I had sweet young Vanessa here to help me clean up messes that I alone had created. Somehow, I was much more organized and neater when I lived with other people. I don't know if it's my current empty nest internal drama, work fatigue, a year full of travels, a bad knee or all of them, but I have been an absolute slob over the past couple of months. I am grateful that I am able to get help for a small price (because it is worth six times what I pay her in peace of mind). I had overflowing summer clothes storage containers that would not fit under my bed, so I left them there for myself to trip over regularly. I had papers all over my kitchen desk that I still need to go through, but now they look manageable. I had a fridge with stinky spring rolls and thai sauces that have been in there for a couple of weeks and no "real" groceries to speak of because I cannot bear to shop for food when my kitchen is not clean. The ceiling fan in my room was driving me nuts because it had three of four light bulbs burnt out and about six months' of dust on the fans.
My place is clean underneath now and the fan blades are free of dust. I have four donation bags sitting neatly by my door to take to the Junior League Thrift shop because women from the YWCA who are homeless shop there for free. I have grapefruit scented oil flowing from a wonderful lamp I bought a couple years ago. I used to always have music going on my stereo and fresh flowers on my kitchen table, especially through long winters, but have not had them there in months because of the clutter. I have an organized pile of fun valentine treats waiting to be packed and mailed. Lateness in those sorts of things is not my usual mode, and it concerns me. I am working hard, but not THAT hard. I have weekends free to do chores, but I am somehow unable to get up, gather myself and move through it all. I have no children at home, boarders to blame or animals who take up my time. I DO not know where it goes except to the extra sleep I seem to need when the workweek is done. This is a fresh start, thank goodness.
There is something about having one other person in my space or expecting someone to come by that creates the inspiration in me to keep my spaces in order. Absent that, I regress to the sloppy teenager that my poor sister had to share a room with. My alarm goes off, I'm up and dressed, out the door by 8:00 am and away until 6:00 pm. or later. I come home, get into my warm and beloved grubbies, eat because I have to and stay up too late working on the computer, escape through the television or fall asleep on the couch, only to wake at 3:00 am to inject myself with insulin and get to bed. None of that makes for a peaceful existence, but I am in the driver's seat. Eeeeek! Dear readers, I will let you know how I progress. I think maybe I'll get some fresh flowers tomorrow.
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Ventures into virtual land
I admit I am a techno dinosaur. My laptop is slow and low on memory space. Maybe these first two lines parallel mid-life. Both of my daughters have recently married in the last two years. I am at odds with myself and contented at the same time. Is that possible? I began this blog in a technology boot camp that was our faculty retreat just days before the halls of our new building were filled with cute boots that college girls wear and the sounds of cellular equipment dinging, vibrating and rapping. Within the span of two years, I turned fifty, traveled to Africa, accepted a position as Associate Dean of a brand new School of Communication that had long roots in a small department I have been part of for eighteen years at an institution I love. I became a grandmother of a little girl, deployed thirty five students to mentor young girls, women and migrants from faraway places out of one of my classes, and traveled to two different states to stand in my role as proud mother of the bride. Alone. Their weddings were as perfect as my daughters are different. I cried unbridled tears at the ceremony where I felt like I was revisiting my former life with their father's family and loving them all, healing from an ancient divorce and regretting the unfinished business I have with the bride. The second ceremony signaled a "coming out" of shyness I had never seen in my younger daughter. I have not been successful in love, though I have loved and been loved; yet both of these beautiful young women, my daughters appear to have found their life's mates. I wish I could take credit for that, but I have no idea if any is mine and am grateful for their good judgement. My insides moved at the second wedding from fatigue, joy, a sense of completion, and overwhelming sentimentality at the simultaneous sight of watching my eldest nurse her baby, worry about a baby girl's fusses while cutting new teeth, and my youngest's embracing of her big, beautiful day that she had worked months to deploy with a budget spreadsheet, delegation of roles to aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents and her truest friends. I spent that day in two places very far away from each other--ecstasy and longing. I celebrated a beautiful couple's joy, likeness, practicality and sense of humor, watched my parents who are in their seventies dance for perhaps the first time in fifteen years. They came alive as if they had not suffered the loss of many dear friends over the past few years; they looked young and as I remember them loving each other in sweet and funny ways throughout my growing years.I felt the loss of my importance in each daughter's life as I watched my eldest fulfill her role as wife and mother, nursing her baby girl, feeling those early pangs of watching your daughter suffer, even if only from cutting new teeth. I felt like a woman cutting new teeth in suffrage and liberation at once. I was far away from my home in Chicago and close to the home of all that I knew as a child and young mother stranded between the whole of what I thought I might do with my life's future over five decades. I have failed miserably in some things and reached heights I never knew I was capable of. I finished a book manuscript over the summer that took me eleven years to write through the trials of tenure, raising teenage daughters and managing parts of my life that always seemed like bikes and ropes and water and steam that I tried to hold onto, but could never fully grasp.
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