Quiet, Please!

One of the things I have the most difficulty with is balancing my need for quiet, alone time with the needs of my household and family. In summer, this is magnified several times over by having my child home from school. My husband's schedule at present is such that he's home some portion of every week, for a total of 14 days a month. DD has her room, DH has his music room cum homemade recording studio. I have no place to call my own. It takes some finagling to make the most of what time I can scrape from the general day to day life of a homemaker, wife and mom.

In this particular season of my life I find it all a bit much at times. The constant demands, the continual vying for my attention, the unending tasks, the crazy unbalanced way the whole life thing swings up and down like a seesaw gone crazy... I find myself getting desperate, fantasizing more and more of running away, feeling almost frantic to hide. That's when I know I have to somehow give up and seek out a quiet place and restore my own sanity or go madly over the edge.

So it was yesterday evening. I'd been 'on demand' all day long. Fretting over this, scrabbling to get that done, feeling guilt and shame and tiredness in abundance over what I hadn't accomplished and a myriad of things known to all moms, wives, mothers and daughters world over. I wasn't enough yesterday and my life is slipping away from me in great globs of time spent in this state, not in the Inspired Life state I promised myself I'd work at having. And so in a fit of guilt, I grabbed my journal, my laptop and my cellphone and took myself away to my bedroom and shut the door. I had one hour before DH was home from work. One hour in which to again grasp at the straws of my current purpose and try to get my head wrapped around it once again, before it all became dust under my feet yet again. One hour of complete and total quiet to really think about what I wanted to show for the month ahead.

Thank God, He gave me the ability to think most rightly when I write. For me, there is a cloak that drops around me when I write and if I am alone I can stay hidden safely under it and work out a plethora of heartaches and worries and thoughts. It can happen at the computer, but I am seldom uninterrupted here.

So as I wrote last night, I thought hard about what I want to show for this re-do month, which has been cut to a mere three weeks after the fast flowing week just behind me, a week mind you in which last night's writing was about the most I've accomplished. These are my three focus areas for the coming month. I may well do many other things that are on my Inspired Life list, but I am basically creating goals to work upon for the next few weeks.

First my marriage. Now this isn't meant to be too personal. I want to share honestly where I am and what I want to change in my life. This passage deals with the intimate side of marriage so if you're easily embarassed skip ahead to point Two.

I am so blessed to be married to the man I am. He's everything I ever dreamed a husband would be and a hundred times more besides. I want to be a great wife to him. It's all too easy to be tired to death at night, to drag exhausted through days and forget the more intimate passages of marriage. But it's such a vital part of the marriage and it deserves more than the obligatory nod.

It isn't a matter of not having romance. My husband knows how to be romantic and is in more ways daily than most men are in a lifetime. I've always considered myself a romantic, too, but to be honest I often fail at it. I am too aware of the dozens of things I haven't done, too caught up in the drama of this family member or that, balancing budgets, working out time snaggles and more. Once a long time ago, my husband accused me of not being able to multitask, but that isn't the reality. The truth is that I am so multi-task oriented that I sometimes fail in one area or another because I have so many things going on at once. And when I do stop, my body suddenly drops into sleep and it's oh well see you in the morning.

It's an irony that at 35 I was so ready and so willing that I often left him behind in the dust. And now, I no longer have the same strong physical desires. Part of this has to do with the time of life I've hit. I've done quite a bit of reading and discovered that most women my age begin to experience drops in libido. Magnesium, Vitamin E, and Zinc can all help restore that somewhat. I faithfully take my vitamins and minerals.

Part of it has to do with sheer weariness (another symptom of periomenopause). I've tried to take a daily nap but honestly some days that is more stress than not. Finding the time to sleep is as frustrating as finding the time to do half the other things I want to do as well. And somewhere in the recesses of my mind I still hear the things I heard in my girlhood about it being laziness to nap unless you were fighting off a life threatening illness.

Part of it has to do with a difference in opinion about what time constitutes 'bedtime'. I personally think in an earlier time frame than DH does. When DD is in school we do have opportunity to think outside the 'bedtime is marital time' box and that is something of a help, but none whatsoever when school is out for the summer or holidays.

So what is the solution? How do you recapture something that has been lost through no design of your own? I have a few ideas, which includes routing out that monster 'laziness' from my mind and trying to catch a nap when I know that I am feeling overtired, as well as trying to be more consistent and to think desire until I feel it if sheer willpower will bring it about once more. And talking and sharing with DH helps. He does understand where I am physically at this point, that it isn't by design that I'm here, just by nature.

Point Two: Computer guilt, specifically laptop guilt. I've mentioned before that one of the gifts to me earlier this year was a laptop. That was my DH's way of showing his support of my writing. However, the laptop came with a stipulation. It was to be used to write a novel or book. It was intended to allow me to go into the bedroom and shut the world away and concentrate on the task at hand.

About the time I got the laptop, I thought my time of having to care for Mama was about at an end. And of course, shortly thereafter, Granny fell and broke her hip and I was on demand for Mama for weeks more and then DD was home for the summer and sick for various reasons that turned out to be a very bad case of Mono. So five months later, here I am.

So why the guilt? Because I cannot balance housework, life and laptop time. I don't want to give up writing my blogs nor my newsletter. I deeply regret having given up writing the Gentle Living letter, some of what I personally consider to be the best of the best where my writing is concerned. I can hammer out a blog entry in 15-20 minutes. I get up and do a load of dishes, sweep floors, clean the bathroom come back to the computer and hammer out ten minutes on the newsletter and I'm off again to cook a meal, serve it up, clear up afterwards, visit with whomever stops by in the afternoon, and then back to computer to read a blog or email a friend and write for 20 minutes or 30. I've gotten into a habit you see, of fitting in writing with my life. And the laptop doesn't allow that fit.

As well I am always mindful that if I don't touch the laptop then I'm not doing the work it was bought for. Guilt. GUILT. And of course, I get caught in that trap: the more I feel guilt the less willing I am to touch the laptop. The more I resist touching the laptop the more I feel guilty. AAARRGGGGHHHH!

I was right in my first assessment many posts back that I haven't taken ownership of the laptop. I truly haven't claimed it as mine. It sits on my desk. It's untouched for the most part by all other family members. Seldom does anyone go near it and no one fails to ask for permission to look at some feature of it, unlike the home computer which is fair game for all. But for all that every one else thinks of the laptop as mine, I don't.

How can I change that fact? Well, I can start by personalizing it and making it mine. On the home computer we each have a screen that comes up with wallpaper of our choosing, menus of our choosing, etc. I have even loaded up the music that inspires me on it, so I have that to listen to as I work. I haven't done anything like that with the laptop.

I can make it internet accessible. No I haven't even done that with it. Initially the thought was to keep it offline and not use it as an internet computer. And it won't be for family usage in that way. But it will allow me to use the laptop for writing blog entries and such and posting to those blogs at a later time. And once I am internet accessible I can take the computer with me to other venues to use it, so I'm not limited to only time spent at home.

And lastly, I can use it to write and if that writing happens to be a chapter of a novel or a page for another book, or a blog entry or a note to a friend, so be it. The point is I'll be using it to do the writing I do. I'm even going to play a game on it each evening just to get used to the way it works and feels and to further establish my ownership of it.

Third: Physical Weight. I've been fairly consistent. For the past year and half I've weighed the same, up 20# from my great weight loss of six years ago. Considering the life changes I've been through, I suppose all in all I should be deeply grateful that self-control has limited me to the 20# weight gain. But there's no denying either that while I was hardly slender 20#s ago, I felt a great deal less pain than I currently feel.

For some reason when it comes to weight loss I go feeling all helpless and very much, "I can't" whiney. Yet I know I can. I've done it before. (Which reminds me of my smoking grandmother who told me "I can quit anytime I want Terri, after all I've done it six or seven times over the last 20 years!"). Irony aside, I do know what works for me (low carb) and what doesn't (eating points). I know what I will do and what I won't.

I cannot deny that the greatest downfall I had with eating lowcarb wasn't that I had to give up eating cake or pie or cookies. No it was not being able on my particular plan to eat an orange or peach in season. That's what killed it for me.

I'm so over the whole diet thing. What I do want to try to do this coming month is to eat 5-7 fruit and vegetable servings daily. I want to fill up on the high fiber items before I eat other things and yes, ice cream and chocolate will be allowed. Just not until after the good stuff is eaten, if you see what I mean. I am too well aware at this point in my life what constitutes good nutrition and what constitutes just caloric intake.

I want to eat more homemade, all natural foods and fewer of the processed foods. Just those two simple changes for the next three weeks are all I'm concentrating on. Whether or not I lose weight is not the point. Whether or not I'm optimizing my health is the point.

Finally: Finances. Compared to most households we are frugal. But even in our lives, there is room for improvement. Just as I want the food I eat to count for optimal health, I want the money spent from our account to get optimum value. That means stopping to seriously consider how much weight a dollar spent is going to carry. Is it going out the door on a momentary, won't see it in five minutes item or something that we will look at and handle and know we spent money on it in five years? What can I do to pay off the little debt we have even quicker?

Seventeen years ago we were literally starting over with nothing to show but five hungry kids and a need for every necessity. Today we are essentially debt free (our debt load is under $2K) and have most of the necessities and some of our wants met. However, in another ten years, we might reasonably be looking at retirement. What will we live off of then? It's imperative that our current savings not only continue, but increase as the years go by. So this month I want to look at the ways I might actively pay off our debt and increase our monthly savings.

And that is the sum total of my hour last night. Lots of thoughts got put on paper and some ideas were culled for use over the next month. All because I finally heeded the need for quiet.