Friday, June 02, 2017

corner turning

I'm trying to buffer unhealthy amounts of hours of internet consumption with a sliver of internet creation.  I know there is something healing and cathartic about creating that we can never get from consuming what others have created, so small and meager and haphazard as it may be, I am trying to come to this shell of a space and hammer something out.

I keep pushing myself too hard and then crashing.  It's really hard not to, "too hard" is still miles below my normal productivity threshold.  But all it takes is one afternoon of cleaning, or one rough night's sleep, or one harried morning trying to get everyone dressed and out the door to be somewhere, and I am knocked horizontal in a hurry.  I'm so over it.

After this week, there are two weeks of June promising to be rather intense.  I worry about how I will manage my energy through it.  The kids start swimming lessons, Vera has rehearsals for her ballet recital, all the accoutrements of Art City Days (and deciding what matters enough to the kids to make outings worth it), and the Hidden Garden Tour and Parade of Homes both start.  (These would be the obvious things to drop, but I look forward to them all year.)

I'm trying to feel some energy about something/anything in my house, but interior projects are on hold (unless you count installing and painting trim in the basement, which project Mr Renn has taken 100% ownership of and I am only a spectator.)  All current house funds are being channelled into both a new heater/AC unit and replacing out rotting back deck (and hopefully covering the enormous hill of dirt in the back yard that makes keeping a clean house im.poss.i.ble.)  While one of these projects is slightly more fun than the other, neither one is poised to involve me much.

There are things I'd like to tackle, most of which would involve squeezing spare hundreds of dollars out of a tight budget and massively inconveniencing my family.  We've been brainstorming a makeover for the kids' bathroom, and can't decide how extensive to make it.  The whole massive open-concept living area/entry needs a paint job like 3 years ago, and every time I look at my giant orange oak kitchen I can't believe I still haven't found a way to make it less orangey.

Living in a house that devours all our spare funds and rarely manages to reward us back with something visible, it's frustrating.  I'd love to make loads of progress and have had the house looking like a new person within a year of moving in... but I have to be kind to myself.  Instead I've finished grad school and a thesis, had 1 baby, had a rough postpartum year, and then started a new baby.  I have got, at some point, to come to terms with how debilitated I am by pregnancy and learn how to be completely ok with accomplishing nearly nothing during the 4+ trimesters of it.  I have a lot of kids, so that's a good chunk of my marriage accounted for with nothingness. Someday I'll be human again.

Even ambitious again.

Even a move and a shaker again.

It could happen.

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