disorderliness of small things

Day 21: FlyLady answers your questions

Except I don’t want to read any more.  I can’t take any more upbeat peppy voices today.  Reading her attempts at encouragement leave me feeling like a cartoon teenager: “Whatever,” and I roll my eyes.

Day 20: Laundry

“A load a day keeps Mt. Washmore away."  The FlyLady system is to do a load of laundry every day, whether it’s completely full or not.  I’ve been doing the washy like this since my children were small.  Back then, it had to be every day because there was so much laundry.  Especially diapers – I was very pleased with our system of dealing with cloth diapers, but it did require two loads a week of hot wash.  At least in the US we have a dryer for the socks and washcloths; in Australia we did a load a day and hung it on the line outside, or a clothes horse in the living room when it rained.  Now, if we miss a day or even two, it’s not a catastrophe, but I find it’s better for me to stay in the habit.

But that wasn’t what I wanted to write about.  When I started this blog, I was cheery and energetic.  The last few days, not so much.  That’s kind of an understatement, actually.  More like bitter and resentful, alternating with hard and detached.  I’m sure it’s a hormonal state, and if I don’t do anything destructive it will pass in a few days more.  

At least I still have energy to keep working.  In the winter I generally add a fluctuating layer of limp exhaustion and hopelessness to the entire month.  A lot less gets done.  Some years, I read a lot of Facebook in the winter.  One year I wrote a lot.  That was better.

This is why I’m doing this whole FlyLady project.  I have to be able to live my life even when the me who planned it isn’t showing up to do the work.  If I want to homeschool my children, there have to be routines that they and I both know and can rely on when my desire and energy fail.  Getting the house clean is a nice bonus.  Having an orderly house certainly feels better than being surrounded by chaos.  But these joyless, angry days remind me that there’s more to the work I’m doing.  I’m building a scaffold around my life for the days I can’t hold it together myself.

Day 19: The same old things

As far as I can tell, there is nothing new we’re being asked to do today.  This is good.  I have already given up on getting all the other FlyLady things done and am just going forward anyway with what I can manage.

Day 18: Eleven Commandments

Yesterday I was too snarky to write about FlyLady’s Eleven Commandments.  Mostly these are sensible and useful advice, but there are a couple of things that make my skin crawl.

Keep your sink clean and shiny.

Get dressed every morning, even if you don’t feel like it. Don’t forget your lace-up shoes.

Do your morning and before-bedtime routine every day.

Don’t allow yourself to be sidetracked by the computer.

Pick up after yourself. If you get it out, put it away.

Don’t try to do two projects at once. ONE JOB AT A TIME.

Don’t pull out more than you can put back in one hour.

Do something for yourself everyday, maybe every morning and night.

Work as fast as you can to get the job done. This will give you more time to play later.

Smile even when you don’t feel like it. It is contagious. Make your mind up to be happy, and you will be.

Don’t forget to laugh everyday. Pamper yourself; you deserve it!

Did you catch that?  “Make your mind up to be happy, and you will be.”  No, no, no.  Just no.  I mean, smiling, sure.  No harm in that, and it is nicer to spread around than frowns.  But “make up your mind to be happy”?  I am going to have to go offline again to vent all the bile this sentiment calls up in me.  #depressionisreal.

I’m also not a fan of “Don’t forget to laugh everyday.”  I’m in such a bad mood from #10 that I have difficulty forgiving the lack of a space between every and day. But that’s normal human frailty, not something that deserves mockery.  I understand and basically agree with the sentiment: it’s important to make time for the things that make me happy.  I just need different words.

Laura’s Ten and a Half Good Ideas

Keep your sink clean and shiny.

Get dressed every morning, unless you are actually sick and need to send a clear message to your family. Don’t forget your lace-up shoes, or earrings, or makeup.  You are beautiful, and you are also on the job.

Do your morning and before-bedtime routine every day.

Don’t allow yourself to be sidetracked by the computer.  Easier said than done, I know, but do keep trying to stay on target.  Timers and lists are good tools to help.

Pick up after yourself. If you get it out, put it away.  Maybe you can teach the children to follow your good example.

Don’t try to do two projects at once. ONE JOB AT A TIME.

Don’t pull out more than you can put back in one hour.  I know that sometimes you’re going to do it anyways, and you’re going to end up walking around the mess on the floor for a month.  I still love you.

Do something nice for yourself every day – maybe every morning and night. Remember to make time in your life for things you enjoy.

Work as fast as you can with kindness.  Getting the job done sooner will give you more time to play later, but you don’t need whips and chains.   It’s also okay to take breaks when you need them.

Smile even when you don’t feel like it. It is contagious.  (Try this in public places or at the grocery store: people generally will respond to your smile with their own.  These kinds of positive social interactions are good for everyone.)

And then one more, which could be 10 ½;

Day 17: Do the things, and also go to sleep at a reasonable hour.

Well, this is completely reasonable and also impossible.  Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care… Some of us have very loosely-made sleeves, it seems, that need a lot of nightly repair.  Before I was a mother, before I fell pregnant, I slept about ten hours nightly and felt great.  Mentally sharp, physically rested.  When my first daughter was born, that changed to five or six hours nightly, taken in two-hour bites; that changed in various ways through her toddlerhood and then my second daughter’s babyhood and young childhood, but I don’t think I started having even the option to sleep through the night uninterrupted for eight or nine years.  And “sleeping though the night” doesn’t mean getting enough sleep or not waking at all, just that I’m no longer interrupted by my children.  Instead, I now wake up on my own, because I’m too hot or cold, or I have to use the toilet, or I’m thinking about troubling things.  Or I need socks on my feet.  Or because I’m hormonal and can’t help sleeping lightly.  Or I can’t figure out why.  Sometimes I think I’ve forgotten how to do this sleep thing.

And then there’s the other problem.  I have seasonal depression, aka SAD, aka seasonal affective disorder.  The clinical kind, not just the blues.  Part of the necessary treatment is daily use of a light box for intense bright light in the early morning.  So for much of the year I need to be awake and in front of my light at 6 am every day, so I don’t start thinking about throwing myself under a bus or other awful things.  This year has been extra challenging (translate: remission didn’t come as usual in April) so I’ve been continuing the light therapy.

A little math here: in order to get ten hours of sleep, I’d have to be falling asleep at 8 pm.  Not gonna happen.  9 pm is sometimes attainable if I’ve had a very quiet day and the kids are in bed early.  10 is a reasonable goal, but the interrupted eight hours that gives me still doesn’t feel like enough.  Enough to function, yes, but not enough to wake feeling fully rested, and definitely not enough to feel sharp.  I am always foggy these days.  I forget things.  All the time.  I think about my mother’s complaints about memory loss, starting about the same time in her life and continuing now into her 70′s.  Is this it?  Am I ever going to feel sharp again?  Or get enough sleep?

Day 16: Do the other things, and also read FlyLady’s website.

You may have heard me raving about Elizabeth Cooper’s “Queer Body Love”, the interview series I listened to last month.  The interviews are no longer available, but I am enjoying her follow-up emails (you can try, too: see elizabethjcooper.com).  Anyhow, last week’s encouraging email contained the story of trying something new – an ecstatic dance event.  She tried dancing, but it just wasn’t working for her.  So she sat down and wrote.  I love how she describes what happened next:

“I felt freedom.

My freedom looked different than most of the hundred plus people in the space, most of whom were moving very energetically. I certainly didn’t see anybody else writing or reading.

I wrote the following in my notebook: ‘I feel such delight in writing right now. It feels delightfully subversive. But I’m not doing it to be subversive - I’m doing it because it’s what I want to do. And that - knowing what I want and taking it a step further and actually doing it - feels so good.’”

I seldom am aware of my own presence.  I don’t easily know what it is I want, let alone how to pursue it.  But I recognize that feeling of joy.  There’s a wonderful, deep freedom and peace that come with finding my place, the place I fit.  Right now, my focus is on survival.  I’m making plans and carrying them out.  I’m doing the things that will hopefully keep me afloat through my monthly crashes now and the expected seasonal crash to come.  But every now and then I happen across something that reminds me of something deeper.  Writing is like that.   There’s a kind of quiet, centered calm clearness and joy that comes with writing from a place of stillness.  It feels real.  It feels so good.

Day 15: Do the other things, and also make your bed.

Make the bed: check!  My dear, tidy, organized husband taught me this when I was just a young slob.  Making the bed makes the bedroom look so much better.  It also creates a clean surface onto which to dump your messy hair drawer so you can sort the contents, allowing you to discover that some unknown person has used your drawer to catch fingernail clippings.

When we lived in Australia, we were introduced to a new kind of bedding.   Here, I understand they are called duvets, but in Melbourne they were called doonas.  For our daughters, for years, all we used on the beds were a fitted bottom sheet and a doona in a nice washable cover.   Instead of dealing with sheets and blankets and tucking and smoothing, making the bed became very simple.  Fluff the doona over the bed, more or less straight if possible, and be done with it.  When the sheet gets changed, so does the doona cover.  Clean and tidy enough, and easy for people who find the physical world clumsy and inconvenient to navigate.

Day 14: Do [some of] the things, and read about calendars.

I will not be decluttering or cleaning much today, because one of my feet is weirdly painful.  Instead, I get to sit at the computer and knock off some of the online tasks I’ve been storing up.  Yay!

Today’s task is to read about calendars.  This one, at least, I already understand.  We have a desk-type calendar with big squares mounted on the kitchen wall, and everything that happens in the family gets written there.  Dd15 convinced me last year that it’s worth springing for the one with pretty colors, and I’m so glad she did: I’m looking at this thing every day, multiple times a day, and it makes me happier to look at something I think is not ugly.  The system is not perfect.  Charles uses a smartphone app for his own appointments, and sometimes they don’t make it onto the real paper calendar in time.  Sometimes I just plain forget to write things down.  I am gradually becoming more willing to consider an app (hear me dragging my feet?) as a backup, so I can see his schedule when I’m planning doctor and dentist visits, but really.  The paper one is better.

There’s another nice side effect to relying on a single physical calendar.  When I’m asked whether I can do something, I can’t give a definite answer right away.  Having to look it up allows me to stop and think: do I really want to do this?  Do I have time to add this thing and still feel relaxed and rested?  I’m not good at knowing those things on the spot, and not having a calendar at hand creates the time I need to find out.

I’ve been meaning to share this with you, in case someone is interested in following along with the FlyLady part of what I’m doing.  Somewhere along the way I got tired of clicking around the FlyLady website and found a pdf summary of her relevant daily steps.  This is much easier to use:

Day 13: do [most of] the things, and do a cleaning mission.

I’m back in the saddle today.  Not having to go out for groceries or doctors makes this much less hard.  Anyhow, I worked on my bedroom for a respectable but not out-of-control time and am pleased with the improvement I see.  The dining room table has again become a staging area for homeless things to gather, but I am working on it little by little.  And I read about the daily missions today’s FlyLady instructions talk about.

I think I get the idea: one of the helpers at FlyLady Central puts together a set of small tasks each week in the area of the house we’re focusing on.  This week, evidently, it’s bathrooms; each day this week has a cleaning or decluttering job that goes beyond the basics.  The task that was proposed for today was to take a toothbrush and scrub around the faucets – five minutes, so as icky as it might sound it shouldn’t be an awful job.  I, of course, can’t do what I am told.  Instead of scrubbing faucets, I dump out my drawer of hair stuff and put back only the things I actually use.  This takes a little longer but is immensely rewarding: no more dead splayed-out bobby pins and scratchy bun pins, no more chaos of elastics, no more combs that nobody uses, no more washcloths that don’t belong there anyway.  Just the good stuff, and not too much of it.

Okay.  I am having trouble getting back to some forward motion here.  I have the sadly familiar feeling of having too many balls to juggle, so many that it’s simply impossible to keep them all in the air.  The only thing I can do is decide which ones to drop.  Will I get enough sleep?  Will my children have my attention when they want it? or when they need it?  Will there be cooked food today?  Will there be any homeschool activities?  Will I keep records of the children’s project work?  Will I have any contact with friends?  Or with my husband?  Will we make it to appointments with doctors (dentists, optometrists, etc.)?  Will there be any decluttering?  Or tidying?  Will my sink still be clean?

If you have never read the spoon analogy of life with a chronic illness, you might like to read this:  http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com/tcS3_media/uploads/2010/02/BYDLS-TheSpoonTheory.pdf  I don’t have lupus or fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome; I don’t have rheumatoid arthritis or any chronic pain condition.  My body is healthy.  But the spoon story gives me a way to talk about my experience of being limited.