Walking Backwards

In an effort to inspire myself to create, I went out this evening with a group of mamas to a local craft studio. It is actually a regular gathering that I had heretofore been unable to attend and was quite eager to break down the door, so to speak. I'm not regularly a very social person, but I felt an affinity with the spirit of the group and decided to give it a try. Originally, the group was formed as sort of sounding board for women who had felt their creative energies sapped by the demands of life and family, for women who had fallen out of doing what they love. Not that I've completely stopped being creative, but it is always a challenge to balance my evolving life and family with the things I do just for me. I really enjoy painting and sewing, but it has been kind of hard to fit in lately. I also wanted to bounce off some ideas of how to incorporate art into the lives of our children.

The ladies I met were warm and welcoming. The group had only been around for a couple of months, though, and still hadn't settled into its groove yet. We mainly spent time talking about our lives and only briefly touched on art and children. I didn't even manage the question about balance. I'm hoping that as the group develops that it. I also didn't know that I was supposed to bring something to work on! It makes sense, but that requires forethought I suppose. I'm going to the next one, but I'll bring knitting and wine and not have such lofty ideals. I'll be content to do my thing and have people to talk to while I do it.

I do wonder, though, how some people do it. How do mothers write with the small ones wanting to play dress-up pirate? How do you paint when all you can focus on is the overwhelming desire to take a nap yourself? Is there a secret? I'd also like to know how to inspire in my son this overwhelming desire to make and do. Yesterday I spoke about something similar. I suppose that balance, more than anything has been on my mind.

I've been following the new voraciously the past few days because of the search for a missing family I found out about through several blogs I read regularly and a friend who is one of the family's clients. Tuesday I refreshed my news pages every half-hour anxiously awaiting any updates on the father who had trekked out to find help and was adrift in the dense wilderness in the backwoods of Oregon. He was found this afternoon. He did not make it. I feel such sorrow for the wife and two daughters he left behind. I hope that they are able to find comfort tonight.

Lost family in Oregon

I just got off of the phone with one of my teachers. My Latin professor is a very nice old man who is utterly confused as to why I am asking him questions about Latin. It is quite frustrating. I finally got in touch with him and am back to where I started in regards to my translations. I also am quite confused about some of the points of grammar, but I don't understand the concepts of predicates and nominatives in English anyway, so I'm not surprised. I have a companion book to my text that I am reading in tandem, but I don't think it is written for hopeless cases like myself. It is also hard to learn these things when your teacher avoids direct questions and chooses to wax intellectual about Ezra Pound. Amazingly, I'm still at the top of my class, but I don't know what that means because it is debatable if my professor has graded my exams.

Right now I am suffering the end of the school year funk whereby I question whether or not it is a good idea for me to be in school right now. Should I spend this time with my son who is only going to be young once or should I work on my own personal development, continuing school and advancing my education? Really, it is a lot harder of a question than I thought it would be. I never thought, before having my son, that ever sublimating my own enrichment and getting myself closer to a degree that will set me up to help the community would ever be a contest. But it is, I put off going to school until Nicholas was two and able to tell me that he was okay with me leaving, now I feel like, even though he is fine staying with friends, like I should be more present in his life. The time we do have together now he has to share with my homework or volunteer work or my constant distraction. I have to say that I don't know how working parents do it. I only do caretaking part time and am in school only three days a week, but it seems like there isn't enough left of me after all of that is over. Not that I don't think that that isn't a lot, but I just feel like I set this up so that I'd have plenty of time with my son and I don't. I just don't.

Wow am I sounding whiny lately! I'm sorry, I don't want to be, but I had to get that off of my chest. I'm really grateful for everything, but sometimes it all seems so overwhelming. I think it is mostly frustration with this class and that I'll be eager to start school after the intersession. Mostly frustration with this class. Down with those Latins :)

Can it only be day four of this holiday writing spree that I'm already feeling a little deflated, the rush of words beginning to ebb away? Surely it can't be? I have nothing to write about today that I can think of. I went to school and came home and made soup and ate and read about a missing family in Oregon obsessively, but I haven't been in it. Today, my mind has taken a vacation from my body and I've just kind of drifted through it. So that leaves me nothing to write about today. I looked at the writing prompt on holidalies, but I don't really feel motivated one way or another about holiday music (but I am rather enjoying the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack in my car). I asked Joe and he looked up from his work with a glazed expression and just shrugged. Nicholas is asleep having driven us crazy enough for one evening, so he is of no help. I have nothing to say. I should be ranting about my class which ends in a week and a half, but I can't even bring myself to get motivated to complain (or study for that matter) which is a tell-tale sign that I am checked out for a bit. I hope I return to my body tomorrow, I have a lot to do and I know I have a lot to say, but for now there is a vacancy in the part of my mind where inspiration usually resides.

So for now, I am including a list of Christmas stuff I have to make. Maybe this will inspire me either to write or to get up off of the computer and do at least these few things:

- an extra long scarf for a close friend needs to be knitted
- three pairs of little boy's pajama pants must be sewn
- two bonnets made for two new baby girls
- an apron with special gnome fabric for nico's care giver and my close friend
- bags, bags, and more bags with all my left over scrap fabric
- my dia de los muertos quilt border as a gift to myself
- a star wars ear flap had for a friend who will actually wear it

We're back from our little weekend trip to Houston and are exhausted. My Mother-in-law's parting words to us rang clearly through the cold and windy afternoon "See you in three weeks!" Really, I miss my home.

You see I'm a homebody. I know it isn't the fashionable thing to be, but I don't mind. I like curling up in my bed to watch television shows with my husband on a television that I know how to work. I don't even mind that we have to give up the super-loaded cable package that we can get at the families' houses. I like knitting on my couch listening to CDs and not worrying that I should be helping to do the dishes. I like that I can leave my dishes in the sink until the house is quiet and I can run them under the hot, soapy water at my own pace and be lulled by their mediative clinks and by the the slow methodical nature of the task. I like that my son can climb on the furniture and not be scolded and that he can find his own juice cup and fill it and take it where he wants. I like our house. I like it's smooth wood floors and weird chonchoidial nature. My favorite things are in my house and so are my favorite pasttimes. I like it here. For some reason, though, I shun my house like the childhood blanket you always used to carry around, but are now too old to be seen with it. Whenever I fill out personal interest forms online or on the first day of class for a professor who I barely know and want to impress, I never admit my true and abidding house love. Under interests I alway write travel and museum hopping, art and literature. All of these are things I enjoy, I love Italy and the Museum of Glass, but really, I always come back to this place, it is where I feel most comfortable, most like myself. I miss my house now when all we seem to do is spend time away from it. I hope it knows how much I appreciate it.

Going out of town to visit our in-laws is a regular occurence in my life. Joe, my husband, has a large catholic family and someone is always getting married or having a birthday or graduation or getting sick. Then there are the aforementioned holidays. So we're here again, this close to Christmas, when I should be frantically searching for gifts for my family, who arrives in less than two weeks now, or cleaning the mess that the crowd left behind on Thanksgiving that I haven't caught up with yet or preparing for finals since my school does not understand the concept of dead week. Instead we're here celebrating my nephew's 3rd birthday, which I wouldn't miss, but really feel I should be doing something else. I have guilt. I am napping during the day instead of cracking my books. I am sitting at the table listening to the multi-level marketing spiel that my mother-in-law is doing (I even bought some lip exfoliant from her). I'm eating a lot of things I shouldn't because that is what you do when you're celebrating with your family. There is a lot of gossip and laughing.

My family is small. My mom, my dad, and my twin brother are basically all of the family that I really spend time with. My mom's brothers are insane, really, and my dad's sisters have never really been on the same page with us, having totally separate lives from ours and not interested in sharing. So, being part of a large family now is so foreign to me. I was thrust into involvement and curiosity and interest. I wasn't used to having so many people care about you at one time. When Nicholas was born, we were overrun by flowers and calls and gifts by people we barely knew, but who were related by either blood or association. My son was born into a world of great-aunts, godmothers, and second cousins twice-removed. I'm glad he has that, too. I think it is something I missed in life, that bond that you share that transcends generations, that connects you only by the fact that you shared the same lineage. People with whom you share the same traditions.

While I think the intent behind the holiday season is to bring out the best in every individual, I don't feel that the reality of it works out that way. Expectations for ourselves and for everyone else just raises frustrations and fosters an environment for disappointment. Expectations lead us to do things we don't really want to do and probably won't enjoy just to satisfy someone else's idea of an 'ideal' holiday. Yes, this is the year we visit the in-laws. This year we drive for hours to celebrate Christmas in three locales over the course of four days. It really isn't fun. It saps us of our energy and leaves our son in a fit by the end. It does not leave us in the Christmas spirit. Worse is that the preparation for this has already begun; the phone calls back and forth, the wish lists sent, the last minute corrections after you already ordered something, the decision by the in-laws to substitute the loud, battery-eating, electronic game monster instead of the requested board game, the patching of the air-mattresses. Already. Our calm and quiet lives disrupted for the consumer holiday that Christmas has become. But it is important to them, to the in-laws, that it happen this way. That they can show their love in the manner that they grew up with and that they want to rekindle in their grandchildren. So I forgive them and sigh and drink a little more wine in the evenings. The trade-off reward is the phone call the week after from the exhausted, but happy mother-in-law who tells me how wonderful my four-year old is and how much he looks like his father. I only have to make it through. So here come the holidays. Brace yourselves.