Resolutions?

Did you make New Year’s resolutions this year?  Are you one of the scoffers who maintains that no one keeps resolutions anyway so it’s a silly practice – or do you cave into the romanticism of the whole thing and do it anyway?

Most of my family belongs to the scoff party, and while I agree that the concept of resolutions shouldn’t be limited to a couple of days at the beginning of each new set of 365, there’s something tantalizing about the year ahead.  Like a blank diary, all crackly-stiff leather, with cool, slippery pages begging to be scribbled over with ink.  Or like a map with an idle compass in the center – you just have to choose where you want to go.

So I’m going to fall in with the masses this year.  While these aren’t “new” resolutions, this will be the first time I’ve inked them onto paper.  (<< I actually wrote this in the back of my planner, so I did really use ink!)  And because I’ve become a compulsive organizer, I’ve categorized my resolutions this year.  Does anyone else do that????

Practical Plans (ie: these had better get done or else)

-- get better about time management and organization.  I cannot stand another year of racing out the door late to work, while the front door bangs shut on the sea of chaos inside.  I’ve discovered from keeping other people’s homes clean that I’m not a messy person – I’m a clean person who doesn’t know how to stop making messes.  A lot of this has to do with time and burnout too – there’s not a ton of incentive to power through cleaning late at night after I’ve spent the whole day doing it somewhere else.  There isn't much time either.  And I have a toddler.  Clearly, I need some concrete strategies here.

-- find more patience.  Do you have some I could borrow while Hunter is in the throes of toddlerhood??  When H was born I swore I would never yell at him or discipline him when I was angry.  This year I failed on both counts.  Somehow I need to learn to be as patient at home as I am at work – even when we’re late or he won’t sleep or he pours his food over his head right as we’re about to leave for work or he’s screaming on the floor and I don’t know whether he’s in pain or throwing a tantrum.  I am meeting with two family counselors to try and strategize ways to maintain parenting calm even under extreme stress.  This is my second-most important resolution for 2013.

-- figure out what I am doing for work/school, and decide whether or not I want to graduate 6 months early or go a bit slower and start working part-time as a CNA.

-- learn to like myself.  Okay, that one probably belongs more in the Impossible Dreams category.  Or perhaps When Pigs Can Fly.  Seriously, though, while I suspect liking myself is a looooonnnngggg way off, I would at least like to negotiate a truce with myself.  A bit of acceptance would be a place to start.  And no more of the I’m-so-stupid-I-hate-myself-I-hate-myself mantras.

-- make God the solid base of my life again.  I hate being a stormy-weather Christian.  I want to teach Hunter about being a child of God, and to do that, I need to be one first.  (This is the most important resolution!)

And then I have the I Would Love To category…

-- run five miles without walk breaks.  Survive.  Do it again.

-- write again.  Fiction.  I want my head filled with characters again.  I feel them at the edges of my mind, pale-ghost faces and WHAT”S THAT WORD fingers tap-tapping at the windows of my imagination.  Even if it’s only one short story, I want to hear that gorgegous cacophony of story-on-the-brew in my brain.

-- make a new friend.  An honest-to-goodness live-in-my-town, go for coffee, workout-partner friend.  Randomly: why on earth don’t they make “friend-ing” websites?  Forget about a date - all I want is a friend!

--  have one day, even just a few hours, where I am just me.  Not mom or student or employee or daughter or any other label.  Just me.  I’m envisioning either a gallop across a summer-thick meadow with the strong-tea smell of horse sweat in my nose, or perched at the top of a "peak" of the Porcupine Mountains, just me on a rock under a clear blue sky.

That's where I'd like to take my year...what about you?  If you made resolutions, share in the comments, please?  If you blogged about them, even better - share the link!

Thankful

written, obviously, on the last night of November...

On this, the last day of November, I go to bed with a heart satiated with thankfulness.  Not such a very un-ordinary occurrence on the last day of the month of Thanksgiving, eh?

Well, for me it is.  I’ve spent November in a roiling storm cloud of discontent.  Even on the days I didn’t feel like a hurricane bottled up into a jar, a sense of unease, an absence of peace stuck to the windows like dirty smog.

I totally flunked my NaNo.  Not because I didn’t try hard enough.  Because I didn’t have enough time.  I burned the candle at both ends and then squeezed the wax drippings into a bowl, but it wasn’t enough.  On the nights I stayed up late somehow I never got past the pile of dishes or the mountain of paperwork or the stack of schoolwork or the gargantuan heap of laundry dripping underwear onto my head.  And the mornings I got up before dawn had been invented, I somehow couldn’t seem to get past the avalanche of emails needing to be answered and doctors’ appointments needing to be scheduled and phone consultations with college and my lawyer and Hunter’s insurance and the To Do list which stretched from the top of the freezer to the bottom of the fridge.

It’s unpleasant living life at the pace of an cheetah-chased impala running for life.  Actually, it’s more like someone sucked out my soul and said I could have it back in three years.  I miss time so much.  I miss time enough to cook healthy food for us and have time to sit down at the table together and enjoy it.  I miss time enough to be spontaneous with Hunter whenever he wants.  I miss that extra five minutes that I already borrowed from the next half-hour when he wants to practice making kissy faces in the morning and I need to get out that door to work we’re late late late.  I hate the endless exhaustion and the nights when Hunter and I mutually cry ourselves to sleep because I just cannot summon the extra energy and patience to get up and rock him again.

I miss time to read.  I miss fingering through books.  I miss having the time to read friends’ stories and novels. 

But most of all (after the time I miss with Hunter) I miss the time I used to spend crafting, writing, turning ordinary bits of nothingness into something brand new.

And right now, I don’t have the time.  Life will continue at this breakneck super-stress scrabble-to-stay-alive pace for the next three years till I graduate school.  And after that…?

Anyway.  So last week I went down to a meeting of my neighbors (all women in similar circumstances) with this roil of discontent in my stomach.  The topic of Christmas came up, and one woman shared that she dreaded the holiday because she didn’t have money for gifts for her kids.  She didn’t even have money for bills in December.  Another had just started working but wasn’t sure if they were going to keep her on because she continually kept having to leave work to care for her toddler because she was unable to find safe childcare for her upside-down work schedule.  Across the street, the lights of the homeless shelter blinked a reminder of how many people wouldn’t even have a roof over their heads for Christmas.  And in my pocket, my phone beeped: an update from a good mom friend whose two year old son is in the early stages of bone marrow failure and is going to have to undergo a terrifying, risky transplant before a year is out.  Right below that update was another from my Down syndrome moms’ group: another family had just said their final goodbye to their six-year-old daughter who wasn’t going to make it through surgery.

I sucked in a deep, deep breath and that ornery storm inside me just shriveled up and went away.

Because I have so much to be thankful for.  I have a steady job which, while it may not pay very well, is fulfilling, rewarding, and allows me to spend all day with Hunter.  I rarely have to worry about childcare.  I have decent health.  I have a son who is amazing and wonderful and lights up my life every day and even though I may not always be able to spend quality time with him I have the ability to spend so much more time than any other single mom I know.  And while he has plenty of health problems, he is alive and doesn’t have leukemia or a heart defect that can’t be repaired or any of the dozens of tragedies that could have come along with his special genetic makeup.  We have a warm, clean, comfortable place to live, fresh, healthy food in our fridge, money to pay our bills, and a car that (in between periodic temper tantrums) starts up day after day.  I’m in school and moving steadily forward to a much, much better future.  We see God working in our lives every single day.

Our life is hard.  At least one point every day I have to squeeze my eyes shut, breathe deeper than I ever have before, and pray for just that last bit of patience or energy or resourcefulness to not give up. 

But our life is also overflowing with blessings.  And in the face of so much tragedy and hardship and sadness swirling around us, my complaints seem so very trivial. 

So, on this last night in November, I am thankful.  I am so, so thankful, so grateful, and so blessed.

Enter November!

It’s November!  I was excited to see the comments from Katherine and Kayla last time about their NaNo thoughts.  Kayla, how is it going for you????  Katherine, did you decide to do something this year?

For me, it’s only 3 days into my version of NaNo and I already bombed the first two.  :(  Both days I meant to write, had ideas to write, and even scribbled some sketchy wayward scraps onto paper, but Life interfered and nothing actually got done, other than teary diary writing at one AM this morning.  Big Gusty Sigh.

So I decided to revamp my NaNo goal this year.  Instead of writing every day, I will do something crafty or creative every day.  It might be scratching words on paper, or it might be a half-hour of twisting myself into a pretzel to photograph sunbeams through broken glass in the sidewalk crack.  Or it could be creating new clothes from the mountain of plus-size sweaters and shirts in my closet.  Or making Christmas gifts.  Or experimenting with papercrafting.  The only thing which doesn’t count is pinning on Instagram.  :D

And no, changing my goal is absolutely not cheating, because NaNo is about personal goals.  And while I want to wear the ink-spattered cloak of words again, to feel the buzz of characters and stories inside my brain, I also want to see jewels where others see broken glass, and I want to capture it on film so they can see the diamonds too.  And every other crafty thing.  I think NaNo for me this year is about taking hammer and chisel to the dingy brick wall which has held my creativity captive for the past two years.  That sounds melodramatic but in reality that is just how it feels.  I never realized how essential the act of creation was to the well-being of my soul until that part of me shriveled up in Florida.  And now that I’m out of that situation my soul is like a toddler just beginning to walk – it needs to create.  Now.  Now.  NOW!

Yes, I probably am certifiable. 

Anyway.  With my schedule of insanity writing and photography and crafting consistently make it to the cramped margins of my to-do list, which means they stay to-do and never get done.  And…that’s why I’m changing my goal to make them priorities instead of luxuries.  Unorthodox, but my creative soul is very excited.

Did I mention I love November?!

CLEP In Relation To NaNo

know are stocking their cupboards with coffee, chocolate, and new pencils in preparation for NaNo (known to non-writers as November).  For those non-writers, NaNo is the time of year where writers—always a bit on the quirky side—go completely over the edge and attempt to write 50,000 words or a complete novel (whichever is longer) in thirty days.  Yes, I used to do this.  Yes, I won twice, and the last year, wrote over 100,000 words.  Then came Florida, a baby, Down syndrome, and Bad Stuff, and single mommyhood, and school and work…yeah.

Hard to believe that I wrote in one month more than I’ve written for the last three years.

Anyway, this time of year is a bit wistful now.  I still open all the NaNo updates which spatter my inbox, and I lurk the forums late at night when Hunter won’t sleep, and I watch everyone else get excited about words and writing and 30 days of crazy comradeship and I miss those days…

But I didn’t intend this post to be an melancholy reflection on the past, but a hopeful prediction for the future, and a giggle for today.  For the future, I’ve decided this year that I will do NaNo.  No, I’m not going to try to write a novel.  I’m not even going to set a word count goal.  What I am going to do is resolve to write something every.single.day for thirty days.  No excuses.  It doesn’t have to be fiction.  Most of it won’t be, I expect.  But it has to be creative writing of some sort, and it has to be every day.  And now I’ve committed it to blogosphere and I would love to be nagged at for the duration of the MonthOfCrazy.

And for the giggle…today I took my College Composition CLEP exam.  I was horribly underprepared due to the insanity that has been October, and I didn’t realize until last week that I had to write two essays, with only 30 minutes for each.  I had only one day to practice, and only time for two essays. 

The first one was a disaster.  I barely finished it in the time restraint, and it was full of grammar and spelling errors and confusing verbage of all sorts. I knew it wouldn’t even pass.

I sat down and had a quiet panic attack.  Then suddenly the 30 rang a bell.  This is just like NaNo!  As a quick insert here—everyone does NaNo in a different way, but my preferred method is to write out a very detailed outline, and then literally flesh out the outline.  So, that’s literally what I did today.  I NaNo-ed my way through my two essays.  And although I made two stupid mistakes in structure (forgot to indent the first one and forgot APA citing format on the second) I think overall the essays turned out very well. Perhaps it’s just the 4 hours of sleep I’m running on, but I think it’s absolutely hilarious and not a little bit plain and simple awesome that I NaNo-ed a test.

So in conclusion to this very jumbled post…to all those of you who are putting the finishing touches on your NaNo preparation, GO GET THOSE WORDS!  And please comment and let me know what your November plans are!

Words, Words, Words

The other day I happened to scroll through my history of online activity and realized that all, ALL of it for the last six months was baby-related. Including this blog, which has been nothing but baby gurgles since Hunter's advent! That might possibly have something to do with the fact that since the sixth of July, my life has been nothing but baby gurgle. Baby gurgle and flour-soft baby skin and downy dollops of duck-fuzz hair and liquid blue eyes and wiggly monkey toes and lots and lots of dirty diapers.

Babies are a lot of work!

Sorry to all you moms who just snorted your coffee all over the place, but yes, that actually was a surprise to me. I did not expect the intense level of total involvement a baby needs! Granted, Hunter has a fairly high-maintenence personality, is easily bored and prefers lots of face-to-face interaction (he takes after his daddy in more than looks), plus special needs subtracts from your available time, but still! Of course, it doesn't help that I have the cutest baby in the world and I very much enjoy bragging about him.

Anyway, hope everyone likes constant baby updates.

(insert flurry of baby pics)

The only non-baby thing in my life at the moment is NaNoWriMo – which YES I was insane enough to attempt. I can see right now this ain't gonna be a 100K year. Won't be 50K either. Heck, I probably won't type my way to 25K. I knew that before I rattled out the first word, though. And it's not the point. This year NaNo is about me starting to write again.

Writing is a lot of work!

Don't be snorty this time. Writing didn't used to be work. 2009 I happily typed out 100K + and had a ball the entire time. Somewhere in the insanity of 2010 my deep, delicious resevoir of words which I took for granted dried up. Words don't wash through my mind like the waves of Lake Superior anymore. Now they hide out behind palm trees scattered in a very dry desert. I stalk them endlessly, frustrated and tired before I catch a half dozen. I found my pair of Vision Decoders the other day, which are a magic invisible pair of spectacles which, while worn, allow the wearer to constantly process what they see into words. I'm so excited at wearing them again! When you subconsciously convert life into words, everything is so much MORE – because you have to think about what's happening. You have to become conscious of the temperature of the wind, of the smells it carries, of the feel of it when it hits you. You have to taste all the flavors in the bite of marinated chicken, biting cautiously to determine texture and consistency. You have to really look at a sunset, discovering all the colors of the rainbow in the strip of last light over the ocean.

Even though the words rarely make it to paper (or the computer screen, for that matter) they're back in my life.