Beginning to Cook

I have often made light of my inability to cook and how slow I am at the most basic tasks. You may as well laugh as to cry about it. What I want to know from you more seasoned cooks out there is what should a kitchen have? Assume that I have nothing--this isn't true, but it is easier than making a list of currently owned kitchen items--and that my goal is to make most of our meals at home, relatively from scratch. What should I and my kitchen have?

Eager to Begin

This morning as I was driving into work, praying my morning offering, letting my thoughts wander as they often do because of the length of the drive and the demands of paying attention to the road, I had a thought coalesce in my mind.  For months I have told myself that I am being impatient while working these last few months, however many there may be. I have said I need to be more patient as I wait for the process to slowly turn its gears and I can finally walk away, but this morning I decided I am not being impatient, I am only eager to begin.

If I were being impatient I would have thrown my hands up long ago. I would have declared it impossible and allowed myself to sink into despair. Maybe I haven't been as impatient as I thought. I have patiently held this vision of how our lives could be for years. This patience has not always been cheerful or pain free, but it existed. The pinprick of hope that allowed me to see through disappointments and set backs and hold onto the vision in my mind. Is that a form of patience? I think it might be.

Ever since the real estate became a viable option, I have been filled with a peace that reassures me this is really happening. There have been some set backs and disappointments, but I have rarely peaked over the edge into that dark pit of despair where I used to teeter. I need to stop looking ahead with anxiety trying to figure out the timetable and just be pleased when the moment arrives. I wanted to be home in June because it is my favorite time of the year and that is not likely to happen, but in the long run, it is okay. There will, hopefully, be other Junes.

It is not wrong to anticipate or to be excited about life's possibilities. In a lot of ways I feel like I am getting a second chance that not everyone gets. I will soon get a chance to figure out how real life measures against the image in my mind. I will struggle and fail and succeed in an environment where I can do the most good and make the biggest difference and not just be a cog in the wheel, easily replace by another cog. Soon. I need to stop telling myself that this excitement is impatience.

And now, I am eager to begin. 

Homeschool Planning Block

Back a few months ago, I mentioned my desire to homeschool. I have always been fascinated by it and when I mentioned my plans everyone encouraged me to start planning immediately. It is planning season for next year and all over, people are posting their plans, schedules, subjects, and curriculum. The excitement is in the air. I, on the other hand, am having a very hard time doing the actual planning. It's like writer's block except it is homeschool block.

I have a strong understanding about what my goals for next year are: I want to establish an entirely new way of living. That's all. Not ambitious at all.

I want us to ease into a new rhythm where I am the one running the household instead of showing up after the day is over. I am going to have to learn how to manage chores and children and learn how to cook more efficiently and oversee the education of three children, two of whom have spent years in a public school.

I do not have overriding academic ambitions for the year. The girls have always excelled in school and I do not worry about them falling behind. I want them to keep working, of course, but the focus of our first year is going to be learning how to be together as a family and finding routines that work for us instead of everyone running in her own separate direction.

That is my big picture, but when it comes down to actually taking out the calendar and planning individual subjects and choosing curriculum or books or anything, I cannot make myself focus. There is a sense of unrealness in the activity. I cannot make myself believe it will really happen.

I know, in an objective sense, that it is extremely likely I will be able to quit my job in the next few months before the next school year begins, however it hasn't happened yet. I feel reticent to make solid plans because if, for unforeseen reasons, I had to continue working next year and put them in school again, it would be devastating. If I hadn't planned it out yet, it wouldn't be so bad, right? It seems like it would be easier to lose vague, hazy ideas than to have concrete plans ripped away. I feel like I am not allowed to count on anything until I know for sure. I am protecting myself from disappointment.

But, again, it is very likely these plans *will* work so I need to get it together. I need to push through those fearful feelings and do it anyway, but I don't know where to start.

I am going to a local homeschooling conference on Saturday (Hi, Meredith!) where I have been told to bring my checkbook and a bag for books. I have never been to such a conference and I have no idea what I might purchase. I have that beginning homeschooler's terror at the sheer number of options. What if we spend the money and then we hate it and can't afford anything else?

But more than the feeling of being overwhelmed is the feeling that if I begin to believe, it won't happen after all.

So what should I look for at a homeschooling conference?

Back to the Grind

I took all of last week and also Good Friday off of work in my fourth planned vacation of the fiscal year. My thoughts about taking time off are much the same as the last uneventful week away from work. I didn't do anything specific or special aside from piddling around the house. I changed out the seasonal clothes for two children and cleaned up a bedroom.

It was an odd feeling. Betty Duffy has said somewhere--I couldn't find the post so just believe me--that she finds it hard to write when she is too satisfied with life. I found that to be true last week. I had no grist for the mill. I just puttered around doing mostly what I liked. The thought of blog posts or even FB posts were so far away. I couldn't find anything to say. I momentarily panicked, wondering if I would ever have anything to say again.

I realized last week that I have never really spent normal time around my house without having to leave again in a few days. I have taken maternity leave, but that is hardly normal. I have taken time around Christmas, but that's usually jammed full of activities. I come home on Friday night and try to recharge and cram as many chores as I can over the weekend, but after two days, the time is up and back to work I go. But twice this year, I spent an entire week at home just doing normal things. It was nice.

But by Thursday, the specter of Monday was already looming large and I was in foul mood. A majority of the children were sick and I had promised my parents I would visit for the weekend. My vacation was essentially over and I wasn't very happy about it. After spending the day whining to anyone who would listen, I decided we were not going to drag the children out to the grandparents while they were sick. It isn't that I mind going to visit my parents. It is everything that goes with it: the packing, the unpacking, the time spent away which means chores aren't getting done at home. It stresses me out. Once the decision was made to stay home, my mood lightened considerably. I had snatched another few days for myself from the general chaos of everyday life.

As it turned out, the children felt markedly better by Friday evening and I decided to be a dutiful daughter and spend Saturday afternoon at my parents' house. No packing, no overnight. Just drive up and visit and go home.

Now I am back at work. The most noticeable difference is that I have returned to my deplorable nervous habit of biting my fingernails. When I spend time away, I almost never bite my nails, but put me in a car driving to work and I can barely contain the compulsion. My mood didn't crash coming back to work this time, but I think I am crankier than usual. It's hard to tell sometimes. :P

Right now, we are patiently (or not) biding our time until the real estate option becomes viable. It gets closer all the time. I can see the end almost in sight. Will I have anything to say when I get there?

The Perks of Working

I have long complained about my job, how I want to quit and get on with my life, and what I would rather be doing with my time. However, there are some real benefits to working that will not exist in the same way when I no longer have a job. I thought in the service of gratitude I would list the perks of working.

• I have long stretches of uninterrupted time to read long articles on the Internet.
• I get to have uninterrupted conversations, either in person or online.
• I get to develop friendships with people I have never met because I have time to attend to them.
• I get to fully think out problems and ideas in my head in silence and without competing distractions.
• I get to write long, probably too long, blog posts fully developing a thought.
• I eat lunch and breakfast uninterrupted.
• I get to regularly use the bathroom by myself.
• I have access to regular times to listen to audiobooks. (I'm not loving on the commute here, just the availability of time to listen.)
• Food I have not purchased or cooked sometimes appears for me to eat, like the peanut butter egg out of the break room today.
• Consultants sometimes buy my meal or my drink.
• My children are always happy to see me when I get home.

Leisure

I successfully completed my little experiment to resist the temptation to spread out my work and just do it already. I didn't work as quickly as I might have. If I had, I would have finished about a day before I did, but all in all, it was successful.

Now I am in my third week of nothing to do at work. I have had one-off jobs that take a few minutes, but for the vast majority of my time, I have been aimlessly clicking around the Internet, grasping at conversations, looking for something to do. It's painful.

I have done some procrastinated research on money software and finally revamped my whole retirement portfolio since my employer decided to "make retirement simpler and easier" by eliminating all of our previous choices, forcing us to roll our entire portfolio into something else, and requiring us to choose new funds for future contributions. Easier and simpler, indeed. The time has not been completely in vain, but I have fast run out of things to do.

So what have I learned here?

I definitely think it was worthwhile to push through my desire for distraction and just work. There was some disciple to be practiced. It's good to practice.

But I was right in dreading the inevitable outcome. I still have three more days before the new monthly files start trickling in again. I squirm in my chair. Getting out of bed is harder knowing all I have to look forward to is clicking around the Internet all day. That's fun for a day or two, but it gets old. Painfully boring, sometimes. Even writing blog posts is harder because there is nothing pricking my mind into activity.

Will I keep it up? I don't know.

In April, I am taking the entire first full week off of work, thanks to the new vacation policy. The first week of the month is my busiest time. In the past, there was someone available to pick up my slack, but those people have left. When I return towards the middle of the month, I will be very busy since a) I will be behind and b) April is a short work month anyway.

But May? I will have to decide if I will again practice working through distractions. Perhaps I will do it again. We are hoping that I will be able to submit my resignation in May or June. I can slug through those months of two weeks of work and two weeks of nothing without much discouragement.

One thing I have discovered is that I don't feel nearly as bad about all the work procrastination over the years. I have silently berated myself for wasting so much time at work, but I have a clearer understanding of how it is a coping mechanism more than a shirking of duty. I was right to suspect weeks without any work would be very uncomfortable to endure. I think this boom and bust cycle would be difficult to maintain for years. Even now, I feel the lethargy creeping. Even though it is a maladjustment outside of work and I need to break the work habits when outside of work, I think I have probably been a better employee for slacking than not, perverse though it sounds. My tolerance would be much lower by now if I had endured eight years of these weeks of boredom.

But practicing differently for now might bear some good fruit. Hopefully though, the end is near and I will develop a little more self control right here approaching commencement. 

Putting Your Marriage First

The Friday outrage centered around this deeply misguided Good Housekeeping article where the author explains why it is okay that she is a terrible wife and that she puts her children and everything else above her husband on her priority list. Anne gives the piece the fisking it deserves.

And yet I am somewhat sympathetic to her plight.

“For most of the last 10 years, I’ve been the breadwinner. I worked long hours commuting into Manhattan full-time. Now, John has a job, but I still commute, and also work from home trying to keep us ahead of the bills.”

Breadwinner and mother. It's challenging and exhausting. There are so many demands made on you, your body, and your time and there isn't enough of you to go around. You are completely used up, not in a sweet, fulfilling kind of way, but in a chewed-up and spit out kind of way.

I recognize the temptation to view your spouse as an adult who just has to deal while you tend to the more urgent demands in life. It's hard to carve out time for your marriage when you don't have a strong, philosophical understanding that your marriage must be your top priority. It's hard even when you do have that understanding.

When your time at home is extremely limited, your children don't care that you are tired or have been working all day or that their father also needs your attention. They want your attention. Now. They need it and have a right to it.

 “John’s a great dad, but I play a singular role in each of my kid’s lives.”

It could be that the author is one of those women who demands to be in complete control over her children's lives and leaves nothing to her husband's judgement. He must not pick out the toddler's clothes because He. Won't. Do. It. Right. We all know people like this, so it could be. Or it could be that children want their mother's attention more than any of us quite remember or imagine.

My children spend the majority of their time with my husband. He changes diapers and gives baths and rocks babies and drives them to activities and does all the standard parenting that goes with 'at home' parenting. And yet I am the one to whom they want to pour out their problems. When I come home from work, it is I who gets to hear about the problems of the day. Problems that they never breathe in his direction, even though he asks about their day. It's isn't because he won't listen, but because I am their mother. They surround me, fight over me, and cling to me. I am astounded by how much children desire their mother. And, honestly, I am astounded that I am astounded. What could be more natural? And yet the culture has beaten this knowledge out of us.

It's easy to want to sleep after the children go to bed, especially when you know one of them will be waking in the night soon enough. My husband isn't the only one who sometimes gets overlooked. There are other things that get pushed down the priority list too, like my own hobbies and personal exercise. When you only have three to four hours a night to do EVERYTHING, a lot just isn't going to happen even if it is important.

Our oldest is nine so we still haven't exited the demanding stages of early childhood. Of course, parents of older children and teenagers say it doesn't ever get any easier, it only changes. (Oh, I don't know. I say if you get to sleep all night, it has to be easier than being woken up twice a night, every night.) But I understand the temptation to say I am done for today. I can see where you might slide into a habitual doneness if you didn't actively decide to avoid it.

If you happen to have a worldview that puts having a career! and micro-managing your children as the most important activities in your life, which is pretty common these days, I can see why you would put your spouse at the bottom of the priority list. If you must work and commute eleven hours a day and be the class room mother and plan blowout birthday parties and have your children involved in seventeen different enrichment activities and sleep and eat with your remaining time, what's left? You are completely expended. You have nothing left to give your spouse. I can understand why she can't see her way out of the problem.

Now unlike the author, I don’t think this situation is okay and I don’t think it is sustainable. Something has to give. I am already not a micromanaging parent and yet, most of the time, I feel stretched to my limit. For me, my status as breadwinner is preventing me from leading the life that we want to live and prevents me from putting first the people who need to be first. They might be first in my intentions, but my time is a different matter. We are fighting hard to change our lives so I can put my priorities in the proper order. The order *we* want them in.

But until you see that using yourself up in your job is the problem, that the money you make isn't worth the broken relationships and sheer exhaustion from doing it all, that there is more to life than avoiding student loans, and that a happy, stable marriage is the best gift you can give to your children, I can totally understand why she thinks she has no other options than to ignore her husband and hope he is still around when the children leave.

This author is wrong, but I understand more than I would like. It's like peaking over into the dark side of what might have happened if we didn't deliberately choose another path. When I read what she has to say about her life, I feel scorn and outrage and wonder what her husband thinks about his public castration, but I mostly feel pity.  Their children need their marriage more than her money.