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May. 6th, 2013 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altarflameIf you'd like to see an overwhelmed, long winded ramble about WHAT I CAN DO DIFFERENTLY TO CHANGE MY LIFE, that is under the cut. It is not really something finished, with an ending. I wrote it almost 2 weeks ago and, as so often happens, writing it out and then reading what I'd written made a lot of answers very clear to me. Usually when this happens I just delete the entry without posting; this time though it was saved and when I went to update again,
Ok, so, I am trying to come up with some solutions and strategies to keep myself from falling into this muddy quagmire of depressed, unproductive paralysis. Feel free to weigh in, if you aren't going to be an asshole.
Good things I'm already doing:
-starting counseling next week
-starting every day with lemon water and a smoothie that's ridiculously concentrated awesome: fish oil, probiotics, flax, coconut oil, emergen-C (which is loaded with B vitamins), keffir, etc I'm also supplementing vitamin D and drinking green tea in the afternoons, and never having any gluten/low grains in general
-I'm getting some exercise fairly regularly - today I biked to and from the school to drop Isaac off (mile round trip), walked to and from to see their talent show that he was in, and then biked with Jake and Elise to pick him up. I'm making it a priority to walk laps at the tracks where we go for TLC and PATH, and to take weekend bike rides with Aaron.
-"self care," of varying sorts, everything from really thinking good thoughts about myself and understanding I need space and downtime to long baths and putting aside everything else to read for pleasure here and there
-I'll also be back in school soon (next month), which I think will be helpful on several levels
The dietary changes have really helped my pain and exhaustion. I've been at them for over a month and even kept it up while out of town, and it's radical how either my flare ended naturally or this is working like a mofo. So that's great - although it means I'm back to often not being able to sleep at night, which is my lifelong pattern excepting those months of pain and exhaustion.
I still have weird lumps on my hands/wrists (more than I did in January, actually) and with enough exertion (like washing giant loads of dishes, just for instance) my hands do hurt, a lot. But they don't just hurt ALL THE TIME, anymore. And I can do some stuff without it bugging them.
Anyway, like, yesterday? I had to go to the Clerk of Courts office about this ridiculous snowballed Toll-By-Plate bill we had because our Sunpass couldn't get funds out when it tried to months ago, and we just forgot about it like slackers. So I had to go get a number and sit for like four hours, so I could pay it, while Grant worked from home/manned the fort. And IT WAS SO MUCH BETTER THAN SITTING AROUND MY HOUSE. I was like, wow, this really underlies the importance of not being isolated. Fuck, maybe next I'll go to the DMV to live a little O_o Really though, I talked with this one woman for a long time about all kinds of shit, I had this little girl leaning and climbing on me to her mother's mortification and that started another conversation, I was laughing with a cop about the line. I was "engaged with the world." Today I am mostly sitting around my house trying to make myself do dishes but actually refreshing facebook 700 million times. And arguing with Jake and Aaron about cleaning their damn room. Pacing around really wishing we had a second car again, already. I took a nap and then wished I hadn't and now I want another one. RIVETING SHIT.
Here are some of the ongoing dilemmas I'm trying to figure out the best way around:
1.) I spend too much time on the internet. WAY too much time, some days. I carry a smart phone around with tumblr, facebook, email, YouTube and safari apps, aside from texting, and we have a big plan for it and G's job subsidizes the cost, so basically bandwidth is no object. We have computers on 24/7 in the dining room and my bedroom, aside from how Grant, Annie, Aaron and I all own our own laptops (he's a computer guy and ends up able to bring home a lot of discarded stuff as it ages). I can't just turn off the computers or stay away from them/off my phone, because every fucking day I have a bunch of things that involve them on my to-do lists - right now I'm in the midst of email exchanges about Girl Scout camp, GMYS camp, Dance Empire summer intensives, FIU parking passes, the roller derby rally and counseling appointments - all of which, AND MORE, have involved googling galore, printing things, etc. Yesterday I had a 45 minute long fb chat with my editor first thing, and it was good productive stuff. She seems to MOSTLY communicate with me through fb, which is also how Annie's coach organizes things and does surveys for input about every damn thing. I'm holding a tumblr promotion for my book. Currently, Ananda is at a friend's for 2 days and she will text me or call. Isaac called me from school today TWICE for crying out loud. G and I stay connected throughout the day, when he's up at the office, with Skype. I supplement the kids' schoolwork online - Annie through Florida Virtual School, Aaron with documentaries, Jake with Reading Eggs and Elise with Starfall.
It's REALLY HARD to draw the line in the sand. To know when and how to do that. I also use Pandora for music on my phone and computers and that's something that really helps me to feel motivated and with it. And, or course, on days like today texting and the internet are sometimes my only contact with the outside world, and I reallyreallyreally need the interaction... But I have to draw a freakin' line! Schedule time periods, set up a reward system that divvies out 'net privileges, some shit.
2.) I have way too much crap piled everywhere, for projects I'm halfway through. This has been a lifelong "thing" with me - I really will eventually get around to every little bit of it, as I always do, by which time there will be all new piles of crap that will take me a really long time to get around to. I mean right now to my left, my dresser is covered in a giant pile of fabric that will be two quilt tops eventually. Shoved into shelves of my desk are pieces of clothing that need mending and have nowhere else to go. If I put it all away in the armoire with the rest of my fabric and crap, it will be months longer before quilt tops happen, vs leaving the pieces out - because I can't stand having to re-sort it all out and make sense of it again. I consider that task 1 of the job, now complete so I can move to step 2 when I feel like it. I'm not willing to just give up on the quilt tops partially because, as I said, I know they will happen eventually, as does every project I'm ever in the middle of. A lot of the quilt top fabric is already cut, even (since December...) My dining table has 3 tall stacks of kids' schoolwork in the middle of it. It doesn't interfere with eating, but is an eyesore that makes it harder to put food in the middle of the table for serving. But I spent over an hour going through the kids' cubbies and sorting it - I threw away a mountain of papers and now what I have there is things to show our evaluator, when we go for evaluations; blank or mostly blank things that I can utilize for new resources; and now I don't remember what the other pile is, although it would be clear if I walked out there and glanced at it. But I feel this hopeless sense of futility if it all just gets piled back on top of the cubbies and gradually mixes into needing to be re-sorted, like what I did before doesn't even matter. That took so long in and of itself that we needed to have dinner when I was done, and then the kids needed to be read to before bed, and the next day was one when we basically had to get out of bed and dash out the door. I don't have a better place in mind for evaluation stuff until after they've been evaluated and I can trash and/or file it all. Evaluations will probably be like 3 weeks away.
I had my homeschool closet half cleaned, out there - because it is like an 8 hour job I get around to once or twice a year, that I had worked on for 3 hours already - and that was good enough that we can play a bunch of games that are all together again, and use puzzles that have all their pieces as they should, and do a bunch of art we forgot we had the supplies for, again, but then it all got shoved back in there eventually because THAT racket DOES interfere with being able to eat so it can't sit out in such an indefinite way.
2b, is, I also have a two pronged problem that is plaguing the front end of my house that makes me never want to go there. First "prong", our big sectional couch was just falling apart and we got rid of it, but have yet to replace it and aren't really in a hurry to make it a priority since we have so many things we want to prioritize financially, like summer kid activities and how the van AC is starting to quit, and replacing the second car. It works fine functionally because we had a big spinny chair and a love seat in the library, that we moved to the tv room. But aesthetically, our library is now empty except for a big rug and a lot of tall bookshelves. This makes me feel unbalanced in a stupid way I don't know how to explain; it feels too transitional out there, like we're in the middle of moving, and symbolizes how transitional everything really IS and how we ARE gonna be moving ~*~somewhere~*~ ...sometime... Anyway I sort of hate that. Second problem prong, Jake and Elise LOVE that emptier space and use it very well and constantly now, and so it is CONSTANTLY strewn with little crap everywhere. It doesn't matter if I make them clean it up 3 times a day, it's back within 30 minutes - and they are really working together, being imaginative, etc in ways I don't want to interfere with too much. It's been awesome. They always have something to show me or I'm eavesdropping on something great.
But that means the first room you walk in, when you come in my house, is a room with nowhere to sit where the rug is invariable askew, that is littered with two dozen ponies and bits of building toys and pieces of miniature tea sets, at any given point. I seriously can't stand it, but Jake shares a room with Aaron who doesn't want Elise in there all the time, and Elise shares a room with Annie who definitely doesn't want them playing in there, and neither shared bedroom has nearly the space that the big barely used library sans furniture does. It's obviously the best play area in the house, hands down, at the moment.
Isaac is also thrilled to be sleeping in the tv room on the love seat, temporarily (they all always beg to sleep in the tv room, I don't get it), since the chicks we got at Easter are in his room while they are in between being tiny new things and being hardy enough to keep outside. They are enclosed and leave plenty of space, and he still plays with legos and changes his clothes in there, but their neverending cheep-cheeping keeps him awake at night and there is no shutting them up since Isaac can't/won't sleep in pitch darkness or be totally silent.
It just feels like chaos even though nothing is truly amiss, ok? I'm turning into one of THOSE PEOPLE and I even dream now of having some perfect room in my house nobody is allowed to go in, like those uptight old ladies with their display, formal living rooms that I've always hated the idea of. I get it, now - more every day! I actually browse tumblr looking at big, spacious, minimalist all white rooms, and expanses of cleared wood floors and giant windows and tall ceilings. One day not long ago I was like, "What is the matter with me?" because I was looking at this picture in some ad, of all things, and thinking, "I could BREATHE if I lived there! I could do anything, if I lived there." I do not think it's fair or acceptable to chuck most of the kids' stuff out, since what we have (aside from things lost in the dregs of the homeschool closet) gets used, and we have five kids here, and I rely on our breadth of educational and creative materials when I'm slacking off. So is it a corner I've painted myself into until the kids are grown? Or would our whole lives be different if before tooth brushing every night I made them spend 15 minutes tidying things? I feel like that would barely dent it. That's what kills me about...wait, that's the third ongoing dilemma:
3.) I really hate my life and get very very grumpy very very quickly, if/when I'm nagging, yelling or getting irritated with people. It's something I have a very hard time with. I don't know if this is primarily about just valuing relaxation and positive interactions, or my mother's inability to ever "emote" and the way she stigmatized emotional outbursts of any kind, or...what...but I place an irrational amount of value on my self-concept as a chill person. The way I patiently interact with kids and put others at ease is one of my favorite things about myself.
Cleaning this house makes me turn into a shrill, grumpy, monstrous nutcase. All of a sudden I see everyone around me as adversarial and complicating, and everything anyone wants to do as potentially disastrous, when those are not the kinds of thoughts I normally entertain. I am totally cool with people doing 500 piece puzzles, painting and using clay...while everything is a cluttered up mess and the floor is kinda gross. I'm 100% cool with Annie making brownies herself and Aaron scrambling up some eggs as a snack...if the kitchen's already a lost cause. Everything changes once I'm trying to keep up with things, though. I don't know how to strive for order and organization and not be a ball of stress from the struggle to make the other 6 people in this house be on board. I fucking hate trying to force people to do things and some things - like being nice to others and eating well and learning things and personal hygiene and being safe - are worth forcing to me, but I'm not always sure if picking up after themselves is on my "worth it" list :/ Or, if it is just much much harder TO force, for whatever reason. My possibly biased perspective is that my kids have WAY more chores and personal cleaning responsibility than any of their friends or our neighbors, and that I've been much more consistent than relatives of ours or other people online seem to have been with their kids, as mine have grown...but it doesn't matter. It's just nothing but a nonstop uphill battle, regardless. Perhaps I model cleaning as loathsome.
Part of my anger and frustration is definitely that I can't stand how incapable I am of cleaning up after myself in a timely and consistent manner, and so it is maddening to watch the same inability in 6 other people ranging from 5 to my husband, too (who, like Aaron, is much much worse than I have ever been about even being able to even "see" a mess, let alone attend to it). And while I am basically able to make my own shortcomings work, doing a big blitz clean once a week on my own bedroom and bathroom and a massive purse purging monthly... The entire rest of this fairly large house goes to hell in a handbasket in a way that is not something you can "let go" of for more than a couple of hours without having hell to pay. I feel like I've made HUGE strides from the way I was raised, housekeeping wise, but like that's not nearly far enough, and I don't know how to get any further. I've tried every online "system" out there from Fly Lady to Unfuck Your Habitat and nothing sticks beyond the first few days (although I have picked up valuable tricks and techniques from each of them, that I periodically do use).
And a huge part of why it doesn't stick is because I hate everyone while I'm doing it. I am a totally anxious wreck when I'm really trying to be on the ball with the house, saying "no" to messy requests, scolding like crazy and letting passive aggressive (and aggressive aggressive) tension build with Grant. Even when I start from scratch, with everything done (like if we all just worked hard for a solid day to get ready for a party or out of town guests), I just feel like the number of hours and level of attentiveness I have to stick with is TOTALLY impractical and unrealistic. For anyone, not just me. Like I just flat out HAVE to get to a budgeting point that allows for professional cleaning help, or something (which sounds like something that'll happen right around the time I go into private practice and the kids are grown and gone...)
I get a tremendous amount of validation when my mother or mother in law or some other much cleaner home'd person is here for more than an hour and says something like, "Wow, I didn't realize how different it is when they don't ever go to school!" or "Geez there are so many dishes when you cook real food all the time!" I love that shit.
What I wanted to say today, was:
1.) I realized yesterday how huge the backlog of pictures I want to post is becoming, and then spent over an hour selecting, resizing and uploading almost 80 of them. There will be at least a couple of huge picture posts really soon :) I have some great stuff!
2.) Aaron and I have started a documentary unit study. It's micro learning in many senses - 3D printers! What is meth, anyway? Tibetan monks, gun control, Nikola Tesla - but the macro learning is what I'm more interested in, with this. We started with this big talk about how every documentary is made by a person or persons who have some kind of driving agenda, and the totally contradictory yet factual cases one can make for various things. For instance, a hypothetical "FIU is a totally green university" vs a hypothetical "FIU is a university that is destroying the environment"...both are highly defensible and could be made into a convincing hour long presentation. Neither are the whole truth, though. We're also doing a lot of talking about how documentary subjects overlap. They're often organized into groups that include things like, "science" even though technically, "drugs," "the environment," "nature," and "technology" are all also science. There is biography in politics, and politics in conspiracy theories, and conspiracy theories in philosophy, and so on. I want to show him at least a couple of single-topic documentaries that are totally against each other. We're highlighting the ways dramatization can blur the truth or seem persuasive, and I'm asking him to try to see what he can learn from a given documentary as well as what questions he should ask about it's motivations, sourcing, and so on.
Aaaanyway, today he watched the hour long National Geographic special on the Bermuda Triangle (available on YouTube, not actually on that list I linked previously). He was extremely frustrated with how open ended it left the whole issue of WHAT IS HAPPENING TO THE SHIPS AND PLANES AND WHY ("the methane gas bubbles could happen anywhere, it's just a coincidence if they're happening there over and over!") but then he was like, "You know, Mom? It seems like anything 'supernatural' is just peoples' way of explaining things they don't understand yet." And I was like, "Welp. That's a pretty profound statement many other people have also made." Then we talked about that tribes from a movie a generation ago that incorporated found Coke bottles into their religious ceremonies and saw planes flying overhead as God, and he wanted to go back to this big conversation we had weeks ago about placebo and I was like LISTEN KID. I've got stuff to do. Your brain's gonna have to quietly explode in another room while I wash some dishes and figure out what's for dinner :p
I think it's a great supplemental thing for him, that is very very painless compared to, say, getting him up to grade level in math and forcing him to do creative writing. Both of which are deeply painful.
ETA: I've learned that the anti-anxiety med they gave me at the ER - Lorazepam, aka Ativan - is strongly contraindicated for dissociative disorder (which I have) as well as being seriously addictive. Meaning that, you know, maybe the ER nurses shouldn't be able to hand out and advise people on psychiatric medications? This chick sat with me telling me I needed to experience it, see how I felt, if it was something that could help me, she really sat down with me and talked it up for like 15 quiet one on one minutes - and I went home with a prescription for a whole bottle of it (that has just sat). *sigh* This is right on the heels of them trying to refer me out to a cosmetic dentist for the first lump on my wrist, and the year after they gave Aaron DTaP when I asked/signed for a tetanus shot only (an old nail went through his Croc, into his foot). Aaron has had three years of DTaP shots before without incident so for him this is not the end of the world, just a booster. For a kid like my nephew Brian, or Elise, who have had previous seizures, though, and not been vaccinated with DTaP because of it, it could be a big fucking deal to a parent. The fact that they injected a kid with two more things than the parent signed for is a huge liability factor and just another sign of their weird general carelessness :/ I'm starting to feel a burdensome responsibility to write them a letter laying a bunch of this crap out on the table.
Ok, so, I am trying to come up with some solutions and strategies to keep myself from falling into this muddy quagmire of depressed, unproductive paralysis. Feel free to weigh in, if you aren't going to be an asshole.
Good things I'm already doing:
-starting counseling next week
-starting every day with lemon water and a smoothie that's ridiculously concentrated awesome: fish oil, probiotics, flax, coconut oil, emergen-C (which is loaded with B vitamins), keffir, etc I'm also supplementing vitamin D and drinking green tea in the afternoons, and never having any gluten/low grains in general
-I'm getting some exercise fairly regularly - today I biked to and from the school to drop Isaac off (mile round trip), walked to and from to see their talent show that he was in, and then biked with Jake and Elise to pick him up. I'm making it a priority to walk laps at the tracks where we go for TLC and PATH, and to take weekend bike rides with Aaron.
-"self care," of varying sorts, everything from really thinking good thoughts about myself and understanding I need space and downtime to long baths and putting aside everything else to read for pleasure here and there
-I'll also be back in school soon (next month), which I think will be helpful on several levels
The dietary changes have really helped my pain and exhaustion. I've been at them for over a month and even kept it up while out of town, and it's radical how either my flare ended naturally or this is working like a mofo. So that's great - although it means I'm back to often not being able to sleep at night, which is my lifelong pattern excepting those months of pain and exhaustion.
I still have weird lumps on my hands/wrists (more than I did in January, actually) and with enough exertion (like washing giant loads of dishes, just for instance) my hands do hurt, a lot. But they don't just hurt ALL THE TIME, anymore. And I can do some stuff without it bugging them.
Anyway, like, yesterday? I had to go to the Clerk of Courts office about this ridiculous snowballed Toll-By-Plate bill we had because our Sunpass couldn't get funds out when it tried to months ago, and we just forgot about it like slackers. So I had to go get a number and sit for like four hours, so I could pay it, while Grant worked from home/manned the fort. And IT WAS SO MUCH BETTER THAN SITTING AROUND MY HOUSE. I was like, wow, this really underlies the importance of not being isolated. Fuck, maybe next I'll go to the DMV to live a little O_o Really though, I talked with this one woman for a long time about all kinds of shit, I had this little girl leaning and climbing on me to her mother's mortification and that started another conversation, I was laughing with a cop about the line. I was "engaged with the world." Today I am mostly sitting around my house trying to make myself do dishes but actually refreshing facebook 700 million times. And arguing with Jake and Aaron about cleaning their damn room. Pacing around really wishing we had a second car again, already. I took a nap and then wished I hadn't and now I want another one. RIVETING SHIT.
Here are some of the ongoing dilemmas I'm trying to figure out the best way around:
1.) I spend too much time on the internet. WAY too much time, some days. I carry a smart phone around with tumblr, facebook, email, YouTube and safari apps, aside from texting, and we have a big plan for it and G's job subsidizes the cost, so basically bandwidth is no object. We have computers on 24/7 in the dining room and my bedroom, aside from how Grant, Annie, Aaron and I all own our own laptops (he's a computer guy and ends up able to bring home a lot of discarded stuff as it ages). I can't just turn off the computers or stay away from them/off my phone, because every fucking day I have a bunch of things that involve them on my to-do lists - right now I'm in the midst of email exchanges about Girl Scout camp, GMYS camp, Dance Empire summer intensives, FIU parking passes, the roller derby rally and counseling appointments - all of which, AND MORE, have involved googling galore, printing things, etc. Yesterday I had a 45 minute long fb chat with my editor first thing, and it was good productive stuff. She seems to MOSTLY communicate with me through fb, which is also how Annie's coach organizes things and does surveys for input about every damn thing. I'm holding a tumblr promotion for my book. Currently, Ananda is at a friend's for 2 days and she will text me or call. Isaac called me from school today TWICE for crying out loud. G and I stay connected throughout the day, when he's up at the office, with Skype. I supplement the kids' schoolwork online - Annie through Florida Virtual School, Aaron with documentaries, Jake with Reading Eggs and Elise with Starfall.
It's REALLY HARD to draw the line in the sand. To know when and how to do that. I also use Pandora for music on my phone and computers and that's something that really helps me to feel motivated and with it. And, or course, on days like today texting and the internet are sometimes my only contact with the outside world, and I reallyreallyreally need the interaction... But I have to draw a freakin' line! Schedule time periods, set up a reward system that divvies out 'net privileges, some shit.
2.) I have way too much crap piled everywhere, for projects I'm halfway through. This has been a lifelong "thing" with me - I really will eventually get around to every little bit of it, as I always do, by which time there will be all new piles of crap that will take me a really long time to get around to. I mean right now to my left, my dresser is covered in a giant pile of fabric that will be two quilt tops eventually. Shoved into shelves of my desk are pieces of clothing that need mending and have nowhere else to go. If I put it all away in the armoire with the rest of my fabric and crap, it will be months longer before quilt tops happen, vs leaving the pieces out - because I can't stand having to re-sort it all out and make sense of it again. I consider that task 1 of the job, now complete so I can move to step 2 when I feel like it. I'm not willing to just give up on the quilt tops partially because, as I said, I know they will happen eventually, as does every project I'm ever in the middle of. A lot of the quilt top fabric is already cut, even (since December...) My dining table has 3 tall stacks of kids' schoolwork in the middle of it. It doesn't interfere with eating, but is an eyesore that makes it harder to put food in the middle of the table for serving. But I spent over an hour going through the kids' cubbies and sorting it - I threw away a mountain of papers and now what I have there is things to show our evaluator, when we go for evaluations; blank or mostly blank things that I can utilize for new resources; and now I don't remember what the other pile is, although it would be clear if I walked out there and glanced at it. But I feel this hopeless sense of futility if it all just gets piled back on top of the cubbies and gradually mixes into needing to be re-sorted, like what I did before doesn't even matter. That took so long in and of itself that we needed to have dinner when I was done, and then the kids needed to be read to before bed, and the next day was one when we basically had to get out of bed and dash out the door. I don't have a better place in mind for evaluation stuff until after they've been evaluated and I can trash and/or file it all. Evaluations will probably be like 3 weeks away.
I had my homeschool closet half cleaned, out there - because it is like an 8 hour job I get around to once or twice a year, that I had worked on for 3 hours already - and that was good enough that we can play a bunch of games that are all together again, and use puzzles that have all their pieces as they should, and do a bunch of art we forgot we had the supplies for, again, but then it all got shoved back in there eventually because THAT racket DOES interfere with being able to eat so it can't sit out in such an indefinite way.
2b, is, I also have a two pronged problem that is plaguing the front end of my house that makes me never want to go there. First "prong", our big sectional couch was just falling apart and we got rid of it, but have yet to replace it and aren't really in a hurry to make it a priority since we have so many things we want to prioritize financially, like summer kid activities and how the van AC is starting to quit, and replacing the second car. It works fine functionally because we had a big spinny chair and a love seat in the library, that we moved to the tv room. But aesthetically, our library is now empty except for a big rug and a lot of tall bookshelves. This makes me feel unbalanced in a stupid way I don't know how to explain; it feels too transitional out there, like we're in the middle of moving, and symbolizes how transitional everything really IS and how we ARE gonna be moving ~*~somewhere~*~ ...sometime... Anyway I sort of hate that. Second problem prong, Jake and Elise LOVE that emptier space and use it very well and constantly now, and so it is CONSTANTLY strewn with little crap everywhere. It doesn't matter if I make them clean it up 3 times a day, it's back within 30 minutes - and they are really working together, being imaginative, etc in ways I don't want to interfere with too much. It's been awesome. They always have something to show me or I'm eavesdropping on something great.
But that means the first room you walk in, when you come in my house, is a room with nowhere to sit where the rug is invariable askew, that is littered with two dozen ponies and bits of building toys and pieces of miniature tea sets, at any given point. I seriously can't stand it, but Jake shares a room with Aaron who doesn't want Elise in there all the time, and Elise shares a room with Annie who definitely doesn't want them playing in there, and neither shared bedroom has nearly the space that the big barely used library sans furniture does. It's obviously the best play area in the house, hands down, at the moment.
Isaac is also thrilled to be sleeping in the tv room on the love seat, temporarily (they all always beg to sleep in the tv room, I don't get it), since the chicks we got at Easter are in his room while they are in between being tiny new things and being hardy enough to keep outside. They are enclosed and leave plenty of space, and he still plays with legos and changes his clothes in there, but their neverending cheep-cheeping keeps him awake at night and there is no shutting them up since Isaac can't/won't sleep in pitch darkness or be totally silent.
It just feels like chaos even though nothing is truly amiss, ok? I'm turning into one of THOSE PEOPLE and I even dream now of having some perfect room in my house nobody is allowed to go in, like those uptight old ladies with their display, formal living rooms that I've always hated the idea of. I get it, now - more every day! I actually browse tumblr looking at big, spacious, minimalist all white rooms, and expanses of cleared wood floors and giant windows and tall ceilings. One day not long ago I was like, "What is the matter with me?" because I was looking at this picture in some ad, of all things, and thinking, "I could BREATHE if I lived there! I could do anything, if I lived there." I do not think it's fair or acceptable to chuck most of the kids' stuff out, since what we have (aside from things lost in the dregs of the homeschool closet) gets used, and we have five kids here, and I rely on our breadth of educational and creative materials when I'm slacking off. So is it a corner I've painted myself into until the kids are grown? Or would our whole lives be different if before tooth brushing every night I made them spend 15 minutes tidying things? I feel like that would barely dent it. That's what kills me about...wait, that's the third ongoing dilemma:
3.) I really hate my life and get very very grumpy very very quickly, if/when I'm nagging, yelling or getting irritated with people. It's something I have a very hard time with. I don't know if this is primarily about just valuing relaxation and positive interactions, or my mother's inability to ever "emote" and the way she stigmatized emotional outbursts of any kind, or...what...but I place an irrational amount of value on my self-concept as a chill person. The way I patiently interact with kids and put others at ease is one of my favorite things about myself.
Cleaning this house makes me turn into a shrill, grumpy, monstrous nutcase. All of a sudden I see everyone around me as adversarial and complicating, and everything anyone wants to do as potentially disastrous, when those are not the kinds of thoughts I normally entertain. I am totally cool with people doing 500 piece puzzles, painting and using clay...while everything is a cluttered up mess and the floor is kinda gross. I'm 100% cool with Annie making brownies herself and Aaron scrambling up some eggs as a snack...if the kitchen's already a lost cause. Everything changes once I'm trying to keep up with things, though. I don't know how to strive for order and organization and not be a ball of stress from the struggle to make the other 6 people in this house be on board. I fucking hate trying to force people to do things and some things - like being nice to others and eating well and learning things and personal hygiene and being safe - are worth forcing to me, but I'm not always sure if picking up after themselves is on my "worth it" list :/ Or, if it is just much much harder TO force, for whatever reason. My possibly biased perspective is that my kids have WAY more chores and personal cleaning responsibility than any of their friends or our neighbors, and that I've been much more consistent than relatives of ours or other people online seem to have been with their kids, as mine have grown...but it doesn't matter. It's just nothing but a nonstop uphill battle, regardless. Perhaps I model cleaning as loathsome.
Part of my anger and frustration is definitely that I can't stand how incapable I am of cleaning up after myself in a timely and consistent manner, and so it is maddening to watch the same inability in 6 other people ranging from 5 to my husband, too (who, like Aaron, is much much worse than I have ever been about even being able to even "see" a mess, let alone attend to it). And while I am basically able to make my own shortcomings work, doing a big blitz clean once a week on my own bedroom and bathroom and a massive purse purging monthly... The entire rest of this fairly large house goes to hell in a handbasket in a way that is not something you can "let go" of for more than a couple of hours without having hell to pay. I feel like I've made HUGE strides from the way I was raised, housekeeping wise, but like that's not nearly far enough, and I don't know how to get any further. I've tried every online "system" out there from Fly Lady to Unfuck Your Habitat and nothing sticks beyond the first few days (although I have picked up valuable tricks and techniques from each of them, that I periodically do use).
And a huge part of why it doesn't stick is because I hate everyone while I'm doing it. I am a totally anxious wreck when I'm really trying to be on the ball with the house, saying "no" to messy requests, scolding like crazy and letting passive aggressive (and aggressive aggressive) tension build with Grant. Even when I start from scratch, with everything done (like if we all just worked hard for a solid day to get ready for a party or out of town guests), I just feel like the number of hours and level of attentiveness I have to stick with is TOTALLY impractical and unrealistic. For anyone, not just me. Like I just flat out HAVE to get to a budgeting point that allows for professional cleaning help, or something (which sounds like something that'll happen right around the time I go into private practice and the kids are grown and gone...)
I get a tremendous amount of validation when my mother or mother in law or some other much cleaner home'd person is here for more than an hour and says something like, "Wow, I didn't realize how different it is when they don't ever go to school!" or "Geez there are so many dishes when you cook real food all the time!" I love that shit.
What I wanted to say today, was:
1.) I realized yesterday how huge the backlog of pictures I want to post is becoming, and then spent over an hour selecting, resizing and uploading almost 80 of them. There will be at least a couple of huge picture posts really soon :) I have some great stuff!
2.) Aaron and I have started a documentary unit study. It's micro learning in many senses - 3D printers! What is meth, anyway? Tibetan monks, gun control, Nikola Tesla - but the macro learning is what I'm more interested in, with this. We started with this big talk about how every documentary is made by a person or persons who have some kind of driving agenda, and the totally contradictory yet factual cases one can make for various things. For instance, a hypothetical "FIU is a totally green university" vs a hypothetical "FIU is a university that is destroying the environment"...both are highly defensible and could be made into a convincing hour long presentation. Neither are the whole truth, though. We're also doing a lot of talking about how documentary subjects overlap. They're often organized into groups that include things like, "science" even though technically, "drugs," "the environment," "nature," and "technology" are all also science. There is biography in politics, and politics in conspiracy theories, and conspiracy theories in philosophy, and so on. I want to show him at least a couple of single-topic documentaries that are totally against each other. We're highlighting the ways dramatization can blur the truth or seem persuasive, and I'm asking him to try to see what he can learn from a given documentary as well as what questions he should ask about it's motivations, sourcing, and so on.
Aaaanyway, today he watched the hour long National Geographic special on the Bermuda Triangle (available on YouTube, not actually on that list I linked previously). He was extremely frustrated with how open ended it left the whole issue of WHAT IS HAPPENING TO THE SHIPS AND PLANES AND WHY ("the methane gas bubbles could happen anywhere, it's just a coincidence if they're happening there over and over!") but then he was like, "You know, Mom? It seems like anything 'supernatural' is just peoples' way of explaining things they don't understand yet." And I was like, "Welp. That's a pretty profound statement many other people have also made." Then we talked about that tribes from a movie a generation ago that incorporated found Coke bottles into their religious ceremonies and saw planes flying overhead as God, and he wanted to go back to this big conversation we had weeks ago about placebo and I was like LISTEN KID. I've got stuff to do. Your brain's gonna have to quietly explode in another room while I wash some dishes and figure out what's for dinner :p
I think it's a great supplemental thing for him, that is very very painless compared to, say, getting him up to grade level in math and forcing him to do creative writing. Both of which are deeply painful.
ETA: I've learned that the anti-anxiety med they gave me at the ER - Lorazepam, aka Ativan - is strongly contraindicated for dissociative disorder (which I have) as well as being seriously addictive. Meaning that, you know, maybe the ER nurses shouldn't be able to hand out and advise people on psychiatric medications? This chick sat with me telling me I needed to experience it, see how I felt, if it was something that could help me, she really sat down with me and talked it up for like 15 quiet one on one minutes - and I went home with a prescription for a whole bottle of it (that has just sat). *sigh* This is right on the heels of them trying to refer me out to a cosmetic dentist for the first lump on my wrist, and the year after they gave Aaron DTaP when I asked/signed for a tetanus shot only (an old nail went through his Croc, into his foot). Aaron has had three years of DTaP shots before without incident so for him this is not the end of the world, just a booster. For a kid like my nephew Brian, or Elise, who have had previous seizures, though, and not been vaccinated with DTaP because of it, it could be a big fucking deal to a parent. The fact that they injected a kid with two more things than the parent signed for is a huge liability factor and just another sign of their weird general carelessness :/ I'm starting to feel a burdensome responsibility to write them a letter laying a bunch of this crap out on the table.
