deep thoughts from a 44 hour staycation
or welcome to my brain
Last week, as my birthday gift from my family, I stayed at a hotel in town for two nights. Just to be alone. A little ironic, I guess. After 36 hours or so, I finally started to be able to think clearly for the first time in what feels like forever. I guess it’s hard to be able to do that when little people are constantly making requests or asking questions. Anyway, I started reading
’s Enchantment. And starting having thoughts. I started this document just as a way to collect those thoughts for myself, but then it turned into a little bit more. I hope you enjoy the random ramblings in my brain or at least feel a little less alone in yours.
I don’t feel like I have time to be present and slow and ground myself. How do I make time for that? Less devices. Can I make that part of my day? Maybe if I take walks a couple of times a week in nature. Hikes with Dave. Stop work completely by 5. Don’t start until 9. Writing? Morning pages or a night journal?
Sleep: I’m going to have to stop using my devices pretty much after I finish work. I can’t do it right before bed if I want to sleep better, and before that, I’m with the kids. Why do I feel so much resistance to that? It feels like it’s my time to unwind. How can I unwind without it? Sitting outside with Dave? Also write down all the sleep hygiene things Jancee Dunn mentions in Hot and Bothered. Note: this book is great so far, and her last book, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids was also great.
I want to make more of a mindful practice of cleaning. I’m obsessed with the TikTok videos of someone snapping their fingers and their space is clean. It makes me feel so *something* to see everything back in its perfect home. We don’t have perfect homes for everything and certainly not things in them. I usually clean while feeling resentful that I have to do it (not that I do it all myself, my husband cleans fully as much as I do, it’s just that we have to do it one day, then the next, and so on). I like it when things are clean, I feel better, so why can’t I make it something that I think of as a self care practice and not a chore?
Speaking of cleaning, how can you get kids to help without constantly reminding them (which makes sense, they’re learning) and feeling like a unfun mom but also making sure they actually do it? I’ve been feeling like an unfun mom a lot lately. Lots of telling kids what to do and what they can’t do or have. I didn’t want to be this way.
My youngest child is still in preschool. He has missed the deadline to start kindergarten by 3 weeks. (I know, I know, people are choosing to do this more and more often, but he’s ready. And we’re ready.) That means another year of paying for childcare. We tried to save money and put him in a peer mentoring program that was extremely low cost, but it was only going to be 3 hours a day. Every time I thought about it, I felt trapped. Not only would I have little time for working, I’d have almost no time for resting, and on top of that, would have to ask for help just to make it work. But we’d just have to do it for a year, right? Surely we could do that? When I made sure that my husband knew that he’d have to give up some of his side gigs to make this work, he balked. Had he just not thought ahead about how this would all play out? Why don’t other people (men, mostly) not think through and plan ahead like we (women, mostly) do? Luckily, we were able to reverse our decision and put him back in full day preschool (let’s call it what it is: childcare).
I’m so relieved and even still, there’s some little pinch of guilt about how we should save that money and spend more time with him, but it’s just not possible. Not if I want to have any semblance of mental health.
So now I get to have my days back. At least every year or so, I try to imagine my ideal schedule. I want to have time to work, rest, move my body, spend some time in nature, clean, spend time with my boys before they don’t want to anymore. Don’t forget all the minutiae like dentist appointments and buying birthday presents. It just doesn’t all seem to fit. But I keep putting some of those pieces off. When will I be able to have them?
That leads me to how I’ve been thinking a lot about how each decade of life supposedly has its own challenges. Puberty/teen years, just trying to become a human. Twenties, also trying to become human and figure out what you want to be doing with your time. Thirties, working, possibly having children - this stretched into my forties and has been without a doubt the hardest decade. So far. Once you start to recover a bit from being parents to young children (if you so chose), menopause hits. They say that can last up to ten years. I guess maybe you start to feel settled in your sixties? Do you get a few blissful years before your body starts to break down? I wish I was one of those people who found ways to be happy no matter the challenges. But all of these things feel/felt all consuming at the time.
And…my time is up. It’s time to check out and go home.
I’ll be traveling next week and will return to Substack on August first. If you’ve been enjoying my Substack, I’d love it if you could share it with a friend or consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Cleaning...I have that same issue. I love to have my environment controlled, oops, I mean clean (lots of deep issues around this for me). But when you have little kids (or in my case right now two big kids home from college for the summer), it is really impossible to have things truly tidy.
I once asked a friend—who has twins who are 10 years older than my twins—if she regretted anything about how she parented them when they were little. She said: "Just one thing. If I had it to do over, I would NOT have washed that damn kitchen floor every night." I remember that when I am lamenting the smears of peanut butter that, to this day, get left all over.
Love you!
Please feel no guilt about another year of preschool. Some of us are better mom when we’re not around our children constantly 🙋🏻♂️. The patristics making you feel guilty. Fuck the patriarchy.