Month: August 2016

This past weekend, my daughter’s Girl Scout troop went camping for two nights. While last year we all went tent camping, this year we went yurt camping, which I recommend because there are, at least in this case, beds and mattresses. And you get to say yurt a bunch of times.

When I’m camping, whether by tent or by yurt, I try to make bargains with my body. The biggest one is, Let’s get through the night without having to get up in the middle of it and I’ll do something nice for you later! Tent camping with my family, it’s not a huge deal to crawl out of bed at 2am. The sound of the tent zipper breaks through the quiet, but for the most part, everyone stirs and rolls over and I’m staring up at the stars and it’s slightly chilly and I’m glad I’m sharing a little part of the night.

In a yurt with a dozen 8-year-olds and 3 other adults, suddenly it feels like breaking out of there without waking everyone else up, and potentially creating a line ten children deep in the dark at the door of a plastic outhouse, requires the subterfuge of Ethan Hunt and the wizardry of MacGyver. Just ignore it, I tell myself. Count slowly. Measured breaths. Change positions. What time is it? If it’s close to dawn, I’ll wait it out. 1:48am.  But I’ve been up for hours! Have I even been asleep at all yet? Okay, I am an adult. Mind over matter. 1:54am.

How many times in life do we figure we’ll just wait it out? We’re less than comfortable. We’re less than happy. The solution is right outside our door, but we’ve fashioned an unscalable wall, an unvaultable chasm, made a pointless bargain, created a problem out of an easy answer. I have a skill set for this that’s remarkable.

I saw an Instagram meme recently that said, “You are far too smart to be the only thing standing in your way.”

A year ago, I was pretty much on top of my game. Previously, I had felt sick and tired and nauseous, dealt with horrible hives and random rashes. It was draining and limiting and I was done with it. I decided I wasn’t going to live that way any longer, so I cleaned up my diet, started exercising, started sleeping better, started feeling better. I promised myself that this was the new me. Actually, I didn’t even promise myself because it was so bleeding obvious that I would choose to feel good over choosing to feel bad. For about a year, it was the new me. But then I got a little cocky, or maybe a little lazy. Or I thought, I’ve got this figured out now, so I can stray just slightly from this path, and I know how to get right back.

Halloween came, and I bought the kind of candy I like, too. Because a fun-size Snickers never hurt anyone. And neither did an Almond Joy. Or a Reese’s. And Christmas came and I remembered that peanut brittle is both gluten free and packed with protein (packed! peanuts!). And even though I had found that 45 degrees is one of my favorite running temperatures, and even though Colorado nearly always has a least a couple 45 degrees days in any given winter week… well, I got the flu right after the holidays. And then it was suddenly February. And it is really dark and pretty cold in February, after all. Some weeks it’s not 45 degrees at all. Or if it is, there’s still snow on the ground and is it my fault when some neighbors don’t shovel and ice builds up? And when spring came, and I tried to dust off my running shoes, my hip hurt. So I took some time off. And then it still hurt. So I stopped altogether.

Somehow, even though I knew how to get back to the right path, I felt sick and tired and nauseous and my knuckles hurt when I made a fist, and I had a little rash under my wedding bands that never quite went away, reminding me that before, in the previous not-good stage, I couldn’t wear rings at all on my achy swollen fingers. Why am I not fixing this? How am I not taking the known path straight to feeling better? It’s 1:54am; the solution is right outside. What is wrong with me that I don’t begin?

So as of Friday, I have given up office chocolate, because I can’t be trusted with it. I don’t have to feel awkward about the 1200 calories worth of wrappers that the cleaning crew surely, and ought to, judge me by. I always expect that people are going to be somewhat scandalized by this sort of choice. No one ever is. My closest co-worker said, “We’ll keep track and I’ll make you a 30-day medal shaped like a Butterfinger.” Clearly he didn’t feel abandoned, forced to eat candy alone. I told one of my good friends and she said, “I want to start doing better, too. What day are you available to walk this week?” Just like that. As if it was just that easy.

Today, on my fifth day without a mini chocolate anything, I cut open an avocado to throw into a hearty lunch salad and I remembered a well-halved avocado is actually kind of pretty, in that botanically-amorphous is-this-a-fruit-or-a-vegetable way. And I like avocados. And hearty salads.

My Butterfinger-medal-making coworker asked me today, as I was leaving work, “Do you sometimes feel like we come here for 8 hours, but then our day actually begins at 5pm?” School has started back up and with it fall schedules and homework and bedtime skirmishes and relentless alarm clocks. I was, in that moment, beyond exhausted, miles to go before I sleep (I mean that only as a Frost tribute and metaphor since my body’s given up sleeping of late). Miles to go. Promises to keep.

I met my friend for a before-dinner walk, our children thrilled by an unexpected play date. And I felt better for it. A lot better, actually. We talked, they played. We broke a light sweat as thunder rumbled just over the horizon. I came home to the dinner my husband had made while we were out, because sometimes I forget we’re a team who can divide and conquer, and then I took my daughter to dance. I stopped at the library to pick up a book that she had placed on hold, and I talked to a far-away friend, tucked under the library’s outside awning, as the thunder grew closer and an unforecasted downpour turned the air earthy and metallic, cleaned off the pavement and created puddles that children jumped through, their parents protecting their newly chosen library books. I had to run to the car in the downpour, back to dance class, catching a sneaky puddle midway across the parking lot. But I didn’t feel tired or harried or just a little bit ill. I felt connected and appreciative and content.

I don’t know if I’ll magically get some sleep tonight, fortified by avocados and good friends, a little exercise and a cleansing rainfall. But I think I’ve remembered, at least a little, that if I can magically create a problem out of an easy answer, I’ve also held the solution all along.

It’s me… just deciding not to stand in my way today.

 

 

 

You guys, I don’t want to come across as an obnoxious braggart, but today I took a load of fresh laundry out of the dryer, folded it and put it away, all while it was still warm. It’s going to be a rude awakening for my clothes when they get worn, since they’re used to waking up slowly in a wrinkle-remove sauna cycle each morning, before we just jump into the day.

If I asked the last ten people in my phone’s text history what one thing they would like to wrangle from the universe, I would be unsurprised if 9/10 said “more time.” We live in a society that prides itself on how busy we are. Even while we decry our busy schedules that keep us out of the house 5 nights a week, we secretly feel like they’re proof we’re not falling behind. We’re proving ourselves to be good parents, interesting people, multi-faceted hyphenates who can easily fill out a hobbies and interests section of any form that comes our way. And yet, we say, ad nauseam, if only we had more time.

No matter who we are, we have a list of things we would like to accomplish this morning, today, this week, before we turn 40, before the kids grow up. Bucket lists. It’s an equal playing field. Working parents, stay-at-home parents, single professionals, students balancing part-time and full-time jobs. We all wake up with lists that we will not accomplish today.

Last night, my daughter was up several times with a stomach ache. This morning, she still felt sick, and added to that, we were both tired. I felt conflicted. It’s only week 2 of school and I was 85% sure that once she was up and about for a while, her stomach pain would pass. We’re fairly experienced on that front. I hadn’t brought my computer home over the weekend. To work from home, I’d have to fetch it. I searched through a laundry basket of clothes that hadn’t gotten put away last week and now held the also-rans of my closet, unchosen in the first round. I need to find time to do laundry, I thought…

And so, I didn’t work from home. I took the day off. I texted my multiple bosses. No one seemed alarmed. My daughter felt better before lunch, but we both just took the time.

My ambitious plan for my unanticipated day off, of course, included a list that would ultimately fall short. But 5 out of 5 beds have clean sheets, and 4 out of 5 beds are refitted with their clean sheets (for the 5^th, the cat claimed the sheets before I could get them on the bed, and if there’s one rule in our house, it’s that, like a sleeping baby, you don’t disturb a sleeping Tres.) I daydreamed about putting sheets out to dry in the summer sun (a simpler time fantasy that would probably prove frustrating in reality) but to do it justice, I did harvest some garden produce.

I went through the dozens of nail polish bottles that accumulate in a house with three girls and I threw away anything that seemed more viscous than liquid. I went through approximately eight months of Birchbox samples and divided them into lip, face, hair, and lotions/perfumes. The top of my dresser has been sighted. I felt like a shipwrecked crewman, Land ho! I knew it was there, but it’s nice to have confirmation.

And look at this! The right-hand counter by the kitchen sink! Absolutely clear. (Immediately after this, my daughter tried to put an empty snack bowl on this counter. I told her no.)

I did not clear out my children’s sure-to-be-too-small fall wardrobes. They will definitely still be sporting highwater pants for the first few weeks of cooler weather until we begin to weed those out by trial and error. Our shoes are still a haphazard pile in the entryway. And the two dozen bags that seemed essential to summer – daycare bags, pool bags, concert picnic bags, sleepover bags – are all still sitting nested within each other, spilling out into the living room.

But it’s amazing what a clean counter can do for a tired psyche. Tomorrow it’s back to it but in this moment, I feel as zen as if I had actually spent today watching clean sheets rustle in the summer sun.

Who knew Monday could be a friend. 

“How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn.  How did it get so late so soon?”      — Dr. Suess

On long car trips when I was young, my brothers and I were allowed to take our turn traveling in the ‘way back’ of our boxy brown station wagon we’d named Jason. Nestled in amongst the luggage, it was a cozy nest. Every summer we would travel to Ohio by way of Pennsylvania, visiting both sets of grandparents. There would be summer night porch swings and fireflies and crickets, bug bites, strawberry shortcake for dinner, and the heavy, sticky, thickness of summer humidity as thunderstorms rolled in.

For a few weeks each summer, we were tucked away first in my father’s old bedroom, his long ago horse’s saddle still waiting for him, a confusing contrast between his life now, with me, my brothers and our station wagon and the boy we hadn’t known. Or I’d sleep in my mother’s old bedroom with the white, spindle-legged three-way mirror vanity, where I could see endless reflections of myself replicated down a corridor of glass. I can remember going to bed after my usual bedtime, but while it was still twilight, listening to the adults still awake, distant laughter and words I couldn’t distinguish, dogs barking, the sounds of summer whose bedtime hadn’t yet arrived.

I realize that in fact, those childhood summers may not have been quite as idyllic as I remember. I perhaps applied my mind’s Stardust filter, but the warm glow is palpable. To my parents, they were probably full of concerns about car maintenance, squabbling children, and issues of family dynamics that I had no inkling of, at least not then. Summer may be most magical in retrospect, but that only makes its magic less tangible, not less real.

I always think that each summer is going to involve time standing still. Summer, my tired spirit whispers. A hammock by a stream. A favorite book and a cold, sweating glass pitcher of lemonade that the bees refuse to bother. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book in a hammock by a stream. And yet it exists in the peripheral of my memory, much like wartime London or Colonial Williamsburg. I’ve been there in my head so often, I can almost imagine the tin hats, the wagon-rutted streets and the cool water splashing over my ankles. Such is the faulty, magical memory of a reader, and a daydreamer.

As an adult, even as my children achieve the deep tan of childhood that no amount of sunscreen can prevent, I now see summer as a utilitarian reset period. I mean, not only that. There are still some Stardust filters. But by the end of May, I am holding on by a thread. School lunches have gone from thoughtfully packed representations of the food groups to “if you don’t want to buy lunch today, you have two minutes to find something to fill out this mini bagel I threw peanut butter at…”

At the end of May, I am not at my best. But during the summer, I get my mojo back. Long summer nights mean more time, fewer rules. We’re all spun up like tightly wound tops during the school year. But in the summer, we get to spiral down into a slower and slower loop until we’re no longer the bleeding, blending siren of colors of a mini plastic cyclone, but a body at rest. There’s a glowing, perfect moment when you can feel your shoulders relax and your jaw unclench, air fill your lungs. That is the reset. Anything is possible again.

This summer, I did not reset. I am no longer the spinning top, but somehow when the spinning stopped, I didn’t take that deep breath. I didn’t recharge. I spun to stillness, but not rest. My body has stopped accepting sleep as currency, and so I struggle through each day more exhausted than I have been in years. I assume I was more tired than this when the girls were babies, although I can’t specifically recall (probably because I was so tired). Regardless, the only thing that is moving me forward is the thought that I’ve been more tired than this and made it through. (I must have been.)

And so this year, I have a new plan. A non-reset plan. A when instead of a phoenix, I still just have ashes plan.

It’s time to remember that my children are 8 and 10. If they have to put baby carrots into their own snack bags, they can do that. And if they house the butter knives on the far right side of the silverware drawer instead of the far left, it’s fine.  And even if they mix the primary silverware with the backup silverware… that’s still okay (I will convince myself it’s okay). If every now and then dinner is a choice between the multiple fun and exciting cereals in the cupboard, everyone will just appreciate spaghetti all the more.

Summer is magic, I think. And not just because of the childhood nostalgia we hold for it, while the adult us works through it, promising ourselves happy hour patios and twilight front porches. I say it because even now, I can hear the crickets, louder than any other nighttime sound. And a dog barking a brief hello, a street or two over. My youngest read me a book about leopard habitats that probably isn’t on the AR list, and no one worried about whether it counted, and we both pictured leopards, asleep by day in the African trees. 

Summer is a break from the expectations we assign ourselves. We can spin down. We can daydream. We can reset, if the option avails itself, or we can use it as a soft start evolution of our self-imposed expectations.

Maybe I’ll start a melatonin regimen, we’ll get a new mattress, this soul-sucking election cycle will end, and one day this fall, I’ll wake up a new person. Maybe my reset is just a little delayed this year. In the meantime, no child has ended up in therapy from not having their lunchtime sandwich shaped into a heart…. have they?