Well, it happened.  Even as I sit here now, I’m not sure how.  The only other time I’ve ever felt this consumed by levity was immediately after I gave birth to my first child.

I’d labored 28 hours to bring that baby earthside, and by all accounts I should have been exhausted.  Except, I was floating.  Hours after he’d been born and bathed and brought to my bosom to suckle himself to sleep, I paced the hospital floor fueled entirely by elation and weightlessness.  

When I woke up this morning, my ambition for the day was to finish the last few loose things on the floor of the garage.  There were at least another dozen steps left until completion, and  today was for tackling one of those tasks.  In an effort to beat the midday heat we’ve been having, I was down in the garage before the big kids were even out of bed.

At some point, their dad came to pick them up, and B moved things around with me for a little while before breaking for lunch with Roux.  I just kept going.  And going.

Even after a huge bin of legos exploded all over the garage floor, I kept going.

I did not stop once to check my phone, so I completely lost track of time.  B came to check on me every now and again but he mostly kept Roux occupied so I could focus.  When they finally came down together, I was addressing the very last handful of things needing a permanent home.  By this time, not only had I cleared the floor, but I had somehow gone through the last wall of shelves, organizing my impressive craft artillery.  I consolidated years of collected supplies into categorized storage and all of the sudden, I was finished.

The garage was finished.

Just. Like. That.

We relaxed in our rocking chairs while Roux rode his bike. The first time I had sat down all day, and it was to christen our new curbside lounge area.  I’m really living into my Brooklyn stoop fantasy, and it is absolutely more fun that I thought.

I casually picked up my phone, expecting it to be just after 1 and it was almost 4!  Possibly the most productive seven hours of my entire life, and I kept going for another four after because the inside of our apartment had only a few cabinets left to address.

Which is how it came to be that on the ninth day of the fifth month of this crazy ass year, I finished a project I’ve been putting off since I began acquiring stuff of my own.

Phase one, you’ve been fun!

I woke up this morning to a house that was even more transformed than I’d remembered, which is a great feeling.  I smiled a bit remembering how, just a week prior, we were climbing over boxes to get from one room to the next and now, we’re deciding which pieces to hang where and whether or not we need more houseplants. (We do, duh!)

At one point early in the day, before I decided to go out and purchase the material we needed to build the little cabinet that is now in our kitchen, I acknowledged the strong sense of balance I’m experiencing.  Everything is falling into place, I thought.

And then an email came that alert to changes ahead, and I am being asked to make a choice.  This is not the kind of choice that will have any affect upon whether or not the changes happen, or even the degree to which they happen, nothing like that.  This is the kind of choice that will determine how I respond to the changes, if and when they happen to come.

It does not surprise me that earlier this week, I finished reading this little book that had been lent to me months previous by the older sister of my dearest friend.  The book is dated, and more than a little corny, but it is a super quick read and contains a great message about the importance of adaptability.

No matter how much we plan for the future, how certain we are of a particular outcome, how comfortable we are with our routine, there is always always the potential for unexpected change.  The question for me, then, is not whether change is coming, but rather how I will react to change when it does.

For now, I am choosing to focus on the fact that it’s not yet even the middle of May and we are closer to the end of this phase of our project than the beginning.  All three of my kids are sound asleep in a bedroom that came together even better than I’d hoped.  Our apartment is quickly becoming the kind of place that reflects the people it houses and the life they share within its walls.  We are making a home together and it is the most fun ever.

I may not have always been the best at fielding curveballs, and I really won’t know my ability until one is lobbed in my direction.  I do know that my eyes are open and my hands outstretched, and my gut’s got a pretty good feeling my game will not disappoint.

When I decided to go ahead and order the few things I needed from IKEA to finish creating my work space, I hadn’t really started on the rest of the house and the Garage Project hadn’t even crossed my mind.  Had I known that I’d have to wait more than two weeks for delivery, I’m not sure I would have gone forward with making the purchase.  But, I did place the order and had no other choice but to wait.

I’m no good at waiting.  I get antsy real quick.  So antsy, in fact, I haven’t stopped moving since.  We haven’t stopped moving.  Tonight, my kids are sleeping in a bedroom that is one soon-to-be delivered rug away from being done.  There is fresh paint curing in the hallway and art hanging in the bathroom.  

Turns out, my workstation taking this long to get here might be one of the best things that could have happened.  Because, by the time it arrives, chances are the rest of the house (including the garage!) will be almost finished.

If I weren’t completely exhausted, I’d be doing a happy dance.

Big day over here, and not just because we are just putting the finishing touches on phase one of the garage, meaning the purging / organizing will be complete.  The next phase is a bit more elaborate and involves outside help.  But this part, the one that feels like a cross between Tetris and those plastic slide puzzles, is rapidly coming to a close.

What I have been avoiding for years, and what I thought would take at least three months, ended up requiring a little over a week and a half.  There is a much bigger lesson in there, but that’s not what I want to talk about right now.

Today we celebrate one year.  One year of digging deep, of making it or breaking it, of choosing to heal instead of retreat, of forging ahead despite enormous obstacles that often appeared insurmountable, of letting go and holding on.

Turns out, love wins after all.

This morning, the littlest one and I carefully planted seeds for our first ever patio garden.  Now seems like the perfect time to sprout roots and bear fruits, and even though we don’t really know what we’re doing, I have a feeling we’ll be harvesting homegrown goodness in no time.

Pretending this is what it’s like to live through a real renovation – the kind where floors are ripped up and walls are torn down and the kitchen is not usable for a month so meals are cooked on a camping stove in the bathroom – is helping me not get discouraged by the fact that the inside of our apartment resembles the aftermath of an earthquake.

For now, this is as close I have come to starring in my own HGTV episode, and one thing that’s really being tested currently is my patience.

Good thing, then, that the replacement dresser and bookshelf I ordered for the kids’ room arrived a full three days before schedule, instantly improving their space (and preventing me from whining about things taking too long).  An added bonus: the bins that had previously served as a make-shift way for them to store their clothes are now free to be repurposed for use in the garage.

Oh, the garage.  So close, and yet still. So. Far.  What makes it particularly grueling is that it involes a tremendous amount of pulling things out in order to get to work, and then putting them back in order to be finished for the day.  That is a tedious, repetitive task, the annoyance of which is amplified by the fatigue in our bodies.  We’ve been hauling, shoving, building, for nearly a full week and, boy, can we tell.  Ouch.

Strangely, the hardest part for me each day is knowing when to call it quits.  The scope of this project requires hours of labor, far more than exist in a single day.  It is not really the kind of work that has clear stopping points, it is more a get-as-much-done-as-you-can-before-running-out-of-steam type gig and anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not necessarily known for running out of steam.  I’d still be down in the garage right now if it weren’t for B, who is much better at knowing when enough is enough.  I’d still be in the kids’ room if Emet hadn’t looked at me imploringly as asked if they could “go to bed yet, mama?”

I just want to get it done, not because I’m bored of the task, but because I’m inspired by my vision of the finished space.  I can imagine it so clearly that now it’s just about making it happen as soon as humanly possible.

When I first committed to this project, I gave myself an initial timeframe of three months.  My goal was to have my garage completed by my birthday in July.  Tonight, B told me he thinks the garage will be finished by the end of the month.  I told him at this rate, we could have the entire apartment finished by the end of the month, with the exception of a few complicated details that exceed our skillset and require the assistance of a very skilled and knowledgeable handyman.  Hi, Dad!

While I may be the one who initiated this extravaganza, if it weren’t for B, it most definitely would have taken me until at least my birthday if not longer to accomplish what we’ve managed to do in the past few days.  This project of mine became this project of ours and now we’re closer than ever to the end. 

Teamwork, dream work, baby.

 

 

I headed to the laundromat a little later than I had originally planned so my sunset run by the water became an run lit by the glow of the city at night and it was kind of nice, though I don’t plan on making it a habit because running in the dark has never ever been my favorite.  Yesterday, though, it was just what I needed.

We spent more than three straight hours in the garage yesterday and it is really coming together.  After a few more trips to the Home Depot, we should have enough shelving and containers to get everything out of cardboard and into well-organized bins.  This is something I have been meaning to do for years and I’m ecstatic that it is finally happening.  After so many hasty moves and so much residential instability, I cannot explain to you the sense of peace that comes with this gesture of ordering our belongings and settling into a dwelling place.

In our nearly ten years together, B and I have moved sixteen times.  The transitions have not been the most graceful, and our homes have reflected a certain kind of underlying impermanence.  I am working harder than ever to abolish this and replace it with steady, rooted warmth.  At first, I thought this need to nest came from a desire to give my children the kind of home in which they’ve yet to live.  As I get deeper into the process, however, I’m realizing this impulse comes from a desire to provide myself with the kind of home in which I have yet to live.

During the ten years before I met B, I moved at least thirteen times, and all the years prior to then were spent shuffling between two separate households, each characterized by their own kind of capriciousness.  When I think about all of this, I can begin to understand why I’ve never been particularly good at moving, unpacking, all of it – I never learned how to craft a welcoming home because I never had a home in which I felt welcome.

Coronavirus has taught us all about the importance of adaptability, about maing the best of a bad situation for the sake of survival.  For me, that has meant honoring the space that holds the ones I love, including myself.  Living through this quarantine has completely shifted my perspective on the importance of a thoughtfully curated living environment: it is not a luxury, it is a necessity.  The quality of a well-made home has the potential to instill a sense of both security and beauty into those it houses, and I have made it my job to bring this awareness into every place I live for the rest of my days.

As I rounded the corner back toward our little apartment at the end of my run last night, I could see the lights glowing from within.  I thought about the hours we’d spent earlier in the day, pulling years of stored stuff out from their decrepit tombs and into the sunlight of a bright May morning.  The muscles in my arms swinging at my side were sore and fatigued from the weight of all the boxes they’d carried, but my heart, pounding from the exertion of a three-miler, had never felt lighter.

Assuming that school begins next Fall as it normally would, we would return to our classrooms the Wednesday after Labor Day.  That leaves more than four months between then and now.

One quarter year.

As of today, very little remains accessible to us as residents of our beloved city.  The parks, trails, and beaches are still closed, libraries, museums, the zoo, all of the things we normally punctuate our summer vacation with are not currently available to us.  Roux hasn’t been inside an establishment since mid-March.

For the foreseeable future, time at home is what we have, and I’m pretty sure that is why we continue to be in full-on project mode over here.

In no particular order, I present a working task list of our current round of renovations:

-Painting the hallway

-Planting a patio garden

-Awaiting the arrival of three pieces of furniture to help pull two different rooms together

-Debating light fixtures

-The Great Garage Project

-Searching for the perfect mountable bathroom shelf

-Deciding between four different rug options for under the bunkbeds

-Getting art up on the wall

-Drafting plans for the shelf we plan to build in the kitchen

-Deciding if we should build or buy a bedside table

-Mounting the bicycles

And that is just off the top of my head, first thing this morning.  Phew!

We are committed to living here through the end of next school year, and if things keep going as they are, we’ll actually have a living space that has been perfectly tailored to our needs.  For our family of five sharing a small city apartment, that is a very tall order.  However, four months sounds like more than enough time to make our way through this list, customizing every nook and cranny exactly to our liking.

I have recently rediscovered Pinterest.  Come to think of it, I’ve recently rediscovered all things internet circa 2010 and I’m not mad about it in the least.  (I haven’t hopped back on the Twitter train, but these are crazy times!  Anything can happen!  Except Tik Tok, that is a line I will never cross.)  My point is, I am remembering why I first had a romance with the way of the web and I am enjoying blogging and pinning like those are normal things people still do.

Today is for laundry, posting projects in my Google Classrooms, a sunset run by the water, and finishing up the last batch of this week’s boxes pulled from the garage.  Also, knitting, always knitting.  If I’m lucky, I’ll get a nap.  And not a stitch of sugar will be consumed!  All the makings for my favorite kind of (Quarantine) Sunday.

My mother once told me a story about how, when I was a baby, I would wake as soon as the sun peeked through my window.  Once I began to speak, I’d announce excitedly from my crib, “Mr. Sun’s awake!”  The day had begun and I was ready to go.

For most of my life, I have been an early riser.  Of course, there have been seasons where this was not true – my mid-teen years, my first semester of college, deep winter – but mostly, I’ve been an up-and-at-’em kinda gal and never before have I been more appreciative of this quality of mine than right now.

The early morning is my time.  The house is still and quiet, and I can just be.  I watch the sunlight spill over the hills into the city, I listen to the birds exchange their break of dawn chatter, I peek at my slumbering children, kissing them softly and replacing the comforters that have shifted during the night, I brew my espresso and drink in its aroma long before its warmth touches my lips.  I do my best to not wake anyone as I putter about, knitting, scrolling, typing.  Sometimes I indulge in a long, hot bath, sometimes I go for a walk, but always always always I try to gather up as much grace as I can, hoping it will carry me through to the next day.

It takes a lot of strength to be at home, all of the time.  To be my best self for my family at every hour of the day without the kind of time away I used to have, before life shifted dramatically for all of us.  I’ve always been the kind of mother who was made better by my time outside of mothering.

Please don’t misunderstand me, being a mama – especially to my three magical kids – is the very best part of my life.  But, like anything, it simply can’t be the only part of my life.  I never intended to lose myself into motherhood, in fact, the journey has done quite the opposite for me: I found myself as a mother.  And in finding myself, I discovered that I am fortified by my experiences beyond raising my babies and cleaning my house, and that I bring it all back home with me to everyone’s benefit.

These days, when getting out of the house is damn near impossible and borderline illegal, the value of my simple morning ritual has really become evident.  I’m measurably less irritable when I’ve had time to myself before beginning the duties of the day, so I have been making it a point to slip out of bed each morning.

I’m especially grateful to the sun for shining a bit earlier with each new day, the added brightness exponentially increases the potency of these sacred moments.  

We’re coming up on 50 days in quarantine.  But who’s counting?

 

So many thoughts attempting to swim through the rough waters of my brain, eager to carve their path toward a more gently flowing stream of consciousness.  The Garage Project is in full swing which has brought up all sorts of stuff (both literal and figurative) as I make may way through the many years of things I have collected.

I am extremely rich by way of crystals and empty notebooks – I find a handful of each in nearly every box I open – a further testament to my lifelong inner witch.  This of course is only reinforced by my impressive collection of hair locks and baby teeth.  I promise it’s not as morbid as it sounds but, yeah, on paper I admit it reads as more than a little bizarre.  But honestly, why else do they make those cute little ceramic boxes painted with words like “First Tooth”?  It’s practically a formal invitation to keep them forever, and I have merely done as I was told.

Remarkably, I’m only prone to slight distraction.  I think I am so focused on the end result that I’m not too caught up in lingering sentimentality, which is helping me make progress much more quickly than I had anticipated.  Consequently, the rapid progress motivates me to keep on forging ahead.  I am on a mission and there is no turning back.  

Now, if only I could muster this same sort of enthusiasm for sticking with the Whole30, then I’d really be set!  Alas, this quarantine has continued to bring out the absolute worst of my bad habits when it comes to food, which is how I know that despite my continued productivity and my mostly positive attitude, I am still living with deep seeded anxiety about the state of the world.

Last night, B and I took the littlest one out way past his bedtime to go see the bioluminescence that is graces the Southern California coastline at this time each year.  (I’m choosing not to lament too much the fact that the big kids weren’t interested in coming with us on this excursion and instead stayed behind to do “homework” which, for my kids, really means Emet is making music and Jade is either reading, drawing, or bathing.  Sigh.)  So, just , the three of us piled into the car and headed toward La Jolla with no real plan other than to try and see some of the glowing tide.

We kept driving, and as there were other cars on the road headed toward this same area, we kind of just flowed with the traffic.  Before we knew it, we were looking for parking very near La Jolla Shores and a few minutes later we were barefoot on the sand, running toward the sea.

It sort of just happened?  Roux was giggling and B and I were exchanging the kind of glances shared by parents as they marvel at the magnificence that is their child brimming with wonder.  The whole thing was magical, and not just because the waves crashed with a spectacular neon blue glow.  It would have been fine if it were just the three of us on the beach, but we weren’t alone.  Other families were there, couples were there, individuals, people all come to witness the natural beauty of this phenomenon.  Sharing in this experience with strangers, I couldn’t help but allow the lump in my throat to grow and spill out through the corners of my eyes.  How badly I miss existing with other human beings.

An entire calendar month – April 2020 – passed in quarantine.  It’s part crazymaking and part comforting (for a homebody like me, anyway), but wow.

If school were in session, we’d be dressed in all white with flower crowns in our hair.  We’d gather together on our grassy field and sing spring songs and skip around the Maypole, colorful ribbons dancing in the gentle breeze.  Instead, we’re home.  The big kids are wrapping up another week of virtual learning and the little one is counting down the seconds until his rest time is over this afternoon to welcome the weekend with a hard-earned episode of Mr. Rogers.

As for me, I’m headed out to brave the grocery stores to restock our supplies for the coming week.  I plan on picking up a few bunches of blossoms for us to play with this afternoon, crafting arrangements and garlands and crowns of our own, to bring a bit of the season into our space and remind us that the Earth is blooming, and she invites us to do the same.

This morning, my son’s precious Kindergarten teacher shared a poem she composed for her students and I could not love it more:

A May Poem, by Anna Masters

The earth reaching up towards the sun. The

fairies and the garden One

Let all the chores be left undone!

Enjoy the fruits and daffodils

Rejoice the flutes from the hills

Bring smiles and joy from your sills

Green and golden, pink parade

Fairytales of this are made

Hands upon our hearts are laid

Joy! Joy! Joy! Upon you shower

As budding forth comes each new flower

Today is the day, and this the hour

Upon that strikes the merry chime

With your family join and dine

The earth’s bounty now is thine.

Beltane blessings, dear friends.  The fire burns, for all of us.

 

I should start by saying that I don’t love online shopping to begin with, and my recent experiences are not helping change my mind.

That virtual IKEA cart I mentioned?  Well, the items have all been purchased and are scheduled to arrive toward the middle of NEXT MONTH!  That’s like a century in Quarantine Years!  To further my frustration, the dresser I ordered to solve the riddle of storing the kids’ clothing arrived damaged and needs to be returned.  And, after seeing it in person, I can’t decide if I want it replaced or find a different one that fits within both the peculiar dimensions and our limited budget.

On top of everything else, I feel like I have hit a wall.  We keep doing the days, to quote an adorable child of an acquaintance, but I’m ready for a break.  There isn’t a mother on Earth who loves being with her family more than I and yet the first words I spoke to B yesterday morning were to tell him that I needed Roux to leave me alone for a few hours, which is the homeschool equivalent of calling in sick.

I’m sure it does not help that Operation Garage Organization is off to the kind of start that brings more chaos before it brings order.  Surely I can’t be the only one who makes a bigger mess while she’s cleaning up?  

It’s the middle of the week and items are getting added to the list more quickly than they are being eliminated.  But! I got a new step stool and literally cannot believe I have lived all of these years at my height without one!  It’s revolutionary.  

You better watch it, Wednesday.  Mama’s in a mood.