aspirations

by

Tuesday Randomosity: Sleep Award Edition

I have done it! I have done the thing I always think I should do, and never do, which is to GET UP when I awaken in the middle of the night and do something more useful than lying awake, counting how many hours of sleep I could get if I fell asleep right then.

Lest you think I am no longer susceptible to the patterns of the past: I woke up at 3:00 a.m., almost on the dot, and then lay in bed/read soothing blog posts until 4:00, and then lay in bed in the dark, telling myself I should just GET UP ALREADY and start the day until 4:37. That’s when I finally Did The Thing and put on my glasses and came downstairs. I deserve a Sleep Award. Although, now that I think of it, a Sleep Award seems more appropriate for sleeping restfully through an entire eight-plus hours, so perhaps I’ll have to relinquish my claim.

In lieu of an award, I am drinking tea, as I do when I wake up. My stomach is a little uncomfortable with this idea – it thinks it is Sleeping Time, rather than Accepting Sustenance Time. It is also a little concerned about what time we will want lunch. 

If only the grocery store were open now, and I could get that over with! Oh well. I will blog about random nothings instead! 

  • Carla has been having extra trouble getting to sleep lately. Firstly, I feel just terrible that she has apparently inherited my fraught relationship with sleep. She has had trouble falling asleep her entire eight-and-a-half years, and that doesn’t bode well for the remainder of her life, which I hope is very long. At least, I suppose, she seems to be able to maintain sleep once she gets there. While I occasionally have trouble getting to sleep, my main issue is staying asleep.
  • Well, I suppose my brain is smoothing over the many, many times that Carla has come into my room at 3:00 or 4:00, or that I have awakened to learn that she had been awake for hours already. BUT, it seems less frequent than her troubles drifting off. The power of posting about something of the internet will immediately ensure that she wakes up at 3:00 every morning for the next month.
  • The only thing that comes close to the frustration of not being able to fall asleep is the frustration of one’s CHILD not being able to fall asleep. Last night, my husband and I were watching the first episode of Sex Education and I kept hearing suspicious thumps coming from upstairs. It was quite windy outside, and my husband felt that the thumps might be exterior noises, while I was quite sure they were human. And then we had one of those mildly irritating conversations I imagine happen frequently in any longterm partnership, where he said, “Do you want to go check on her?” and I said “yes,” because I’d HEARD “Do you want ME to go check on her?” And then he had to correct my misperception and I had to glare at him briefly before I went to investigate the source of the thumps. 
  • Thump source: Carla. Instead of reading quietly or thinking about sheep or doing deep breathing – all of which we have discussed AT LENGTH in regards to their soporific powers – she felt the best way to induce sleep was to get out of bed and gather some toys and play with them, in the bed. On the bed. Preposition the bed. Exasperation! Incredulity! How did she think this was a good way to get to sleep? And yet she seemed very sincere that she thought it would help. Trying to turn down the scold volume on my lecture, I removed the toys and reminded her of all the other options that we have discussed for helping lull our brains to sleep. Count backwards from 100. Count backwards by 5s from 1000. Imagine yourself, in great detail, walking along the route to somewhere you love. List 50 things you are grateful for. Go through the alphabet and name an animal beginning with each letter. Do some deep breathing. Read a book. Recite a poem over and over in your head. When I went back to check on her about 20 minutes later, she was fast asleep. Sometimes it seems like the BEST way to induce sleep is to scold her about it. Which seems… not right. 
  • Carla mentioned to me that she cannot see pictures in her head, so the “walking along the route to somewhere you love” isn’t a viable option for her. I love that she’s so aware of what it’s like inside her head. I don’t see pictures in my head either, but I guess my internal travel writer is so descriptive that I can still make that option work. Or I can drum up a feeling of a place that is almost as vivid as an image. 
  • Also, it is unfair of me to expect that she remember these techniques when I am terrible at remembering them myself! Only when I am DESPERATE for sleep do I recall most of these strategies. The one that I use most often – mentally reciting Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” until I fall asleep – sometimes doesn’t even occur to me in the middle of a 3:00 am wakeup. Instead, I turn to my phone, which almost certainly makes it HARDER for me to sleep. 
  • There was supposed to be a secondly somewhere up there. I suppose you have forgotten about it as well. But on the off chance you were waiting on tenterhooks – “You did the ‘firstly,’ what’s the ‘secondly’? WHAT’S THE SECONDLY?” – I cannot remember. 
  • I have finished my first book of poetry for the year. One of my 2022 aspirations is to read a poem every morning, and I have been keeping up with that so far. However, I may not have chosen the best book to start out the year. I selected a book at random and came up with The Seven Ages by Louise Gluck. She has an umlaut over the u in her surname; I don’t how to do that on my computer. I adore Louise’s poetry. (This makes it sound as though we are on a first-name basis, which we are not. I did meet her once, though. We went out to lunch and she is as fascinating as one hopes a famous poet would be.) But The Seven Ages is all about her contemplating her own death. That’s all fine and good, and it resonates, and I appreciate reading her thoughts from the perspective of being 50ish because I am nearing that age. But it was also a little depressing. Perhaps I will try a Billy Collins book next; I own two of his collections, but I don’t think I’ve ever read the poems; my impression is that they are lighter and sometimes attempt to be humorous.
  • One of the Gluck poems has really stuck with me. It’s called “The Sensual World,” which, in my opinion, mis-implies what the poem is about or how to read it. But poems are very personal, so you do you, boo. Anyway, the poem is about how the world will grip you in startling and unpredictable and inescapable ways. There is this moment of exquisite beauty that the narrator recounts, in the kitchen of her grandmother. A tiny moment: a glass of juice; its taste; the way the light refracts through it. But it leads the narrator to offer an urgent warning about the trap that life has set for you: “you will never let go, you will never be satiated. / You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger. / Your body will age, you will continue to need. / You will want the earth, then more of the earth – / Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond. / It is encompassing, it will not minister. / Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you, / it will not keep you alive.” It makes my heart pound, it resonates so deeply. I am so familiar with those moments – of shocking beauty that flares suddenly out of the mundane, of intense love provoked by the smallest, most inconsequential thing (a kitten at the pet store, butting its head against your hand; a child seeing you in distress and trying to soothe you with the very techniques you use to soothe the child; an unexpected kindness from a stranger; a moment of private humor with a spouse; a child, asleep, with hands folded beneath the chin as though posed). And I know the exact feeling of wanting to clutch those things with both hands even as I know – we all know – they are not ours to keep. It is not our lot to hold them forever, but only for the short time we have on this plane of existence. You will never let go. It will not keep you alive.
  • Yesterday, I experienced one of those moments of satisfaction/guilt that seem to be a hallmark of parenting. Carla was really anxious about returning to school (who knows why?!?! Is it the constant barrage of contradictory information, such as “Covid isn’t a big deal since you’re vaccinated; don’t worry too much, it probably won’t affect you too much if you get it” but also “make SURE you wear your mask and don’t breathe on anyone and for Todd’s sake, please don’t let anyone breathe on you!” Is it the fact that she hasn’t been in school for a month? Is it the fact that “school” could mean home/not home at any given time?) so I had to bribe her to even get her out the door yesterday morning. The bribe is not the satisfaction/guilt part, although perhaps it should be; it worked. I bribed her with a chocolate chip cookie for dessert (we are reverting to a “desserts on weekends” kind of schedule) AND with “something fun.” (She claims she never ever gets to do what SHE wants, all she does is go to SCHOOL.) I told her she could pick anything non-screen related, and she picked playing Barbies together. Sigh. I haaaaaaaate pretend play. It is the worst. But I agreed, and after school we played Barbies for 30 minutes exactly. Which is nothing. A tiny amount of my day. Then, when we were doing our bedtime mindfulness routine, and we got to the part about “what were you grateful for today?”, Carla said, “I was grateful that I got to play Barbies with Mommy.” No hesistation. Awwww. What a worthwhile way to spend our time together! But also: guilt, because I HATE playing Barbies. And yet it is such a simple way to make my beloved child so happy! Ugh ugh ugh. Well, I am not promising anything, but I will TRY to do more Barbies with Carla. 
  • A thing it turns out I DO enjoy is playing Sleeping Queens. Do you have this game? I ordered it on a “my child is not doing enough math” whim last weekend and it is QUITE fun. There’s a video on the product page that describes how to play; it seems much more complicated than it is. And it’s a much faster-paced game than I anticipated. The basic object is that you want to get as many queens as possible. To get the queens, or to keep your opponent from getting queens, or to prevent your opponent from getting your queens, you need special cards. Your only chance to get the special cards is to discard a card from your hand. And – here’s the math element – you can draw more cards if you have an equation. So if you have cards in the values of 1, 5, and 7, you can only discard one of them and pick up one new card. But if you have 2, 5, and 7, you can make an equation and discard all three; then you can draw three cards. If you have/know a child in the young elementary age group, I highly recommend it. Because the number cards only go up to ten, the math is quite easy for Carla (although there’s no harm in keeping up with basic addition and subtraction), but it would be ideal for someone who is just learning to add/subtract. We also do multiplication, when it’s possible. I really wish there were an expansion pack with higher-value numbers. Anyway, I find it to be a really fun game and we have already played at least a dozen times. BONUS: This is a game that you can easily play with two people, which means that we don’t have to wait for Daddy to be home. 
  • I made my first foray into baked oatmeal. I am a little reluctant to post about it, because I didn’t love it. And I WANT to love it. It was both better than I thought it would be and worse than I hoped. But I think I chose the wrong (for me) recipe. It called for coconut oil, which – to me (though not to my husband) – ending up being the predominant flavor. I wanted an APPLE flavor. Also, I don’t think I put in enough nuts. The nuts were my favorite part. I need to do more experimentation before I can make a firm decision about not liking it. I think I will try this recipe next. 
  • I had a mildly negative interaction the other day that is still gnawing at me. It’s one of those things where the situation felt very fraught, almost purely because I am overly concerned with what people think of me. And the rest of it was fraught because it involved Covid, and I am caught in a wildly swinging internal pendulum of “you can’t control it and you need to find some way to live with it without forcing your child to be a miserable hermit” and “it is perfectly reasonable to continue to take precautions for the sake of those who aren’t protected/in order to keep Carla in school ” and “if you allow Carla to go to school, then how is this situation different” and “it is okay to have boundaries and limits even if they seem arbitrary; everything seems arbitrary right now” and “you and Carla are both vaccinated, you really can relax a little sheesh” and “arrrrrggghhhhhh.” I fervently wish I were the type of person who a) knows the exact right thing to do in any given situation and b) doesn’t care what other people think of me. I am neither of those people though, I am me. And as much as I try to be breezy, breeziness is not in my nature. And I DO care what people think, and I hate that about myself but I do.
  • Totally related to the above point: It is not fair to present a situation in one way, with clear parameters, and then to change the parameters in the moment. It is especially not okay to then pressure people into accepting the new parameters. 
  • Gah.
  • We have a new addition to our Dinner Plan this week. My husband requested Taco Tuesday. I think you know that I will never turn down a request for tacos. This is the beauty of planning out fewer meals than one intends to eat. You can just slide tacos right into the mix, no biggie. It is especially helps when you haven’t yet made it to the grocery store.
  • That reminds me that I have my check-up this morning. It is a totally normal check-up, so it should be fine. But it’s with a new doctor, in a new office, in a new location. So I am a little anxious about all of those things. Will I find the office okay? Will I get there on time? Will I like the doctor? Also, will I meet her for the first time while naked? That’s never fun. And then I have to do it all over again in a couple of weeks, because my PCP is retiring and I had to find a new one. (Hopefully I won’t have to meet her naked, though.)

Well, that’s it. I am already painfully aware that today is going to be a grind to get through; my 3:00 a.m. alertness has eroded into fatigue. But blogging is a much better way to spend the early hours of the morning than tossing and turning next to my blissfully sleeping husband, waiting futilely for sleep to bless me with its presence. 

by

Some Gentle Aspirations for 2022

Time for some non-resolutions! As per tradition, I am setting some gentle aspirations, rather than goals. These are simply a testament to what seems important now, and when I review them at the end of the year, they will help me better understand my priorities over time. I refuse to feel bad about failing to accomplish any of them, except for the writing-related ones, which I already feel bad about not achieving years ago. 

In addition to the aspirations I may or may not complete, I would also like to state that I am making some resolutions that I am NEARLY CERTAIN of completing, either because I have already completed them prior to this writing, or because I am on the precipice of completing them in mere days. That is the power of posting one’s goals on the internet. I can decide which goals to post, and maybe I have already achieved them, and that is my business and I will be delighted to count them as complete. It is the equivalent of writing a to-do list where the first item is “wake up” and the second item is “write to-do list.” It feels good to cross things off the list and momentum is important! For instance, I encourage you to put “put away holiday décor” on your own list of resolutions, even if you stowed the last ornament days ago. Then you are already ahead of the game!

For sake of honesty, however, I will alert you to any of these goals that are already half complete. Because I don’t want to cheat anyone, not you, certainly, and not my future self, who will be super annoyed that I have halved her feeling of accomplishment at year’s end but who will also appreciate my sense of ethics. 

Personal

Aspiration: Read 50 books. In 2021, I read 74 books. That doesn’t seem replicable, but I think 50 is an achievable goal. 

Aspiration: Work out 5 days a week. This is an oldie but a goodie. I need to get back into regular exercise, and I know it can be done. 

Aspiration: Read a poem every day. I am semi-stealing this aspiration from Nicole, who read Rumi every day last year. Wow. That is A Feat. But it inspired me. However, I am not going to limit myself to Rumi, or to a single poet. I have an entire bookcase FULL of poetry and yet I rarely read poems! This must stop. Poetry is an essential part of life, and I can so easily grab a random book off my shelves each evening, and flip to a random poem each morning rather than reaching for my phone. 

Aspiration: Buy some new shirts that make me feel cute and not like a slob. Listen, you know I am All For stay-at-home clothes. But I have discovered over the past somethingish months that I would like to feel cute in clothes when I inevitably am forced to leave the house, and I do not feel cute in clothing that doesn’t fit me. This is one of those goals that I may have almost achieved even as I write this: I ordered two shirts from Nordstrom with a Christmas gift card. But I am cautious. The new shirts could look… not good. So I may still have this feat ahead of me. 

Aspiration: Come up with a workable weekly schedule. This stems from a middle-of-the-night attempt to come up with a schedule for myself, allowing for maximum writing and revising time, but also slotting in time for working out, eating, and blog stuff. Which led me to determine that there aren’t enough hours in the day and I need to “wake up at 5:00 and go to bed at 10:00 every day,” when I don’t know if that’s doable. Okay. I’m pretty sure it’s not. What I need to do instead is to come up with a few different versions of a schedule, try it out, and then figure out what combination of timings and tasks works for me. 

Aspiration: Try baked oatmeal. This is a late addition, because I somehow forgot about how badly I want to try baked oatmeal after our breakfast convo the other day (she says, as though it wasn’t in early November). For some reason, it intimidates me. Mainly because I really really don’t like oatmeal. But this sounds more like a cookie than like hot mush, and it gets such high praise, and I am going to try it. 

Reach Aspiration: Leave my phone upstairs unless I leave the house. This is laughable to even attempt, isn’t it. And yet I have done this, multiple times, and feel such a sense of freedom from the pull of email and social media when I do. If I could do this on a daily basis, just think of all the work I could get done! 

Family

Aspiration: Eat more vegetables. If you think this aspiration seems as though it should belong to the Personal category, you would be correct. But I am the meal planner and dinner maker in this house, so I have a certain amount of vegetable wielding power around here. We could all do with more veg on our plates. 

Aspiration: Do more non-screen things together. Listen, we have a good amount of Family Togetherness around here, which is a wonderful blessing. But a lot of our time together involves a PlayStation or a TV. We can do better than that. If we ever get snow, we will go skiing and sledding. Once the weather warms up and dries out, we can go biking. When the weather, as is typical, absolutely sucks, we can play the wide variety of board games we own. If we don’t want to play the ones we own, we can buy more of the murder mystery games we enjoy. This is doable. 

Aspiration: Do less “forcing” of my will on the family. This is semi-stolen from/inspired by Swistle. (Maybe the connection is only in my head, because her resolution is very different from mine.) I have noticed that a lot of things don’t happen unless I nag and badger and harp. That’s not fun for anyone, INCLUDING ME. For instance, we were supposed to make sticky toffee pudding for New Year’s Eve dinner. Dessert. You know what I mean. But even though I washed the potatoes and broccoli well in advance of dinnertime, no movement was made by anybody else to prepare anything for the dessert. Then my husband decided at a very late moment – like 4:00 or 5:00 pm – that he wanted to work out. Which is great! Exercise! I am fine with that! But then when he was done, it was much too late to do anything, including make the fancy dinner we had planned, and especially making sticky toffee pudding. We did end up making the steak and potatoes and broccoli, which were delicious, but we didn’t make the pudding. And we didn’t make it yesterday, either, even though we were Going To Make It, because once again he got caught up playing video games with Carla and then at 5:00 pm wanted to work out and lost track of the time. This is fine! It’s prioritization at work! It is not enough of a priority for him to note the time and stop playing video games. It is not enough of a priority for me to do all the work of making sticky toffee pudding by myself. So it didn’t happen. It could have happened, if I had called down to him that we needed to get started if we wanted to have sticky toffee pudding for dinner. But the thing is, it is not my job to be Ultimate Time Monitor. It just isn’t. So I wrote a blog post and drank a cocktail while he worked out, and we did not make sticky toffee pudding, and maybe we won’t do it today either, who knows? There are three of us in this family, and it is not my sole responsibility to keep everything on track. That’s not fair, and it’s not fun, and no one likes the Time Badger, least of all the Time Badger herself. Some things are going to fall by the wayside. And sometimes that will cause some pain. And maybe that pain will inspire a change in behavior, though I am not optimistic. 

Aspiration: Go on some dates with my husband. We went on three (outdoor, rainy) dates in 2021. We now have a good babysitter to call on, should we need her, and one of these days we may decide to brave a restaurant. But even if all our dates take place in the summer, outside, that is fine! I just want to spend some time ALONE with my husband, AWAY from our house.

Reach Aspiration: Have friends over for dinner. We have been to two friends’ homes this past year, and if nothing else, etiquette requires that we return the favor. But also I would like to entertain again. A little bit. Maybe.

Reach Aspiration: Stop treating Carla’s needs as if they are mine.  Brought to you by Girl Scout Cookie Selling Season, which is my own personal hell and yet which is somehow My Thing instead of my husband’s. But that’s only one example of many. This is a two-fold aspiration. First, Carla is eight-and-a-half and can do with more responsibility. Second, just because I am The Mom doesn’t mean that I am automatically responsible for Carla’s laundry in addition to my own, for Carla’s meals in addition to my own, for Carla’s whatever-whatever. We are so fortunate to have two parents in this household, and I should allow/enable the other parent to do just as much as I do. Sure, some things will always fall to me because of my husband’s job (making and attending appointments, for instance). I think, for awhile, this will involve things like answering questions about “what does Carla normally eat with her chicken nuggets?” but perhaps that will be a worthwhile endeavor. See also the related issue of Putting Away Rags and Hand Towels Is Not My Sole Responsibility. 

Work/Finance

Aspiration: Revise my manuscript and start querying agents. Everything I read says that the agent-seeking stage is soul destroying. I am going to do it anyway. Check back at year’s end to see if I have fragments of soul remaining.

Aspiration: Finish my second manuscript. This second manuscript is a thriller, and I think it will be quicker and simpler than the first one. I just need to figure out the ending and WRITE IT. That is in the wrong order. I need to WRITE IT and figure out the ending.

Aspiration: Get a financial advisor. This is another one of those goals that I have already all but completed! My husband and I met with a financial advisor, and he is supposedly looking over our haphazard finances at the moment, and all we need to do is sign an agreement and let him HELP US make wise financial decisions! Side note: Carla asked us if he was a man. Her follow-up question was whether all financial advisors are men. Her follow-up to that was whether we knew any of these supposedly-existing women financial advisors. This line of questioning kind of made me wish that I had found a woman financial advisor. But it was hard enough to find THIS GUY and get up the nerve to meet with him, so I am moving forward as is.

Reach Aspiration: Take a writing class. I want to take a class about writing short stories (I am not good at writing things that are short) (you: YES WE ARE AWARE) or maybe about writing a personal essay. This terrifies me. 

Home/Property

Aspiration: Install a gallery wall in the living room. This one is BACK ON THE LIST, baby! You have kindly supported me and offered me reasonable suggestions for accomplishing this goal by myself many times, and still I have balked. You must first understand that I am incapable of making straight lines. “But use a ruler,” you say. No, even with a ruler, my lines somehow get distracted and wander off. So my husband MUST be involved in this project, because he is the yin to my yang, the meticulous to my slapdash. You must second understand that my husband was originally GUNG HO with this project, many years ago when it first appeared on my list of totally achievable desires. And that he then decided, at some point, unbeknownst to me, that it was MY project, and I should be in charge. That’s where things broke down. Because while I am willing to say “we should have a gallery wall in the living room,” I am unwilling to be the sole person dictating which items appear on said wall, which is co-owned and co-utilized and co-looked-at by other people in our family. And also, even if I could just go balls to the wall (unintentional pun) (but disturbing/perplexing imagery when I call out said pun and visualize it) (why is “balls to the wall” even a phrase? I have never thought deeply about it before and never want to do so again) full steam ahead and pick out a bunch of artwork, I simply cannot install it in a way that would look purposeful and not like a feeble earthquake had come through and jostled everything on the walls. My husband refused to care about the project. I refused to move forward. The project died. This is very long. This past fall, my husband and daughter and I went on a road trip, and found a little gallery that had lots of fun things, including a painting by a local artist of our state bird. We wanted very badly to buy the painting, but I said that I couldn’t in good conscience purchase it, knowing that I wanted it to be on the gallery wall, and knowing also that the gallery wall would not happen. This turned out to be a carrot, friends! A carrot! My husband said something like, “Well, if I promise to help you realize your gallery wall dreams, can we get the painting?” Marital compromise at work! And I agreed and we bought the painting and it has remained in its paper wrapping since August. But now, NOW, we are on the threshold of a gallery wall! Supposedly! Let’s refrain from holding our breaths. 

Aspiration: Hire someone to redo our ceiling and paint our trim. I am including this as one aspiration because a friend suggested a person who supposedly does both. 

Aspiration: Hire someone to fix our fridge. Our fridge leaks. It makes constant musical noises at us to alert us that Something Is Wrong. It has done this for… years, now. I have been afraid to have someone look at it because I fear that the only answer is to buy a new fridge. But it’s time. It’s time. 

Aspiration: Clean our basement and finalize a craft space for Carla. This is another aspiration that is all but complete. We spent the last week of December doing a DRASTIC CULL of our basement, and it looks as fabulous as a basement storage area can look. We also set up the craft-space items Carla received from Santa, and are in the process of finalizing it all. There is still much to be done (I need to cull THREE boxes of Precious Baby Items to ONE, for instance) (plus we need to buy a rug to go underneath the craft area), but it is well on the way. 

Reach Aspiration: PAINT THE BASEBOARDS MY GOD IT HAS BEEN 11 YEARS. Why is this a reach aspiration, you wonder? Well. My baseboards have been dark forest green for eleven years, that’s why. 

I think that’s PLENTY for this year, Internet. Wish me luck!