shifting

Do you ever feel as if you need a vacation from your vacation? I didn't even travel, with hours in the car or on planes and in airports from which to recover. My vacation was merely a three-day weekend. We made no plans so that our three days at home would feel like a real break. Instead, our weekend became so jam-packed with friends and activities that I’m even further behind on "action items" (I hate this jargony word—let's be honest, it's “chores” that I'm needing to do). I’m feeling a little worn out and I’ve lost all desire to do anything. It's also really cold here and I've had enough.

We did do some fun things during our President's Day holiday. Simon’s friend Sydney played at our house on Saturday; when we returned her, we stayed for dinner and (drunken) wii. We drove to Mayer, MN, on Sunday and bought a 1967 VW Beetle. John drove it back to St. Paul and I followed, just in case. Nik had Sunday dinner with us. We’re glad Uncle Nik is back in town! The kids went wild when they saw him, and it gave me a good excuse to have a guest for dinner without cleaning the house. No apologies necessary, Nik doesn’t read this blog. We had a Monday morning mission to use bagels as a vehicle for clearing umpteen cream cheese tubs out of our fridge, which Steve C. helped us do because he was in the neighborhood looking for a wi-fi connection. Then John and I took the kids to the Spiderwick Chronicles, which we all enjoyed (the part about trying to destroy knowledge in order to tame evil still sticks in our craw, but has given us plenty to talk about with the little boys).

And, I got to cook a lot, though I may have overextended myself a bit. Friday night: big, fat wild brown Mexican shrimp sauteed in olive oil with cumin, pimenton, and garlic; Saturday afternoon: sausage-butternut squash-kale soup (Caryl, I'd love to cook this soup with you sometime); Sunday: a six-pound free-range organic chicken, Southern cornbread stuffing (John’s mother makes this at Christmas; the recipe comes from a Columbus [GA] Junior League cookbook), and homemade vanilla ice cream; Monday: red beans and rice (a Monday tradition in New Orleans; I'm dreaming about warmer places and listening to lots of roots music at the moment).

I want so badly to get back to our regularly scheduled program, where everything is picked up and in its place. The dishes are done. The laundry is washed, dried, folded, and put away in drawers. The last season’s clothes are in bins and out of sight. The bills are filed or shredded. The magazines are read, information tucked away. The projects we've started are finished and the detritus and tools cleared. The kids' toys are picked up and in their bins, the broken parts filed in the trash. The kids’ books are picked up and on their bookshelves. The kids’ artwork is stored or tossed. Do you see a pattern emerging here?

Every room in the house is a fucking disaster, and I feel like we're just getting further and further behind. It's a JanuFeb thing. But there also aren't enough hours in the day.

I know that I’ll have to adjust my thinking—about what’s important and about what really needs to get done—and, yet again, lower my expectations so that I can move forward. When the boys were little I was a big fan of the Louise Bates Ames child-development books (Your One-, Two-, Three-, Four-Year-Old and beyond). Although they're a tad bit dated, one of her theories, for which I offer up my children as empirical examples, finds that children have developmental shifts every six months. We often notice that one of our kids may be cranky and difficult for an extended period of time, but then turns sweet and helpful a few months later. Ames explains, and I'm super-simplifying here, that during the cranky bits, your child is experiencing a physical (e.g., learning to walk) or psychological development (e.g., learning how to deal with emotions or socialization with peers), rendering the child unable to cope with normal life.

I’m beginning to think that this is true even for adults. Consider: we're aging. I've just turned forty, and while the year leading up to my milestone birthday was very celebratory, I'm just starting to accept and adjust to changes, both physical and psychological, that I see in myself.

I may be deep in one of Ames's shifts—not a rut or a bad place, mind you, just a shift.