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It’s certainly not Wednesday and I do know that despite the blurring of time that’s happening as we’re prepping for my sister’s wedding this weekend. But the camera disappeared yesterday and WIP Wednesday* is so much better than TIHF Thursday**.
*Work In Progress
**Things I Haven’t Finished
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I’ve got one PS red project on the needles: Stulpen (scroll down for English), done top-down and with a hole instead of a thumb to minimize bulk when I’m writing on a table. I’m 2/3 of the way done the cable on the second and if I can get that done tonight, I should be able to auto-pilot myself through the rest of the ribbing before the end of the month. My sister’s wedding is this weekend, but if I can just get to a mindless part of the pattern I’m all set to finish these on time.
I think I did fingerless mitts the last time there was a red/pink phase of Project Spectrum. Probably mental suggestion: red = fire = warm fingers.
Yarn: Fleece Artist Basic Merino Socks
On a blue baby quilt from my babyhood as I get ready for the blue phase of Project Spectrum
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I’ve been slowly working along on this for the summer, the first sweater in pieces I’ve done in years. I love the simplicity of double moss stitch, and am really looking forward to having the simplicity of this cardigan to throw on in fall.
Pattern: Minimalist Cardigan, Interweave Knits
Yarn: Andean Silk in olive
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A kicky pleated skirt from “Sew What: Skirts!” languishing because of an unusually cold summer. It’s hard to remember to work on it when there’s no weather in which to wear it. 8 months in a row of colder than average temperatures is starting to get old.
Also, I’ve discovered that I’m not a sewing gal by nature – you can’t cuddle with it on the couch while the family watches something and it’s noisy. I still like sewing. It’s just not something that works into my day easily.
All of this inspired by the parade of WIPs each week on GailV’s blog.
I’m supposed to be cleaning. Big cleaning before the guests and the whirlwind of my sister’s wedding this weekend. But instead I couldn’t stop watching this video of the 2004 Ironman Hawaii race. It’s a series of stories that embody the various beauties of being a human being. I’ve seen it once before 2 years ago on DVD in high quality, but the stellar composition of shots and the incredible storytelling still got me on my monitor. It’s a long one, over an hour, but…astonishing.
After I watched it the first time I was uplifted. I was delighted. I finally understood why Rainer wants to do an Ironman. I found the show so incredibly compelling I turned it off wishing I was the kind of person who could set a goal like that.
This time, this me, I’m thinking I am the kind of person who can set a goal like that. What an adventure that would be! Rainer says that anyone can do an Ironman. It’s about training and mindset. I’ve got 7 years before I turn 40. That’s enough time to build up slowly. Maybe I’m setting a goal right now. Maybe you’re in on the ground floor. Maybe writing maybe is a lie.
If you need to pass some time while knitting or while folding laundry, watch it. If you need to get yourself out of the blues, watch this. Watch it all the way to the end and tell me you’re not a stronger person, at least in the faculty of imagination – that most important of places. Watch it with your kids and learn together just how incredible the story of humans can be.
Heck, do what I’m thinking of doing and gather a bunch of kids together and have them do a dreams workshop, maybe writing out what they want to accomplish some day and putting it inside time capsules and then watch this together. Light some lives on fire.
That’s what’s inspiring me today. My heart feels bigger. My mind feels stronger. And my thoughts are very much with the two men I know who are doing Ironman Canada this weekend.
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“Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.” Rita Mae Brown
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What do you trust?
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22.9 km (14.2 miles) :: farther than I’ve gone alone
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2 hours and 23 minutes :: hard running on uncooperative legs
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Done :: done in.
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on the grass looking up :: not moving.
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post-run delight :: chocolate milk
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cold bath :: harsh but good for the legs
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Then I took myself and the novel Bloody Jack out for sushi. I was soooooo not cooking lunch.
Thank you so much for your generous response to “One of the Me-s I Used to Be”. I emailed everyone who commented and if you haven’t gotten it, please check your junk mail filters. I really wanted to let you know how much it means to me that you connected with my words. One of my great, quiet joys is helping people find their own paths.
Many of you wrote that I inspired you and I want to share something that can’t be overstated.
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I bought the notion that choice is a singular event and then wondered why change was either a) hard or b) fleeting. Here’s the thing: the first time we make a choice is really important. Really, super important. But to keep that promise to ourselves we have to keep on showing up and making all the supporting followup choices.
Day after day. Again and again. I want a change? Then I’ve got to show up dozens and hundreds of time along the way. Eventually making those supporting choices becomes easier and then it becomes habit, but I still have to do it.
For example, I’m fit because I didn’t just say one day, “I’m going to get fit.” I also said, “And that means running in the rain.” I said, “Even if I feel tired.” I even said, “You’d better get up at dawn and go because it’s going to be hot.” Not to mention, “Shut up, whiner, the treadmill may be boring, but you’ll be so happy with yourself once you’re done.”
At the same time, you’ve got to forgive yourself along the way for being human and not a superhero. Don’t ask yourself in each situation, “What’s the best choice I can make here?” and answer the question as though you have the resources of Bruce Wayne, the flexibility of Elastigirl, and the army of staff at Buckingham Palace. Your best choice in any situation may not be worthy of a TV mini-series, but it’s still your best in that moment. The wonderful thing is that each and every time you show up for yourself, you get the energy, the confidence, the surge of motion that comes from keeping a promise. And every time you do approach a choice, no matter how tiny, you get the chance to start again. Even if you blew it five minutes ago, here’s a new chance coming along.
I think of it as building railroad track. I got that from homeschooling author Charlotte Mason, but I use it alllllllll the time with my Weight Watchers people and with Sandra and Matthias. Building habits is like laying track – hard, hard work. Leveling hills, tunneling through mountains, draining swamps…Hard work. But once laid, you just put the engine on the track, point it in the right direction, and it gets to its destination. A habit is like that – work to build, but then you get to ride it home every time.
So it’s not just a choice. Don’t buy that myth. Make that one choice and then show up again and again.
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“Never be within doors when you can rightly be without.” C. Mason
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Where are you going today?
Sandra had held up her end of the deal, and now it was my turn.
The weather was very…weather.
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But we suited up anyway.
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The 24 of us doing the Try-A-Tri distance faced west along the beach, heading to a bright pink buoy 150m away. The sprint distance got ready at the same time, heading out into the lake for their triangle pattern. It was exciting to have so many people in the water at once, but reassuring to know so few would be heading in the same direction as me. The water was 19 degrees…so much warmer than the air that getting in was a bit of a relief after waiting around so long watching the Olympic distance swimmers do their 1.5k.
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It was Manitoba’s biggest triathlon ever with over 300 participants. Rainer was one of 150 participants in the sprint distance. He said he’s never been kicked as much as this triathlon.
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The mist made sighting difficult. I need my glasses, and find the sighting difficult to begin with. At least we had a bright pink buoy and not the yellow ones.
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I like swimming in lakes, to my utter surprise. I really enjoyed swimming as a girl and even the first few years of university. But every time I’ve gotten in a pool since becoming a mother I’ve gotten a headache – I’d developed a sensitivity to chlorine. But getting into a wetsuit, heading for a destination, and slipping through the water all buoyant and sleek…wonderful!
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I was second out of the water! So exciting! I struggled with my zipper a bit and didn’t have the most fun in transition what with the cold rain that had started falling and struggling to get damp things on a wet body.
(There aren’t any more photos, since the rain drove the family that was watching Sandra and Matthias indoors.)
It turns out that I am more competitive than I thought. I never feel that way in a running race – I’m not going to win and it’s obvious. But here…man. I wanted to pass everyone in front of me on the bike. I was affronted – what were they doing there? They belonged behind me. I biked so hard and then ran so hard. It was fun to know that the distance was short enough that I could just give it my all.
My feet were numb for the first half of the run and when I finally had the feeling back my feet were so wet and slooshy that it wasn’t much fun to be able to notice.
But somehow still fun! I’ve watched Rainer do this for the past few years. I’ve risen early with him. I’ve stood in the cold morning air. I’ve watched the waves on the water. I’ve felt the winds. I’ve suffered in humidity and heat. And I’ve wondered why. Why get into a wetsuit? Why throw yourself into the water before breakfast? Why three sports? I’ve discovered the answer is: Because.
Because you can. Because it’s fun and weirdly attractive to switch sports. Because not letting the weather run your life is so Canadian. Because you get bragging rights. Because it’s there like a question waiting for an answer. But mostly the infuriatingly imprecise ‘just plain because’.
I ended up being second over all and first among the women! My time was 48:36. So not only did I discover that I have two new sports to dive into and enjoy, I also came home with a gold medal. Pretty sweet. And I can’t leave out how awesome Rainer was. So supportive. So fun. So good at believing in me. And his own results…smashingly good. He was 13th! 13th! He rocks. He’s been such an inspiring example for our family. He’s taught us so much about how it’s never too late to try something new, to push your limits.
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I’ve been many versions of myself. There was the shy, sweet Mennonite child who was shredded by the kids and the public school in a prairie town. There was the pre-teen who contemplated suicide and struggled with depression. There was the teenager who was desperate for responsibility and control who reached out and became a punk to make a little space in her life. There’s the post-punk young woman at university, married at 18, wearing hiking boots and flannel shirts and planning to backpack all around the world.
I say, “There was,” but the truth is all of those Sarahs are with me still. Some of them give me strength and others I’ve tucked into bed with hot cocoa and kissed on the forehead while murmuring, “There, there, it’s OK now.”
The Me that I want to talk about today is the early mother.
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When I look at that photo I feel a sadness and a sort of itch. An itch because I remember being that woman and how it felt to be her, like there was no match between her insides and her outsides, and that is an itchy feeling.
Let’s see. I was 23 and Rainer 28 in that photo. Two unplanned pregnancies that were so hard I lay down for months and thought that getting my own crackers was a good day. Two babies when our friends weren’t even dating seriously much less parenting and we were so isolated. University students with the attendant shifting schedules and lack of daily routines that might have helped us transition to parenthood more smoothly. At this point we were in London, ON while Rainer did his Masters in Library and Information Science, in married student housing, each about 50 pounds overweight, and doing our best.
Our best was pretty good. I think that I’ve judged that particular me pretty unfairly at times as I journeyed away from her. We devoted ourselves to attachment parenting. I gave myself to parenting in a way that was all-consuming, like an artist at a canvas. These little lives were so precious. Rainer would do a full day at school and come home and parent like a dream while cooking supper and making the kids giggle. I trained to become a La Leche League Leader. We just didn’t know how to be ourselves in all that. We got lost in the cultural definition of ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’, especially in Western’s super-preppy married student residence, populated largely by Business grads and their trophy wives and their antiques on the townhouse linoleum.
Life was flux. I had just been finding my way out of the very all-consuming and rigid self-definition that is being a punk and replacing it with an identity as a professional academic (top of my class and with big plans for grad degrees) when I was sideswiped with motherhood. By the time Sandra was 5 we had moved 9 times. Co-op job and back. Summer job and back. This university and that. Every semester a different schedule. Every day a different amount of sleep, a different mood in the kids. And to top it all off, neither child slept through the night til 4 years of age.
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We were young parents who didn’t feel young. We were funny, out-of-the-box thinkers, rebels, rabble-rousers who didn’t know how to combine any of that with being Parents. With parenting itself, sure. We were still making unusual choices in our parenting, just not in ourselves.
We had just started to get the hang of good housekeeping/daily rhythms (well, good-ish, we were students!) before I got unexpectedly pregnant with Sandra because of the collision of a backpacking trip in Scotland, a terrible rainstorm, and my now-soggy birth control pills. There was within me a desire for structure. A wish to respect myself more. A feeling that there was strength in me beyond the strength to bend with the winds of life.
There was also a feeling that I couldn’t strike out for shore when the waves made treading water a priority. And this is, I think, the core of what wasn’t working: I was surviving, not thriving. Aside from motherhood, the rest of my life wasn’t doing so well. Things felt a little out of control, since they were, and that showed up in my days.
Why did things change?
There was a whole confluence of factors that just piled up into a useful platform from which I could take many little steps:
Deciding to homeschool. With both pregnancies unplanned, it seemed that I had always just adjusted to one phase as it ended. Homeschooling was a choice I thoroughly explored and made ahead of time.
Moving to this city. Not because of the city, but because it represented stability. Rainer had a job. We bought a house. We weren’t leaving soon.
Reading homeschool message boards. At first I was comforted that there were others who were like me. Then I was inspired by those who said they used to be that way and had changed. One of the first quotes I collected in my commonplace book was from a mother who said, “We all pick the pain in our life – either the pain of self-discipline or the pain of regret.”
There was, simply, a growing need to stop ‘sweeping under the carpet’ in so many areas of life. For example, I wanted to stop doing emergency tidying before someone came over; I wanted to live a tidy life for my own self. And other things, too. It was time to live in a way that made me proud. That I could respect. I wanted there to be a closer alignment between myself and the people I admired.
I had a growing sense that I didn’t want to get to the end of my life and have regrets. I also had a dimly-felt understanding that the external disorder was a sign of an internal disorder, or perhaps more properly, that getting my house and my lifestyle in order would be a part of achieving that sense of grace and peace that I desired. If house guests were worth a clutter-free house, perhaps I was, too. It was a little like always saving the good china for company, but in this case it was saving the peaceful environment for others. Surroundings have far more effect on us than we might believe and I came to see that I needed to at least test this theory out.
Joining Weight Watchers. It gave me a deep, exciting confidence in my ability to set a goal and achieve it. I hadn’t had that feeling in a while, not for goals bigger than a To Do list. It reminded me that a big goal with lots of little steps is doable. Spending the money gave me a good reason to rate my needs and my goals as being as important as the other family members. It helped me unearth a physical Sarah I recognized. It took 10 years off me psychologically, gave me a pile of energy, and stopped me from feeling middle-aged at 25.
And, as I’ve written before, I had a startling moment when I thought, “If I was paying someone to run my life and they were doing it like this, wouldn’t I fire them?”
How did things change?
Blogging. At first I blogged as though Rainer was reading it and might come home and be super nice to me if I had a hard day. Then I blogged with a mission to be homeschooling’s Erma Bombeck. I liked to make people laugh and it seemed like too many people were shining up their image and never talking about how hard things could be. But eventually that wasn’t as satisfying as it used to be and I started using it to focus on the little treasures. And to have a little treasure to focus on each day in order to ‘feed the blog’, I needed to be sure to have one. And so, between a change in my mental sorting of experiences and a change in how we lived (ever so slight), things shifted.
FlyLady. Not so much the system, although I did give it a try a few times. No, more than the practical housekeeping skills, it was her other messages that kicked me in the butt. She wrote things that made me realize that if I wanted things to be different I had to stop wanting and wishing and waiting for some godmother with a wand to show up. If I wanted a better life, then I would have to make it happen. No whining. If I wanted the satisfaction of a tidy dining room, I would have to rate the work of tidying it as worthy. The fact that it untidied itself at a break-neck speed every day? Just one of the stupid facts of life – and heck, one of the definitions of crazy is arguing with reality, right? Also, I really, really needed to learn the lesson of the power of a 5-10 minute burst of work. Wow. I was a mother with never a stretch of hours in which to accomplish things and make them perfect, but that was OK because a Ten Minute Tidy had awesome powers.
Thought Tidying. FlyLady was also part of a general mental decluttering that I did. I took apart my thought patterns. Why was I telling myself certain stories about my day? Why was I letting my mental framing of situations steal the power from me? What emotional relationship did I have with these stories? A lot happened here. I read a lot of books. One of my favourites was The Tao of Pooh. That book led me down some very interesting paths and to a real sense that Taoist philosophy could help me unleash a whole lot of things that sound glib when you type them, like magazine covers: “gratitude, flow, happiness, personal power”.
Life Art. Getting back to my punk teens, the childhood with my wonderful parents who made unusual choices, the attachment parenting, I somehow re-connected with the ability to not try to fit in. There was something so high-stakes about parenting that I’d just gone with the herd, looking and talking like An Average Mom as depicted in ads. Oh, and the fact that I was a mom at 20 and everyone else at playgroup was 30 and I didn’t want them to know how much more their junior I was. But I wasn’t me. I started to think of life as a kind of art, the days and years we have as a sort of canvas, and I started to paint with more accountability to the idea of Sarah on her deathbed looking at the picture and being happy with it.
Things got better. Then they got fantastic. Not always easy, mind you, but fantastic.
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I don’t want to fire myself anymore. I don’t feel regret. Every day is a new canvas and we’re having a blast with our brushes. The things I dimly felt – about order and harmony, about bravery, about a custom-fit life, about the incredible power a family can have when parents take care of themselves – they were true.
A not-inclusive list of things that are delighting us:
Audiobooks:
James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small – this marvelous trip in time, geography, and career has captivated our whole family.
Nightwatch – sly, satiric yet full of heart, dramatic. Originally bought for me to listen to as I walked the dog on cold, dark, winter nights, it became a couple thing, and now Sandra can’t get enough Terry Pratchett on audio.
Tales from the Odyssey -another dramatic family favourite.
Read Alouds
Percy Jackson and the Olympians – Wow. How can I not have heard of this series before?! We started it on our camping trip and the kids and Rainer were begging me to read it all through the day and not just at bedtimes. I didn’t let them know any of the plot before we started the first one, and as the Greek themes revealed themselves they were delighted and agog. Funny narrator, dramatic and gripping plotline, memorable world.
The Complete Tales of Winnie the Pooh – You’re never too old. This is cracking the kids and me right up.
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Read silently
Rainer: Out Stealing Horses (after a review from Lolly Knitting Around)
Me: Mysteries of the Middle Ages: And the Beginnings of the Modern World – witty and interesting, and I’m always up for a good book on the Middle Ages
Sandra: Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident – “It’s really good, Mom. You should read it.”
Tias: it’s all Calvin and Hobbes these days
Blogs
Dear Amanda – I dug this up the other day for a La Leche League meeting I was leading. It does such a marvelous job of describing the roller coaster ride that is mindful parenting. It makes me laugh and cry. Ironically, I couldn’t use it at the meeting because there were so many babies and toddlers there that we were all too busy parenting to listen to a long essay.
Makeunder My Life – addition through subtraction
DVDs
From the Earth to the Moon – Wow.
Elizabeth I – Complicated woman, fabulous clothes, with dashes of goriness thrown in to remind you of the reality of the times
