Today I was so tired of yelling at Matthew that I went to bed. I took him with me. He watched TV in our room all day and I dozed. Lame, I realize, but I am so tired of him refusing to do anything that I want him to do and I just gave up and threw in the towel for today.
Now I am all groggy, it's nearly three and we haven't eaten lunch and I'm not sure if Tim is picking Mara up at school.
And tonight is Trick or Treat night. Yes, it IS the 26th, but that's what night it is in this idiotic town.
Too much for me. I think I'll go back to bed. Blah.
Yesterday I was re-reading The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing. I first read the book in Scotland, right after it was published. It's not an easy read (which of Lessing's are?), but I keep coming back to it again and again. I actually still have the promotional poster I hung in my dorm room in Dunbar Hall in Aberdeen. At any rate, I was about thirty pages in yesterday, on my tenth or so re-reading when it hit me: I suddenly realized how much Doris Lessing helped to shape my only-just-post-adolescent ideas about what grownup life was going to be like. More importantly, that realization may be the key to understanding my frustrations about what my life is really like instead.
The dream that David and Harriet share in the beginning of their marriage -- not so much the million kids they plan to have, because I never really wanted a million kids, but the rest of their image -- of a big house where people would come for the holidays and really the whole way Lessing describes the home they create is what I wanted. I could type in some stuff here and you'd maybe start to understand what I'm talking about, but then you wouldn't have to go find the book and read it, so I'm not giving the short cut. And besides, I'm really writing this for me so it doesn't matter if you understand or not. I know what I'm talking about and why it makes me happy-sad.
I called Sarah yesterday to tell her about that sudden realization. She has always -- or at least it seems so from here -- had a very clear idea about her dream house and dream life. I envy her that certainty. I actually envy her for lots of reasons, but right now the certainty is key. Because even my dream life has lately been just a vague and discontened "Not sure what it is, but I know it isn't THIS!"
Today in the backyard I was struck again at how completely my life is the opposite of what I had envisioned. We were supposed to be working on a long list of inside cleaning today, but it was beautiful and we really needed to mow, so our work shifted to outside. And as we were transferring things from the van here and there to go pick up the mower we needed to borrow (Ours broke. Again), I was just feeling so depressed. I can't get to the rakes because there's too much else piled up by the door of the garage and I can't put the yard toys away because nothing has a home and mostly, I just never wanted to be like this. I didn't want to have a garage that is always so full of crap that "cleaning out the garage" really means shifting the crap around in order to be able to put more crap in. Forget ever putting an actual CAR in there, I can barely put the trampoline away!
I didn't want to be someone whose life consisted of these intermittant frenzies of cleaning and throwing away that ultimately leave no visible dent in the crappile. I wasn't going to be a person whose kitchen floor is always vaguely sticky and who can never find anything because everything is either dirty, dumped in a pile someplace kinda near where it goes but not exactly, or behind a big pile of something else that doesn't have a home or, or, or. I was going to have a spare, probably Scandinavian furnished home, with a scrubbed table and fresh flowers and the smell of bread cooling on the counter. I wasn't going to be this person who can never actually FIND the counter, let alone any space for baking bread or who was so frustrated with just the daily struggle to get through the day that the very idea of baking is impossible and maybe even frightening in its magnitude.
I never do the things I want to do with the kids because a) there's no place cleared off enough to do it, or b) we can't find the stuff we need but mostly because by the time I get a place cleared off and un-sticky and find the stuff we need, I am too sick of my life and angry with the kids and angry with myself, not to mention exhausted and frustrated and depressed -- to feel like doing anything anymore anyway. I end up just wanting to scream at everyone or go to bed and not get up, ever. So the kids watch another video and I lie on the couch feeling like garbage. Again.
Nobody wants to help clean up -- which I understand. *I* don't want to clean up, but I feel like we are living at the bottom of an avalanche that's always about to slide down on top of us again. And I don't really need advice on "just do it" or "do a little at a time" or any of those things. I know all those things. Conquering my inertia and my frustration at working all day or all week or all month or all year and seeing barely a dent in the mountain -- that's what I don't know how to do. The "little at a time" approach doesn't seem to help, primarily because the little is obliterated by the next day and I am so frustrated by the constant feeling that it won't matter how much I clean, it will still look cluttered and crappy that I just don't manage to do anything.
I guess at the root I am struggling with an identity crisis. This is not the person I wanted to be by now. There are so many detours that we have taken -- some were bad choices we made, and some were things we didn't have control over. But I am so tired of continually trying to figure out who I am and who I am going to be -- without ever coming to any kind of a conclusion aside from "Not This".
Anyway, the title of this entry is the first line of a Suzanne Vega song that has been going through my head all afternoon. Here's the rest of it:
It’s a one time thing
It just happens a lot
Walk with me
And we will see what we have got
My footsteps are ticking
Like water dripping
From a tree
Walking a hairline
And stepping very carefully
My heart is broken
It’s worn out at the knees
Hearing, muffled seeing blind
Soon it will hit the Deep Freeze
And something is cracking
I don’t know where
Ice on the sidewalk
Brittle branches in the air
The sun is blinding
Dizzy golden, dancing green
Through the park in the afternoon
Wondering where the hell I have been
I guess I should have expected it really. I mean you can't put the Food Network on for background distraction (in lieu of cartoons or other non-suitable programming) and not think your kid is going to want to cook.
Mara has always enjoyed cooking, but she is more the "Can I stir in the chocolate chips while you're making cookies" type. Matthew, on the other hand, wants to be head chef. And while I understand this impulse, I wish it wasn't happening on my dining room table (and the dining room rug and the dining room floor).
Because what Matty-moo calls "making a recipe" usually involves taking whatever he has leftover from dinner -- or the salt or the pepper or whatever else has been left on a low enough counter to reach -- and mixing it with any leftover drinks that are still on the table -- or if there are no drinks left, freezing cold water from the bathroom sink.
There is also lots of stirring involved in making a recipe. Everybody knows that -- duh! And when Matthew stirs, he also sloshes. And when he mixes, he inevitably wants to crush or sprinkle or tear or otherwise create tiny particles that get EVERYWHERE. If there are no tiny particles, the ingredients in question inevitably combine to create a glue-like substance that's all over the table and chair and floor and Matthew's hands and...
Tonight Tim made Thai chicken. This is a very delicious meal, but it does have the potential for multiple disasters on the "making a recipe" front. So tonight I very conscientiously put away the leftover noodles and chicken in a tupperware dish and put it in the fridge. I tranferred the crushed peanuts to a container with a lid. Mara put the lime juice and the soy sauce in the fridge. Remembering past concoctions, I put the salt up on the back of the stove. I started to leave the Mongolian Fire Oil on the stove for a second while I put something else away, but the image of my son rubbing his hands, covered in red oil, into his eyes was all too glaring, so instead I put it up on the high shelf where it goes, congratulating myself on my forethought.
I couldn't do the dishes properly, because there's no light in the kitchen right now -- breaker's out that does the overhead lights and the microwave outlet, everything else is fine. But I had taken care of stuff and it was all going to be fine.
Has anyone else seen the error? Have you realized what I should have put away and didn't? I'll give you a hint: Greyson (my son's best friend and the kid I most regularly have at my house for long stretches of time) is allergic to it. I'll give you another hint -- it wasn't a big bowl of bee-stings. Nope, I went off and, in my celebration of cleverness over the bottle of fire oil, I left the container of peanuts on the table.
Unguarded.
In a little dish.
A little dish suitable for mixing the rest of Mommy's Diet Coke.
Once you poured out most of the peanuts.
Onto the floor and the table and the chairs and...
And the kicker is that I wouldn't even have realized he was doing it if he hadn't scampered into the kitchen to get a proper spoon for stirring and sloshing.
Ooooooooh I am mad! Somebody is going to bed, and I mean NOW! But really, it was my fault, wasn't it?
P.S. -- the peanuts are cleaned up. I vacuumed. Again.
Today Greyson and Matthew and I went to Hugus Fruit Farm on a field trip.
My friend Nancy Hugus invited us to come and join a 1st grade group they had coming in for a tour this morning. It was drizzly and chilly, but it was a fantastic day -- it felt like Scotland, which I forgot to mention to Nancy. She is a Wooster alumna also and like me, she did junior year abroad in Scotland. I think she would have agreed with me about the day.
The tour itself was lots of fun. Nancy put us with the group that had the tour guide she thought we would like and she was indeed, a very good guide. We saw the cider pressing process, including the pressed stuff that's left after all the juice is gone (it looks like wet particle board and smells delicious. Apparently cows and deer both enjoy eating it). We saw the sorting machines and the brushes that polish the apples. We got to go in the cold storage, which was like a huge igloo stacked full of apples. We walked in the orchard and each child got to pick an apple -- very carefully with a twist -- and put it in the tour guide's picking basket -- gently, like an egg! The apples we picked were golden delicious and they smelled amazing. We saw how the picking baskets have a kind of cloth tube at the bottom to let the apples gently down into the apple crates so they won't bruise. We all got to eat a Jonathan apple and we watched a video about apple growing.
It was so much fun, but I was especially glad not to be actually "with" the group that we tagged along in the back of. I asked Nancy later, after all the school kids had gone, if they often had groups with such unruly grownups. She said that the groups tend to be either very very well behaved, or much like the group we had where the chaperoning adults are less well-behaved than the kids. Our tour guide actually had to ask who the teacher was, because none of the women that were with the kids seemed to be particularly in charge. The teacher thought this was very amusing and giggled with the other women (moms? aides? I wasn't sure) about how funny that the guide couldn't figure out who the teacher was. I was just disgusted. When we went into the cold storage room, Grey and Math and I were at the front of the line, so I actually had the kids behind me following in a line -- which is really the first time they were orderly at all. Matthew and Greyson were at least as well behaved as the first graders -- better than some.
After the school children left, we got some special tour stuff. We got to see the apple sippy cups that are ready to go to the fair next week. We got to see how the big red scale works, and Nancy took the boys up into the giant John Deere tractor so they could see all the controls. I wish I'd had the camera! They were thrilled! Then we bought apples and cider for everyone who didn't get to come to the tour. The boys each had their own bag of apples and they were so happy to get to put them on the big scale and see how much they all weighed.
We had a great day. Oh, and Mara's jacket was still there, left from the anniversary party we went to three weeks ago. So even if the tour was awful, at least we got her jacket back!
Yay!