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Oh hey, that's right, I have a blog!

The last time I wrote here was 4 years ago.  Jeez Louise.  Since then, kiddo has finished up homeschooling high school and moved on to taking college classes, 45 has been elected, impeached, and lost his bid for re-election, we're 8+ months into a global pandemic, I am embracing the transition into cronedom.  

We're getting ready to shift into another stay at home order as the numbers surge.  We're working on getting the basement set up as an apartment for kiddo, I'm working on cultivating a couple havens for myself (my backyard fortress and my upstairs room), I'm looking for remote work.  I'm dreaming of a van (Ford Transit Passenger Van, baby!) so I have the freedom to travel wherever and whenever I like, knowing I have everything I need with me.  I'm closing up my outdoor garden for the winter and opening up possibilities for some indoor growing.

Our extended family responsibilities and caretaking are growing, but I don't yet know how much I want to write about that here.  But I at least want to acknowledge that that's a huge chunk of what's going on with me.

I don't know what I'm going to do with this blog.  I suppose we'll find out.

Getting on with things

What I wrote to some friends, earlier this week:
"For the second or third night in a row I've had this strange, hard-to-put-my-finger-on feeling. Sometimes it's a quiet, subtle lightness, sometimes it's almost a giddiness. I don't know if it's contentment, happiness, freedom, self-sufficiency... What a sweet, intoxicating feeling it is, whatever it is. It feels like cool summer rain."

I am happy. I still cry most days. I miss Grandma, and missing her so acutely reminds me of how much I still miss Grandpa. One of the reasons I decided to leave the school was so I could spend more time with her (among others). I wish we'd been given that chance.

But I get up in the morning and ease into my day. I appreciate my cup of tea, and the sunlight coming in my window, and the cozy blanket on my futon, and the possibilities of the day before me. I spend some time on paperwork and other home-administrative tasks, and some time on decluttering (I've checked the first three decluttering projects off my list already, within a week of wrapping up my time with SMC), and a couple times a week we see friends, both mine and Sarah's. I restarted a batch of sourdough. Tonight we devoured my first experiment with excess-starter-baking (whenever you feed sourdough you have to discard a bunch of it. There are recipes especially for using up the excess starter, so you don't have to just toss it).  It turned out nicely. A subtle sourdough flavor, that we could easily tweak in a savory or sweet direction.

Sarah and I have started up our weekly homeschool check-ins again. How different they are from when we were last doing them regularly, 3 or so years ago. Back then her learning was self-directed but I was very much her education consultant -- she would tell me what her intentions/goals/priorities were, I would collect resources and suggest a plan, she would give feedback on the plan, and we'd tweak it until it seemed like something that would work for both of us (with the emphasis on whether it worked for her, but my thoughts still a big part of the conversation and decision). At this point she's transitioning to managing her own high school experience entirely. I asked for the weekly check-in, and I suggested the form of it (reflect on last week, review our self-selected priorities and projects, set intentions for the week). We're coming to the meeting as peers -- she has her priorities and projects, and I have mine. I'm continuing to actively model the skills I want her to develop and the questions I think she should be asking, but the actual prioritizing, choosing resources, and setting pace and direction... That's all up to her. For the summer, her priorities are relaxing, seeing friends, working on her comic-creation, and catching up on Duolingo (because they've started sending her sad owls when she doesn't keep up with her Norwegian lessons). My priorities are settling in to our new/old routines, self-care, making music, and starting my self-ed habit up again.

 

Sumer Is Icumen In

I woke up this morning feeling as if summer had started.

Not that far off -- my personal summer season begins immediately after kiddo's birthday, which will be in less than a week.  And we'll be getting a taste of summer today, bringing a picnic in to Queens to visit with a few dear relatives and enjoy the extended sunlight of these late-Spring days.

Today would have been my grandparents' 70th anniversary.  I've been thinking a lot about their 50th, which happened just a year or so after Joe and I got married.   We loaned them our cake topper as part of the decorations.  The granddaughters all dressed up in Andrews Sisters-inspired outfits and sang a handful of our grandparents' favorite songs, then led the family in a singalong.  For Grandpa's 100th we skipped the performance but did lead a singalong in the backyard.  I think, often, of that day, and how much joy was in that yard, and how many folks there hadn't seen each other in years.

I think about finding more opportunities for joyful gatherings.

I'm thinking, also, of how I spent the summer the last time I had recently separated from a school.  The intensity of my solo roadtrip to Montana.  The rawness and fragility of my body and spirit, from how hard I'd pushed myself, trying to keep that school open, and feeling such a sense of deep personal failure at not having been able to.

How much better and more satisfying this experience has been.  How much healthier my boundaries and self-care have been, this time around.  What a strong team we built.  How proud I am of my work at SMC, even as I'm conscious of things I could have done better, wish I'd done differently.

It's two weeks to the end of the school year.  Bittersweet, bittersweet.  I've been working on letting go in bits and pieces -- supporting the staff and the students, but letting my own opinions about things drift into the background a bit.  It doesn't matter what I think about the calendar, I'm not the one who's going to need to deal with it.  I'm glad I'm the one designing the closing ceremony for the school year -- the ceremony itself will offer an opportunity for reflection and closure, but the act of *designing* that ceremony is deeply meaningful to me.

I haven't been writing as much here as I'd expected to, about all the prep I'm doing for my post-school life.  The preparations are continuing apace, but things got busy, and then got sad, and I haven't felt much like writing.

But I've been working away -- helping kiddo make progress on her room, getting a bunch of totally unglamorous but absolutely necessary paperwork done, starting to find new way to connect with people (including slowly starting up a letter-writing practice), beginning to organize our home lives the way I have organized my work life, overhauling the budget (which allowed us to pay off the car loan early, and we're now deciding which other loan to start paying off faster, using the money that freed up).

For the next month we're mostly just planning to maintain the progress we've made, while we wrap up the school year and celebrate kiddo's 15th birthday.  And then, to sink into the work of the summer.  I'm so ready to sink my teeth into the domestic sphere again and just conquer the hell out of it.

I like making plans.  Planning my new routines, planning my garden, planning holiday meals, planning all the things I want to learn next year.

The people in my life can sometimes find this...  overwhelming.

When we realized that we were going to be shifting back to full-time homeschooling next year, I started bubbling over with extremely enthusiastic questions about what books/activities/field trips/videos she might be interested in exploring next year.   I very quickly realized I was going to have to keep a very tight rein on myself or I'd wind up seriously stressing Kiddo out.  Every time I wanted to make a new suggestion or ask a new question about next year, I'd write it down in my notebook, or email it to myself, or search for info online and bookmark it.   I asked the occasional question when possibilities popped up that she'd need to register for now, but after a few of those I let her know that I was doing my best not to overwhelm her with questions and asked her to let me know when she was ready to talk about next year.

It has been so hard.  I have been *so* good.   And today I was rewarded!

She bounded into the room, this afternoon, to tell me that she'd been reading one of her books on comic-creation and is feeling really excited about next year and is full of ideas about wanting to immerse herself in comic-creation, US politics, economics, Norwegian, and math (later on she added mythology and literature to the list).   I asked how I can best support her and she said she'll be looking for suggestions for great books on those subjects, and help not overscheduling herself.  Which means...  we get to start making plans!

Odds and Ends

Even while aspects of perimenopause are extremely challenging, there are also so many things going well.

My new yoga routine is awesome. The new evening routines are *phenomenal*. We're making such great progress with our home repair projects. Our RPG this weekend kicked ass (I killed something like 5 magic spiders and got a chance to explore who my character is during her off-hours. It was such fun!). I'm sticking to my healthy breakfast and dinner plans easily (lunch is hit or miss, depending on how well I stocked the fridge over the weekend). My usual "Learning in a Student-Led Setting" spiel at this week's Open House went really well. I'm behind on email a ridiculous amount, oh my God, but I should be able to catch up in the next few days, now that school's over for the week.

I'm also really appreciating certain aspects of my current stage of life. I'm halfway through a root canal and haven't been thrilled with this dentist's manner and judgement (my usual guy doesn't do root canals and this is the first time I've tried this new person) but thought I could deal with it to at least get finished with this one process. Nope. I went back today for the second half, and she was patronizing, defensive, dismissive of my concerns and was doing her best to run roughshod over my clearly stated treatment decisions. So I walked out. That is something I would never have been able to do in my 20s. Go, 44 year old me! Of course, now I need to spend some time tomorrow finding a new root canal person so I can finish this damn procedure.

Next week is Spring Break, and I have very few plans so I'm making plans with myself to sink deeply into relaxation and not to add anything else to my schedule (except possibly a root canal appointment). I took a week or so off FB (except for doing work publicity stuff there) and then found that if I made some careful choices about how and when I use it, I can visit occasionally in a way that doesn't make me nuts. But I think limiting my online time as much as possible during Spring Break is feeling like the right choice.

 

Stick a sock in it

Is it possible to take a retreat from other people's opinions entirely?  I find myself responding, recently, to any opinions expressed in absolutes or generalizations or in any way expressed as if they were objectively True (as opposed to "What I liked about X was..." or "I find myself drawn to the candidate because of their position on Y")  with an immediate, visceral "Who the hell asked you?  Keep it to yourself, you old gasbag!"   I've never been a fan of the conversational style in which people make grand, sweeping statements or smirking, overconfident pronouncements or folks who express unsolicited opinions instead of asking illuminating questions, but this is a whole new level of complete and utter lack of patience with it.   I wish I could lure everyone I know (back) over to the slower-paced world of blogging (not that the world of blogging is free of gasbaggery, but it seems to have a lower percentage of it).  [note: this is not a reference to any individual -- it's the internet as a whole, right now]

In other news, my life overhaul is proceeding apace.  I've been tracking it with various paper journals and photos. Perhaps this weekend I'll put them together into a post here.

Short form:  Got the house back to baseline; morning routines are going well, evening routines have been overhauled and the new ones are *excellent*; got in 2 of the needed medical visits (they're all general checkup things, other than 2 root canals); anxiety and other perimenopausal stuff continue to be a struggle to deal with; seedlings are thriving and it's time to get them in the ground; stumbled on my plan not to volunteer for any more tasks at work (volunteered to work on the hiring committee because it felt like an important part of responsibly wrapping up my time at the school) but I think I can limit that job to about 15 hours of work, which is acceptable; this weekend I expect to wrap up processing the pile of paperwork so I can flip it from "in progress" to "maintenance".   I want to make more time to see friends and finish up the kitchen and paperwork stuff so that I can get to the next layer of tasks.

I can almost see Spring from here

What I'm up to:

Reading: Neuroscience articles. It's obnoxiously difficult to find articles on our best guesses about consciousness or cognition that are at an appropriate reading level for the kids in my class and that also make their case at all persuasively. 

Listening to:
Two of the songs we've been singing in Glee Club:

Watching:
Loads and loads of Top Chef. It's been the background noise to our evening reading and gaming, recently. Hail, Caesar, which was a whole lot of fun.

Doing:
Planning for next year -- both at school and at home. Visiting my parents in the North Country, going to the Schenectady Science Museum and playing Scrabble. Starting nearly from scratch with getting back into all my good habits.

Eating/Cooking:
Geez. Absolutely nothing interesting. We went to a pretty nice Thai restaurant in Schenectady. At home we've been eating whatever was easiest to make -- lots of pasta and salad.

Something that went particularly well, recently:
Last week we had a visit from an elder in the free school community. My classes have been going well. We had friends over to make music. I had a lovely visit with A. And a wonderful visit with Grandma.

Something that went less well:
The house is a wreck. I can't seem to get myself back on track with stocking the fridge. Some symptoms of depression and anxiety that I'm tracking, to see if they're an anomaly or the start of a trend I need to reverse. A bit of a stomach bug, this week.

Something I'm grateful for:
Confirmation of my continued good health (went for a stress test onaccounta some annoying symptoms -- everything looks good).

Something I'm thinking about:
A variety of ways to simplify my life.

Something I'm looking forward to:
Feeling better. I'm tired of feeling queasy.