Category: It IS all about me

Well. That was an unpleasant little trip through the dark corners of my psyche. Thanks to all of you for your comments of support and solidarity. It’s edifying to hear that a lot of you think the whole daycare-crapout situation was ridiculous – at least it wasn’t entirely me!

I spent quite a large part of the long weekend trying to wrest control over the things I can, and looking for the courage to accept the things I can’t. Cleaned the bathrooms, vacuumed, washed the floors. Boxed up our winter boots and hauled them down to the basement. Threw out half the stuff in the funny-shaped cupboard in the corner that barfs out misbalanced stacks of lidless tupperware and disposable aluminum pans and stray paper plates every time you open the cupboard door. Bought a new battery for the cordless phone that dies if you leave it off the cradle longer than an hour or deign to talk more than 15 minutes. Mowed the lawn, front and back, AND hauled out the weedwhacker to do the edges. Bought a funky new Hound Dog dandelion puller after reading a review of it in the paper (and it was worth every penny of the $25 I spent on it. I filled half a bag of dandelions in less than an hour! Disclosure: link built through my Amazon Associates account.) Bought a bleeding heart perennial to fill a gap in the back flowerbed.

In short, I tried my best to eliminate as many things as possible that have caused me some form of grief in the last little while. And still found time to read a chapter or two of a good book on my new swing. AND watch that stellar hockey game on Saturday. Thank goodness for long weekends.

This post may well qualify for induction into the “Boring Posts Hall of Fame”, but I’m trying to cram something in before bringing Tristan to school. I’m home with the boys today since we are newly caregiverless, and I have to tell you, on a sunny May day it’s not a bad time to be out of the office.

Sincerely, thank you to all of you who offered a word of kindness in the last couple of days. The good news is, I think my words are unstuck again, and I’m feeling a lot better about the chaos that wasn’t banished over the weekend. I mean, life without at least a little bit of chaos is kind of uninteresting, right?

Thanks, friends.

This is not the post I wrote today. I wrote two others at various points today, trying to relieve some of the pressure in my head. The first two are tucked away in the draft folders, too raw to be published. Hopefully, just getting them out of my head and into the computer is enough.

It hasn’t been the best day. It hasn’t been the best week. Matter of fact, we’re going on two weeks that I’d pretty much either do over or erase from memory.

When I went to see the doctor 10 days ago and she diagnosed the pneumonia, the symptom that was bothering me the most was not the cough, or the fever. It was a much less quantifiable, “I don’t feel like myself.” The antibiotics quelled the cough and broke the fever, but the emotional malaise lingers, amplified by the criticism and concerns raised by the caregiver.

I’m tired of listening to the various voices in my head. One of the other two posts I wrote today tried to capture the ongoing conversation – no, debate – in my head over the past three days. The voice of comfort tries to tell me I’m doing a good job, I have a great life and very little to complain about on a relative scale, and that this too shall pass. The voice of the critic is less charitable, and makes me feel inadequate and overwhelmed as a parent, as a wife, as an employee, as a person.

Overwhelmed. Inadequate.

Breath in, breath out. Try to find your bliss, try to find just a granule of peace to tide you over.

Right now, I can’t think of anything that would make me feel better, which is a kind of desolate place to be. Often, I’ll be able to cheer myself up with a meal at a favourite restaurant, or an afternoon of shopping indulgence, or just an hour with a bowl of chips and a good book. Meh. None of those things appeal to me.

The malaise coalesces every now and then into a flare. A flash of temper, a raised voice, tears. And then I feel bad, because my life really isn’t so bad and I don’t know what the hell has gotten into me. But the negativity is strong, and I look around and see faults everywhere. That was the other post I wrote, trying to capture my vacillating feelings about the boys right now. After the caregivers comments, I’m suddenly hyper-aware of their faults, of my failings. They ARE restless, and relentless. They DO need to learn to listen the first time. They DO talk back a lot, oh my god the arguing and bickering and complaining. Simon really is a handful right now, and I’m honestly out of ideas of how to discipline him. I know they’re just going through a phase right now, but their relentless testing feeds my growing ennui and I’m overwhelmed – with worry, with guilt, with anxiety. What if I am screwing this up? What if it’s too late? Why can’t I do this? Why is it so hard? Why is it so goddamn hard?

So I start to make plans, to compensate. I’ll make up charts with reward stickers for good behaviour, limit computer time, make myself more available to them. Except, I haven’t washed the floor in two weeks and the toilets in I don’t know how long and the grass in the backyard is nearly to my shins. And suddenly two days have gone by and I’ve been doing menial tasks all weekend with the voices arguing in my head and noticing every. little. thing the boys have done wrong (and, to their credit, a good number of the things they have done right) and I still have this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach like I’m not doing a good job anywhere in my life right now. And I just want that feeling to fuck right off because I like it much better when I’m happy and oblivious to the mess and the chaos and I wonder what that says about me.

Breath in, breath out.

I don’t know whether I want to publish this post or not. It seems to me I’ve been doing more than my share of whining lately, and I keep coming to you asking for your feedback, for your endorsement, for your support. That’s not what I want, not what I need. But maybe if I tell you that I’m having a hard time, it will make me feel better, and make it easier for me to not be having a hard time anymore.

Even though I’m not a writer in the traditional definition of the word, I rely on the written word for my livelihood. I write communication strategies, news releases, web content, briefing notes and reports, among a long list of other things. My job is all about words.

The amount of finesse required and the level of care I take when stringing those words together varies day by day and product by product. If I’m writing e-mails all day long, not so much. But there are days when how I string those words together matters. Working for the government doesn’t give me a huge creative licence, but there is still room for artistry.

On the blog, I write every day. (Every damn day. It tires me out just thinking about it some times!) Even with blog, though, some days involve more effort and creativity than others. I’m not especially careful when I string together a meme, but I’ll often rework an anecdote for quite a while. The mechanics of good writing come naturally to me, but I like to pick at a first draft for at least a couple of minutes to reconsider the word choices and the rhythm and the resonance.

Lately, getting the words out has been a painful and difficult process. Whether I’m writing for work or for blog, for the past week or more the simple act of writing has been a struggle. Each sentence is an effort, wrested from some deep subconscious dungeon and dragged reluctantly to the light of day. Each paragraph is filled with false starts and abandoned phrases. My writing feels stilted and forced.

When it’s good, it’s very good. I love the joyous rush of being in the groove, of completely disengaging my brain from my furiously typing fingers and simply sitting back to marvel as the words assert themselves on the screen. I am my own biggest fan, and there are days when I go back and read some of the stuff that I’ve written and say, ‘Damn, woman! You can write!’ And then, of course, there are days like today when I look back at some of my finer writing and think, ‘That’s it, I’ve jumped the shark. I’ll never write that well again.’

It’s not a matter of being in a creative drought or lacking my muse; even when I know exactly what I want to say, the words themselves are the hinderance. Rather than flowing together, tumbling out in an enthusiastic and satisfying rush, the words are tangled and sticky and awkward, and each one has to be coaxed reluctantly onto the page. It’s exhausting.

Is there anything more excruciatingly boring than reading someone complain about how hard it is to string words together? Oh yes, definitely: writing about how hard it is to string words together.

P.S. On my screen, my sidebar seems to be taking a vacation in the sunny south. (Although it’s fine on the laptop at home.) I’m not sure why. It started doing that yesterday, but I haven’t added anything to it, nor do I have any content in the posts that would throw off the alignment. I’m hoping it fixes itself. Bad enough when the words are fighting back, but the technology is throwing a hissy fit, too. At this rate, I’ll be sending out blog posts via seminole semaphore signals by next week…

This is what my sweet, sweet boys and Beloved gave me for Mother’s Day:

This is all I really needed:

Happy mother’s day!

I’m writing a quick e-mail, and Beloved happens to look over my shoulder at the monitor.

“Woot?” he asks, reading my first line. “What are you, an owl with a speech impediment?”

“Woot!” I say. “Sheesh, get with the lingo, dude. Woot is old skool now. Squee is the new woot.”

He lowers his head into his hands, shoulders drooping. “I’m married to a thirteen year old,” he sighs.

“This is a bloggable moment!” I exclaim brightly, clicking to open the Blogger dashboard.

He shakes his head in resignation and walks away muttering to himself.

My name is Dani and I have a problem.

I am a packrat. More than a packrat, I have what is bordering on a pathological inability to throw things away.

What things, you ask? Well, I’m okay when it comes to throwing out dirty diapers and pizza crusts and apple cores and whatnot. But the rest of the clutter that migrates into our house on a daily basis, moves in and procreates in corners, in piles on end tables, crowding into bookshelves and spilling out of drawers? It’s taking over.

Some of it I keep because I think I might need it again some day. Stacks of magazines with interesting articles on parenting and astronomy; recipes I might want to try some day if I ever develop a taste for food I don’t currently like; things the boys might some day find interesting about art and classical music and politics. Newspaper clippings that are about people I know, or were particularly interesting, or I thought some day might lead to inspiration for an unspecified future writing project. Eight years worth of bank statements because once I needed to find one from the previous year. Containers of any shape or size, because you can never have enough containers in your life – even when they begin to take over your life. Flower pots, mismatched cutlery, coffee carafes, empty picture frames – because you just never know when they might come in handy. A full series of 1990 Topps baseball cards. Almost a dozen boxes of comic books. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of three million paperbacks.

Way too much space is occupied by things I think might make good crafts some day. We’d have to make a craft every day and night for the next six years to use up all the bits of flotsam and jetsam I’ve stashed away for unidentified future crafts. Meters and meters of fabric scraps, each scrap too small to be a quilt square. Ditto for scraps of wrapping paper. Construction paper with only one corner cut off, or one line drawn and then abandoned, saved for a rainy-day project. Socks with no mates, or socks with holes in them, that would make lovely sock puppets. Straws, popsicle sticks, shiny bits and sparkly things. Scraps of lumber leaning in the corner, waiting to inspire. Greeting cards from people I no longer remember, saved not for sentimental reasons but for the craft-able-ness of the pretty pictures.

Speaking of sentimental, that’s a whole other category of stuff that I’m destined to keep for the rest of my natural life. Simon’s soothers, for example. How can I throw them away? I think I still have Tristan’s tucked away somewhere. And every greeting card I ever got from the people whom I do care about, like Beloved and the boys and my folks. Photos. Who can throw a photo away, even if you can’t quite remember who the photo is of? And clothes that don’t fit anymore, or are ridiculously out of style, but were bought for me by my mom. I can’t throw those away!

Clothes are hugely difficult for me to throw away, or even recycle. My grandmother used to recycle my grandfather’s shirts by pulling the stitching out of the worn collars and cuffs, turning them inside out and restitching them. Now myself, I can barely sew a hem and certainly not an invisible one, but I have baskets of distressed clothing that I imagine could be resuscitated – if I only could figure out how. And since Tristan is so hard on the knees of his pants, there are many pairs of one-kneed pants just waiting to be converted into shorts. Or, you know, to sit in the drawer and take up space for eternity.

And even the undamaged clothes I find hard to part with. I have five, maybe six rubbermaid bins of clothes too small for the boys that are stacked in Simon’s closet. Some days I think I’m saving them for a potential future baby of mine. Other days, I’m saving them to sell on eBay. Mostly, though, I’m saving them because it’s less emotionally difficult than deciding to get rid of them. That’s without even mentioning the entire maternity wardrobe hanging patiently in my closet, from work clothes to weekend wear to underwear. I might need it, and if I don’t need it maybe I can sell it. Or maybe give it away. But not yet – someday, but not yet.

And then there’s the boys’ artwork. They love to colour, to draw, to paint. I simply can’t in good conscience bring myself to recycle their masterpieces, no matter how minor. They print colouring pages off the Internet by the ream, and each of them is a work of art, even the ones where they never actually got around to finishing the colouring. And now that Tristan is in school, he brings home workbooks and exercises in addition to artwork, and there’s no way I can bring myself to turf the products of his labour. We’ll need a new house to store it all by the time both boys have made it to university.

No wonder I can’t keep the damn house clean – I spend all my (albeit rather limited) dedicated housework time taming clutter instead of actually cleaning. But I’m not ready to part with any of it. Not yet, anyway.

Surely I’m not alone. What do you collect?

After years of listening to friends rave about Costco, I took advantage of a deal that knocked $20 off the price of a membership and signed up online. Today, we took our first trip.

I swear, I must be the only person in North America who can walk into a Costco and walk out with nothing but a bag of milk and two loaves of bread.

You know that snowstorm that wallopped the Northeastern USA, Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime provinces on Monday? Yah, sorry about that. Mea culpa. You see, I bought some new spring shoes on the weekend, thus condemning us to at least six more weeks of winter (I’m far more reliable than Wiarton Willie or Punxsutawney Phil!)

I’m not really a shoe person. Mostly, I buy shoes because it’s not socially acceptable to pad around in my socks all day. Not terribly comfortable in February, either. So shoes are a functional thing for me. I have some black ones, some brown ones. I have a couple of pairs for work, one of which is good for skirts. I have my winter boots (new and a steal from Globo this year) and a pair of Guess backless canvas tennis shoes that have come a long way from their original white. I have a pair of sandals for summer, of course, and a kicky little pair of cream coloured dress sandals with kitten heels I got last summer to wear to work. I have a pair of Timberland hikers that I have worn within an inch of their lives, and a pair of Saucony runners that I paid a comparatively small fortune for, but I love them. My single foray into the world of fashionable shoes has been this adorable pair of navy ballet flats with orange and cranberry and emerald embroidery and (gasp!) sequins that I bought last summer.

(Aren’t they cute? And I paid a stunning TWELVE dollars for them.)

So I own probably ten pairs in all, maybe a dozen. It seems to me an excess of shoes, shoes for every occassion. They’re all very nice, very functional, mostly comfortable and (with the exception of my fancy little ballet flats above) terribly uninteresting shoes.

My skirt shoes (I really have just one pair, a staid black pump with a two-inch heel and a square toe) had worn down considerably in the four years since I bought them to wear to work after my maternity leave with Tristan had ended. So this season, I found myself in need – okay, in want – of a new pair of skirt shoes.

I was in the mall on the weekend looking for new pants for Tristan (post for another day = what the holy hell do boys do to their pants that is so hard on the knees?) and I just happened to pop into Payless on my way by.

I started off looking for something in a staid black pump with a two-inch heel and a square toe. What I found was a sassy little patent leather(ish) slingback with kitten heels and a flirty little bow. LOVED them! I haven’t worn patent leather shoes since I was six years old, but I immediately and deeply loved them. I had to have them.

You’ll be shocked to hear that I was then mesmerized into buying a second pair by the buy-one-get-one-half-price devilry of Payless. As I mentioned, to date all my shoes have been variations on a safe neutral palette and conservative styling. But I’ve been studiously taking notes while watching Friday night episodes of What Not To Wear, and Clinton’s exhortation to punch it up with a bold splash of colour was rattling through my brain when I set my sights on a gorgeous pair of (he says red, she says coral) strappy summer shoes with a skinny wedge heel.

Aren’t they lovely? Red, strappy shoes. I feel so fancy! And so thrifty, too, because I paid only $40 for the lot, including tax.

(insert smug and fancy grin here)

But can I just take a minute to say that taking pictures of your own feet is not nearly so easy as it looks? Oh sure, the taking of the picture is easy enough, but the not making your legs look like sticks or amorphous blobs? Not so easy. Props to Marla, whose carefree feet photos seem as effortless as they are adorable. She is an unacknowledged master of the foot-photo, and of the foot family portrait.

So, bloggy friends, having just endured an entire post about my feet, do tell me about yours. Are you a shoe person? What are your favourite shoes?