creative.mother.thinking

explaining my life to strangers

Archives for March 2007

Just Post for March

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This is my post in the Just Post roundtable series. I have installed the button in my sidebar but it won’t function until March 10th or so. Right now you’re not too late to join us. If you’re interested, click on the button below.

justpostmar2007

When I was pregnant with my son the pregnancy was deemed high-risk. And do you know why? Because of the simple fact that I got pregnant in the year that I turned 35. Thirty-five. Had I been pregnant one year earlier it wouldn’t have been considered risky at all.

So what? Because everything went well. But I didn’t know that when my doctor advised me to get an amniocentesis. Because you know older women have a higher risk of having a handicapped child. (By the way, after my first post about “handicapped” people I realized that the term is not political correct. I’m sorry but I don’t know what to write instead. “Special needs” seems a little ridiculous.)

To me this decision was a no-brainer. Have my belly punctured with a needle? To find out more about my baby? Are you nuts?

Apparently the rest of the world thought I was the nutty one. Everybody had an opinion on this. Of course I should do it. What if I had a handicapped child? Indeed, what if? I knew that I would have kept the baby anyway. And what if the amnio hurt the baby? I’ll give you the math: the risk of having a baby with a chromosome defect for women age 35 to 37 is 1.6%. The risk of losing the baby through the amnio is about 1%. (It is less than 1% if made by a specialist.) In my world that means that the risk of having a baby with a chromosome defect is only slightly more probable than losing the baby through the amnio.

But that’s not all. A factor to be considered is also what one would do if the baby were “defective”. (And this is why I think that this is a social issue not only a personal story.) If there had been anything wrong with my baby there would have been considerable pressure not to have it. I think that knowing that one will have a special needs child is stressful enough without people telling you that you’re doing a disservice to society by having it. If I had gotten pregnant just a couple of months earlier no one would have tried to persuade me to be punctured by needles. (Sorry, but this picture was just horrible to me and still is.)

What I did do was let them make a very big and detailed ultrasound. I was okay with that because I knew that it wouldn’t hurt my baby. And I knew that I would have kept it anyway. Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally pro-choice, only my own baby already was a human being to me when it was just a tiny clump of cells.

While I was making that decision I met with the overpowering opinion of almost everyone I met (apart from one friend) that if the baby were handicapped his life wouldn’t be worth living. That it would be better off not to be born. And of course that handicapped people are expensive.

I was flabbergasted. You know, most people aren’t born handicapped. There are only a few things that can be seen in pre-natal diagnostics. And what if something went wrong when it was born and it ended up with spasticity? What if it had a rare gene defect like muscular dystrophy that you won’t see until a few years later? What if my baby were already a toddler and then almost drowned or had an accident and ended up different than before? Would those same people think his life not worth living then? I don’t think they would tell me though, even if they thought so.

As I have told before there are a lot of people who secretly think that handicapped people should be put away so that they don’t bother the others. And that surely there shouldn’t be money spend on their education since there isn’t enough for us normal people anyway. This makes me very, very angry.

Because that indicates that this is something that can’t happen to us. That if your child is deemed healthy and “normal” you’re destined for the happily-every-after-ending to your life. When your mother was punctured and diagnosed then nothing can ever happen to you. Nobody will ever have an accident, nobody will catch a disease, nobody will ever be old an feeble. Of course you will go through life with a right to stay youthful and strong and healthy. And then maybe die in your sleep at age 101.

I have the feeling that all this fuss about pre-natal diagnostics (and from what I hear German’s pregnant women are more thoroughly diagnosed than US ones.) is so that everybody has a feeling of being insured against, well, life.

Addendum: I just saw Jenn Satterwhite’s post on “Teaching understanding of disabilites in elementary school” on BlogHer and wanted to point you towards it.

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How to become a happy person

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This post was prompted by a recent post by my friend De of “sober briquet“. She started it by a quote saying: “Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so. ” I disagree. And I’m not the only one so I’d like to point everybody to Gretchen’s blog, the happiness project, and especially to her post about the John Stuart Mill-quote, her “Tips for how NOT to be happy” and while I’m linking all over the place you might find this post about “The Three Secrets to Happiness” on zen habits interesting too.

I started out quite unhappy by the way. When my husband and I first met we found that even real love with marriage couldn’t make us entirely happy. I talked about it at that time. I thought it was inbuilt. There was something inside of me, a part of my soul that was never quite happy. I also used to be jealous, shrill, judgmental, nervous, impatient and sarcastic.

At that time I even was a little proud of it. It set me apart. It made me special. Never to be content. I thought this was what made me creative and what made me strive. I was afraid of losing it. Afraid of being happy because I thought I’d turn into someone who just sits there grinning, achieving nothing. Well, I was wrong. I can’t say when it happened exactly but nowadays I find that I’m even happy when I’m feeling utterly depressed. I can’t explain why or how but I can point to some of the changes I have made during that time which have helped.

So, what does it mean, being happy? Does it mean that I’m going through my day in a state of coital bliss wearing rose-colored glasses? Certainly not. To me it means being aware of a part of me that always feels in tune with the universe. The part that feels safe and loved no matter what. The part of me that still marvels at life. A part that can’t be hurt. To give you an example I tell you of a moment when I suddenly realized that I was happy.:

My son was a baby then, a couple of months old. I was standing outside the wine store with him sleeping in the stroller. I was waiting for my husband who bought wine. It was raining, there were a lot of cars, it was loud, I was having cramps, was tired and hungry. And suddenly upon standing there I felt happy. Despite all those circumstances. And not because my son was sleeping but because in standing there I felt alive. And I knew all was well.

See, I can’t really explain it. But I take happiness whenever it happens and try to notice it. And the more I think about it the more tips I find. I could just link to Christine Kane‘s blog and say, “Look there. Heed her advice. You’ll be happier for it.”. And I can tell you a couple of things that helped me:

Speak to yourself as if you were your best friend
After I started thinking about compulsive eating and reading Geneen Roth’s books I realized how much time I spent criticizing myself. Especially my appearance. I used to think about how fat I was all day long. Then I thought, “I have a good life, I have a healthy son, a good job, a marvelous husband, is it really important how I look? And if it is, why don’t I do something about it?” and every time I found myself thinking something like, “Your belly is really fat.” I didn’t even bother to scold me for that but turned my thoughts to my music. “I wonder how that song could be improved.”

I try to be polite to myself. You wouldn’t tell a friend, “You’re lazy. You never get anything done. And I know you said you’re gonna lose weight, but be honest, it will never work.” Which brings me to the second little thing:

Be polite and nice
Really. It does make a difference. The old “treat others as you would like to be treated yourself”-rule.

Exercise
I used to be a couch potato. Never made an unnecessary movement. My cardio-vascular system got so week that I wasn’t able to climb a flight of stairs without huffing and puffing. When I realized that I started forcing me into exercise. I hated every minute of it but I liked to be strong and fit. It took me three or four attempts by the way. I’m stubborn. Each time I was so proud for exercising three times a week for a couple of months and then it would all fall apart. I started my final round eight years ago and now I can say that movement really is a part of my life. Easy stuff like walking errands instead of taking the car, 15 minutes of a workout DVD. The animal part of me feels much better when I’m in my body. When I feel capable. When I know that my feet can carry me everywhere even if it might take awhile.

Sometimes less is more
When I gave up my aspirations to become both a scientist and a musician a heavy load was lifted from my shoulders. As much as I try (and despite my old tagline of “I want it all”) I can’t do everything at once. And I don’t have to. I am allowed to do what I love even if there is no social status attached to it.

This goes together with an important one:

This is all the life I got
Of course I could wait for it to get better. But in the midst of life with a baby I realized that there would always be something wrong with it. That there never would be time to do the things I love if I didn’t make room for it. Everybody said, “Oh, it’s just so hard when the children are tiny. Just wait till he is in preschool.” Okay, so I wait three years. And then? Something else will come along for sure. Trust me on this. I know people who have spent their whole life waiting for circumstances to be right for creativity or fun or whatever. I know of at least two people telling themselves they’d pursue their hobbies in retirement. I sincerely doubt they will. So I started using tiny little spaces for the things I love. Ten minutes of singing practice. Ten minutes of meditation. Taking a twenty minute walk because I “don’t have time for real exercise”.

It doesn’t have to be perfect
Oddly enough lately the Buddhist saying that “life is suffering” has been soothing to me. If life is sometimes chaotic and people get hurt and things are never quite perfect that is okay. Because that’s how life is. Otherwise it is like trying to step into a stream without getting wet. You spend all your time complaining about your wet feet without realizing that being wet is the state of water.

I used to be trapped in a thinking that if only I could do everything right life would be perfect. But life isn’t perfect. It doesn’t have to be. It’s life and that’s enough. It’s not a race, you’re not supposed to come out best of your class or something. It is there to be lived. And if you dismiss what you experience because it’s not like you want it then you miss your life while it’s happening.

And this one leads to:

Be grateful
I remember the first time ever when somebody told me he kept his perspective by being grateful that he has enough to eat, a roof over his head and clothes to warm him. I was in the midst of some drama or other as always but I never forgot. There are a lot of people out there without that. We really are privileged. I am. Or as Jon Kabat-Zinn put it, “As long as you are alive there is more right with you than wrong.” So, off you go and start your gratitude journal. This is an order.

Since this is far too long already I’ll just cram the rest in here:

– Stop watching the news and worrying about things you can’t change.
– Start meditating.
– De-clutter, and
– do something creative.

And of course, live in the moment.

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The "Cinderella-Princess-Unicorn-Play-Party-Sleepover"-Project

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Last Friday my son woke up half an hour early and said that he had had a dream where he had danced a unicorn-dance with A, a girl from preschool, and that he needed to make Cinderella-princess-crowns out of metal and wood right now. And then glue paper to them to add color.

Since my husband and I had been to a very, very loud nicotine-infected concert the night before all I managed was, “Um. Not right now.” I was so grateful that my mother-in-law had said she’d make him breakfast and take him to preschool and so I took him upstairs and went back to bed.

Grandmothers seem to be more patient than mothers because in the evening he proudly showed me this:


Cinderella-Princess-Unicorn-Crowns modeled by Teddy and Mikesch, the Cat

All evening long he talked about which crown was his and which was A’s and that his had to have long hair glued to it so he’d look like a girl.
And there would be a play and the unicorns would dance and there would be aparty. And that he would go and make scenery with his father on Saturday. (We had persuaded him to wait until the next morning.) And that I should go and prepare the food and freeze it.

On Saturday morning he woke up, early again, and told me to go and sew the costumes now. While he would build scenery in the cellar with my husband. And that he had already started on that.

In his room I saw that he had started to draw a “castle” on the big piece of cardboard that we use in lieu of a blackout blind so he doesn’t wake up too early. He even had tried to cut out pinnacles. Actually he woke us to say that he needed the big scissors. Fortunately I could discourage further cutting and promised to buy a real blackout blind soon so he could use the cardboard for his play.

All my poor tired husband wanted was a little sleep. So I told my son with all the authority I could muster that real theatre people always make sketches of everything. Costumes, scenery and who’s supposed to be where. Here they are:

The Unicorn’s Costumes

(Notice the unusual colors, red unicorns with black hooves. Also the “cinderella-princess-crowns” with their golden unicorn horns and eyes with extra-long eyelashes.)

The story of the play goes like this:

Two female unicorns are having a wedding. They have a picknick. Suddenly there is a knight who hurts the unicorns.


The Knight’s Costume

Very traditional though his sword is quite thin and cross-like. The knight is to be played by J, another preschooler.

The unicorns say, “Oh, don’t hurt us, knight, we are very nice unicorns.”
The knight stops.

All this is happening in front of a castle:

The Castle
(Very old with a sagging tower.)

At the end there is the unicorn dance. The two (played by my son and A) are dancing gracefully.


The Unicorn Dance

The audience is delighted.

The Audience

Afterwards there is a party with food and then A and J are to stay overnight.

Sugar

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Since I’m not completely stupid I already have known that my relationship with sugar is a little, um, intense. I remember sneaking sweets as a child, raiding the whole apartment for candy and eating glasses of honey and boxes of powdered sugar. When I was a child all I ever drank was soda and cocoa. When as a teenager I started drinking juice instead of soda for health reasons that was a hard transition. When I was in my twenties and was afraid that I had scurvy I cut back on sugar drastically. I stopped putting sugar in my tea. Well, mostly.

Back as a teenager when I was still very Christian I tried to give up candy for Lent every year, I only managed that (and it was real hard) when I still ate big amounts of cookies and cake every day. I don’t think I ever had a day in my entire life where I didn’t eat sugar at all.

In the past years I made a lot of changes: I never eat candy against hunger anymore. I don’t have something sweet after every meal. I restrict the amount of chocolate I eat. And I was very, very proud of myself to finally having that problem under control.
Only I hadn’t. After two years of making little rules around my candy consumption I had to realize that I still am not able to sit in the kitchen and read in the evening without eating much more candy than I intended to. When we visited my parents on Christmas my mother made a point of putting big bowls of candy and cookies right under my nose (she is a little jealous because I lost so much weight and she gained a little). I couldn’t resist. And not like “Oh my god, I ate TWO COOKIES!” But still like “I don’t know how and when but I just inhaled the whole bowl.”

So when I thought about addiction in my family I realized that maybe my biggest addiction might be to sugar. And that maybe ties in with my compulsive eating. There are other things that I turn to when I eat compulsively (and I do that less and less) but most involve sugar. In the past when I went on a binge I was after the sugar high. I didn’t mind throwing in some bags of potato chips and a couple of beers but if I had to choose I’d have taken the sugar.

So now I can report how it feels to have abstained from sugar for a whole week. And I haven’t even drunk much. It is the third time ever that I even tried. The first time I started after reading Christine Kane’s post about “How to give up coffee in 7 easy steps“. I don’t like coffee and avoid it wherever I can but in that post she mentioned sugar and so I thought, “Why don’t I try to cut back on candy?” Notice that I didn’t think “Why don’t I cut back on sugar?” Because I knew of former experiences that if I wanted to reduce my candy consumption there had to be cookies or cake in this. The first time I tried for a week I succeeded. The second time I cut the week short due to something really important I no longer remember.

Then suddenly a week ago on Saturday I said, “I’m addicted to sugar. I won’t eat it anymore. Period.” Immediately I begun to see how much sugar I really was eating. It’s not only candy or chocolate. It is yoghurt, it is ketchup, soda, sometimes even vegetables. And I began scheming: what would I tell people when I was invited in the afternoon (eating cake and drinking coffee is an integral part of German social life), what would I tell my mother, whom would I tell? All this was completely irrational and only showed how important sugar was to me. There was no need of a big declaration. No need to prepare for if I ever would be invited to a party, I’d just say thank you. But in my mind it was a very big thing.

That Saturday we had a party at our house, about fifteen people, some with children. The first thing was that my mother-in-law made cake. I love cake. Of the people that came three brought cake and three brought chocolate. Two brought fruit salad. It was potluck but usually people bring more salad. The whole buffet had only three salty things and all the rest was sugary. Never have I been to a party in my life where there were so many sweets. That was my first test.

I failed. I started with trying the cake at 3 in the afternoon and only stopped for sleep. The next day I continued with cake and chocolate until at 3 on Sunday my husband said, “What are you doing I thought you didn’t want to eat sugar because you are addicted to it. I’d like to throw that stuff away.” And I nodded and said, “Go ahead.” He put the rest of our candy in a hiding place that is hard to reach.

Since then I have stayed “sober”. The first days I thought about sneaking candy while running errands. Every single day after lunch and dinner I get this craving for chocolate. It feels like it’s sucking me in. How can one end a meal without eating a little chocolate-y goodness afterwards? The first days it felt like there was a little, furry predatory beast inside of me that howled, “Feed me! Feed me!”

I didn’t. I haven’t felt withdrawal much. Yesterday we went on a walk and then into a café. I decided to give myself a treat. I ate a piece of cheesecake. I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would and it felt as if it was too much but of course I ate it anyway. And the little piece of chocolate that came with my latte. Yeah, I had it all. Milk which always sits very heavy in my stomach, coffee which I don’t like and cake and chocolate. We went back home and I thought, “That’s the way to go. Have sugar as a treat on Sundays.”

All was well. Only my PMS worsened. And I felt very moody. And I couldn’t sleep well. And I yelled at my husband. Of course that’s all the coffee’s fault.

Or not. Because during the week without sugar (apart from one cube of brown sugar in my enormous cup of morning tea) I felt calmer than ever before in my life. In the midst of my midlife-crisis there was a calmness inside of me that I have never known before.

So I’d say that I react sensitive to sugar. And I’d say my son does this too. He is devouring sweets and sugary yoghurts like crazy. And afterwards he is hyper. And in a bad mood. Angry.

Interestingly this week hasn’t been hard for me. It was a little weird when I went grocery shopping and realized what I couldn’t eat anymore but so what. I still don’t quite know what to eat for an afternoon snack. This week it has been nuts and raisins. (I don’t like fruit in its natural state.) But I’ll continue this. I feel better. I don’t want addiction in my life anymore. By the way I have been avoiding alcohol too. It just doesn’t appeal to me anymore.

Who would have thought that possible…

Addiction

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Hello, my name is Susanne, and I am a sugar addict.

Well, only a couple of weeks ago I would have said there is no such thing but then I had to admit it.

Those conversations with my husband during the last few weeks were not all about gazing into each other’s eyes, holding hands, and declaring our deep and unconditional love; we also had to face some things about ourselves that we didn’t want to face before. We were certain our relationship was sound and extraordinarily happy, yet I felt compelled to buy books like “Getting the Love You Want”. A couple of days ago my husband threw the word codependency in and addiction and something in me clicked.

When I wrote about my depression (and I’m still reluctant to call it that because it is so mild) Esereth said there had to be a deep cause for that. It hit home with me but I didn’t see a cause. I have been thinking about it, trying to unearth something but all I got was “Depression is anger turned inward” on which I started writing a blog post until I remembered that Flylady had already written about that. I know that I am a very aggressive person. Mostly it stays put, I’m mild and polite and smiling and turn on myself with the things I do compulsively. Like eating and reading and computer games (which I had to give up) and watching TV and reading blogs. So most things I do compulsively are things one can do in moderation for fun. And cutting out all of them is not the point because then I’d find something else instead.

What I never thought about was what I am so angry about. Why am I aggressive? And then my husband said “codependency” and I remembered that I already knew that my father is an alcoholic. I just didn’t think about it anymore.

I thought a lot if I should write this or not. I try to only write things I’d tell people in person too but I wouldn’t like my parents to read this. I thought that maybe I should talk to my father first before telling it to all the world but I didn’t. I think I will have to confront him with it eventually but I don’t think this will change anything for him.

And before you all start feeling sorry for my poor mother who is married to an alcoholic in denial let me tell you that she has issues with addiction too. Just try to come between her and her nicotine. So I have to face it I inherited an addictive personality and the psychic wounds that go with growing up in a dysfunctional family.

Not visibly dysfunctional though. I don’t have a father who drinks himself into a stupor and passes out. He never lost a job because of it. When recently somebody said, “Well, every family has a secret.” I thought, not mine. Obviously I’m very versed in denial.

Now I remember how much my parents fought over putting like little fences and rules around the alcoholism. How my father wasn’t allowed to drink before he ate something. How he wasn’t allowed to have the cognac bottle on the living room table but had to put it back every time. How when my father was still working and I was still living at home the top priority of every family member was to feed him dinner as soon as he came home. So he wouldn’t drink his dinner. He never ate at work. He’d leave the house in the morning without breakfast, spend the whole day drinking coke, and come back home where he’d often end the day on beer and cognac before falling asleep in front of TV.

My father is mild, polite, intelligent, a little distant but very caring and emotional underneath. Once in a while he explodes. All his frustration and anger, all those repressed feelings come out in a burst and then that’s it. Only this week did I find out how frightened I am by the least bit of aggressive behavior. I accused my husband of talking to me in a way that I felt as if he hit me, and all he did was tell me things I didn’t want to hear in a very calm and reasonable way. Only then did I think of the two incidents where my father completely lost his temper with me and hit me and then sent me up into my room where I cowered in a corner, wept and thought the world was about to end. Only this time did I realize that I must have been only two years old, three at the most, and that the most hurtful thing about that probably was that nobody came after me to console me afterwards. Now I know why I often have the feeling to expose myself and make me vulnerable when my husband has the feeling that I’m distant and withdrawn.

Now I know why I never drank a drop of alcohol when I still lived at home and never started smoking at all. I’m really, really angry at my family for pretending that all is well.

Alcohol is not the problem for me. I have a couple of addictive behaviors that I might have to give up or not. That’s not that important right now, but my relationship with sugar is worrying and so I decided to give it up.

And since this already is too long, I’ll write another post about that.

Relax and Refocus

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or: What I did for the last, um, month or so.

New! Now with better spelling and added links!

First of all, some of you might remember that I signed up for “February Album Writing Month”. Well, I have three started songs, none of them finished. This had to do with several things. I jumped into that project a week too late and without preparation (no pre-assembled food this time), I was determined not to loose sleep over this one and, maybe the biggest obstacle, I have been having tonsillitis since the beginning of February now. I’m currently on my third round of antibiotics and hope to fend the bacteria off for good this time. Any good vibrations sent my way are deeply appreciated. My husband had another kind of bacterial infection, staph. Not pretty, highly contagious which sent us on a quest to wash every single thing he touched in the whole house while feeling queasy and weak from infection and penicillin. All that time we were worried that our son might get any of our illnesses, but no, he had chickenpox. And another ear infection on top of that.

Those are the few moments when I regret being self-employed. When the doctor asked me, “What do you do for a living?”, and I said, “I’m working as a singing and piano teacher.” and she replied “Not this week.” and I had to work anyway. I cancelled one singing lesson and had two students calling in sick, so all went well. But I’d rather have stayed in bed.

One other reason why writing 50,000 words in a month did work and writing 14 songs in a month didn’t was that I can write my 1,700 words in about two hours but a song takes much more time than four hours. I originally had planned to just record a couple of 3 minute long free improvisations and count those as songs but my sore throat made that impossible. Also I don’t really want recordings of a dozen improvs, I’d like to have a couple of songs.

But now for the important things like why I haven’t been blogging much lately. Well, to be frank, I fell in love. Oh, no worries, I fell in love again with my husband. We have been acting like newfound lovers, talking and talking to each other. It is amazing. I’m not quite sure if this is legal. It feels weird and surreal but very good at the same time.

About two weeks ago we decided to turn our lives around big time. You might ask why because everything seemed to be good before. Well, but there were two things a little off. One thing was that with all my improvements, plans, strategies and systems my life didn’t feel like I wanted it to. I thought I had to become even more efficient, more goal-oriented, more organized; always leaving space for a little fun or creativity of course because otherwise I’d know it wouldn’t work. My life became a series of thin slices of time. I would have loved to be able to slice time like these monks in the “Thief of Time” who were able to move very fast and accomplish things other people couldn’t but I had to fall back on giving myself little allotments of time. “So now you are allowed a little blog reading for ten minutes and then you have to make lunch. When you have cleaned up the kitchen you might have ten minutes for taking a shower and then you have to practice scales for three minutes before you have to teach. – And don’t dawdle!” Somehow that didn’t work as well as I had imagined it would. Instead I’d often spend all the time reading blogs then taking the shower and open the door to my first student with slightly damp hair. So, of course, I set intent to be even more structured and effective, to make my chores streamlined and efficient so that I would have more time for the things that I love. I complained that I did everything right but that life felt wrong anyway.

My husband on the other hand whom I deemed morally superior and successful with his “monolithic approach” to life had the exact same feeling about life. I think I have talked about this approach before but can’t find it right now. The “monolithic approach” means that you do a necessary minimum of housework, exercise, social contact and such and otherwise you just teach and make music. Nothing else. I always admired him for being able to do this but I knew this could not be my approach because every time I tell myself I can’t have something I immediately dash off to get it. Like when I set the firm intent to focus on songwriting only, and then immediately got myself a blog. Or whenever I went on a “diet” and then immediately spent the next weeks bingeing. But he has succeeded in making two CDs this way amidst house renovations and the birth of our son. Then, one day I talked to him about something De wrote about her husband reading her blog and we started talking about what all those new things I’m doing like blogging and writing mean for him. And he told me that maybe he wanted to have new and exciting friends too. Maybe even on-line friends. How he didn’t like my immersion in blog-land because he still was disappointed that I hadn’t made writing songs my top priority. And not because he was so attached to having a composing wife but because I said so. Ouch.

We started talking in earnest. I really thought we were talking a lot before, but as I said, now we’re back to the kind of talks people have when the meet for the first time and fall in love with each other. We have been living quite separate lives apparently. Every evening we would sit in our respective rooms and do something alone. I’d spend all my time sitting in front of the computer with my back to everyone while my husband was playing guitar in the next room. We already knew that we had had a tendency to polarize in the last years but we didn’t knew that we had taken it that far. He’d be the fuser and I the isolator. I’d be the one to constantly try new things and go places and he’d be the one staying home. I’d be the one to read comics and watch TV and he’d be the one quoting Hegel. I’d be the one with the midlife crisis and he’d be the calm one who already had gone through it.

And then we started talking about how he felt lonely too. And a little jealous. And how we forgot how much we love spending time with each other. And that it is not possible for one of us to have a crisis without the other being affected. And then he started reading my blog posts. And instead of just rolling his eyes when I’d say the word blog or blogger he really questioned me about it. “Why are you doing it?”, “But you already have a real life, why do you want to have a virtual one too?” “Is blogging really a valuable creative outlet?” and “Why do you need to sign up for something like NaNoWriMo in order to get something accomplished? Don’t you think your desire to write might be fake?” and the always dreaded “You know that you can’t have it all in real life, don’t you?”. And this time he didn’t ask to make me cave in and say that I only do all these things like an addict craving numbness but that there might be valid reasons for all those things too.

So we both made a commitment that our relationship and family comes first. To really be where we are at all times. Not sitting in front of each other nodding with a mind somewhere else. And you know what? I really enjoy spending time with my family. When I’m not constantly thinking I should be doing something else instead. We acknowledged that our lives are full enough as it is. Even if we were to do only our jobs, housework and parenting, life would be full enough. That doesn’t mean that we won’t strive to be creative but it does mean that we honor what is. And if I prioritize my life by spending hours and hours in front of the computer then I shouldn’t tell myself that I really want to be a songwriter.

When we made that decision it felt as if a tension fell off that had been there for years. For a week or so I felt totally shapeless. As if the pressure had been the only thing to give me structure. It still feels scary. Going into the unknown without a plan. But I decided to trust myself. That I don’t need to be an efficient goal-achiving machine to get things done. That not having a plan and a timetable wouldn’t mean that I would spend my days in bed reading, watching TV and eating while surfing blogs. I still have a little voice inside of me that is saying, “But you don’t get anything done. You should be cleaning right now.” but I don’t think the house will fall apart if I continue to not doing zone work for a couple of weeks.

I try to be label-free for now. No more thinking about whether I’m a write or a musician or both. I had to accept a couple of truths though that I didn’t like. It seems that I’m much more unreliable than I would have liked. And much more sidetracked. That my enthusiasm has to be taken with a grain of salt which I already knew. That I am much less patient than I would have liked. But that my husband is okay with that as long as I don’t pretend to be something that I’m not. And after crying and feeling awful for a couple of days (I really want to be reliable. Really. And I worked so hard on that one.) I feel relief. I can just let it go. Not that I want to become one of those people who say, “Well, that’s just the way I am, I can’t help it.” but to know it. So I can work with it instead of against it. Like I had to accept that I can’t be trusted around potato chips and chocolate and so I had to make up rules for myself.

I know this is a long post but there are still things I haven’t talked about. Sometimes life is so full that you can’t write about it. It fells exciting and scary. And who knows, my husband might even take up blogging. For now it feels weird but good to have a husband who not only reads this but actually tells me to go blogging already instead of asking if I’m still sitting at the computer. And it feels very liberating to let go of all those intentions and goals and plans and just do what I’m doing and enjoy it.

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