Who let me adult?

Saturday

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The house is a wreck and it’s stressing me out, but the sky outside is crisp and clean and blue with November sunshine, so I pull your high chair over to the window. Between mouthfuls of Gerber pureed carrot you watch the shadows of the trees dancing on the fence. You keep glancing back at me as if to say, Are you seeing this?! The world is so cool!

Babies sort of force a person to live in the present.

You smile at me with those chubby cheeks and duck down hair, and emit a squeal that makes the cat turn her head lazily from her sunny spot on the floor. We haven’t gotten very many chores done today, and I’m not sure what we’ll eat for dinner, and speaking of eating I hope I’m introducing you to enough solid foods to keep your development going on a good timeline, and what if –

But I can’t worry about that right now, because you’re leaning toward me without taking your eyes off the outdoors, mouth wide open for another bite. When I slip the spoon in you hum loudly, MMMMM. You like carrots, apparently. That’s probably a good sign.

“Ba ba ba DA,” you announce, banging both hands on the tray table. You smile with orange lips when I laugh at you, then do it again. You like making us laugh. A few more drumbeats on your tray, and then you stop abruptly to stare at the spoon and hum aggressively. MMMMM. More.

Right now, all you want is this, sitting in our messy kitchen, making your mama laugh, another bite of carrot whenever it occurs to you.

Right now, I’ll try to just want this.

All Are Welcome

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The Engineer and I often talk about our “forever home” and the various attributes this dream house will have. We want a vegetable garden, a renovated carriage house where the Engineer can tinker with his five motorcycles (yes, we have decided on five) and I can read in the loft, a wood stove, a playroom for our kids, sustainable energy-efficient technology, and of course a library with a secret door behind one of the bookcases. But most of all, what we want is room to welcome others in.

When we scroll through Zillow over lunch, learning about each other’s architectural and aesthetic preferences (I always want to redo the kitchen cabinets, he always looks for staircases), we keep coming back to wanting a guest bedroom, a space that our kids and their friends can hang out, a place to offer anyone who might need a place to stay. Even though the word made me twitch for a while (due to its overuse in the Unfortunate Internship), the value we’re really looking for is hospitality.

Most of the time, I feel like this is a thing that Future Me will be able to do. Future Me will be the one to invite people over and have an open-door policy and be the second home to the neighborhood kids. (Future Me will have better furniture and magical amounts of free time, too.)

But that desire to welcome pops through in unexpected ways already. In our old apartment complex, our friends from church would literally just walk into our apartment at all hours; we often compared it to living in a sitcom where no doors are ever locked. When we were choosing our house here, we intentionally searched for a two-bedroom and got a daybed that converts to a king bed so we could encourage loved ones from the West Coast to come visit.

And a few weeks ago, one half of our New Couple Friends asked if she could crash on our couch since she would be in town to finish up some things at their old apartment. Instead of the couch, of course, we made up the day bed in the study, I made her tea and breakfast in the morning, and we had a lovely chat before she headed home. Although it never crossed my mind to say we couldn’t host her, I briefly wondered if it would make me feel harried or stressed to have someone over on a random Monday night/Tuesday morning. In reality, getting to hang out quietly comparing our DuoLingo progress in Spanish and laugh at my cat’s antics was comfortable. 

Maybe Future Me doesn’t have a monopoly on hospitality after all.

 

 

 

Where the Hell is Our Mailbox?

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When the Engineer and I were house-hunting, we had a wish list.  We wanted a garage for his motorcycle, an in-unit washer and dryer that were not coin operated, a cat (not included with the house, but we wanted the option to get a feline friend), and a mailbox in which we could not only receive our own mail but have outgoing mail picked up (our old apartment complex didn’t have an outgoing mail slot, so we had to go to the on-campus post office).

We got some of the most important things on our list.  The Engineer’s motorcycle is safely tucked in our garage, and we’ve already run several loads of laundry in our Very Own Laundry Room.  Unfortunately, though, the cat is not allowed.

And at first it seemed like we didn’t have a mailbox.

We noticed a bank of locked mail slots at the end of our street in our little townhouse/apartment community.  The keys we received from the realtor included a mail key, so this seemed a likely spot for our mailbox to be.  On our way out on an errand one day, we pulled over to see if we could find our mailbox.  There were four sets of boxes, numbered from 1 to 14 over and over.

Our house number is above 1200.  We have no other unit number for it.

We texted the realtor, but she just told us the mailbox was at the end of our street, which we already knew.  She didn’t know what number it was.

We resolved to flag down a neighbor the next time we saw them, ask which mailbox was theirs, and extrapolate from there.  But we kept missing them in our comings and goings.

Finally, we stood together in front of the bank of boxes, trying the mail key in as many boxes as we could before someone drove by.  None of them worked.  One of them even tried to eat my key.

Then, at last, on his way to a meeting today, the Engineer spotted the mailman himself at the mailboxes.  Pulling over briefly, he explained that we had just moved in and didn’t know which mailbox was ours.  He came home triumphant.

“I found out which one is our mailbox!”

So we took a stroll up the street, stood again (less suspiciously this time) in front of the boxes, and ceremoniously turned the key in our box: Number 11 in Row 3.  Sure enough, on the inside of the little metal door was our house number and our last names.

And right below it, etched in a little metal lid over another slot: OUTGOING MAIL.

We had to hunt it down, but we sort of got our wish after all.

The Tide of Adventure

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“From sea to shining sea,” to me, always meant from East to West.  Moving west was the proper direction, from the Atlantic that first brought European explorers, troops, and colonists, to the Pacific that halted Lewis and Clark at last.  From the first sea, the Old World, to the second, the New (to white people).  I had a certain amount of pride in growing up in the Pacific Northwest, where, it seemed to my elementary school self, everyone must have wanted to settle down.

Going east now seems strange, like we’re pulling against the tide of adventure that swept so many people to the western expanses of the United States.  “Go West, young man!” our so-called Manifest Destiny proclaimed, and the young men obeyed, and women, too.

(I’m currently reading a history of the Harvey Girls, which may be part of why moving back East [does it count as “back” if I’ve never lived this far east before?] feels weird – I just finished the background section on the Santa Fe Railroad.)

Instead, our current is bringing us to the shores of history, the New to Us But Old in General world.  From the west coast – where I grew up surrounded by stories of pioneers for whom the Oregon Territory was the endgame, making it seem like the West must be the final goal for everyone – to the east coast, where the water is actually warm and the first growing pains of our nation started.

From one sea to the other.  Our own new adventure.

 

Top 5 Self Care Habits I’m Bad At

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These are the things that pop into my head whenever I see an article about self-care, the things that I immediately know will make me feel better and more at peace, the things I somehow can’t seem to do consistently despite knowing their benefits.

1. Journaling. I definitely notice a difference when I keep this up for even a few days in a row. My emotions seem more reasonable and orderly if I take time to name them and examine their origins in writing, especially at the end of the day. But my usual excuse is that I’m too tired.

2. Going to bed on time. I am a toddler when it comes to getting myself to bed. The more tired I am, the more likely I’ll stay up reading or scrolling through Pinterest. (And then I’m too tired to journal.)

3. Keeping in touch with family and friends. I love my friends and I like to think I’m close with my family, but I don’t reach out or respond to them as often as I should.

4. Exercise. Cliche, I know, but this is another one that leaves me feeling a positive difference when I do it…but is still hard to keep up past a week.

5. Prayer. My faith is a foundational part of my life, so when I take the time to recenter my thoughts and motivations on God, I’m reminded that I am not the one in control. (Maybe that’s why I approach this habit halfheartedly, given my love for control.)

Bonus! 6. Hydration. It exasperates the Engineer to no end, but I hardly ever drink water unless it’s heated and poured through coffee grounds.

All of these little things make a noticeable difference in how I feel both physically and emotionally. But even knowing that, I can’t seem to make myself keep up the habits. The inertia is too hard to break through.

What good habits do you have trouble with even though you know they’re good for you? Got any tips to get over that inertia of Not Doing Things? 

Home Part II

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the place in which one’s domestic affections are centered

(in games) the destination or goal

The Engineer has lived in the same house his whole life.  I have lived in five – the one in Ohio where I was born, our first house in Washington (the “old old house”), the house that was great for pretending to be Cinderella (the “old house”), and my mom and dad’s current respective houses.  That’s not even counting Dad’s apartments while he looked for a more permanent house.

I dismantled my old room when I went to college, since Bird wanted the big room for her high school years.  I pared down my belongings even more when I moved to our Small College Town full time last year, putting mementos and old school projects into plastic totes for storage in the basement and cramming the rest into Bird’s and my cars to drive across the state.

Fitting, then, that she also accompanied me last week to move the last of my stuff out of that apartment.

I have transferred my affections from one home to another several times.  The Engineer’s childhood room is still exactly as he left it.

But this weekend we’re packing all our now-mutual belongings into a truck for him and his brother to drive to North Carolina.  The Pacific Northwest will still be home even in that gaming sense, because our ultimate plan is to move back here.

So the two definitions for “home” at the beginning of this post are comforting to me, because while we wait for our “domestic affections” to catch up with us and recenter on the opposite coast (at least for a few years), our pretty new townhome and all that goes into it can represent our new goals.  It will be our home base while we explore a new part of the country.  It will be a sort of home for Bird, who plans to take advantage of our presence in her university’s timezone to visit often.  It will be our first home together.

And honestly, though I know we’ll both be homesick at first, the Engineer himself has been “home” to me for a while now.

Never-ending Easter Egg Hunts

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“In, two, three, four, out, two, three, four, five, six yourefineyourefineyourefine seven, eight.  In, two, three four…”

I said the words in my head like a crazed conductor, sternly scolding my chest when it tried to contract again too soon.  My lungs preferred hyperventilating to this slow, rhythmic exercise.  I felt like I was choking every time I breathed out for too long.  But eventually my heart rate slowed.  The air stopped feeling oppressive.  I stopped counting as I drifted off to sleep.

For a few weeks, this was my bedtime ritual.  As soon as I got under the covers, I would immediately feel guilty that I hadn’t completed all these tasks.  But during the day, when I had the time and energy (and daylight) to devote to working, I only remembered a fraction of them.  They seemed to hold back, waiting to rush at me the second I turned out the light.

It was like a protracted Easter egg hunt.  Some eggs, hidden in obvious places, were easily spotted and placed safely in my basket – the completed tasks that I had already planned on doing.  Then there were others that I glimpsed as I went about my day – the random, little things I suddenly remembered and addressed even though they weren’t part of my original list.

And then, when it got too dark to look for Easter eggs, my workaholic little brain piped up: “You can’t go to bed yet.  We didn’t find all of them.”

“It’s fine.  They’re plastic.  They won’t hurt anything if we don’t find all of them until tomorrow.”

“But what if we don’t find them in time and the candy in them melts?  Or what if someone gets annoyed that we didn’t collect them all?  No, we should keep looking.”

“I promise you, it’s fine.  We’ll look with fresh eyes tomorrow.”

“Did you check under the sofa?  I think I saw one under the sofa.”

And on it went.  As much as I told myself that I had time, that I hadn’t missed any deadlines or accidentally forgotten to reply to someone, my anxieties had a new worry for every one I dismissed.  The most compelling of these was, “But if you forgot to do it today, what if you keep forgetting until you completely forget?”

Cue racing heart and shallow breathing.

My mental state, whether in the midst of my depression or just a lot of stress, has always been the most frantic at night.  I have trouble with the concept of “rest” when I feel I haven’t earned it, whether that be letting go of emotions until I am better equipped to address them or getting some sleep even though I haven’t exercised/written/worked “enough” that day.  So bedtime, when I put away all distractions and wait alone with my thoughts before falling asleep, is a great time for my mind to rebel.

Some nights found me up with that damn basket, hunting the rest of the Easter eggs (e.g., all-nighters on projects that weren’t even due the next day, just because they were worrying me).

Other times I’d stay up long enough to map out a plan for exactly where to look for the eggs the next day (putting together a specific schedule for the next day to address all the random tasks I was suddenly remembering).

On occasion, I do manage to shush my brain entirely, with exercises like breathing (fun fact: exhaling longer than you inhale is supposed to disrupt the fight-or-flight response) or doing something similarly meditative like saying my rosary.

Melatonin supplements work too.

I’m still learning how to negotiate with my own mind and body in order to get some sleep.  But even just recognizing that this time of day can be difficult – that’s a start.

What stress-reduction/brain-quieting strategies work best for you?  What time of day do you find it hardest to deal with stress and anxiety?

 

Crying in Spin Class

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“Well this is new.”  I sniffled and smiled at the gym employee holding out some protein bars.

It was new.  I had decided to try a new class, cycling, at the gym.  Workout classes like SoulCycle seem so popular, so I figured I’d give it a try.  I could pick a bike in the back, take it easy, watch other people and take my cues from the more experienced participants.

Except there were only three other people in the class, so hiding in the back didn’t really work.  Not knowing how to adjust the bike properly, I felt like I was going to fall over every time I tried to lean forward and reach the handlebars.  This also meant I couldn’t reach my water bottle, which was jammed into the holder just forward of the handlebars, so I kept having to dismount to get some water.  And there were no breaks.  In Zumba, we have breaks between songs.  But this was just trying to keep my balance and honestly wondering how on earth the other three girls were making their legs move so damn fast.

That was what eventually broke me, I think.  Stand up and pedal?  Sure.  Increase the resistance?  Great.  But every time the instructor said, “Sprint!” I could not physically make my legs go faster.  And as I leaned forward and saw spots and hoped I wouldn’t somehow slide sideways off my bike, I noticed that tears were starting to gather.

Hoping to make a quiet, dignified, inoffensive exit, I dismounted and grabbed my towel and water bottle.  Unfortunately, since there were only four of us in the class, the instructor caught my eye.  She asked, “You OK?”

And that’s when I started crying in earnest.

The instructor led a bewildered, quietly sniffling me to a recumbent bike, adjusted it so I could just use it as a regular seat, and told me to take deep breaths while she got someone to check on me.  In a few minutes, the front desk lady brought over a handful of protein bars and asked if I’d eaten that day.

“Yes, I had dinner right before this,” I said.  She smiled, but still looked concerned, so I added, “This is new.  I honestly have no idea why I’m crying.”

I often forget the link between the physical and the emotional, probably because I spent a lot of my adolescence doing my best to ignore the former and rein in the latter.  But as a counselor pointed out, suppressing negative emotions or reacting to unwanted thoughts takes physical energy.  And I had been a little stressed with wedding and moving planning, so I had been suppressing more negativity than I’d realized.

Until I exerted myself physically and lost the energy I was putting into keeping up the emotional barrier.  At least, that’s my working theory.

I didn’t tell the nice front desk lady this.  I told her that I’ve never been able to lean too far forward (which is true – I can’t do a somersault or a cartwheel, and I always think I’m going to fall when I try to touch my toes) and that was probably it.

But it was an interesting reminder to pay attention to how my body reacts to stress.

The Looming Negative Streak

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I currently have a 141-day streak on DuoLingo.  The more days in a row I practice Spanish with that little green owl, the prouder I feel – and the more determined I am to keep my streak going.  Losing those 141 golden calendar days and having to start over at 1??  It’s unthinkable.

Clearly, the concept of being On A Streak is motivating to me.

But The Streak has an evil twin.  This is the string of accumulated days in which I have not done something, not started that habit I kept meaning to do, not read that book or taken that walk or called that friend.  Similar to cold being the absence of heat, this isn’t really a streak in itself, but the absence of one.  It’s a buildup of squandered potential.  It is The Negative Streak.

The Negative Streak doesn’t cheer me on the way being On A Streak does.  Instead, it hovers.  It looms.  All those blank calendar days, all the unchecked boxes, peer over my shoulder and *tsk* at me.  And whenever I tell myself that any day is a good day to start something, The Negative Streak taps me on the shoulder.

“Remember all the days you’ve already failed?” it asks sweetly, frowning in false concern.  “You’ve already procrastinated so much.  Be honest with yourself.  Today won’t be any different.”

Suddenly, instead of facing forward, looking at all the time I have in front of me, I’ve turned around to view an insurmountable wall of wasted days.  It’s dispiriting, to say the least.

They say that perfectionists procrastinate to preclude failure, and I think The Negative Streak is born of that same mindset.  “Look at how easy it was for you to fail on such a small scale,” it says, “and think how much worse it will be when you (inevitably, given your track record) fail at the big stuff!  Much safer not to fight the inertia and just keep not doing things.”

The main place I’ve seen this lately is in my writing.  All the days of not managing to post on this blog or to even open the document of my manuscript have snowballed into an overwhelmingly enormous idea of this big, blobby project labeled just “WRITE MORE” which is hardly actionable or realistic because it has nowhere to start.  I am a person who needs lists, steps, concrete actions to take.

So I did two things.

One was that I actually kept a habit journal.  For the month of June, I tracked the habits I would ideally like to make a daily occurrence in my life.  I didn’t write once in that time, but I did get a better picture of where my priorities are, and seeing the places in my life where I am On A Streak (reading for fun, getting outside, exercising) was helpful.

The second was reading a blog post by a dear writing friend where she talked about why she has decided to start a secondary project just for the fun of it.  She explains that her Real Work in Progress is daunting, scary, and difficult, and she needed something to remind her why writing is fun.  And I realized I also needed something to remind myself why writing is fun, without any attached expectations.  So I dug out an old idea for a story and started writing.  There’s no cohesive narrative, no specific plans for story – I’m just having fun developing that world.  (There are dragons!)

So for July, maybe I’ll get to fill in the little color-coded square for “wrote today” more often, even if it’s just a paragraph about the etiquette of talking about hoards in draconian culture.  I’m hoping to put some distance between me and The Negative Streak.

The Future Mr. Changeling

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The Engineer and I are getting married!

Remember when I said our spring break was lovely?  That was a bit of an understatement.

At his insistence, I had gone up to visit the Engineer’s house on the peninsula, even though I could only stay for one day.  We went for a walk on the beach at Salt Creek, which was nothing unusual; since it’s one of our favorite places, sometimes we go there every single day of my visit.

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Once a group of college students left, we had the whole beach to ourselves.  It was a delightfully “west side” type of day, a little breezy and overcast but nothing like the freezing weather we’ve been having in our little college town.  We meandered down the beach and back again, chatting and pointing out pretty rocks or a bird on the water.

I didn’t notice at the time, but the Engineer was making sure to keep me on his right side and wouldn’t hug me too closely, because the ring was in his left coat pocket!  He wouldn’t even let me put my hands in his pockets to warm them, as I sometimes do; he just held my hand and kept choreographing our movements so I wouldn’t notice the box.

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The log I decided to Instagram right before he proposed

Finally, when I stopped to take an Instagram picture peer through the tunnel formed by a driftwood log, the Engineer followed me with something slightly more than his usual amused expression on his face.  He hugged me, fumbled in his pocket for a moment (“Don’t be ridiculous, it’s just his phone,” I told myself), then pulled away and got down on one knee (“That is not a phone.”).

Holding up the ring, he asked if I would marry him.

“Of course I will!” (Then I asked if he was serious, because it’s good to check, apparently.)

We walked back along the beach, both grinning, when a family of bald eagles flew overhead.  Two of them landed in the top of a nearby tree and started squawking to each other.  They stayed perched there for nearly an hour while we sat on Our Log (the log that we sit on every time we go there, where we first had a conversation about getting married years ago) and talked.  The solitude of the beach gave us a bit to process what had just happened and enjoy our shared excitement before we had to start telling people.

We still had another week of grad school visits ahead of us before going back to school, so we spent the next few days calling friends and family and swearing them to secrecy so we could tell certain people in person when we got back.  Those reactions were well worth the wait, most notably the Commodore, who was in town for her spring break as well, setting down her coffee in order to scream and jump up and down; my current roommate, who sent her parrot on a panicked circuit around the room when she leapt up to hug me; and our other friend C., who took a full ten minutes of small talk to notice the ring before stopping midsentence to stare, count my fingers to be sure that yes, it was the correct ring finger, and jumping up and down.  (A lot of jumping was involved here.)

I’m very excited for our newest adventure to start.  Can’t wait for September!

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He chose well!