Coloring Outside of the Lines

Being around my sister and my mom reminds me why I need to be such an advocate against abuse. 

http://www.momsrising.org/

This is an awesome organization.  You can go there, create a free account, then send a letter to your congressperson about the bail-out and about the current economic situation.  It is a no-brainer because they do all the work for you except, of course,  write your letter.  There are so many awesome, horrible, important personal stories posted.  I hope someone in government  is reading them and listening.  Here is the link to those personal stories I mentioned:  http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1768/t/1546/blog/comments.jsp?key=502&blog_entry_KEY=23311&t=

The children are beginning to gage their height by the wall of water cases I have stacked in my pantry.   It has grown to the point that only one child, the oldest who is taller than me,  stands above the stack. 

The stack grows in direct relation to my nervousness about the current economic crisis.  Dry, old-fashioned  oatmeal is also taking over shelf space at  an alarming rate.  You see, it all boils down to “what would I feed my kids if there was a terrible emergency in my corner of the world?” or “what would I feed my kids if the depression that my father lived through happens again?” 

I can’t be without answers,  not with children counting on me, so I store oatmeal, water, toiletpaper, dry beans, dry rice, canned fruit–anything on sale that is healthy and necessary and can reside on a shelf indefinitely.

My mother-in-law, right before the new millenium, stock-pilled beans and rice in so many containers that she had to store them under her sofas and beds to make room for them all.  All of us in the family shared a smile at her insanity even as  we sympathized with her fear because we knew she truly believed that the world as she knew it would end at 12:00 midnight on December 31, 1999. 

Of course the world didn’t end and our sympathy evaporated, replaced by more humor.  Now, sheepishly,  I’ve begun to wonder if my husband looks at me with the same combination of humor and pity.   

So, being the inquisitive soul that I am, I asked him.  His response surprised me.  He admitted that during one of his city council meetings–he volunteers on a committee–emergency preparedness professionals from the city spoke and warned that in the case of a city-wide emergency, no citizen should count on support personnel reaching them for at least  2 weeks therefore, every person should be self-reliant in the event of no-electricity and no outside help for at least that period of time.  At least.  My husband’s conclusion:  my stacks are justified and smart. 

I live close to Washington D.C. so besides the Great Depression and the Great Katrina,   I also worry about 9/11 style terrorist attacks.  I visualize the unguarded metro train my husband rides.  I think about the Petagon right down the road and National Airport and a host of other landmarks I see or visit on a regular basis.

When the worrying gets too big,  I buy cases of water and canisters of oats because you know, if you had to,  you can live off just those for 2 weeks and still be healthy.  If you had to.  I pray we never have to.

I suffered a relapse, of sorts, last night.  Panic attack and tears.  I know what triggered it–can’t blame hormones this time–and I guess knowing your triggers is half the battle; but I wish I could have stayed calm.    This baby is counting on me to provide a safe, healthy haven for her as she grows.  I’ll do better.

God offered us a whole weekend of 60 degree plus weather which the children enjoyed out of doors, without jackets, and with sheer abandon, zooming around the yard, scurrying up trees, and swinging as high as their legs could pump them.   

My 9 yo son never learned to pump himself on the swing, even though we all attempted to tutor him at the art.  I knew the problem was he didn’t care enough about swinging, didn’t spend enough time at the practice.  The backyard holds other pleasures for him like raking leaves, digging holes, and pounding rocks. 

Saturday, though, he took the time.  A gleefully yelled “MOMMY’ pulled me to the bay window where I could see him swinging high, pumping his legs furiously, grinning hugely like a happy dirty puppydog.   He did it as he does most things that he does in a “late” fashion–all at once. 

Last month it was double digit addition and subtraction.  He had struggled with both, taking tedious amounts of time to complete problems even with me sitting beside him.  But, last month, the “tada” factor occurred and he could do them one morning, no agonizing, no prompting, just “oh so that’s how it works.”  He mastered all of it:  adding, subtracting, borrowing, carrying in that one morning.  Now he owns it–all his.

Now if I can only master, control, obliterate–own somehow instead of be controlled by–these panic attacks. . .

Did I mention that my hormone-induced paranoia and panic are decreasing steadily as the days pass?  Boy, was I a case there for a while–the whole month of January, it seems.  I think writing on  this blog stabilized my mental state.

I’m doing things for myself now, things I haven’t done in years.  I started reading a new book last night–new to me, I mean–Goody Hall by Natalie Babbitt.  Quite a wonderful read.  I’ll hand it off to my daughter this evening, after I’ve consumed the last delicious page, and see what she feels about it. 

My goal is to continue reading children’s books–older age level books–for the duration of this pregnancy.  They’ve always been my guilty pleasure from high school through college and young-adulthood.  And, I will begin some craft projects that I’ve longed to begin for years, but have not felt motivated enough to start. 

I blame everything on time, but the truth is there is always time for the things we are motivated to do.

The biggest realization I’ve made in the last ten years is that I “know”–really know–very little.  This wasn’t a snap my fingers, “I’ll be darned” type of realization.  No, it evolved through the breath of life, the turn of conversation, the sight of observation. 

As it kicked in, this realization,  I found myself withdrawing from yahoo groups, from e-mail loops until I reached a point where I belonged to none.   I’m not sure why I needed the distance.  I guess part of it was those groups were full of conclusions.  Homeschool this way, not that way.  Parent this way, not that way.  Teach math with this technique because the other technique never works.  It seemed one person’s reality made it hard to see the truth of another person’s.  And I felt like that reality was becoming mine.  I began to think more like the masses and less like a member of my own family.

Sometimes, I think about writing articles.   I have a few dozen sitting in my computer, but when I reach the part where I switch from drafting to publishing,  I realize that I don’t have a conclusion.  What does it all mean? 

My whole life is a rough draft.  I don’t know what I’ve perfected.  I learn constantly in breathtaking ways, in heartbreaking ways, in tedious ways.  It seems the conclusions I draw are limited to the moment, to the situation, to that mood, to that person, to that fragile breath I drew in that fragile moment.

I live by God’s hand.  The truths he painted for us–of honesty, of faith, of kindness–are my truths.  But they aren’t conclusions.  They simply are.  They aren’t the beginning, the middle, or the end–they are all of it and none of it. 

See, still no conclusion.

I read posts at Melissa Wiley’s blog today.  She has a post–a long post–about patience.  Reading through it, re-reading parts, reading the comments at the end brought a clarity to my life as a mom that I’ve lacked recently.

 As the years have passed and my family has grown, my patience has not.  Where is the mom who used to sit on the floor for hours brushing barbie hair or reading 2 foot high stacks of picture books?  I lost her.

And the thing is my kids really need me to be her again.  And I really need to be her again.  I grew up in a dysfunctional home and I fought hard to overcome the disadvantages that gave me as an adult . I thought I had overcome the worst of it and I thought I was on my way to giving my kids a different life.

Somewhere in my low 30s I changed, became more like my mom.  My kids remain trauma-free in that I don’t yell at them or criticize them the way my father did me; but I’ve recognized a behavior in myself at times that disturbs me just as much.  

It is something that I see and saw in my mom–a distancing, a protective shell, an emotionlessness.  I don’t know what to call it.  I see it come out in myself at times and I am fighting like mad to control it. 

During pregnancy I’m a bloodhound on steroids.  Every odor/aroma is intensifed to an unspeakable degree–so much so that I can distinguish the smell of the 2 year old’s pee-pee diaper from that of his older brother’s.

 And when the girls’ open a can of catfood, it smells exactly like someone split open a bad tuna right next to me.

The children stink.  I ask them to change clothes countless times throughout the day because I can smell a bit of foul Cheese-it dust from at least 8 feet. 

Yesterday, in CVS, some poor man walked past me reaking of onions and some off-type of meat.  I had to immediately walk outside and gulp a few mouthfuls of city air in order to ease my rolling stomach.

My husband says I’m downright rude with this stink-thing, but I am trying my best.  I hold my tongue at least 60% of the time therefore the other 40% is  necessary for my sanity.  And remember what I said about my unwinding ball of sanity–I need to clutch at whichever strands I can.

I have to be honest, right from the start, I am writing  this blog in order to keep my sanity from completely unraveling.   And it is unraveling, it seems, like a ball of yarn,  faster than I can wind it up again. 

So much is new this year:  a new job for my husband, four children homeschooling instead of three, a new baby on the way, a mortgage threatening to balloon next year,  and this economic crisis looming over it all. 

Our household is a creative one, coloring outside of the lines is not a choice, it is a lifestyle we’ve owned from day one.  I spent the majority of my life longing to be and trying to be a super-organized, practical being.  In recent years, I threw off the pretence and accepted my creative, often bumbling, absent-minded, disorganized self.  I still don’t appreciate it fully, but I am feeling more like myself all the time–the self that I had to swallow in order to survive public school. 

 I can trace the process of smothering my true self like coordinates on a a graph–the failing grades I received from Kindergarten all the way up to 3rd grade, the leveling off in 4th grade, the gradual upward curve 5th grade through 8th grade, and finally the higher marks–the upward diagonal–in high school as I spent every minute studying, memorizing facts and figures, trying to be practical instead of creative. 

 Anyway, here I am–writing to stay sane, writing to ease my anxiety, writing because I honestly don’t know what else to do. 

And there you go, and there you know, and there I have it off my chest, so I guess I can sign off.