eleven bee

I’m surrounded by piles.  Piles and piles of stuff.  Mountains, almost.  And it’s driving me bonkers.

Ours is a problem of input versus output.  We have ridiculous amounts of stuff coming into this house, and not enough stuff going out.  I’m the mom that goes to pick the kids up from daycare at the end of the day and tries to extract my children without being forced to take home the piles and piles of paperwork — “art” projects, announcements, book drive order forms, fund-raising propaganda — that the eagle-eyed caregivers try to press into my hands.  I take a moment to appreciate the boys’ most recent colored pencil sketches, I glance at the announcements, and then, if I can get away with it, I locate the nearest recycling bin and toss them.

If that doesn’t work, I end up piling the backpacks, jackets, and papers on the passenger seat of the car, and then try to sort through them when we get home, before we all unload into the house.   If that doesn’t work, then I concede and add the papers to the growing mound of papers on our kitchen counter, evidence of other past failed attempts to purge.

And that’s just papers from school.  I’ve started to use the mailbox as spill-over storage, dreading having to retrieve and sort through stacks of mortgage refinance offers, Direct TV fliers, overly technical reports from our financial planning service that I’ll never actually read through or have any hope of ever understanding.

On top of that we have toys, books, shoes that are too small or out of season, and an assortment of useless tchotchkes.  I once thought that we would be able to avoid having so much useless plastic crap around just because we don’t do the happy meal thing.  Apparently, though, there are other sources of these tiny pieces of misery.  Kids’ birthday parties.  Festivals.   Well intentioned gifts from  friends and family.  Other kids.  It just never ends.

We get numerous magazine subscriptions, which would seem harmless enough on their own.  But added to the other unending sources of stuff coming into our house, I have now come to resent them.  Not only that, but the actual magazines that we receive seem a little ridiculous when you look at the state of our house.  The American Handyman?  Why in the world do we need The American Handyman magazine when we long ago accepted the fact that neither of us is the DIY kind of homeowner?  Maybe I’m being overly sensitive, but I’m feeling a little mocked by The American Handyman.

I love, love, love getting rid of stuff.  I’m not sure why it’s so hard to do.  Perhaps if we could all be a little more disciplined about not bringing stuff home in the first place.  Perhaps if we had a little more time to organize.

Last night on Halloween, I took the boys out trick or treating.  Each time a neighbor opened their door and pretended to be impressed with our kids’ store-bought Star Wars and Batman costumes while they handed them a piece of candy, I’d catch a glimpse of the insides of their homes.  None of them looked like they were at risk of being as overcome with stuff as I feel we are.

How are they doing it? I wondered.  And is it too late for me to learn how…?

Is there a difference between feeling sorry for someone or taking pity on someone?  I can’t quite figure it out.

Lately I’ve been noticing people passing out pity for things that don’t strike me as pity-worthy.  Take parenthood, for example.  I was at a birthday party for a little girl and ended up grazing at the food table alongside a woman I didn’t know.  “Which one of these is yours?” she asked, making a sweeping gesture towards the gaggle of kids running around in circles with no apparent purpose.

“Um…” I looked around and tried to focus on the whir of children.  “That one.  And… that one.”  I pointed to my two boys as they zipped by squealing with laughter.

“Oh. Two boys.  Wow,” she said.  “I’m sorry.”  And then she laughed a little.

I crinkled up my brow a bit.  “Don’t be.  I’m not.”

Turns out that she was the mom of a little girl, a little girl she adopted from China.  So clearly she chose her child.  I didn’t actually get to choose my boys, but honestly I wouldn’t have changed anything even if I could.  It’s not that I think things would have felt any less right if I had had a girl or two, it’s just that … well it seems pointless to spend any real amount of time even pursing that line of thinking, you know?  It is, as they say, what it is.

So what circumstances do merit pity?  Illnesses, I suppose, are pretty universally regarded as unfortunate.  And accidents. A run of bad luck.  But other things seem kind of subjective.  You want to be careful with saying things like, “Dude.  Sorry about that haircut,” because there’s every chance that homey likes that mullet that you just immediately assumed was a botched hair style.

I guess in general, I’m thinking of being a little more careful when doling out my sympathy to others.  Maybe, just maybe, others like the boxes they’re in, whether they chose to be in them or not.

This evening as I was scratching Kai’s back at bedtime, I commented in an off-hand kind of way, “I wonder why I even bother scratching your back at night.  The second I leave your room you pop right out of bed and monkey around for another half-hour or so.”  I wasn’t really expecting an answer.  I mean, I know why I do it:  cuz it’s our thing.  I like spending that time one-on-one, with each of the boys, at the end of the night.  Plus they’re just so gosh darned cuddly at this age.  I love it.

I wasn’t expecting an answer, so I was surprised to hear Kai respond back, in as matter of fact of a voice that can be expected of a four year old, “Well you never actually sing to me…”

I thought this over for a moment and then started singing Rock-A-Bye-Baby.

“No,” he stopped me.  “Not that one.”

“Oh, um.  Okay.  How about this one.”  I started with Mama’s Gonna Buy You A Mockingbird.

“Nuh uh.”

I was stumped for a second — those were my two stand-by lullabies.  So I dug deep.  And I ended up back in 1977.  All the way back to the seven-year old me, serenading my parents in our livingroom in Morristown, New Jersey, so proud that I had finally learned all the words.

I finished the first verse and noticed that Kai had seemed to settle down.  Who knew Debby Boone was so soothing? Another verse and a chorus or two later, and I tiptoed out of his room across the hall to Colin’s room.

“Hey,” I said, as I shooed him into bed.  “Kai asked me to sing him a song tonight.  Want me to sing one to you too?”

“Yeah,” he said, “What song?”  I told him.  “That’s a bad name for a song.”

“Well, sure,” I agreed.  “But it was a big hit in its time.”

He shrugged and snuggled down in his sheets.  And I began again.  Quietly, softly.  So many nights, I’d sit by my window.  Waiting for someone to sing me his song. Colin turned his face to watch me as I sang to him.  He had a strange little look on his face.  In the dark it looked almost like he was… smirking?

“What?”  I stopped, suddenly a bit self conscious.  “Is it bad?”

“No!  It’s good.  It’s a pretty song.  And you sing so pretty too, Mom.”

Aww…

The lyrics lack even one iota of subtlety — the word “cheesetastic” comes to mind —  but there’s clearly something about the tune that has stood the test of time, at least with the four to six year old age bracket.

Tonight was the first time in a long while that the boys actually stayed in bed after I left their rooms at the end of the night.  As I walked down the stairs, I pictured them drifting off into a deep sleep dreaming about sitting at a window, looking longingly for someone to come along to light up their lives…

Get it?  Flu?  Shoe?  Waiting for the other shoe to drop?

In addition to the ultimately productive discomfort of starting a new job about a week ago, I’ve been battling a bit of a cold.  Around me, people are dropping like flies — M. to the left of me was officially diagnosed with H1N1 the day after getting a flu shot, A. to the right of me had to leave work in the middle of the day because she was feeling queasy and ended up in the emergency room that evening with a 106 degree temperature.  (She soaked in an ice bath for a good amount of time, but has no memory of any of it.)  And me?  All I got was this stupid cold.

It seems that all anyone is talking about these days is H1N1.  Balloon boy offered a brief respite from swine-flu-mania, but we seem to have picked up right where we left off.  AHH!  Run for the hills!  H1N1 suuuuuuucks!

And this is stupid of me to say, I know, but at this point, I’m tired of living in fear.  It’s like, All right, already – bring it! At least then I could stop worrying about when or if it will get me…

Hear that sound?  That’s me knocking on a giant block of wood.

During the Q & A portion of the evening at the “Intro to Cub Scouts” meeting this evening, the antogonist in me came thiiiiis close to raising my hand and saying something like, “My six year old son thinks he might be gay.  Is that a problem?”  But I’m proud to say I resisted the urge.  See that?   Mama’s learning how to screen her thoughts a little!

Progress!

I can’t be the only one out there who actually enjoys falling off the wagon from time to time.  Doing things that are good for me really does feel good while I’m doing them, but it’s still an effort all the while.  So when I find myself off the wagon, I take full advantage of it.  When I stop watching what I eat, I really stop watching what I eat, and I have a blast.  When I stop exercising, I really stop exercising.  And just a few weeks ago, I started smoking cigarettes again, just a little bit… though I have to admit that I have a harder time just enjoying smoking because it is just such a sucky thing to do.

Nonetheless, I know that I’ll eventually get back on track with all of these things — sooner rather than later — but for the most I do enjoy not having to exert so much effort to do the right thing, at least for a little while. It’s a decadent kind of laziness thing.  And, at heart, I’m a lazy, decadent kind of woman.  And it’s just so comfortable down here off the wagon…

image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/helenethierry/

Do you believe that everybody knows everything they’re ever going to know from the moment they are born?  And that they then spend the rest of their lives rediscovering what they already knew already?  It’s an interesting — if ancient — idea.

Asking questions, some say, is the key to leading people back to what they already knew in the first place. I’m intrigued.  Not convinced that I necessarily buy into it, but I’m intrigued nonetheless.

My dad had a favorite little story that he used to tell about my early communication skills.  As he told it, one night as we were sitting down to eat dinner, I surveyed the meal that had been set down before me and proclaimed, “Sometimes I like broccoli.” That was it.  The real meaning behind my statement, he explained to me, required a bit of deciphering.  Sometimes she likes broccoli.  So that probably means that sometimes she doesn’t like broccoli.  Now is this one of the times when she does?  Or is she trying to tell me, instead, that while she does sometimes enjoy broccoli, tonight is not, in fact, one of those times, and therefore there will be no eating of the broccoli this evening?

It’s a kind of round about way of getting a message across, but eventually he did understand my meaning:  no broccoli for me tonight, Dad.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to be a little more direct.  I find it’s just easier all around, and really leaves much less room for error. For example, earlier this summer Charley mentioned that he would be out of town on business on my birthday.  Now a younger me may have spent some time batting her eyelashes, dropping strategic hints about things that he could do to make up for the fact that he wouldn’t be there with me to celebrate me turning almost 40.  But I’m a slightly sleep deprived working mom of two young boys, and frankly, I didn’t have the energy.  So instead I just laid it out there:  “Well then you should at least send some flowers.”

And, wouldn’t you know it?  I got a beautiful bouquet of flowers on my birthday from my thoughtful husband!  See?  It’s a win-win.  I was happy because I got exactly what I was hoping for, and he was happy because he didn’t have to guess about what I wanted. It may be slightly less romantic, but it certainly is more direct, and ultimately, more effective.

With all the challenges that we all face each day in the normal course of things, it just seems to make sense the lessen the chances for disappointment where possible.  So when I can, I let people know what I need and I try to do so in the clearest possible way.  Really it takes much less effort.  I still don’t necessarily always get what I want, but at least if I don’t, it’s less often because my needs weren’t understood in the first place.