it's okay
I'm not the fun one. I never have been. Dave likes to tease that my idea of fun is scrubbing all the floors and then going for an eight mile walk. Haha. What makes that joke funny is it's true. I didn't learn to be fun, and it didn't come to me naturally. There was a tiny part of me that hoped I might miraculously be a "fun mom" when Nettie came, but it hasn't materialized that way. I'm a perfectly competent and even a doting mom, but NOT fun. Dave is a fun dad. My mom is a fun grandma. But I, I am the one who stays in and vacuums and folds laundry and cooks dinner while Dave and Nettie go sledding.
I can live without fun, clearly. But here's what gets me down. I can't seem to stop DOING. Doing everything and doing it well keeps me running and dissatisfied most of the time, and it interferes with the time - and the quality of time - I have with Nettie. I always feel like I should have been able to get more done in the day, and what I do get done, I find myself apologizing for. What started me thinking about this is was our old friend possum, in a roundabout way. Or maybe it was the sewing class or the foggy drive. But when I came in that night and Dave went out to search for our pesky friend, I did something really strange, at least for me. I laid down on the kitchen floor, right in the middle of all my bags of groceries and sewing basket and purse, just laid down on my back and stared up at the ceiling.
After a moment or two, it struck me what a poor texturing job the drywallers had done. And as I reflected on that, I realized that it had taken me almost four years to notice this. I have painted the ceiling, of course, and swiped cobwebs out of the corners, cleaned the light fixtures, but never really stopped to study it. Ughh, and now I have to reveal that this becomes a story of crying over a texturized ceiling.
To be fair, the ugly ceiling was NOT the culprit for my tears. Neither was the sewing class or the foggy drive or the possum. It wasn't even the fact that for the first time, I'd missed Nettie's bedtime. Okay, it was partly that. But mostly, I cried because the ceiling made me see just how closely I'm tethered. I give myself very little space. There are so few things in my life that I consider optional. Everything that fills my day is mandatory. Mandatory for a certain standard of cleanliness, or health, for routine and schedule, for learning, for edification, for productivity. I even make creativity a mandate some days. Create something, you unoriginal boob! I know this is a weakness of mine, this desire to accomplish and achieve, to measure my worth in how much I can do and how well I do it. But I never seem to shake free of it. And it limits me in so many ways.
See, it's not that I wish I had spent more of the last four years staring at my ugly ceilings. It's a metaphor again, if I can parse it out.
The ceiling is clear blue cloudless skies on summer afternoons that I've spent working when I didn't really have to. The ceiling is every sunset I've missed rampaging around the house, using that magical "golden hour" of light to track down and vacuum up all the dust and cat hair. The ceiling is all the naptimes I've forced myself to clean the bathrooms and the litter box and start supper, when what I really want to do is read poetry. The ceiling is bowing my head to an endless to-do list and never looking up.
I've heard that a good way to break a bad habit is to replace it with a good one. Our brains like habit, apparently. So I need to practice forgiveness. Skipping a chore and "being okay" with that, maybe even enjoying the freedom that affords. Like this morning, instead of eating breakfast at 8:30 the way Nettie and I usually do, I didn't get to it. So we had banana "nice cream" at 9:30 together. Nobody suffered; we enjoyed our treat, and I'm not a bad mom for doing what was easier today. And yesterday instead of cooking and cleaning all morning and putting Net off with promises, we just made Valentines. They weren't anything fancy. I didn't do any of the cool ideas off Pinterest. We just enjoyed painting and coloring and playing with tape together. Forgive me if this seems idiotically simplistic, but these are things I had to let happen in an intentional way. Being "okay with things" is not my default setting. Even when things go mostly according to plan, I struggle to feel okay about them. I always see what could have been better. And don't anybody use the P-word because yes; I know perfectly - dammit - well that's an issue and we're not even going into that today, okay? Today we're talking about "okay-ness" and "fun-ness" and not doing all the things. Ness.
Valentine's Day has plenty of haters, but we could all use a little love right now. I'm trying to give myself a bit more, and you should, too. Whatever it is you're struggling with, it's okay. You're okay. I'm okay. We're all going to be okay. Eat some ice cream, show someone you love them, spend time doing something that makes you happy.
Rememory
How could we know
the blessings
which illuminated our days?
The joy too strong to feel
until it was
no longer there to disturb us.
- David Whyte
from "Letting Go," Everything is Waiting for You
Humans aren't much good at living in the present, and though I know doing so would make me a happier, more content person, most of the time, I fail. Oddly, sometimes viewing an image in retrospect gives me more joy than I remember experiencing the moment it was taken.
My Christmas gift to myself this past year was to go through all our photos taken since Nettie was born and order prints for albums and framing. Outside of ordering a few prints for the grandparents here and there, we had not taken the time to print any for ourselves, and didn't even have any framed photos of Nettie around the house. I knew it was going to be a big task. There were over 5000 photos on our hard drive (which I recognize is not a huge number by today's standards), and I wasn't sure how long it would take me. I started in June, and really got serious in October.
Unfortunately, the process was slowed by the fact that we chose to use a popular photo processing service that did not end up functioning well with our sometimes spotty Wi-Fi connection. So often a naptime's worth of work (that's the common currency for stay-at-home parents, right?) was lost to a few seconds of internet interruption. Seriously. As if I need MORE reasons in my life to cry during naptime.
I stayed with it, though, weeding through months and months worth of images, and in early December I placed an order for over 1200 prints. I was so relieved. About a week later they arrived, and I excitedly opened the first envelope. Hmmm. I opened the next envelope. Mmmmm. And the next. Huh-uhh. The fourth and fifth and twelfth. Noooooo. I had chronologically uploaded the photos, and in the cart, they appeared that way, but in the printing process, presumably because our camera re-uses photo numbers each time we delete the old photos, the prints had been re-ordered, all the months mixed. Disappointed is not a big enough word, but then again, I realize this isn't an actual tragedy. So let's stick with disappointment and I'll keep trying to be big about this.
I had pictured myself leisurely spread out on the rug, watching Pride and Prejudice or Little Women, something familiar and comforting, as I brainlessly slipped photos into pockets and wrote cute little captions. Oh mama, bury that idea. Along with the dreams of 7:30 bedtime and "mommy and me" yoga sessions and "fun and easy" toddler art projects. So I shut the photos up in a cupboard and didn't look at them for a month.
I pulled them out a few days ago. Net was safely out of the house for a few hours so I dug in. Photos were spread across and stacked in piles covering the 8 by 10 rug, where I hunched over them with burning eyes, trying to make sense of things. I did not have the heart to start a movie. I just sat in the semi-dark, frantically sifting through the mess. Sadly, I discovered that along with being completely scrambled, I was missing many photos from the first six months, which must not have uploaded completely during one of my interrupted sessions. Back into the cupboard went the photos.
The fun part of this story is that I DID get some photos in frames, and put them up in our upstairs hall, where I've long wanted to create a family photo wall. I'm so pleased with it and Nettie really enjoys seeing and talking about all the pictures. And the photo saga has given me a lot of incentive to keep up with our images as we empty the camera so that I NEVER HAVE TO DO THIS AGAIN.
It also got me thinking about memory. I heard a while back that many of our memories, especially childhood memories, are invented through photos. As in, we don't actually have an independent memory of some events; instead, we invent a memory to correspond to a photograph. Usually we don't do this knowingly. It's just something our brains do. You can read more about this "fake memory" here. In the same vein, seeing photos reinforces our (actual) memories because it triggers the same neurons that were involved in creating the experience captured in the photo. So photos are so valuable in preserving memories.
The last two years have often felt very hard. But the photos we have say differently. They show me that nearly every day since Nettie was born, we have documented smiles and laughter, and countless times, pure joy. I can't change the past two years, but I can shape my memory of them. I can choose to revisit some of the best moments. I see them every morning as soon as I get up and before I go to bed at night, and they remind me to be grateful for what I've been given.
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