One Cobble at a Time

I need to pause and acknowledge today. It wasn’t a day that ends up featured in family photos or social media posts. It was entirely ordinary, except it was the kind of ordinary that has been missing for a long time, so I want to pause and notice instead of letting it slip by.

Howard scripted a full batch of comics and generally felt good about the work he did. So often his brain plagues him with negative emotions or self doubt. Today was cheerful. Also he gave me one of the pieces I needed to finish RAM.

We got a big shelf unit moved from my house where it was in the way to the warehouse where it is the exact right solution to a problem I’ve been having. Sure the contents of Howard and Kiki’s studio are still exploded all across the family room, but it is a sign of moving forward and settling in. These are good things.

After carefully navigating the first week of away-from-home where my son kept refusing my advice (No mom, I don’t want any food in my fridge, I don’t need dishes. I don’t need silverware) my son had a day where he was outright cheerful and full of stories about things that happened during his day. Also, he realized that he wants snacks, cups, and a spoon. We haven’t reached bowls or forks yet, but slowly he’s beginning to recognize what things he’ll actually need in his adult life. So nice to see him moving forward.

High school girl rocked her online classes today, plowing through a bunch of work that was stalled. Then she spent the afternoon playing Overwatch with her brother, which led to “where did my day go?” frustration. But that frustration is entirely normal and a good life experience in time management.

Home school English went very smoothly. I doubt it will always go smoothly. We’re more likely to hit emotional tangles over an opinion essay than over the current grammar unit, but it is an auspicious start, and if we can plow through grammar quickly, that buys us extra time to stew when we get to the more difficult stuff.

As I said, an entirely ordinary day, untroubled with emotional crises or depths of despair. I’ll take it.

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.