I’ve spent much of this week furiously—fast and furiously—NanoWriWhatTheHeckAmIDoingMo. The rest of life is going on, too, and frankly, I’m exhausted! It’s a big week working on Preview Massachusetts’ stories, too. Every single time I interview folks, I become the most contented writer ever, because how cool is it to have an excuse to talk to neat people? It’s very, very cool, indeed. (Paul Shoul posted his photograph of Norton Juster in this month’s issue, and, well, it’s gorgeous.) So, if you want a take-home message here, the buzzword is busy.
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I loved doing a guest post on the MOM EGG blog recently. I wrote about whether there’s a feminist slant to a clean house. Not surprisingly, thinking and writing about this prompted me to keep clearing and cleaning.
Here’s a fast update: in October, two big boxes of baby clothes went to faraway, plus about three more bags to a friend nearby (along with a car seat). There are signs of floor in my “study,” the room that I hope is destined to become eldest child’s bedroom in order to free up his bedroom—and then, the hoped for plan is to move Saskia to his room and return Remy to his original room, which became hers. More junk has exited our bedroom. And there’s a very sweet art “clothesline” in our dining room.
I have a very, very, extremely loooooooooooong way to go to approximate a neat house (or even a neat-ish house).
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One thing that’s changing, though, is my attitude; despite the fact that I still feel overwhelmed—by stuff, by how much there is to do in the house and in general, by my inability to figure out what goes where and what to get rid of and what to do with things I somehow think I should keep—I am experiencing more moments of feeling good about the process. That’s a good thing, right?
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Returning momentarily to the whole busy thing, if I were to add to my long list of worries about the NanoNuttyMo big old November writing challenge, I might offer that this whole take-back-my-house project is actually really important to me. In the slightly sour grapes department, I don’t (yet?) feel terribly supported—as in helped—by my family in doing it. Hope springs eternal and I’m still banking on the idea that with less chaos and more logical places to put pretty much everything, I can enlist at least a little help. Maybe the backpacks will stop landing on the couch after school or something.
