After a big ol' bloggy hiatus...

Instead of nights of restlessly flipping around the internet, my TiVo, and even going back to my bad old habit of eating ice cream once the kids have gone to bed, it occurs to me I might write through my anxiety rather than eat through it while taking endless Facebook quizzes and playing (but not paying close attention to) Lost reruns.

It's Sunday night. I've spent much of the past week looking for rental houses due to a sudden urgent urge to get a bigger place. I don't need a better place. The duplex is great. Love the location, love the price, and the fixtures are good enough. But it's getting harder and harder to keep the kids in here without them at each others throats. I send them to bed at 8pm, and they're still rockin and rollin back there at 10:30pm. I need three bedrooms and I need a yard.

So far, no luck on the new house front, but I'm not giving up yet. Mia starts kindergarten in the fall, so I need to lock down at least the elementary district very soon.

Lately I've been feeling so very blech. My job has lost its shine of late. More than that it feels precarious. Frustration level is very high. I am thinking bad thoughts like being alone though what is left of my 30's. I have set goals for my health and my finances and my career and everything since getting a divorce, so as to ward off complacency and deterioration. I have a good savings, I have been actively running for almost a full year, and have been researching graduate school programs. But I still feel a certain despairing feeling creep up on me when the day is done and I have the house to myself. I feel worn out for no discernable gain. Like my days are passing unremarked upon and that is turning into my life.

Things that make me feel better:

• cleaning
• packing for work the next day
• watching Oprah
• ironing
• reading

Things that I do instead

• watch TV I don't care about
• surf the internet
• eat

Like the Dow Jones Industrial Average...

Over the past month I have experience great mental and emotional highs and lows. I had trouble laying in bed at night trying to fall asleep. I have much hope for awesome things. Maybe what it is I feel is the desire for those things. Also those hours are the ones I have for reflection. When the kids are sleeping my life boils down to me and a very silent house. I am restless.

This explains the blog silence for almost two months. Several things have happened in the past couple of months of note: a) actual divorce filing b) my vacation to Chicago c) I have decided to pursue a social life d) I joined a church e) I joined a single parents' group at that church.

The church and the single parents group has been a surprisingly enjoyble and even more surprisingly - truly comforting - force since I started attending. The church services are extremely non-traditional, although definitely Christian. No one has put out judgemental or exclusionary vibes, or asked me what I belive. In return for showing up I have the opportunity to join some volunteering plans around the holidays and meet other single parents for a meal and conversation every other Sunday afternoon. Older kids babysit younger kids and we discuss a chapter from a book about putting a life together for yourself and your wards after finding yourself alone in this role. I wept through my reading of the first chapter. These other folks I listen to have great humor and just take care of business and inspire me to keep on with all that I need to do with great strength and confidence.

Again and again I am blown away by how well-trodden all this territory is, how completely common this experience is that I am living. I'm also blown away with how much I have tried to live my life as an island for so long. Just joining casual groups of other people and getting out there is incredibly powerful.

Goodbye Summer

Today is Labor Day, and Darin picked up the kids for a day of car shows and father-child bonding (hopefully) bright and early. I headed out for a jog to the elementary school, around the track and back. Leaving the house I checked out the morning glory vines, as I have been doing all summer long. The kids and I planted these seeds in April, and it took until August for the plants to even start their journey up the trellis. We watered faithfully, but pretty much it has been a bust. Then today, September first, we achieve actual morning glories.

Today marks the end of summer, and the summer has been very long. It has been my first summer living on my own in years. I've spent time mapping out a new future for myself, mentally embracing my new realities, and setting new goals. Maybe the summer feels long because all that came before separating from Darin feels incredibly distant. Hasn't it always been this way? Hard to believe the way it was.

Ode to a Clean Garage

Last week Monday, immediately upon putting the kids to bed, I walked out into the garage and started opening boxes. I was out there in the night air sorting through until 12:15am, when a tornado siren prompted me to go inside and check the TV... and discover that it was 12:15am. Shower and sleep at that point.

By the way, the weather seemed perfect when the siren started, and as far as I could tell never got really bad in my neighborhood.

Most nights this week and most of the day today found me in the garage sorting through. My garage has been a problem looming over me since I moved to Missouri and there is no excuse. Yes, there was a rodent problem that first summer and I do find mousey evidence in random areas of my old belongings. But the worst of that I threw away as soon as it was discovered when I moved into the house in Republic with Darin in September 2004. So much of what we brought from California just never got unpacked. Then after moving to this duplex, many boxes we backed up from the old house never got unpacked either.

Purging my abode of these boxes and piles of forgotten belongings has been kind of a therapy for me. A meditation at any rate. Inside each box has been a peek inside a former life: clothes I used to wear, toys Mia used to play with, photos of what my life used to be at some random period. Above all there are books and books and books. Whatever else I did not accomplish for myself in my twenties, I accumulated a hell of a book collection that sounded interesting and I got around to reading only maybe 20% of them before they were packed away.

This garage cleaning had me reflecting on what I was running towards when I used to hop jobs every year or two, hop relationships and coasts every year or two. I was chasing happiness pretty hard and I was pretty miserable. Everything was a supreme force of will; every relationship and every job I kept one foot out the door. I was uncomfortable everywhere, in every friendship, every relationship, every geography, and so I kept on moving. "It" had to be found sometime in my travels - that thing that would click and make me feel like a natural fit for life. Funny, it never happened until I was effectively stranded out here in Springfield Missouri in a nonfunctioning marriage and new motherhood. But I'm left with all these relics from the bright, shiny, frenetic, ultimately empty chase of my younger years.

The books I accumulated, even the portion I read and loved, look different to my older eyes. Subjects like the education system, philosophy, feminism, history.... man do they pull different strings in my brain now. Age, parenthood, maybe explain that. But also I am coming from inner calm that I never had before.

When I went up to Minnesota last year to see Colleen and Phil graduate I was using Colleen's hair dryer at some point and looking around her apartment. I kept coming back to this little sign she had posted in a frame - I think it was on a tabletop. It said something like "Life is not finding yourself. It is about creating the person you want to be." Revelation. I have ruminated on that idea since that weekend. I knew on that trip my marriage was failing and I knew I needed to change my life. It is sort of liberating to give up this false sense of "searching" and just start making some executive decisions about my life. Waiting for external confirmation - seems crazy now - has been driving many aspects of my destiny for a long time.

So, I am very close to having a garage that is the envy of all my neighbors. What will I have gained? Space for the kids' bikes? Check. Good reading material for all my downtime? Check. A Hanta virus infection? Remains to be seen. (yes, that was for Phil) The biggest thing I feel like I'm doing is clearing the slate so I can create something purposeful and geniune, small scale and humble, and totally what I want it to be.

New Birthday - Gratefully

I have been remiss lately on the blogging. Since my surgery the weather has turned cooler, it has been getting dark obscenely early; I have been sluggish and accomplishing little outside the normal rotation of meals, laundry, housecleaning, and general ruminating.

Next week is Thanksgiving... we have been living here in the new abode for three months and really it feels like a lot longer. I am sad that I am no longer a homeowner. I've been mourning it and a few other big things in my life this year. But letting go has also been a relief. I don't think about the house I thought I'd raise my children in almost at all these days.

The year is ending, and so is a phase of my life. I learned a lot over the past four or five years. Sounds so silly but I have never valued habits, consistency, and setting goals. I think I was confident that I had ability and personality and a good attitude-- serendipity would supply the rest. Maybe that's just an extension of that typical invincibility of youth.

The truth is at 32 years old I am for the first time getting methodical and systematic about what I want and how to accomplish it. My new year starts with my birthday and I've already started working on my resolutions.

Don't worry, I'm not going to become a sappy freaky self-help preachy do we have to hang out with her type of girl. If I do, give me a little slappin' around. I am just going to be focused. Things have crystalized.

I have so much to be thankful for this holiday and so much to do this coming year. I'm ready!

Fresh out of moral outrage here. Check back next month

Have been in a funk lately, as evidenced by my previous post. Nothing ground breaking. Just ugh. Lots a medium to little stuff rolled into one big ugh.

So I am ruminating before my databases the other morning when the office conversation (a rare event in itself) turns to the subject of a MSU professor who resigned this week upon his exposure as a registered sex offender. Turns out he was convincted twentysomething years ago of rape of a minor. RAPE OF A MINOR. He does not claim innocence, by the way. Just says he has put his life back together, walked the straight and narrow, paid his debt, etc etc.

Whether or not he keeps his academic job, I am deeply ambivalent about. Could not care less. There is a campus community there that needs to duke this one out amongst themselves. He is a sex offender; there are child care centers, a major private school, not to mention thousands of our state's young adults in the mix there.

One of my coworkers has many close university employee friends. All her comments on this case, which is all over our local news, center on how sad it is for this professor. "Award winning researcher and professor, forced to resign" is about a verbatim of the typical comment. Other coworker in 30's (there are only 3 of us) is all about condeming the reporter who first outed this guy to the public. Oh, he's getting depressed. I hope he can put his life back together. All because this guy who is such a joker outed him in the press. Both of these people just graduated from the MSU business school in the last few years.

Um. I am obnoxiously drawn to play the devil's advocate in matters great and petty. One of the reasons, I'm sure, I was such a JOY for my parents to hang out with when I was a righteously indignant teenager. In this case I found myself getting really irritated, not just inspired to poke at their opinions for sport.

The debate over this red lettering of sex offenders is a legitimate one. To me, the statistical reality of recidivism among these people is scientific proof that we need to be wary. Not paranoid, not stripping them of all civil rights, but wary. Felons forfeit certain rights.

Couple of crotchety thoughts to wrap this uP:

• if this guy thought there would be no politics involved in his teaching at a public university as a registered rapist of a minor, he is not as smart as he seems.
• would my coworkers be so outraged on behalf of some guy not so peerlike? Say, the black guy who sweeps the floor, never finished high school, raped a minor back in the day but now just wants to keep coming to school to sweep the floor; to have a chance to put his life back together? gimme a break.

you'll wish I didnt bother to post

Officially we have made it through the horrible winter. We've been somewhat healthier as a group. Quinn is quickly approaching his first birthday and toddlerhood. I've lost my baby weight. We are settling into what is perhaps the first stretch of time since Darin and I have been together -- or at least certainly since I first found out I was pregnant with Mia -- that I can envision the horizon more than a few months away. We have been in survival mode since moving to Missouri: scrambling for a decent job, our next mortgage payment, etc. Now we are in a more or less reliable pattern of life. What a trip the last few years has been. holy crap.

The next two years: Darin will work at Solo on the night shift. I will work at the hospital. Mia will be in preschool; Quinn will be in daycare. In the landmark summer of 2009, Mia will be headed to kindergarten and Quinn to preschool. Big changes that year - stability in the plan until then.

It is going to be a hard sprint. Hard, but I am determined to take the time and appreciate the good. My babies will be growing up a lot in this time. Darin and I won't be seeing a ton of each other. We will be scraping every day to keep ourselves from sinking under the weight of our financial obligations and at the same time take care of our health, and try to remember to be patient and good to each other so that we may still like each other when times aren't so tight. If we work as hard as we can and everthing goes exactly right, our reward will be seemingly small: the family will stay together, in our house, reasonably healthy and not broke. No new cars, no nice clothes, no furniture, no vacations, no landscaping or remodelling, no fat savings account. Just a material breakeven as reward for the hardest work and most sacrifice I've done ever.

Don't get me wrong; I am so grateful. We've been luckier than many who are more deserving. My family is the best thing I've ever done, hands down.

I do have new empathy for people whose marriages fall apart, families are a mess, diets and exercise routines nonexistent. This responsible parenthood thing can be really hard, choices extremely limited, indulgences unheard of if not arriving in an ice cream carton. I talk to my coworkers more than I get to talk to my own husband. These are the type of years when women lose themselves and couples lose each other. I can see it there like the big ditch along highway N, a threat parallel to my path and easy to see.

My resolutions during these next few years of young motherhood:

• Continue to lose weight, no matter how slow the process


• play a lot with my kiddies, including in a bathing suit no matter what my vanity says


• keep blogging - reminds me I do have my own brain and point of view. I almost forgot.


• continue to set personal goals for myself. for myself and the example I'm setting.