Peace + quiet

I spent a precious 33.5 hours alone at home this weekend. Not that I'm counting or anything.

I've been trying to finish up a big project for months, my first solo program evaluation of a nonprofit organization. It's been a long and interesting (but only to me...I'll spare you the details) process but with the kids home full time it's been difficult to do the final data analysis and write the report.

The shadow of this expectation started looming large but my hearty procrastination skills rose to the challenge and I kept thinking "I'll get to it tonight, after everyone's in bed"... "I'll get up early in the morning"... "once I read up on this statistical procedure I'll be ready"...and so on. Some projects are just too huge for the usual multi-tasking, chipping-away approach! {Or at least that's what I told myself. Also, I really think I might have late-onset ADD lately. I cannot manage to quiet my brain but flit from project to project, thought to thought without much productivity. Please advise.}

Enter G {husband + father extraordinaire...dadadaDA} who kissed me on the forehead, packed up the kids, and headed to Vermont to camp and cook over a fire and tube down a river. As soon as they left, I decided my fridge needed scrubbing {curse you, productive neglect!} but after that I sat down for seven hours, went to bed, woke up and sat down and worked for eight more. Take that, Procrastination Vader and ADDish bright-shiny-object chaser!

Last year sometime I wrote about my great Grandma's philosophy of occasionally packing up and "going to live with the bears" (or, in my case, sending everyone else to the bears). I think we all need that now and then, whether it's to finish something up or to get a new perspective or to recharge. Even if it's just an hour. Or fifteen minutes.

p.s. It must be in the air right now. Once I resurfaced I read about a couple of others who are taking peace+quiet project vacations, too. I love what Brene says about taking the time and fighting the "who-do-you-think-you-are" thoughts (and I just had an almost identical conversation about success with some of my friends in my PhD program...I'll have to post about that another time). Tara the magnificent also rocked the home quiet while her kids lived with the bears elsewhere for a while.

Declaring bankrupcy

At first I was pretty good about staying on top of things.

Then they just kept coming, faster than I could keep up.

Then came the shameful day when I decided to ignore them entirely. Ignorance is bliss, right?

There was no going back after that. Did they stop? No. The debts kept piling up while my head was planted firmly in the sand.

But now I owe too much! It's hopeless!

Today I declare phone message bankruptcy and wipe the board clean. I hereby absolve myself of any owed messages on my voicemail but, in exchange for the clean slate, I promise to return calls from now on. Ahhhhh....It feels so liberating to come out from under the weight of owed phone calls and ignored callers. Free at last! The shackles have fallen from my...wherever shackles are placed!
I really must apologize to any of you who ever left a message on our answering machine in the last nine months or so. It's very misleading, that message that says "...we'll call you back as soon as we can." Not entirely true. I should have said "...we'll call you back if we ever listen to this message. But it's highly unlikely. Frankly the chances are zero."

It's not you, callers, it's me.

First, I'm not a big phone talker. Love to chat in person, I'll even join in on a good text conversation, but I'm not so great on the phone. I can't hang up fast enough. [I can't count how many times I've told G "...okay...yeah...well, let's talk about this tonight when you get home."]

So when we moved into this house last summer, I noticed that the message indicator on the phone didn't work anymore. I used to come in, glance at the phone, dial in to voicemail and listen. But with no indicator, I could go days without listening to messages and then when I finally checked there would be an insane number: "You have...1498 messages." If you think I proceeded to listen to each and every message, you are sadly wrong. Better people would have done that. Me? I just hung up.

At some point, somebody told one of the kids that our voicemail was full. I was so happy! Now when people called, they wouldn't be able to leave a message and would call back instead. People wouldn't be roaming the country believing that I was spitefully ignoring them! [Quite often I would tell people our phone message system was "broken" and to use my cell phone if they needed to reach me but unfortunately I'm sure there are some people who thought I was giving them the cold shoulder. My shoulders are warm, I promise!]

You might ask why didn't I just cancel our voicemail system? That's a good point. Well, that would involve making a phone call to the phone company, wouldn't it? And, even worse, waiting on the phone for hours! So on and on it went.

Until.

We bought a new phone this last weekend with a built-in answering machine, an old-school solution of listening to the taped messages out loud. It works! It really really works. I listen while I put away the groceries or putter around the kitchen and it's almost like the caller's right there in the room. Sometimes I even talk back. But--so far, fingers crossed, wood knocking--I've returned every single one.

And that's why I had a chocolate banana shake for lunch today. It was Phone Message Bankruptcy celebration day. Feel free to raise a glass in my direction today and join me!

The notebook

The tween/teen years are tricky parenting geography, especially with your oldest child. How much permission to grant, what are the kids ready for (and you! what are you ready for?), how to balance freedom + protection???

So here's an idea we tried: Years ago when Lauren was around 9, we started a notebook conversation between us. At the time we were in a rut where I seemed to be finding much more negative than positive things to say to her (of course now I can't remember the reasons or the issues or why they seemed so important to me...) and she was getting moodier in that hint-of-adolescence way. I had a bunch of blank books so one day I grabbed one, wrote her a note in it, and left it under her pillow. Then she wrote back.

It's been a crucial thing for our relationship. Recently I got it back out again on an evening when neither of us could really understand where the other was coming from. We both sound better in writing at those times. Friendlier and more calm.

Our guidelines are that we can say anything or ask anything, we won't correct or critique, and (my personal commitment to myself as the purported adult in this whole thing) I try to say positive things each time.

And confidentiality, of course. I won't quote our exchanges here but I'm sure you can imagine them. Sometimes she just asked what a word meant, sometimes I simply praised her efforts at trying new things. Other times we passionately defended our points of view or begged for understanding (or forgiveness!).

As a bonus, we have a terrific chronicle of our relationship. I look back and realize how ridiculous my expectations were at times. Lighten up, Annie, I remind myself. Most often, though, a re-read of the notebook increases my compassion for us both + shows what I've hoped all along: we're both doing the best we know how to do.