M.I.A.

I have been ignoring ye olde blog as of late. Right now I have two small, but loud, reasons why who happen to be climbing on my lap. So! How about a couple of pictures.

Faith, helping with muffins, in the blue morning light.



James, up close and personal.



I shall write again soon and tell of the new (!) house which is far from finished, or my new job, or how I am eating healthy again and always hungry, or some other facet of my fascinating life. Ah, how I love the sarcasm.

Adjusting

Jeff’s work schedule is somewhat strange and since the kids and I usually have no sort of routine of our own we often fall into Jeff’s on/off shifts and I have to stop and think about what day it is, when we should be sleeping, and other things that are completely not normal.

This week he has started working nights and I now have TWO part time jobs so I’m sure that the next few weeks will be a confusing blur of wake/sleep home/away questioning who has the children sort of mess that I can only hope will go smoothly.

We should be closing on the house any day now and the appraisal came back $90,000 OVER what we are getting it for, so to say that I am thrilled is an extreme understatement. Faith tells me that she wants to paint her room black, which makes me think I have a mini-goth in my midst. She also tells me that she doesn’t know how to play all by herself, she doesn’t know how to go potty all by herself, she doesn’t know how to sleep, eat, etc. all by herself, making me be her constant companion all day. When I get tough (ha!) and tell her she has to do whatever it is by herself she looks at me with big, round, blue eyes and tells me that it will make her sad. Which makes ME sad that she’s sad (and also a little ashamed that I’m constantly being guilted by a three year old), but also frustrated that I can’t have all the time in the world to just sit and play with her.

There is simply too much to do these days, but it’s a glorious sort of busy. It’s wonderful to have a life that calls for hair that is styled and makeup applied, instead of too-long hair and paper thin t-shirts with faded script. It’s nice to have somewhere that I have to be, a place I have to leave home behind for, if just for a few short hours. It’s nice to just be Jenny again for a little while, and not constantly “mommy”. Even writing that, though, makes me wonder if I’ll ever be able to separate the two, if I’ll be able to be gone without thinking constantly about the kids and how they are doing, what they are doing.

Here I go. Hooray and ouch at the same time.

What's Going On

Where have I been?

Playing Xbox, lego man, obsessively.

Getting back in shape, painfully.

On a new sleep schedule, one that included 1:00 a.m. nachos (see above).

Going on interviews.

Working from home, with children in the background. This is impossible, by the way.

Making phone calls to lenders and realtors while managing to remain in the dark.

Staying close to family, listening.

Playing barbies, ponies, and pets.

Nursing bruises and booboos.

Reading every chance I can.

Discussing heavy metal.

Laundry.

Dancing in my living room, with the kids, spinning, dipping, and twirling, joyfully.

I feel wonderfully refreshed, somehow washed clean of the melancholy that I’ve been dipped in. I feel powerful, like I can do ANYTHING. Life is amazingly good all of the sudden. Or rather, it always has been and my eyes just opened.

This Too Shall Pass

This past year has been, hands down, the hardest of my life. It’s not because I was adjusting to being the parent of two young children – in fact, that part has been surprisingly enjoyable.

It was my marriage. It was missing my old friends. It was accepting hard truths. It was going without money, without things. It was living in the middle of nowhere, in a trailer none the less. It was feeling like I should be doing more, for my children, for my husband, for myself even. But the days became a blur, one day seamlessly weaving into the next and all the while my goals remained unmet, something large was missing, I kept feeling as though I should have been doing more. What “more” was I could never say, but I knew I wasn’t doing enough.

It’s been hard to deal with but I learned that the only thing I could do was to trudge forward and make the most out of every moment that I could. Those moments when Faith was incredibly sweet and tender, crawling into bed to curl up next to me with her long strawberry-blonde hair tickling my nose. Those moments when the kids somehow miraculously played happily together. The moments when Jeff and I managed to get grandparents to babysit so we could get a dinner out. When James said “mama”. When we went on car rides as a family, the children falling asleep, their faces mirroring each other. Those joyful moments of stepping on the scale. James, clutching tightly to me, with his precious smile and urgent need to have me near. Faith, singing, theatrically – reminding me of just what I thought a child of mine would be long before I ever had children.

I remember a framed section of cloth near the door of my grandmother’s house. It had the words “This too shall pass” cross-stitched onto it. I used to think that it was an ominous reading into the future, something to remind us that everything will be gone and forgotten one day, in an apocalyptic way. Instead, as my grandmother told me with arched eyebrow, it meant that our troubles will all pass one day, just as suddenly as they came.

That comes to me often now. This too shall pass.

And on the horizon, better times, more happy moments, joy found in unexpected places. I’m so ready for it that my breath catches in my throat to think of it.

Happy New Year, world.

Christmas

The Sunday before Christmas Jeff and I went to Atlanta to continue our new-ish tradition of a couple of days spent kid-free in the city. We got a room that looked out onto Centennial Park, which was all done up in lights and Christmas music drifted out from the ice-skating rink that was set up in the middle of the park. It was beautiful at night, entertaining during the day. I could have spent most of the weekend staring out the window, looking at families and couples celebrating the holidays outdoors in the freezing (literally) cold.

We ate lots of good food, had fantastic seats for the hockey game, were able to sleep at night without a baby kicking our heads, but I was very happy to come home to the children and our own little Christmas tree with a handful of presents underneath.

:::

We had three separate Christmas celebrations, all different. We are now swimming in a sea of barbies, ponies, and tiny trucks. My mother went overboard, like she always does, and gave Jeff and I an Xbox and now I am obsessed with the Indiana Jones lego man game. I have kept Jeff up late the past couple of nights playing it, until he tells me that he HAS to go to sleep now.

As usual, I’m glad and sad that Christmas is over. The magic is gone now, the anticipation of everyone opening up the gifts I’ve gotten them is over, and I’m ready to throw out the tree to be burned so I don’t have to vacuum up needles anymore. The sweet and melancholy music is not relevant anymore.

:::

Back when Jeff and I were just dating, before marriage and children, we had conversations of what kind of Christmases we wanted to have with our own children someday. We talked about the best parts of our Christmas celebrations as kids, what we wanted to repeat, what we wanted to start new. Yes, we wanted to go crazy with gifts for our children. Yes, we wanted to make the season a big deal. Yes, we wanted kids of our own someday who were thrilled with every moment, enchanted by the lights and the sounds, who stared wide-eyed at the bright boxes under the tree.
So it was more than fulfilling this past week to watch them have all the things we wanted for them. And very satisfying indeed when Faith opened up all her gifts, looked amazed at all she had and looked up at me, blue eyes round and serious , and said “Thank you Mommy”.

Working

Everything is going along just swimmingly. The offer on the house was accepted, another financial move fell easily into place and then my father, out of nowhere, tells me that he has some work needed to be done on an up and coming project of his and do I want to do it from home to make extra money? Well, yes I do, Dad and thank you for asking!

I've always had a fairly strict policy on working with family – that it should NEVER be done. My father owns his own company and at any given time there have been at least three or more family members working there.

*shudder*

It's many things. The fear of other people thinking I had gotten a job not because of my intelligence but because of who I was related to. The fear of not seeing my father as my dad anymore, but my boss instead. Or my sister. Or uncles. Etc.

I wouldn't ever want to question anything myself either. I would want to know that I had received a raise because I deserved it, not because my parents knew I was having hard times financially. I would want to be promoted when I earned it and never question if “Daddy” was just helping out again. So over the years I have stood firm and always knowingly smiled at my poor sister's woes of working with my father and now I have succumbed. Because I am poor and I need the money and I have no shame.

Tonight, though, when I did my meager share of work sitting at my antique desk with my Christmas tree softly lighting the room, I felt that small soaring feeling again. I was doing work, real work that I'm going to get paid for. And it felt good.

How We Got Here, Where We're Going

Once upon a time Jeff and I lived in a comfortable little house in Dallas, Georgia which is about thirty or so miles west of Atlanta. We fixed it up, worked hard, loved our serene and cozy home. It had a huge, flowing river birch in the front yard and dogwoods dominating the backyard. It had a little window over the kitchen sink that looked onto our miniature magnolia tree. The sunlight filtered through the windows like poetry, lighting our happy little home with warmth and sunshine.

Jeff took a year off of work to go to school. I took a year off to raise our baby girl. Money was tight. We accumulated debt. We couldn't afford the house anymore. We put it up for sale and it had a contract on it less than two weeks later.

Since then we stayed with my mom for a long while, carving out a little corner in her massive home, then eventually migrated north and eventually settled in my in-laws' trailer. I have often had moments where I suddenly stop and my temporary blindness is stripped away. I abruptly see everything clearly and want to ask myself “How did I get here? Since when do I live in a trailer?” and then things continue to unfold in a familiar way and this is just where I sleep, eat, take care of the kiddos – it's where I live, unfortunately.

I try to think of my grandmother, who raised three children in a tiny two-bedroom blockhouse. Or my husband's grandmother who raised seven children in home that may not even be classified as a “house”. We have a roof over our heads, food in our bellies, clothes on our backs. That's all that matters, right?

The plan was to build our dream house on this land. The house we want, the house we've wanted for years, costs too much for us to build. We don't want to settle for something less because once we build it here, well, it's here forever. So we're stuck. We don't WANT to live in a trailer, but we can't afford our dream home.

The solution? Something in between. We signed a contract to buy a house today.

I feel a little breathless.