Space For Jean

Energy

I have more of it now than I did a while back. What a relief. It took effort to get there though. Who would have thought? Not only did it take rest, it took effort to get energy. I had to use some to get some. I lost quite a bit having cancer and being treated for cancer. I became terribly used to operating at a very slow pace. But post-treatment found me bumping into walls as I tried to ramp up (see this post).

At first I thought it was still part of the recovery process. But now I think it may be something different. I think I'm in training, sort of. I'm in training to work longer and maybe a little faster. I'm building my endurance. It's a very physical thing. Like runners who train to run farther or faster or both. It's hard and then it gets easier with repetition. I SO cannot relate to this as I'm not physically oriented at all.

The part that throws me is that it shows up emotionally. I get very down and depressed and don't behave well.

Will I ever get it?

One Week at a Time

This week went a little more smoothly, especially the part where I come to the end of it and organize for the next week. It's not even noon on Saturday and I have figured out the menus for the week, balanced my checkbook, and gone to all three grocery stores. It's not a competition or anything. I look forward to the weekend as a time to do less and be less under the gun. So if I haven't finished this part of the process I have it to look forward to, which I don't. Now it's done.

These organizational processes are partly a way to clear my head. If I don't do them, some part of me will anyway, all the time. And that background chatter keeps me from relaxing for one thing. It also keeps me from focusing my energy on real problems. This applies to the work I do with Heather as well. If some of it isn't just routine (e.g. going through the chapters of a workbook week after week) it's too much to organize. I don't want to create brand new lesson plans every week for four academic subjects. That would kill me! Not that I haven't tried, mind you.

I think I'm probably pretty late in the game with this stuff anyway. I usually am. It takes me a while to take in all the details of what I need to do and then stream line them so they make sense to me. At any rate, this year I have made improvements.

I should add that none of this has actually led to joy for me. My original ambition two years ago was to find my way to happiness. It does seem to be rather hard to do if your path is cluttered with jobs and responsibilities for which you have no plan other than to stop each time you bump into one and deal with it. What a mess that has been. The jobs often overlap, take a variety of knowledge and creativity to solve and if I planned ahead I could scoop a bunch of them up at once and take care of them. But joy? Satisfaction, maybe. A reduction in stress, maybe. But not joy yet. That will take more time.

 

Crashing

OK, I crashed. Complete meltdown, tears, exhaustion, wipe out. Striving to do more, be more, carry my head up, cover the bases, keep things moving has this effect on me. It's a thing I've been doing and learning about since the cancer treatments. They drained me of physical and emotional energy like nothing I had experienced before. It was a bit of a surprise to find that when I recovered from them it still happened! Not as frequently and I do recover a little faster but I still fall into a huge pot hole that only doing nothing of consequence, or requiring any creativity or problem solving, will resolve.

It's more than a little humbling.

I took a day to do only things that didn't require thought, kept to myself, read, sat, recouped. I feel better today. From now on I'll try to act a little less frantically, pacing myself again, like I did before; wish like anything I could see the signs before the meter goes into the red. My progress, I guess, will be measured by the length of the interval and the ensuing trauma when it happens. How fast can I keep from inflating it into a national catastrophe and just stop to rest?

Sooner rather than later I hope. Sigh.

Reorg - Week 2

My first week back in the swing of the things went really well. I enjoyed sharing some of my steps with you and patted myself on the back for being such an organized mom. Then there was Week 2.

I'm not going to say I was disorganized. Things went off as planned. But I had three separate appointments that were just for me, squeezed into the tightness of our days and before I knew it, my planning Friday was given over to other things. My Saturday was spent doing something fun and away from the house so I couldn't do a quick makeup the next day. So, I am punting. That's life in the 21st century.

That said, if I didn't already have these planning processes in place this kind of thing would have completely undone me. However, I do have processes in place and I implemented them, though not in the order or way I would want. But they got done! That's something I feel very good about.

The week ahead looks to be packed as well. We have little windows of time sprinkled through the week, largely eaten up by my appointments last week. I often wish I could fill them with some literature sharing with Heather. Instead this week she will get a watercolor lesson with a friend which is all good. What I could do if only . . .

I keep working on getting there. Better to have more than we need than to run dry of ideas and sit and twiddle our thumbs.

Shopping

Heather and I rarely get a chance to go shopping together. It's not an activity I enjoy just because I don't much care for the in-store experience. But with a growing teen it's frequently necessary to replace clothing that just doesn't work any more. But where to fit that kind of activity into the schedule? It's hard. But we did take some time today to look for a few things. It was fun to do this with her.

During our excursion she told me that she observes among some of her girlfriends a real friction with their mothers. We talked a little about what it takes to have a good relationship with anyone, let alone with ones mom.  How the responsibility for that relationship falls on both people. And we mused on the peer pressure that makes some girls who would otherwise love to be with their moms disdain them because that's how all their other girlfriends treat their moms.

Sometimes personalities in a family just don't mesh. Sometimes they run afoul of the pressures from outside. We're lucky. We've always believed that the relationship between all three of us was more important than just about anything else. And it shows now when Heather is moving into the strange vortex of adolescence. I'm so very pleased that she still wants to be with me. I'm not naive to think there will never be a moment in which she isn't just a little embarrassed by her frumpy, clueless mother. However I'm pretty confident that she respects me enough not to let me know when that moment happens, at least not until it's long gone.

Keeping Track

I am so IN to keeping track these days. I mentioned the home school tracking program I used before. I have also gone a little wild tracking my checking account. I've applied the same level of attention to other things. I am in a committee at church that supports the youth program. I'm the administrative head but I am not qualified to do more than that. I tried Google Calendar to allow all the members to see what was ahead of us as we plan activities. I don't know if anyone else looks at the calendar but I do try to keep it updated. It's an easy tool to use. I'm also a bit obsessive with my own handwritten calendar at home. I write down everything I need to do or it will be forgotten, that's for sure.

There are so many threads of activities going on in our lives. As much as I would like to have a routine that could be easily memorized it rarely turns out that way. Because of my cancer treatments I have regular doctor appointments and test-taking appointments that have to be squeezed in and around homeschooling and classes. I am getting older and need to generally go in to check on things I didn't think would ever be a concern, like blood pressure. Heather certainly has her activities and needs. Gosh, think we should maybe buy her some clothes this year? I wonder if she's 5'9" yet? Those sleeves do look sort of short on her. I hate going to the mall. And groceries! Oh my goodness I have to start a list.

Keeping track is one way to keep my blood pressure under control. Not doing much left me at my whit's end when things suddenly needed to be done and there was no time. Or punting when it came to either a meal or what to wear for a special occasion. So I will continue to use the tools that I come across to make sure we get as much of it in as we can with the least amount of stress.

Learning to do Things Over Again

I did not realize how big a hole our dog would leave. Every day I feel the oddness of the house as we put our pre-Christmas routine back into play. She was old and slept most of the time. Apparently not as much as I thought because there is a strange silence where there used to be the clatter of her nails on the wood floor and the jingle of her collar when she shook her head.

She was a golden retriever and so I have lots of golden hair about the house. I managed to keep the floors mostly clear of it but I've been working to clean up my car and her travel bed in it and her regular bed in our room. It makes me sad to do these things even though it used to gripe me that I had to deal with the dirt.

Everything we have done this week has this odd self-consciousness about it. It's like we are starting over doing things in a new way. Every event is cast in a new light. The most noticeable was when the gardner came yesterday. There was no one to bark fiercely at him when he blew the leaves away from the doors. No, the most noticeable was NOT taking her with us to the art center.

Heather is at a drawing class there today. She gets a lot out of this class designed for adults. She just makes the cut age-wise but her classmates are all much older than her. It's a good thing she has lots of experience with older people because she holds her own quite well with them.

Wednesdays are a little light due to this long afternoon class. Heather worked on her math this morning and we did some reading of a novel. Math used to be torture but she turned a corner last spring and now it's just regular work. Reading any literature together is pure joy. We try to do that as often as we can during the week. We read it aloud. I used to do all the reading but this year we trade off. For some reason we are always reading long books together. So it will take a long time to read the whole book. Good thing we both have stacks of books on our nightstands to read alone at night.

Tracking it!

Last fall I decided to get organized about Heather's homeschooling records. Next year will technically be high school. It will matter what she does and how much time she spends doing it. It thought I would get a leg up and start tracking all that now. I found a free software download that allows me to do this. On top of that it has helped me to organize how I implement the week's schedule as well as keep track of the outcome.

Yesterday afternoon I input how we would spend the next three months. (I finally learned how to copy/paste in this program.) When we do the lesson or activity I've set up I go back in and show it completed. There are reports I can generate from this data if I want them. I really like this method. It has taken a lot of stress out of the process for me. Additionally, we now keep printed copies of all the writing Heather does and any worksheets I have her complete. We have notebooks for math (e-books that I print out) and a divided notebook for the other subjects (currently expository writing, Latin, economics and WWII). It makes us all feel good to see all that's been covered in the past year.

Shakespeare

School is back in session at our house. Heather has long insisted that Monday be a sleepy-don't-get-dressed kind of day. So I ease into the week with limited requirements for her. Wish I were that lucky. Today, while she works on math I'll be looking at a new program we'll start next week on Shakespeare. I took advantage of a free educational resource to get a unit on Shakespeare from the National Endowment for the Arts. It was quite a large packet of books and CD's. I also bought a resource book on Shakespeare recommended by other homeschoolers.

We are finishing up the great economics unit that we started in the fall and I'm all aglow at the idea of working on literature. We have a lot of fun when we do. We read "Hamlet" together last year, alternating parts. But we didn't do much more than taste the Bard. This time we'll be delving into him as a person and an author as well as nibbling at all kinds of works he produced.

I hope for the best when I start something like this but I'll have to get back to you on just how well it goes. They don't always pan out.

Taking Down Christmas

This Christmas was a little less festive than previous years. We held back a little in our household decorations due to time and pressure to work at other things. The weather actually kept us homebound a lot and we couldn't be tempted by new things in the stores to use for decorations. Our dog's illness book-ended the whole season and occupied quite a lot of my mental space.

That said, Heather and I have developed quite a routine about the whole process over the years. Even though we did not use a live tree this year and added the extra work of taking down an artificial tree (we did manage to repackage it in the original box - yay!) it took very little time. I do not have memories like this with my own mom. I'm not even sure how much I helped. And mom wasn't an active partner in these kinds of projects, more a silent partner. Heather and I problem-solve, split up the tasks and get it done very efficiently. It helps now that she's so much taller than I am and can reach the top of the tree.

Anyway, it's done and Christmas is officially over, as Heather would say. Time to move into the new year.