Update and Ugh

I ate three nanaimo bars yesterday, and felt horrible. Man, those things really are too sweet. I've eaten a few more today and they are so sweet and so rich that I've eaten much less of anything else compared to normal, and I feel horrible from the richness and subsequent sugar crash.

Clearly I am 35 but need to be saved from myself.

Late night blogging

Last night I lay in bed waiting to fall asleep and thought of an absolutely fascinating post to write. Truly. And then, of course, this morning the only part of it that I can remember is ... that I thought of an absolutely fascinating post to write. 

So we (I) survived the gymnastics. The Boy ran about like I had put methamphetamines in his breakfast (which I had not, for the curious), and climbed and clambered over things as he did last time. I suppose it's good for him; he gets a lot of energy released, at the very least. And I suppose that any running about means that he's learning new gross motor skills as he climbs around things. But it's not like he's going to be winning any Olympic medals anytime soon. Not that I expect that, regardless. 

Six weeks or so ago I suddenly had an urge to eat vegetables. Lots of them, and pretty much only them. I get like this from time to time. Not a diet, because I don't believe in them, but just a conscious effort towards putting raw food into my body as much as possible. I dropped a few pounds, and found that the less junk I ate, the less I wanted it. The other day I headed down to our local coffee shop for a treat and found myself overlooking the cookie I thought I wanted and getting an all-fruit smoothie instead. 

Today, however, we popped out to the grocery store, ostensibly for milk, and ended up coming home with boxes: macaroni and cheese and nanaimo bars. I have never made nanaimo bars, I have never wanted to make them, and I don't even eat them all that much. I find them too sweet most of the time. 

But this box, it called to me. I bought it, brought it home, and figured it might share the same fate as the box of brownies I bought about four years ago that was, until I cleaned the cupboards six months ago, still unopened. (now it's in the garbage, in case any of you are gasping in horror that I ate a three year old cake mix.) 

I made the nanaimo bars. I salivated throughout the making of them. And then I ate several while the chocolate on top was still cooling. 

I write this post feeling curiously satiated, calm and blissful. There's just something about indulging a craving, you know? Six weeks ago it was for raw broccoli. Alas, this one hit right at the same time that those jeans were finally beginning to fit. 

AAAAIIIEEEEE

Last week we skipped the dreaded chaos of gymnastics because the rellies from England were here. Now we have no alternative! 

Pray for me.

Sleep

I spent part of my day looking at studies on sleep deprivation. I've been wondering, lately, why I haven't been feeling better even though I've been getting more sleep over the past few months. I have to confess, though, that better sleep actually isn't that much better -- three nights of seven I'm still woken in the night, and the other four I'm getting a absolute maximum of ten hours a night. Most nights, just eight. Which yes, I admit, is great sleep (at least, compared to what I've been getting the last few years) but it's not like I'm making up for sleep at all. One study I saw said that in order to make up a sleep debt, you have to sleep half the time that you missed -- as in, if you missed six hours of sleep, you need an extra three hours to make up for it. And given that I'm missing approximately eighteen trillion hours of sleep -- give or take -- over the last two and a half years, and not making any of that up, it makes sense that I'm still feeling less than well rested. I don't want to fall asleep while driving anymore, but I'm sure not feeling like running a marathon is a good idea. 

However, another study notes that it's actually impossible to make up sleep, and that with chronic sleep deprivation your body in fact forgets how to make up for lost sleep. As in, you'll start sleeping only eight or ten interrupted hours instead of sleeping for 12 or 14 like you might have otherwise with acute short term sleep deprivation, to make up for the loss. Uh, yeah. That's SO true. I haven't slept for more than 10 hours in a row in getting on for three years, even when I've had the time to do so. But then I feel kind of helpless and hopeless about it -- well, if I can't make up for lost sleep, will I ever feel well rested again? Am I just doomed to be like this forever, or will it eventually -- and very slowly -- get better over the next year?

Other interesting ideas of note -- sleep deprivation makes your immune system half as effective (hello all the colds I had last year!), makes you less able to cope with stress (hello feeling the effects of no personal time / alone time!), irritability, decreased mental function, decreased ability to concentrate ... pretty much everything I've been having lately, much of which I've been attributing to stress and boredom at work. And maybe I am stressed or bored at work, but maybe I'm just so chronically overtired that my ability to function is really impeded.

So what do I do? Get more sleep, I suppose. Easier said than done. I do sleep as much as I can, but fitting everything into the day that needs to get done sometimes means that I get to bed only at 9 or 10 -- early, but not early enough to make up for lost sleep. I guess that there's nothing else to be done but wait and hope that things continue to slowly improve. Unless someone can spare me a week wherein I get to do nothing but sleep -- no work, no house work, no child care, nothing. I think that I could probably sleep for the entire 168 hours.

Working flags

This afternoon The Boy and I drove home across one of the many bridges in this town. This is not a regular thing for us, so it still involves a fair amount of exclaiming. Arches! Cars! Trees! 

And then he saw the banners. You know the kind, the rectangular pieces of cloth they put on either side of light poles, often saying nice things about the city or advertising an upcoming community event. 

"There are a lot of flags here" he says.

"There are a lot of legs here??!" I ask. Because the bridge is noisy and crowded and I am of course hardly paying attention.

"There are a lot of FLAGS here." he repeats. Flags are a big thing. I don't know why. Like planes and ambulances and cement mixers and cranes, they just need to be pointed out whenever and wherever they are found. Who knows the mind of the toddler. Anyway the banners aren't exactly flags, in face their only similarity comes from the fact that they are both colourful material, given that these banners are held at the top and bottom and don't even wave, for pete's sake. 

A fact that is, of course, noticed by the child who cannot realize that eyebrows are made of hair. After this latest pronouncement there is a pause. A critical pause. And then, in a disappointed tone of voice. "But they aren't working."

Mindful

Yesterday I had lunch with a colleague, and she mentioned in passing to me that a friend of hers was teaching a writing workshop for women. It was a daytime class, which meant it was mostly full of retired women, and the friend had commented that what was interesting was that in a group of 60+ year old women the recurring and common theme was still "Who am I? What am I doing? How do I interact and contribute to my community?"

After the last post I took myself off to bed and on the way gave myself a mental shake. "What the hell, self? How is it that at 35 years old you still don't know who you are? How can you still be figuring this out at 35?"

I suppose the fact is that the figuring out of who you are, what your purpose is, and where you are going is just a lifelong journey. You're never going to stop, because you never stop evolving and changing and life doesn't either. I won't always be mommy to a toddler. I won't always be mommy to a child. I hope I will be mommy until the day I die, but the mommy I am will change from year to year and day to day. And that's just true of every identity I wear. It's the very nature of life, and so to wonder why I'm still figuring out who I am? Well, it's illogical to think I'll ever really know. Or in other words of course I'm still figuring out who I am. I recently added a huge, huge piece to my puzzle, and all the other pieces have to go in around it, and it's changed the whole playing field.

Go me and metaphors.

Anyway. I know. It's trite and obvious, but sometimes it's those obvious things you have to pay attention to. In the words of the late David Foster Wallace:

One day, two young fish were swimming downstream, and met an older fish. The older fish said "Hey kids, how's the water?" and kept on swimming. A few moments later, one younger fish said to the other "Hey  ... what's water?"

Sometimes the obvious, the stuff right in front of us, is the most important.

And with that, I need to go and pay attention to that which is right in front of me, and most important. My help has been requested to drive a firetruck.

Embracing my inner self

This last week I had meeting after meeting with strangers and had to organize events to which people were invited and let me tell you, when I can barely coordinate a dinner party, organizing a bbq for 350 people is no mean feat, even if all I had to do, really, was call the caterers. *Someone* had to take care of all that worrying.

And then this weekend we had the relations and had a wonderful time. And then Sunday I went to yoga and sweated again next to 40 other people and boy am I out of shape, my shoulders still hurt from all that downward dogging. (that just sounds so dirty, doesn't it?)

But all in all, I am really jonesing for the world to stop spinning for just a few moments. 

Lately I've found myself fantasizing a lot about a life which isn't so hectic, one that allows me time to sit and reflect and to write and take care of my family and myself. One where I can fit in work and solitude and the things I want to do. The latest romance novel is about a woman who runs a b&b on the isolated coast of western Ireland and I find myself envying her the isolation.

And lately I've also been feeling like a big failure. I am surrounded by people who have energy for family and work and home and extra curricular activities, and I wonder what the heck is wrong with me, that all I want to do is curl up in my home and get some peace for a few hours. I think there's something physically wrong, that I am tired and sick and weak, because the idea of something mentally wrong is harder to take. Not that the physical sickness is easier, mind you, I make myself sick with worry about that too.

In the end I have come to realize that this is the first -- first -- time in my life I have ever not had regular time alone. For five months until my office roomie left, my alone time was about an hour a week -- naptime on Wednesdays. And I have been used to having up to two hours of alone time, minimum, per day. Some times more like eight hours. From the earliest time I can remember, I would have hours a day to myself. 

And for someone who has scored 100 on tests of introversion, it's just not enough. I am perpetually exhausted and anxious because I have no mental regeneration time, no time to sit and reflect and be alone. I'm writing this now in the evening, The Man is working late and The Boy is sitting beside me, playing with my necklace, lying on my lap. 

Other people I know are not like this. They feel regenerated from being with people, or they don't need as much time alone to feel whole. I feel like a failure because I cannot do all the things I want to do -- meals with friends, time with my child -- because my psyche is begging that I pay attention, that I finally after two and a half years of dedicating myself to a child who has some pretty demanding needs, pay attention to what I need. 

This is the hardest part of parenting, for me. I hate how it drains me, I even hate how much of a better mom I am after we've had a babysitter. I want to be someone different. I want to be an extrovert.

But I don't think that there's anything I can do to change this. I think in the end I just have to accept it. I've made lots of jokes here about being an introvert, and while I had embraced that part of my person I never thought that it was as necessary to me as breathing.

Turns out? I guess so.

I'm trying really hard these days to accept this about myself, but it feels like it's standing in my way of being the person I want to be. Although I'm not sure it is; perhaps what I need to accept instead is that I'm not living the life that I'm meant to. And I'm working out what that all means -- should I be working in a different place, doing something different? Do I need to just try harder to get out of this alone time mindset? Is that even possible? I have a feeling that there is a life out there that I should be living, that I am not living right now, and that, were I living it ... I'd be much less stressed out, and much more blissed out.

There's a passage within The Life of Pi that I love, that talks about fear, about the way around fear is to "shine the light of words upon it". There's some fear about this for me, about what it means for my career and my parenting, and so maybe just talking about it a little will make it feel more personable, a companion in my living room instead of a tiger lurking in the corner.