Sandra Tayler's Blog, page 72

Choosing to Reach for Happiness

I don’t remember the stated topic for the church lesson, but a tangent landed us in a discussion about the power of conscious choice in changing our lives for the better. I love hearing discussions like this. I like it when people are empowered in their lives. However the phrase “choose happiness” kept getting tossed around as part of the discussion. All the rest of the discussion was wonderful, but that phrase bothered me. As a person who wrestles with anxiety and who lives around people who get depressed, I know that emotions are not under logical control. They show up unbidden and making them leave can be extremely difficult. Telling a depressed person “Just choose to be happy” is about the worst thing you can say, because they can’t. Sometimes they can’t even believe that happiness exists even though they logically understand that it does. There is a huge difference between knowing and feeling.

I sat in the meeting trying to figure out how to retain the message that we have the power to choose without implying that we can do the impossible. Then I realized that “choose happiness” left out a few words: Choose to reach for happiness. We may not be able to grasp it for a hundred different reasons, but we can choose to reach for it. That reach may look like taking a brisk walk on a Sunday morning so that anxieties will not chase you through your dreams at night. It may be seeing a doctor to discuss mental health issues. It may be skipping a treat and paying down a bill so someday that crushing load of debt will be gone. It may be splurging on a small treat because this particular $3 purchase bestows hours of enjoyment. The answers are unique to each person, but each of us can reach for happiness, taking logical actions toward it, even if it seems that grasping it is impossible. That conscious choice–to reach for happiness–sets your feet on the beginning of a path to attaining it.

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After the Shopping

One thing that getting older has taught me is that I often become something I never expected to be. I began parenthood as a stay at home mother who devoted 90% of her creative energy to things which benefited the kids. I thought that was the best kind of mother to be. These days I’m a working mother who often lets her kids fend for themselves and I can see significant advantages to this way of doing things. I used to be a person who started making Christmas purchases in October and had them completed by Thanksgiving. It was all carefully planned and balanced. This year we are making most of our Christmas purchases within 4 days of that holiday. I always thought that sort of last minute scramble represented poor planning and resulted in over spending because of last minute stress. Yes going out shopping today put us into crowded stores, but I don’t think the expense was more. It may even have been less because during the planning years we kept picking up “one more thing.” Nor do I think that the conscious focus of picking gifts was lessened. Choosing a gift is the same emotional action whether it occurs two months or two days before the holiday. I didn’t understand that before, I was too busy carefully planning. Also by shortening the time between gift selection and gift presentation, the kids retain an emotional connection to the gift they are giving. This will not be a year when a giver has forgotten what is inside the wrapping paper.

This is not to say that carefully planning is wrong either. It would not surprise me to discover that my future holds carefully-planned-in-advance Christmases. This is the advantage to discovering that there is no one true way to approach Christmas, I’m free to choose whichever form of celebration best fits that particular holiday season.

The forays into the wilds of Christmas bustle were successful. It turns out that the necessary shopping was split across five people instead of just falling to me. Howard went out, Kiki went out, and I took both boys out. The only family member who did not go to a store today was Gleek. She happily conspired with me from the items I already had here at home.

It was interesting to go shopping with my two boys. They have a very direct approach to gift selection. It is kind of refreshing. They flounder, not at all sure what they should get until suddenly they know that the thing right in front of them is exactly right. Even if it is a thing I’m not certain about, even if I express that reservation, they are not dissuaded. They stick with their choices. I like seeing them decisive. And truth be told, I didn’t argue much. I’m trying to let go, let the kids do their own struggling, considering, and selecting. Kiki had a harder time. She reached a blitzed, unable to decide state. It was a full-bore option overload from which Howard had to rescue her. he did and they came home triumphant, if tired.

Yesterday, during the long shopping outing with Howard, I looked over at him and felt happy. We were out in the holiday crowds–something we try to avoid–and we were shopping last minute–also to be avoided–yet I felt happy. I was so happy to be part of a Christmas preparation team instead of trying to save everyone else from stress by doing most of it myself. At 2 am this morning I could not believe that the holiday would be good. Now I can. I’ll take that.

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Christmas Looms

At 2 am this morning I was convinced that I’d ruined Christmas, as if Christmas was my job to get right for my entire family instead of a mutual creation. But 2 am is not a rational hour and the illogical thoughts capered through my brain refusing to calm down or cooperate. I knew that if I could only sleep, things would look better in the morning. I would then be able to sort the tasks which needed to be done and actually do them. Step one was to fall asleep and that was proving tricky.

I did it to myself really. I spent from 10 am to 2 pm out with Howard, visiting the doctor, a restaurant and three different stores. We returned home with our selections for Christmas morning surprises, carefully chosen. As I tweeted during lunch: The fate of Christmas morning rested upon those purchasing decisions. It doesn’t of course. Christmas isn’t in the gifts, packages, boxes, or tags. The Grinch reminds me of this every year and I always manage to forget it at some point during the next year. We arrived home tired. I napped a bit, but then my youngest needed help cleaning his room because he was inclined to just clear the middle by shoving things to the edges. We cleaned, I caught a brief nap, friends stopped by, I realized I had not yet run to the grocery store despite the fact that it had been high on the priority list for two days. The grocery run brought me home just in time to cook a fish stick dinner for the kids and then dash out into the night for a social evening with friends. Hours of talking (and laughing) later I drove home–too tired to even make conversation on the drive. It was a day with no time for stopping or relaxing, no time for my brain to sort the day or settle it. So I found myself in the darkest hour of night with capering thoughts that I knew were irrational, but could not stop.

I’m not sure when sleep managed to arrive, one of my tactics was to refuse to check the clock. Eventually I woke up this morning able to finally do things to feel that Christmas will be fine. Most of what I need to do is take kids shopping. Four kids. Four shopping trips. All on the Saturday before Christmas. I’m going to be tired by the end of today. Hopefully I’ll be able to cultivate a holiday shopping zen rather than having the entire experience be miserable. Or perhaps I should let it be miserable in the hope that next year the kids will think about Christmas options earlier in the month.

For now, I need to change out of pajamas and let the shopping begin.That, and hope that having had my Christmas is ruined panic last night, I can maybe skip that part of Christmas eve.

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Writing Things I Do Not Post to the Internet

Last April I went to visit my Grandma in the hospital. She was suffering from a broken hip and was having trouble keeping track of reality while she was there. She is much improved now, back at home and back to normal. Yet during that time we all worried for her very much. I did what I usually do, which is to blog about the things that were going on. My dad read the post, told me it was good, but then requested that I be careful about what I post because there are times when grandma reads my posts. This seemed to be a fair and reasonable request to me. I always try to be mindful of possible audience when I say things in public, particularly on the internet.

Yet, my brain was full of thoughts, memories, and emotions. They swirled in my head and I knew that the only way to calm the noise was to pin these thoughts into written words. Writing clarifies me to myself. It is how I sort and make sense of the things that happen to me. I talked to Howard and his wise advice was for me to write it all anyway, just don’t post it. So that is what I did. I wrapped words around all the things I was thinking and I delved deep to figure out what I was feeling. Because I knew I was the only audience, I was freed from being careful. I wrote what I needed to write without fear that it would hurt anyone else.

I have many beloved people in my life who choose not to be public on the internet. They are cautious about online interactions and generally avoid social media. I love them and respect their choices. However I have thoughts and experiences about things which include them. There are stories I would like to write out, except that I fear it would upset someone. I see this often with my children. They have friendship troubles, emotional trials, and health concerns with affect me. I have to think these things through, sort them out for myself so that I know how and when to help. I write it all down and don’t post it.

Lately I’ve been reading the blog of C. Jane Kendrick. She recently posted about telling her life story and why she thinks it is important for her–and all of us–to do so. She had one reader ask her the question “I want to write my story but there have been some terrible experiences that would scare someone to read, should I still write it?” Jane’s answer sounded wise to me:

Don’t we all have those experiences? Terrible, scary experiences? Hurt, pain, anger? Threatening ex-husbands?! If we gloss over those parts how will our children navigate those experiences when they have them? Are the deep wounds as important to flesh out as the times of joy? I say yes. But cautiously, and only when those stories asked to be plucked.

–from The Thing About Mary by C. Jane Kendrick

Yes some of life’s stories are hard, but not talking about them just means that everyone who faces these same hard things feels alone. We need to be willing to share our hard stories because my hard story can be someone else’s road map to survival. I know that I’ve used other people’s experiences as maps for my life. This is why I’ve posted about radiation therapy, my sister’s cancer, my anxieties, diagnosis and selecting medication for my children. Hard things will come to me in the future and I’ll write about those things too. When I write about a hard thing and it becomes useful to someone else, then that hard thing is redeemed for me. It has a point and a purpose.

Yet my belief in telling the hard stories often comes into conflict with my desire to respect the privacy and feelings of others. I have in my heart–and I apply it to all my writing–a version of the Hippocratic oath, First Do No Harm. This becomes difficult when my head is full of hard stories that I need to write, but worry will cause a problem for others. Sometimes I need to post them anyway, because the value is important. Mostly I write them but don’t post.

Sometimes I forget about the option to write and not post. I get so tangled up in thinking about things and respecting others that my brain gets clogged with stories I am not telling. My brain becomes like a slow drain which needs to be cleared. Last night I wrote three different essays of 800 words each. They fell out of my brain one after the other, filled with stories that I needed to write knowing that I would not post them. When I was done I read back over them and realized that 90% of what I’d written was perfectly fine to be public. The remaining 10% could be re-written so that the story was told without doing harm. This is often the case, but I first have to write the story without fear.

Memoir and blog posts are best when they do not pull their punches, when the writer does not shy away from telling the hard stories. However I enjoy them most when the writer is not vindictive or angry, but rather expressing calmness and forgiveness. I try to do that. I try to make sure I tell my stories in ways that do not injure, even though I know that this sometimes weakens the stories. But sometimes I need to write without softening anything. Even though I know no one else will ever read it. Even when I sometimes erase it as soon as I am done. The act of writing the hard stories changes me. I emerge with a clearer sense of where I am and where I need to go. This is why I sometimes write things that I do not post.

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Not Coincidence

I finally dragged myself out to the gym today after two weeks of anxiety and four days of low grade depression. (The kind where I get things done, but every time I stop moving I feel like I want to cry a little. Then getting moving is even harder because I have a hard time believing my efforts make things better. I kind of earned this depression with all the non-stop to-doing, but it still doesn’t feel fun. Catching up on sleep was not making it go away. Hence: gym.) I went to the gym around noon. I took a nap. I dragged myself through making dinner. Then I sat down and wrote 2500 words. In the middle of that I folded some laundry and put kids to bed. The sadness had ebbed and the world feels good again.

This is not a coincidence and I need to point it out so that I will stop forgetting. Exercise and writing = well being and happiness.

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A Mixture of December Thoughts

My December wasn’t busy when I viewed it from the safety of Thanksgiving weekend. I could look at the calendar–mostly empty–and hope that in between the holiday shipping there would be time for some peace. If I look back at the calendar days I’ve just been through, they still look pretty empty, but I know that they were not. December is always like this, or at least it has been for the last several years. It is the unrelenting list of things to do, each one small but important. It is getting the kids up for school and instead of focusing on homework support and house management, running downstairs to process the stack of orders that needs to go out with the mail. Then it is managing the small homework crises which would not have been crises at all had I been following my usual patterns. It is the accumulation of clutter and laundry because I use my spare minutes to plan gifts, manage customer support, or process orders. Then there are the out of ordinary things that rearrange my days. Kiki needing urgent medical attention for what turned out to be an acute abdominal strain. Link having frequent heartburn pain which increased to the point that he was awake in tears at night. So now we’re in the process of diagnosis to figure out why–lab results testing for an ulcer should come in on Friday. Each unexpected thing makes all the other things have to shuffle around.

And then there was the mummified chicken. It was a school project. The kids have been working on it for weeks, but Gleek really owned the whole process. I was fine with that, except one day Gleek called because she’d volunteered a to bring a sarcophagus and she had left it at home. I delivered it. The next day Gleek called because the kid who was supposed to bring the cotton wrapping had not done so. That time Howard delivered the rescue. This afternoon Gleek arrived at the car with the sarcophagus in hand. Someone had to take the mummy home and bury it until spring, rather like an odd version of taking home the class pet for the weekend. So, I have a mummified chicken in my garage waiting for Gleek to dig a hole in some corner of my yard. This definitely falls into the category of Things I Did Not Expect When I Decided to Become a Parent.

I was supposed to take Gleek and Patch to go see the Christmas lights on Temple Square today. It is a trip we all want to take, except when we walked into the house this afternoon, not one of us wanted to leave. I don’t want to leave my house very much lately. I know I should. It is good for me when I do. Yet entire weeks go by when I only leave to carpool kids or to fetch food from the grocery store. And visit the post office. I’ve made many trips to the post office this past week when I could not leave packages by the curb because of the water falling from the sky. This is why it was so good of Howard to send me to see The Hobbit last Friday. This Friday I have a social event with friends. I’m looking forward to it, and simultaneously I do not want to leave my house. I don’t like the word homebody. It has negative connotations for me, but increasingly I think the word applies to me. I’m trying to decide how I feel about that and if it is a problem to be remedied.

Last year I wrote a lovely blog entry about approaching Christmas This year is different than last. I find myself in a strange place where Christmas is only days away and our tree is still mostly bare of gifts. The strangest part is that none of the kids have come to me upset by the lack of presents, though a couple of them have expressed concern about what they should give and how to fund it. I have a stash of things I’ve accumulated, but I get the feeling that none of my kids will be shopping in the mommy store. They are going to go shopping, seeking out what they want to give rather than taking the easy path of giving something I’ve already acquired. I’ll be assisting with this more challenging path, turning over to them this part of creating the holiday. Thus we build new holiday patterns because we outgrew the old ones. More important, I am loosening my hands on the reins, realizing that Christmas is a group project and I have to let everyone else participate instead of just being passengers on my ride. Even if it means that three days from now there is a present buying panic.

All of which makes for a blog entry as mixed together and haphazard as most of my days have been lately.

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Early Morning Adventures

My day began with ringing my neighbor’s doorbell at 6 am to see if they could identify the owner of the silver car which was parked across my driveway. I figured that if they did, then being awoken was a reasonable consequence. Sadly, they did not. So two households were inconvenienced by one silver car and I think I owe my neighbors apology cookies. Or maybe “thank you for being good neighbors” cookies because they offered to let me take one of their cars to drive Kiki to school, or at least to stand around and play guide while I backed my van across my lawn to make sure that I didn’t hit any of the rocks and trees. We were just beginning the process of backing my van, which I gave even odds of getting my van stuck in the snowy grass, when a different van pulled in to the cul de sac and two teenage girls hopped out. One ran into the neighbor’s house on the other side of me. The other came running to the silver car, spilling apologies.

“Oh, I’ve blocked you! I’m so sorry. I just parked here so we could carpool together in one car. We went to the temple this morning.” The apologies kept coming as she tried to unlock and unstick her frozen car door.

“It was so dark when I arrived I couldn’t even see that this was a driveway!”

I looked up at the dark sky with no hint of sunlight. I looked at the streetlamp which shines on our entire cul de sac. I looked at the tree in the corner of my yard which is completely lit with Christmas lights and illuminates my entire yard. I looked at the snowy lawn and the wet-but-clear sidewalks and driveway. I looked at the seven feet of curb in front of my house where she could have parked without blocking my driveway. All of these things were clearly visible, as was the entirely empty driveway of the house containing her friend, which easily could host three cars.

By this time she was inside her car and scrambling to drive away from her embarrassment. My neighbor turned to go back into his house, walking gingerly because he’d come outdoors in bare feet. I called to him “Thank you John, sorry I woke you up!” I pitched my voice so that the girl would hear. Embarrassment is the only consequence she is getting, I wanted to make sure that she got the full load–not out of vindictiveness (well maybe a little,) but mostly because paying attention to where you park is an important safety lesson. The girl is obviously a nice one, just young and inexperienced. I’m just glad that I did not have to leave any earlier. We got Kiki to class only a couple of minutes late and I get to proceed with my morning.

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Playing with Dry Ice

Kiki was sick the day they did the dry ice lab in her physics class. Dry ice allows the students to simulate a frictionless environment. In order to help Kiki make up her assignment we declared playing with dry ice to be our Monday night family activity. For safety, I made them all put on gloves. The squabbling began about two seconds after I got the ice out of the bag. They all had very clear ideas about what we should do with the ice, but none of them were very good at pausing to listen to each other. Even with the squabbles, much fun was had as we slid the block across our kitchen counter helping Kiki with her experiments.

Then we explored the joy of plunking the remaining ice into a pot of water. The bubbles of fog were truly impressive. Photographing them was tricky. Two kids had to blow the fog away while I aimed the camera.

Naturally we spent some time letting the fog flow over the sides of the pot and across the counter.

Even this part of the experiment was not argument free. Gleek wanted to catch and swirl the fog with her hands. Kiki wanted to watch the patterns it made when undisturbed. Except when they swapped roles wanting the opposite things. Add in two more kids with desires to stir, pull the ice back out and slide it some more, and a host of other creative ideas… Let’s just say the playing with dry ice is not a conflict free experience with a family of four.

Yet it was completely worthwhile and quite a lot of fun. Sometimes we get to do something really cool. Literally. The dry ice formed condensation and ice crystals wherever it went.

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Telling Kids About Bad Things

Howard and I spent most of the weekend avoiding the news. We checked in for updates, but only read them in text. We watched no video and tried to keep to bare facts as much as possible. We certainly did not turn on broadcast news in our family room and let our kids watch with us. For them, the school shooting barely existed all weekend long. Howard and I had several conversations during which we sorted our thoughts and feelings, but we were careful to have those where the kids were not listening.

This morning at breakfast Gleek asked a question which showed that the school shooting was on her mind. This is logical since she would be headed off to school soon. I sat down and reviewed some facts with them. We talked about order of events, details we may never know, and how rare this sort of event was. I kept my demeanor factual and calm while watching to see what they were feeling. Children will adopt the emotional states of their parents and I did not want to send them off to school upset. I also did not want to send them off to school uniformed, because kids talk at school. Some of their friends did spend all weekend watching news and listening to their parents cry. I fully expect my kids to come home more upset and with more questions than they had this morning. This is hard.

There was a moment during this morning’s discussion where I watched my kids realize how terrible this is. When I said that the victims were first graders, a flicker passed across both Gleek’s face and Patch’s. They are older. The first graders are the little kids. So we talked about that for a bit. We talked about how teachers died trying to protect the kids and that their teachers would do the same for them. Then we talked about free agency, which God grants to all of his children, even though he knows that some people will make choices to hurt others.

When the conversation wound down to a pause, I deliberately changed the subject. We moved onward into homework and getting ready for school. Hard things happen. We have feelings about them. We help where we can. We take reasonable steps to increase safety. Then we move onward.

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A Resting Place

This week was a push week. I pushed to get the last calendar pre-orders out. I pushed to do the regular shipping. I pushed to organize all the scout things. I pushed to help Patch with his big assignment. I pushed to help Kiki with her massive, must-not-fail, picture book project. All of that on top of pushing for things all the week before. I was not sleeping enough. And anxiety re-emerged to make many tasks less easily accomplished.

I could tell I was fatigued because of the little things like the increase of typos in my text messages, emails, and blog entries. The available cooking ingredients in our house dwindled to canned goods because I kept failing to go to the store despite my intentions to do so. I was late picking up kids. It took me four days to get a plane flight booked because I kept forgetting to sit down and do it. Email stacked up so that my inbox overflowed and I kept discovering that I’d composed email answers in my head, but not actually sent them. My brain was trying to track too many things and lost track of some of them.

In years past I got very stressed about this creeping unreliability. I’ve come to accept it as part of the holiday shipping season. Not only do I accept it, but I let people around me know to expect it. I get flaky between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I don’t want to be, but I’ve had to learn that I am. There is just too much going on. I push too hard on too many things. I short myself on sleep trying to get them done. Even attempting to normalize my sleep becomes another thing to manage. So I just muddle through, prioritizing each day to make sure that none of the critical things get dropped.

Until I hit a day like today. All the big things for the week are finished. I pushed hard. I didn’t miss the important things. I am tired, but there is no time for me to drift and recover. I’ve already got ten more things lined up waiting for me to push and accomplish them. I want to drift and there is no time for it. Time available or not, I’ve done a fair amount of drifting today. I ran out of push.

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