...Is some patience. A way to calm the angry voice.
Fuck yes. I can recognize and relate to that.
I had to turn Alanis off, though. I switched to Yanni. Way better for thinking, sorting your thoughts. Still reminds me of my adolescence. And reminds me that we need a piano in our lives. I would like to play again; the girls would love it. I need to make that happen.
Also: I want to paint. I bought oils and canvas over 2 years ago - I've not opened them yet. It's past time.
I need to leave social media. I recognize it plays an addictive role in my life and I use it the way an addict uses and it is sucking away my time, making me agitated and angry. The bad is outweighing the good.
I fucking suck at blogging anymore. I don't know what stories to tell. I don't know how to tell them anymore. I want to record our lives, to document our day to day, but fucking facebook and Instagram are so much better for that than a blog - so much easier and convenient when you feel like you never have any time. Of course, if i gave up the facebook and Instagram and twitter, i guess I'd find some time...
I'm going to be 38 next month. Heh. In a week and a half. 38. That sounds way older than I feel. I don't know what that means, I just know that I have an idea in my head of what a 38 year old woman is, and that's not me. Except...stable career, married, couple of kids, house, lease, dog, cat - okay. Maybe. I also want to say "my life is not at all what I imagined it would be at 38," but that's not true either. The truth is that, while I full expected I'd be making fuckpiles more money than I currently am, I never pictured many details in my adult life beyond "married" and "kids". I got that going for me. So true, I've not published a book or jumped out of an airplane or traveled the world - YET - I'm really not doing bad for 38. Not by my personal standards, at least.
The truth is, I'm happy as a pig in shit with my boring little life. I have this fabulous man who loves me and made the most beautiful children with me and he is just the best daddy in the whole world and my boss thinks I'm awesome and my parents are the absolute best and my brother, well, I love my brother, and we have this great dog and cat and our jobs pay the bills and leave a little left over and we've got a house with good bones in a safe neighborhood and our girls will go to a decent school...I mean, what else is there, at 38? At any age? I'm not being facetious, or sarcastic - I'm thankful. I went to the doctor earlier this week for my annual health-insurance-required physical, and as she was filling out the form, the doc commented, "Your numbers are great, I wish all of our patients had these numbers." They were all in normal range. WTF? Seriously, so far, 38 is killing it.
I need to make some changes, though, if I'm going to live my best life. I've been doing a great job of focusing on self-care, of being more social, of reaching out to my friends more. I need to do better at home, truth be told. I still come home and spend too much time on my phone when I should be playing with my girls. I excuse myself by saying I'm tired or that I need to take just a few minutes for myself, to clear my brain, but it always becomes more than a few minutes and I end up letting them sit in front of the TV so I can scroll through the nonsense. I do need a few minutes for myself, to clear my brain, but social media sure isn't the answer to that. I can find better, less distracting outlets to clear the day from my mind so I can be a good mom. I'm typing this here because if I put it in writing then I'm acknowledging it and maybe I'll be more inclined to actually do something about it. Maybe. Probably.
I need new hobbies, or to focus on the ones I've tried to cultivate in the past. I have a partially-knitted scarf for Jimi in a bag hanging on the inside of the coat closet door in the living room. I started it 3 years ago, unraveled it when I fucked up a few rows, then began again this past winter. I'm maybe 8 inches into a 36 inch (minimum) scarf. I'll finish it one of these days. "I do what I want," is what I say when Jimi asks if I'll ever finish his scarf.
I also have a lot of garden spots in my yard that have been pretty much ignored since summer of 2015 when I planted the garden in the spot that was sunny in January but not-so-sunny in June. I moved in a few raised beds the summer after that, but their yield was mediocre and i think i was in the full throes of my personal version of postpartum funk by then - it was hard to give too many shits about too much of anything - If it wasn't easy, fuck it, it wasn't happening. There's something to be said for living that way, but you can't live that way and be a gardener, probably.
Hiking. I want to hike so much - I wish I could get into the wood every day. But it rains. Or it gets cold. Or it rained for the last 4 days, so all the trails are muddy washouts. Or it's in an area where they say you shouldn't hike alone as a female because there have been "incidents". For a city with so many parks and so many trails, it sure it difficult for me to find the right alignment of the stars to be able to get out into/onto them. It's frustrating. But the girls are bigger and bigger - I started taking them last year, and we'll do more, so much more, of that that this year. G has already asked when we're camping again. "Soon, baby," is what I tell her. Camping and hiking go hand in hand. My girls will love the woods and the outside at least as much as I do - hopefully more.
Camping - we're going to camp so much this year. Jimi and I have both missed it since the girls came along. I know it's possible to camp with babies and small children - for other people, it totally is. It wasn't for us. I mean, we could've survived it, but it was never going to be easy. Maybe that's because my brain chemistry was all fucked up so everything was hard, but whatever the reason, we've only camped a handful of times in the last five years and now our children are big enough to enjoy the great outdoors so we're going to go get all up in it this summer. It's good for the mind, body, and soul. I need it. I miss it so much.
I wish we had The Property to go to - my grandparents owned 20ish acres in Adair County Kentucky, we dubbed it The Property. When they bought it, there was no road leading to it - it was just a large field and a couple of hills and hollers back off a county road. Papaw mowed it and laid gravel and rebuilt the barn, and although there was no running water or electricity at first, it was the perfect campground. My mom's brother and sisters and their spouses and granny and papaw and their brothers and sisters would all drive out, pitch tents in a circle we'd call tent city, and the men would build a huge bonfire and sit around with their guitars, pickin' and grinnin' as they'd call it - singing songs old and new. It was Papaw's dreamland, and eventually they built a house on the land and moved there full time. He got 3 years or so there before he died. He was getting the soft dirt from under the treeline to add to his flowerbeds in front of the porch. Heart attack. Granny lived another 6 years. They sold the place after she died. I still keep some little fantasy in the back of my heart that one day I'll have the cash to walk up to the front door of that house and make the owners an offer they can't refuse - to move and leave The Property to me. Not that it's even that great of a house or land - but it's my childhood.
Roller skating. Bike riding. Reading. Giving myself a facial. Listening to music. Writing. And that's before I even dive into the mile-long list of mom-related things I should be doing to better the lives of my children. Not that they're wanting for anything at all, but you know how mom-guilt is - i could always improve, right?
I've got half a mind to do something drastic - like cut off my social media access completely. At least Twitter and Facebook - they are the main source of my time-suck.
I'm struggling with this social-media thing, can you tell? Like, a lot. The internet is the best and worst of all the things. Like parenting. And cheesecake.
I'm not making any promises or declarations tonight. I will promise to come back here and hash it out with myself a bit more at a later date, because frankly, I'm sick of talking about it and it's getting late and i need to get to bed.
Sweet dreams.
