Us, 2014
I woke up around 1AM on Sunday night and stumbled out towards the living room, where I found Kendrick setting the alarm and getting ready to come to bed. "Hey," he said. "Why are you up?"
I pointed at our son's closed bedroom door. "I wanted to go lay down with him," I said.
Sifting through my "personal box" gave me all the feelings. (Mostly horrified ones.)
Remember how I mentioned in the post about my (probably ill-advised) new living room furniture that we decided to keep our old couch, so we could do something awesome with it? What we're planning to do - and started doing over the weekend: a massive, massive garage remodel that'll include a separate area for laundry, an office space for Kendrick to record in, and a family room - plus a lofted bed up in the rafters. I'm obviously going to post all about the process, because I'm SO excited - and if it turns out anything like what I'm hoping, it'll be the best thing ever.
But in the meantime, let's look at some embarrassing stuff, shall we? Because while going through my overflowing "personal box" (basically a huge pile of crap dating back to 1984 that I never threw out for one reason or another), I came across a treasure trove.
A couple of days ago, I read a post written by a woman whose children had asked her, in a completely ordinary moment, "Mom, why are you so mad?"
"I wasn’t even 'mad.' It was just another day. She was sitting on the potty and I had gone in to pick up the toy she dropped, for the third time. I must have let out a big sigh, which is what prompted her to ask me that question in her sweet little voice.
I immediately changed my attitude and put her little cheeks in my hands and said;
'I’m not mad! Why do you think I’m mad, sweetheart?'
I wish I could be this woman; I wish I could say of my reaction to my children's needs and demands and tantrums: I wasn't even mad.
The truth: I have been - am - so mad. Mad that they can't be grateful, or patient, or respectful, even though I know that these are qualities that emerge with time. Mad that I can't be gracious, or understanding, or calm.
Mad at myself for being mad.
I told my son that I was taking him on a special trip to the forest where the Ewoks from Star Wars live, and he yelled at me that he didn't want to go, that forests were boring. I didn't sit down with him in a quiet corner and try to parse out what about walking through an ancient forest filled with mile-high redwood trees made him feel so bored that he needed to scream about it; I just got mad.
Because I am. Mad. And sometimes, when you are mad, you are mean.
This image is pretty, but it's not the cleanse I did.
The cleanse I did was this one.
Cleanses and I do not have a very positive history. I've you're a long-time reader, you may recall the Great F-You BluePrint Cleanse post, in which I cleansed for about a day before giving up and eating pizza, and arrived at the conclusion (parts - but not all - of which I still stand by) that expensive, beautifully packaged cleanses prey upon young, upper-class women who already may have tendencies towards restrictive eating, if not full-blown eating disorders. Something about the rules; the precision of it all - I don't know if this happens to everyone, but while I was on the cleanse I could almost feel it poking at the ghost of my many-years-gone anorexia: "Hey, doesn't this not-eating feel kind of awesomely powerful?! LET'S DO IT AGAIN."
Us, at the beginning
If you've been reading here awhile, you've already heard my engagement story, so I'm going to apologize in advance for telling it again - but I started out writing this post about what I did to fix up my original engagement ring, which had kind of fallen apart...and then felt like I had to say a sentence or two about our engagement...and then I got all mushy and just kept writing about it and including lots of weird little details that I'd never included before, and now, well...
I'd just like to leave this here. For posterity, you know.
