Avoiding housework

Supper is almost made (it's in the slow cooker and I just need to make rice later on).  Some squares are in the frig.  I've done my Denise Austin dance workout (very funny but I did work up a sweat) and also done some book ordering for Attic Therapy.  This week has been an intense business week of setting directions and figuring out what is possible and what is not.  There are a lot of paths I could take and each one is intriguing in its own way but the cold hard fist of reality has me by the scruff of the neck and the above mentioned activities do still need to get done on a semi-regular basis.  Not to mention laundry and vacuuming which at the moment I am avoiding by writing here. I constantly struggle for moderation in everything I do and that generally means (wait for it, any OT's out there!) structure structure structure.  If I must do things on a daily basis and if there is a time set aside for them to be done and a place and materials ready . . . they still may not get done.  But at least I do not have an excuse.

This brings me to the whole issue of friendship.  It would be great to be able to be friends the way I used to be - those lovely years when I lived on my own with great roommates in a city far from my parents so I didn't feel responsible for their feelings . .  but also I didn't have any real responsibilities.  Except getting through university but of course you can always cut a class or miss a night of sleep and make things work.  Life was a lot more malleable back then.  It totally suited me.  I felt really close to a lot of people, each in a unique way.  There were chances to do tons of interesting and widely diverse things with other people and still stick to a student's budget of about $400 a month.  Not no more.  No sir.

Last night the kids made us pull out our wedding album.  Wow.  Lots of pictures of people I haven't seen literally since that day.  After our wedding we moved directly to PA where we knew absolutely no one and started completely new jobs and lives together.  While our marriage has I think mostly recovered from that shock, my ability to have deep and meaningful friendships has not. 

For one thing, I am now scared of commitment.  I'm not good at day to day structured contact.  I much prefer one all night conversation plumbing the depths of emotional reality to mundane phone calls and "coffees" together on a weekly basis.  However, I think (at least I'm coming to think) that relationships, like velcro, are made of hundreds of tiny points of contact.  Not one giant piece of sticky tape.  For another thing, who should I be friends with?  My life is so weird and I fit loosely and not well into so many categories that there is no one group of people that calls to me as a group I will fit in well with.  I am acquaintances with lots of people I like and admire.  But to take it to the next step - I'm somewhat at a loss.  Thus the blogging.  It's one way I can explain myself at my own rate and possibly someone else may be able to meet me occasionally - hopefully in person occasionally but also in ideas and ideals and mundane information day to day.  Wow.  This sounds like a really bad personals ad.  How did I get here?  Again, moderation, Lynn. :) 

On a lighter note, Dan was able to trim Jetta's hooves this weekend with absolutely excellent behaviour on her part.  We have been working on that for the last year and so I was proud of her.  It was necessary too as she had chipped a gouge the size of a good sized cookie out of the left fore.  I don't know how that can't hurt but she seemed okay with it.  I was contemplating riding her out this week but then it got way cold again.  However I did get an actual run in as some kind stranger has plowed the railway tracks for a logging road presumably and it's possible to run quite a ways.  That was the other day when it was only -4.  Very encouraging.

Okay, time to vacuum.

the kids are tired

Well, I've started a website finally.  Again.  I worked on one last spring for a long time and then my computer crashed and in the resulting wiping of the hard drive that one item did not get backed up like I thought.  I did not really understand website construction and the assumption of Apple that I would immediately publish it and so it would be safe on the web.  Ha.

I think I understand more this go-round having both read the manual and bought a book no less. It seems actually fun but very time intensive given that I am planning a huge website with lots of features and pages and options and so on.  Nothing simple for me, no way. 

The kids have had a full week of socializing with lots of sleepovers and today is the first day of the February break that we have all been home together.  I cannot believe how crabby everyone is.  We are such a family of introverts!  Debby and my Dad both think I am too but I still cannot quite agree.  I do get energy from being alone, but only to a point, and then if I don't have human contact I will go nuts.  I remember one summer job where I was alone in an office for most of the summer listening to CBC and doing something very mindless.  I have never talked so much each supper.  My roommates laughed at me all summer because I chattered so much.  It was the same when I was home with two small babies.  I joined a sewing group in Crutwell and just relished the chance to talk with other adults.  Until they started quilting and got serious about the task - then it was just work.  Sometimes if I have spent too much time alone I will talk to Dan for about an hour without even needing him to respond except for his classic minimalist "hm".

Anyway, the problem with human contact is that everyone is so screwed up.  If I could be an extrovert with all the well-adjusted people out there (all two of you) it would be clear to everyone that that is what I am.  But people continue to have feelings and as long as they do I will try to co-regulate everyone around me and while I love to do this and it comes naturally and it is fulfilling sort of to emotionally bond with people at all sorts of extremes, there is a limit to my energy.  This is where my husband, bless him, is so good for me.  He has no extremes, just one solid middle ground.  He is so calm.  If I am not tired that alone drives me crazy as it shouldn't be possible, but most of the time I am tired and so I can just lean in.

Today, however, my kids are tired and leaning in to me and I am trying to balance out their little emotional extremes and be calm myself.  This is the sort of day I like to be able to write.  The question is if anyone should ever see what I write!  Sometimes it is a bit too uncensored.  But then, what is the point of  a blog if I am censoring myself all over the place.  The whole idea is that there is an audience that I cannot control and if I cannot control the audience, then it does not make sense to try to control the message.

dreaming

February is always the month where I want more animals.  This year it's goats.  We've had goats before, but they were older and the one we bred to milk had this terribly hard udder after kidding.  The vet said it was a caprine arthritis and incurable.  On Valentine's Day when I bought that goat book I found the exact kind of arthritis and turns out he was right.  Although he said it may have something to do with our soil and this book said it was genetic and so any offspring would likely also get it.  So we gave up on goats as we couldn't very well change our soil but now I'm thinking if we get young new stock from a breeder who can be trusted we will likely be okay. Anyway, I think that goats would be great on our land which is 70% bush and scrubby bush at that now that it's been burnt and flooded and tornadoed (those are other stories).  Of course, like any idea I have this one would just spiral out of control.  To take advantage of our land we need to fence it and of course fencing goats in is a pretty serious undertaking.  And it's not like I have any illusions about making money on anything like that anymore.  It would just be a great source of meat and milk and entertainment.  A few chickens which will happen this spring and we will have a lot less to spend at Superstore, which I detest.

I'm also eagerly awaiting spring and riding season this year.  Last year I did the bare minimum of riding as moving ended up being so all-consuming.  This year I can't wait to take Jetta out.  She's turning 4 and is a Thoroughbred/Percheron and now I believe some Morgan.  Very social and feisty but visibly growing up.  I think that she will be okay on the trails if Dan goes along with good old Chess who I believe will be turning 20 or 21.  I can never exactly remember her age and always have to work it out by when I graduated from high school and where I was when she was given to me.  Also another story.  However she's a great horse that has done a bit of everything and is starting to get stiff but still loves a good trail ride.  I am really hoping not to be so busy with whatever combination of work I am doing by spring that I can't enjoy the Attic because the last 11 years have been very consumed with all-out parenting.  Now that our kids have entered that glorious mid-childhood phase I want to enjoy all the stuff I have been putting off for so long, as well as doing things with them too of course.  So I'm going to garden, write, design a website, continue to develop Attic Therapy in new and interesting directions, ride horses, train horses, and also be the perfect attentive mom and home maker.  Ha ha.

Good morning

It is slowly getting light outside and I can see the horses dimly through a lot of ice fog.  It's minus 25 but nice inside here as the wood stove has been going cheerfully for a couple of hours.  I'm off to work soon and feeling more settled than I have in a while, probably just because I've had a nice long quiet morning.  Heidi is still asleep and my two sons are at sleepovers this February break. Dan is off getting the car fixed.

I love reading my Bible in front of the fire in the morning.  The first cup of coffee (first of two that I allow myself most days) is so good and I need that infusion of quietness before the day crowds in on me like a sensory avalanche.

Here comes Dan and so here we go.

Right and left

May 23, 1998

Chances

branch

skeletal against the light

Choices 

brush

fingerlike but out of sight

Days and nights

and a waning moon

a tilting planet

a rent cocoon

Caught or falling

awake I dream

Madness in the pattern round me

Serenity in an upper stream

Lightning quivers, winks and dies

Gravity has pulled me down here

roots my muscles

Time flies.

This poem keeps running through my head these days.  I wrote it back when Seth was one and I was agonizing over work and home and all those balance of life things that I'm still agonizing about.  I know it makes very little sense but it is exactly how the inside of my head looks right now.  Somehow writing down the chaotic mess inside me has always made the chaos easier to bear.

Anyway, part of the problem is the switching back and forth from the right side of my brain which is all images and intuition and feelings and colours, and the left side of the brain which is science and rational thinking and evidence-based and problem-solving in the conventional manner and scoring all the standardized tests I administer.  I like both parts of me but they get in awful arguments sometimes.  And then I really need a vacation from my head.  The thing I like so much about Attic Therapy is the chance to use both sides of me cooperatively.  Working with kids who don't express themselves verbally (at least not well) means that I need that intuition and nonverbal perception.  But dealing with parents and other stakeholders - the health care system, the education system, and funding agencies, means using logic and verbal reasoning quite a bit to explain the other stuff.  So it's all good but somewhat confusing.

Writing a blog - well, I feel like I need to pick a side.  And either one won't be honest.  So I have been mulling over all weekend whether I can be honest enough to use both voices.  I don't know yet.  But as I haven't come down on one side or the other at the moment that's what I guess I'm going to do.  Share the chaos!

Here I go

The question is, can who I am be separated from what I do?

The Attic is a mix of what I do and who I think I am.  It is the 70 acres our family lives on, smack in the middle of Saskatchewan, near Crutwell which still exists on most maps even though the hamlet is a slight interruption in the miles of mostly burnt forest around us.  It is the atmosphere of the place - dusty, old with the signs of many previous occupants tucked in unexpected corners, queerly shaped and poorly housekept, but with its own untidy beauty.  It is the concept of a spare space, outside of daily life but still joined to it in a treasure-hunting, archive-storing, secret-keeping sort of way as well as the idea that guests may find a place here unlike a typical guest room on the main floor.  Elijah was hosted on the roof which could be a kind of attic.  The Attic suggests old-fashioned, forgotten but valuable, sunlight slanting in separating dust particles, and time standing still.  These are all some of the essence of where we are and what we like to do and who we hope to be.

Attic Therapy, on the other hand, is an attempt to bring the exciting research, theories of the mind, theories of motor learning, theories of sensory processing, and theories of human development and human occupation and apply them solidly in the real world.  The world of cats and horses and gravel hills and sloughs with leeches and willows and sky and clouds and weather and trees and sand and growing things.  My husband, who is a physiotherapist as well as a father of three, and myself, an occupational therapist and mother of the same three, started this business two years ago in an attempt to fill a need for kids with complex disabilities to find a way to experience life with more depth and meaning and fun and interaction with people who loved them.  This blog is about me trying to put all these ideas together - figuring out constantly the boundaries between myself and others, between what can and can't be done, and what is and isn't work.

I am generally overthinking and often overtalking.  I am hoping this blog might start a conversation that will continue to sweep out the dust and create more usable space in the funny contours of my life and profession.    At the bottom, my philosophy is that what we do can create the treasures we are looking for - a very occupational therapist idea, but definitely challenging for someone juggling as many roles as most women do.  I think that doing with our children molds them, shapes their brains, and shapes ours.  But doing what, exactly?  And what is the balance between sacrifice and sanctuary?