Coffee Chat: When It's All Too Much

Hello dears,

Do come on in and have a bit of coffee or some cold soda if you'd rather.  It was 97f here yesterday and felt like June with heavy humidity followed by hail and thunderstorms that evening and ending with a lovely sunset and then more storms.  Temperamental is certainly the personality of June.  Stormy and sunny.  Just like life at present in my home...

I gave serious consideration last week, in a fit of deeper than navy blues, of giving up.  Giving up the house and moving out.  Giving up blogging.  Giving up Jamberry.  Quitting it all and just saying, 'Take it in the handbasket to the place it's obviously heading in and GO..."  I got as far as counting up my funds and figuring out my options.   My fight was gone.  I was in full flight mode.



Then John insisted I begin taking a very low (oh so low!) dose of anti-anxiety medicine and a few good nights sleep got under my belt and I woke yesterday morning with more fight in me.  I haven't been so near real depression in years upon years and it concerned me greatly because I spent a good 25 years of my life thinking daily that life wasn't worth living and while I hadn't got that far in my thoughts, it's a slippery boat ramp into a very muddy river when your head takes that turn.

They call it the sandwich generation when you're caught between aging parent and tending to grandchildren mostly on your own and frankly I was hard pressed and drained and all anyone did was demand more, more, more.  I felt as though I was being torn into great chunks and everyone was claiming that it wasn't enough.   This move of Mama's has dragged on.  I am not finished with her older home, which took long enough to get to the point where she'd even let me go attend to it.  Now there's a mess at my brother's house, but Katie has dealt with a good bit of that.  Still a little of my time has been required there and a lot here.  Katie had begged off another week of cleaning in Mama's old house so I let it go.  But I still felt as though I were spinning six plates on three sticks.

And the work here at home is just so repetitive.  Make a meal, clear up (after arguing with a four year old how he LIKES hot dogs or macaroni), repeat and repeat.  Ditto for laundry, picking up toys, sweeping and vacuuming.  That's all I ever got around to after chasing after the one year old or entertaining the four year old.  So I decided that instead of doing uselessly repeating tasks over and over again, I'd treat myself to a bit of genealogy this past Sabath morning.   We had leftovers galore in the fridge.   I purposely planned the children meals to be what I knew for a fact was liked (and it wasn't but that is ongoing).

So I pulled out the genealogy book and opened my computer and opened the notebook to the first page.  That's when I discovered something important.  You can not run down a rabbit trail when little hands are patting keyboards or pulling at the notebook of papers it's taken years to collect.   I set that aside and said "Perhaps in six months I can do this once more."  I wish I'd never treated myself to that genealogy website at Christmas but I hang on to it because it's paid for and I might, just might, get to use it at some point this year and actually view all the new info that John's brother put in, as well.

Then I thought I'd read but that was no good either.  Two sentences into a paragraph and I had to run to the kitchen to take a one year old from the cabinets.  Sit in the kitchen to guard the cabinets and read the same two sentences over only to hear a great crash from the living room.  Soothe crying baby, sit down, read two sentences and hear a page being ripped from a book...I gave up.  When the boys went down for naps together (so unexpected!) I sat down in my chair and went right to sleep, too.  That was the most 'me' time I'd had in three weeks or so.

I found a VLOG over the weekend that I stumbled into.  I had found another Vlog on YouTube about Dollar Tree Décor.  This gal Denise (I'll have to look up the link) really does make the most high end looking décor items from Dollar Tree items.  I'm talking an 8 inch black framed mirror, a string of silver beads (the sort I think of as Christmas tree garland) and a packet of silver spoons that she removed the handles from to use.  I watched several of those and subscribed because girl's creativity and clear instructions make it all look so easy.  Then I stumbled into Anissa's thelifeImliving vlog.  She's a Toronto girl who lives in a tiny little townhouse with her husband Edmond and puppy Lola and I'm absolutely absorbed into her life.  It's not drama.  It's just everyday stuff.  Housekeeping, diy décor, making meals, a day out editing videos for the blog etc.  And maybe that's the whole fascination.  It's just a stress free, normal routine for her and I miss that more than anything in my own life.  Exactly where I needed to bury myself.  The awesome thing about YouTube is that I can stop the video and restart it right where I left off a few minutes or an hour later. I've found it very therapeutic.

It's also inspiring.  What makes me happy is to take some time to do things about my own home.  So Sunday afternoon I managed to almost do a full routine on my bedroom and bath and I finished it up Monday afternoon.  I weeded, replanted some flowers from various pots to others.  I put together outfits, something I've not had even a moment for of late.  It felt good.  It felt like I was taking back my life.  It felt like I was in charge of the things that make me happy once more.

The garden centers just now are burgeoning with seasonal perennials for hot weather.  I am deeply longing to go buy loads of things but I promised myself first that I would take inventory of what I have, use what I've got and then go buy a few things.  So this morning all the snapdragons were gathered from various pots (two here, three there) and planted together into one.  The petunias that volunteered are planted about the new hibiscus.  I cleaned the patio and flipped over the badly faded cushions on the chairs.  I moved the table down to a shadier spot since I can't keep an umbrella there to shade the table as I'd like.  I've watched too many fade because they were shut up too much or careen across the yard in a summer storm snapping poles or spans as it goes.  I'm done with that.  So no more umbrellas for me.  Shade I do have, courtesy of the Faith Tree, and though it appears I've blocked off the front porch steps (I haven't), we seldom use those steps anyway.  We come and go by the back door.  Only the very strangest of strangers ever go to the front door.

I still have pinks, known as dianthus, and chrysanthemums to pot into single pots.  I've decided I'd rather have a big glorious bunch of one single plant.  The Mums are dwarf and bigger and vary in color.  There will be plenty of variety in those.  At that point...it's off to the garden centers and flower racks for me!

So that is what I've done to help ease the burden of 'too much'.  Tomorrow I mean to clean my living room up very nicely and dust it down and maybe just wander out to the shed, now that I know there's a spare key on John's key chain, so I can get into.  I'm going to look for summer wreaths and pretties I can use in the living room to replace the stale looking things.  I've been waiting for this saga to be over and it's not ending any time soon.  I can put my life on hold another two months or I can just get busy and fit in a little here and a little there and express my creative self.

Now that all sounds better than running away and quitting it all doesn't it?