do.

The learning and making is important because it requires my teenagers to stretch themselves. They begin to explore who they might want to be as adults. They begin to define who they are right now. I might add an additional requirement about getting out and doing things with friends. Perhaps I’ll even require that some of that friend time take place at not-always-my-house. I love having my kids’ friends here, but my kids need to learn how to navigate being a visitor at someone else’s house. They don’t do that often enough.

The other half of my children are both adults. They will be working, one at a job (once he acquires one) and one at setting up a freelance career. All four kids will get pulled in to the shipping work that needs to be done this summer. I suspect we will all be tired of packages before it is done.

With all six of us home all day, we’ll all have to participate in more household clean up. There will be more negotiation over use of space. There will be more times where we’re getting in each other’s way. For now I’m fine with that. By the end of August I’ll be longing for the structure that a school schedule supplies, but for now I’m glad to let it go.

Running the New Kickstarter

We launched a Kickstarter on Monday, and it has been highly distracting all week. Some of the distraction is just watching and wondering if it will fund, but much more of it is the massive influx of email. Each time we update, that creates another comment thread where people can post questions or thoughts to us. Several times I’ve read a question and had to take a minute to carefully figure out which Kickstarter they were asking questions about. This is particularly important because in the last forty-eight hours I’ve gotten questions about the Challenge Coin Kickstarter that we ran four years ago, The Planet Mercenary Kickstarter that we ran two years ago, and many questions about the Handbrain Screen Kickstarter that is currently running. It fractures my ability to concentrate to manage all of this.

On the happier side, Kickstarters also provide a lot of positive energy. People are excited and interested in the results. People express kind thoughts and confidence in our ability to deliver a quality product. All the well-wishes are heart warming.

We have two and a half more weeks doing everything we can to make this Kickstarter amazing. After that will be a wait of a couple of weeks before we have the screens in hand. Then comes the shipping. The shipping will be big and complicated because the screens and Planet Mercenary books will both be shipping close together, but once it is done I will have a huge weight lifted. I will have finally delivered to the backers who trusted us two years ago. I’m really looking forward to that.

Thinking in Lists

In the past six months my thoughts have turned into lists. They are endless lists of urgent tasks accompanied by a sense of impending failure. Yet lately the lists are shorter, and I begin to see the results of those lists in projects accomplished. The lists are going to last through July, but they now have some spaces between them. Those spaces are going to get larger. Occasionally when I am inside of one of those spaces I feel a little lost. I’ve forgotten what to do when my days are strictly constrained by urgent tasks. I know that I should begin picking up my own long-neglected projects, and I will, but not just yet. First I need to teach my brain that it is okay to not think in lists all the time.

Recreating a Living Space


The project I’ve been working on this past week that I haven’t been able to talk about was a house renovation. My daughter was coming home from college and the room we have for her is small. But we realized that if we knocked out the wall of the closet, her bed would fit in there, leaving a much larger space for the rest of everything. I decided to knock out that wall and have it ready for her before she returned. So while I was making the fun discoveries that always happen with home construction projects, I wasn’t able to tweet commentary because it would ruin the surprise.

I retrieved Kiki from college on Friday. Then she and I spent Saturday assembling an IKEA dresser and using power tools to create a platform support for the back half of the bed. I feel very pleased that the platforms were created entirely from materials that I salvaged while removing the wall. The result is a lofted bed with a dresser so that the old dresser can be removed from the room, giving her even more space. Also, there is a crawl space behind the dresser which is very useful for storage of college things that she won’t use again until August.

I’m bumped, bruised, scraped, and sore, but the project has been a good one. Now Kiki can set up art studio space in her room.

Shifting Gears and Slowing Down (Just a Little)

Occasionally life offers a clear moment of transition. There is a clear marker of the current thing being complete or the next thing beginning. Most of the time I’m surrounded by a plethora of transitions as one project trails off to a conclusion, another idles, a third begins ramping up. On this day Planet Mercenary is in its final stages. After months of me pushing as hard as I can every day, I’ve come to the place where I’m waiting on other people instead of being hyper aware that others are waiting on me. It is strange to not have a long list of urgent tasks to do. I’m actually finding it a bit difficult to focus my days. Some of that is pure fatigue. It is normal for me to go a bit drifty after a period of sustained energy. I should probably expect this period of driftyness to feel a bit different because I’ve never had such a prolonged period of sustained energy. I’ve been pushing hard on Planet Mercenary since late December.

Now I am beginning to have spaces and I’m trying to remember what I ought to do with them. Much of my time has been spent on parenting tasks, paying more attention to house, homework, children. Last week was full of melt downs, difficult conversations, realizations, and emotional reactions to all of it. Perhaps all of that is also a natural reaction to the shift in focus. I’m still processing. I’m tired and discouraged on several parenting fronts, while seeing encouraging growth on others. Somehow the fatigue makes the discouraging stuff easy to see and the encouraging things out of focus.

Part of the challenge is that while I’m not pressed with tasks that are “do this today” levels of urgent, I still have a long list of tasks that are urgent this week and this month. Planet Mercenary still has important tasks associated with it. I’m writing the bonus story for the next Schlock book. We’re preparing to do crowdfunding for the deluxe handbrain screen whose development was partially funded by the Planet Mercenary Kickstarter, but which we can’t afford to print without pre-orders. There are some posters and other merchandise which we also want to release soon. And I’m working to release all the currently available Schlock books in PDF as well as print. I have not run out of things to do. They won’t until after Planet Mercenary shipping in July.

And yet, I’m beginning to be able to imagine there being spaces. Up ahead there will be days where I can ask myself “what do I want to work on today?” instead of being dictated to by urgent deadlines.

And Then the Sun Shines

There is something extra beautiful about a sunny day after an extended period of gray and rain. We had sunny today. It was still chilly and windy, but the sun was shining. I have flowers blooming in my front beds. They’ve poked up in spite of the fact that no one has cleared away the dead plant detritus from last fall. My 16yo went roller skating for the first time in months and felt happy instead of depressed. The 14yo exercised without me requiring it of him first. College girl called yesterday with only happy things to say. She’s figured out how to finish college in one more semester instead of two. 19yo has consented to attend a job fair tomorrow so that he can begin picturing the kinds of jobs he could be applying for. The taxes are done and we’re getting a return this year.

On the business front: I printed out pages from the Planet Mercenary book in color. It always feels more real, and much closer to done when I can turn the pages with my fingers. I’ve also printed out some posters that I hope to put in the store soon. And I finally cleared the dumb hurdle which was preventing me from making Schlock book PDFs.

The day hasn’t been completely joyful. I’m all too aware of the news and the fact that I’m not doing enough to participate in ongoing public conversations and legislation. There are upcoming expenses related to book printing and shipping that have me stressed. And of course there is the ongoing weight of Planet Mercenary tasks. I can’t slack off because deadlines are close.

Yet, despite all of that, the sun shone. The day was pleasant. And I think it is very important to spend a few moments sitting in the sun at the end of a long cold time.

Considering Failures

Blink.
And a week has gone by. It was a week full of things, mostly good, nothing truly awful or unmanageable. Except there is that part of my brain that howls at me from the darkness saying that I have failed at everything.
I have lists of the things I could have done better. I don’t want to have these lists, but they show up in my head unbidden. I argue with them, but this does not dispel them. So I wield a pen, which is mightier than a sword, and write the list down.
Things I Could Have Done Better.
Those words are writ large across the top, with capital letters for all the words as is proper for a title. I write each thing, pinning it to the page in dark letters against white. It is permanent there. Others could walk by and read it. That feels far more vulnerable than keeping the failures tucked out of sight in my mind.
But
when I pin a failure to the page, it stops nibbling at me. They all do. It had gotten to the point where I felt crowded out of my own brain. Thought clutter.
The list is long. As I keep writing, my eyes wander back upward to the things already written.
I really couldn’t help that one. It seems silly to blame myself for it. And this one, yeah it would have been better if I’d done it, but the reason I didn’t was because I was managing a much more important task instead. I only have so many hours each day. There are more tasks than hours. If today I succeed at work tasks, I fail at eating healthy. Something has to give.
The ones that grieve most fall under the column Parenting Failures.
Then I cast my mind backward, and I am glad for the small scale of these failures. In the grand scheme “I forgot to make the kid do her dishes” is a failure with minimal consequences.
There are things on the list that matter. Failures I must attempt to remedy.
For now, with the failures trapped on a page, I can move onward with more space to think.

Being Seen

Today at church I had a friend come to me to discuss our mutual assignment. She basically took it out of my hands and said “Let me do it this time. I know how busy you are. Is there any way I can help you?” I didn’t have an answer other than “thank you” because all the answers to “how can I help?” require complex thought and untangling one task from another.

Later in church another friend came to me. She teaches my 16yo at church and had noticed that 16 had been absent more often than she’d attended lately. It is what happens when the mental health meds aren’t working as they need to, so you decide to switch. But then there is this dip in the middle where the old meds are fading from the system and the new meds haven’t yet begun to work. So we talked about how my friend could help my daughter.

After that, a third friend came up to give me a hug and say “are you okay? I know you have a lot going on.”

At which point I begin to wonder “wait, how do they all know?” I scan my memory for what I’ve written on my blog, on Facebook, on twitter. For a moment I worried that I’d been dumping too much stress and emotion online. Yes some of the things are there. Different things in different places, but even if someone were diligent about stitching those pieces together there are many things that never go online at all.

I’ve come to the conclusion that news travels in old fashioned ways, person to person. My church is structured to facilitate quiet, back-channel communication. Sometimes that can feel gossipy or cliquish, but done right it is a great help to those who need it. Though it is strange to have multiple people offering to help and to realize that there was almost certainly a conversation concerned about me and mine. It is both heart warming and uncomfortable to be seen as needing extra attention.

I still don’t have answers for these friends, some of whom I’ve only known for a few months and others that I’ve known for years. There are so many things that I can’t easily hand off. The things that I can, have pretty much already been dumped or hired out. What I probably need most is someone who will listen for hours and help me untangle all the thoughts in my head. Only then will I be able to identify pieces that other people could do. This is why I’ve scheduled therapy. It’ll begin next week.

I don’t want to be spending that money right now ($90 per session because my deductible is so high it is unlikely to kick in at all this year.) But I’ve been putting it off for four years. (Since February of 2013 when all four kids melted down almost simultaneously.)

This afternoon Kiki needed my help unpacking. She’s home for a week of spring break. Kiki didn’t need me to actually touch anything. All she needed was for me to sit in the room with her while she put things away. Somehow having a witness in the room let her sort a mess into a tidy space. I suspect this is what the therapist’s job will be with me. They will sit while I pull out old boxes of emotion and open them up to see what is inside.

I can say that being seen is far better than not being seen. I’ve had that experience at church too. There were middle parts of those four years where I tried to reach out and ask for help, but either I wasn’t specific enough about what I needed or someone else did not follow through. It is often hard to be specific when seeking help.

That is a thing I need to remember in years to come, when I know that someone is in a stressed place and I want to be helpful, it almost certainly starts with listening. Ask for details about the things in their life, and somewhere in what they say will be a piece I can take out of their hands and do for them. The burden of finding what to do needs to fall on the helper because humans under stress are not good at identifying what they need. Also there are huge social stigmas around asking for help.

For now it is just good to have friends who see me and all my things. Not being alone with the things is a huge help all by itself. And now I can add three people to the list of those I can call if I manage to identify a specific thing that I need help doing.

Cecil the Snake

This is Cecil.

He is little and cute, which is not an adjective one usually thinks to use when describing a snake, but it applies here. I’d always put reptile pets into the same mental category as fish: interesting, but mostly decorative. In the week that we’ve had Cecil, he’s been far more fun than I’d have thought. For one thing, he’s so tiny. As I watch him move, part of my brain keeps wondering how something so small can be alive.

Here is a size reference. My daughter’s hands are on the small end of adult sized.

She loves her snake. He spends a fair amount of time outside of his tank either being held or curled up in her shirt pocket. He likes pockets. They feel safe, dark, and warm. Of course after a while he gets too warm and then he wants to go on adventures. We’re looking forward to watching him grow from his current 15 inches to full adult size which can be up to five feet long. It’ll take a few years, but we don’t mind.

And since I know there are people for whom snakes are inherently creepy, here is a picture of a sleeping cat who is of the opinion that my purse is not going anywhere for a while.

A Weekend of Ordinary and Unusual Things

Email. There is always email. This weekend much of it was about tweaking Planet Mercenary art and fine tuning some of the design elements for Planet Mercenary layout.

Reading twitter and the news while being simultaneously pleased that people are stepping up to protest because of their convictions, and being appalled at how my country currently appears to the world at large. I have a Facebook friend in Australia and watching her react to the news from America has been painful. There was an entire thread of Australians saying “well, guess I’m not going to visit the US ever again.” The things happening in my country are too scary for them to want to risk coming here.

Buying groceries at the store where prices are unchanged, people are calmly picking up food they need and luxury items they want. No sense of panic or urgency, just people doing their regular shopping.

Waking up Saturday morning with a crippling sense of self-doubt. It suddenly seemed obvious that I had failed at everything I’ve been trying to accomplish and that anything which seemed near completion would actually prove to need total, massive revision. Howard talked me through enough so I could function. The feeling faded by late evening.

Church was utterly normal. People gave talks on kindness and service without any reference to politics or world events. This was both a relief and a frustration. Events in my country are big enough that they should be changing everyone. We could use reminders about Christ saying “I was a stranger and ye took me in.” Yet I know for a fact that my church congregation has people on both sides of the ideological debates and I really did not want heated discussion to chase away the solace of church worship. I dearly love some people on the opposite side of ideological divide from me. I do not want to fight with them. Bridges not walls.

Laying on the floor next to my teenage child’s bed because she is currently curled up in a ball underneath that bed. She can’t come out because her left eye feels all hollow and everything in the world is poking at her brain. So I keep her company until the noise in her head calms down enough for her to emerge. Down there on the carpet I pondered what to do to help her, whether her medicines need to be changed, and the fact that the carpet really needed a good vacuuming.

It is all such a mix of things heartbreaking and things boring, things complicated and things simple, things routine and things unprecedented. I’m worn out with it all. So I drag myself out of bed each day like tiny Steve Rogers standing back up in the alley saying, “I can do this all day.” Sometimes winning comes from just refusing to stay down.