My last post was in early March before I abandoned the blog and I think I remember doing something about monthly challenges to keep me distracted from life. If I remember correctly, I finished out my February challenge which was to read one book a week from my stockpile of "to read" books, and then I went into full blown survival mode and abandoned the challenges as well.
I thought about jumping into the challenges again this July, but whoa, too much pressure. I haven't even been off a week nor do I remember any of the challenges I had originally planned. What I have felt the need to do is put me back together. I fell apart in the last few months, and as a result, so did everything else, my house, my kids, my marriage. I am very fortunate in the fact that my husband and children were all very understanding and patient with me, but now it's time, finally, to start putting it all back together.
My life had become purposeless. Survival mode is very much about just running through the motions without any real purpose, and since before this job I was running through the motions of wife and mother without realizing it, I had a lot of work to do.
My first purpose in life was to make a clean home for myself and my family. Even the husband agreed on this one as there was mold rings in the toilets and the windows were so dirty you couldn't really see out of some of them. Last week, for the first time ever I might add, we both set to deep cleaning the house one room a day. This was always something I did with purpose and passion, but for the first time my husband also found the purpose in it. I'm sure he won't describe it as the soul stirring experience I've found it to be, but the fact that we are restoring order together is very therapeutic for me and I feel it's a step in the right direction as far as once again finding ourselves on the same page.
The cleaning is still in process. My next step is finding purpose again with my children. I mean, they are the ones I really neglected not just while working in survival mode, but way back months, maybe even years ago. Not neglect in the not feeding leaving them home alone sense, but neglect in the soulful way. So in the last week, I purposefully planned some activities to do with my boys, things I used to do with them all the time and somehow forgot about. The first was to create a summer Book Bingo reading challenge for each of them. I stumbled across this idea last year on Pinterest. You create a bingo sheet and each square is a different type of book to read or a different place to read to read a book. Some ideas:
read a book in a tent
read a book the librarian chooses for you
read a book with a girl main character
read a book on the beach
You get the idea. For the first three bingos they make, I take them to Five Below to pick out a little toy. Then they have to finish out the page and we go someplace "special." (They pick Chuck E. Cheese. Blah!) These bingo sheets are so motivating. My oldest is something of a reluctant reader. He would rather me read to him than read on his own. These sheets have him reading constantly, different material, on his own. Anyway, I digress a bit. I promised my oldest a reading nook. I have two crib mattresses in brand new condition that I can't give away so I told him I'd use them to make a nook and never did. His room was the first we tackled to clean and I finally fulfilled my promise to him and made him a reading nook in his closet. He needed that. He needed a hideaway. He needed a little kick in the pants to get him reading. He needed his mom to keep her promises.
Another activity I planned to do over a year ago was paint giant letters, their initials, and hang them in their rooms as decoration. Saturday was a rainy day and we put the cleaning on hold for a bit so I could call each one up and paint. For ten minutes at a time, I sat with each of my boys and painted, chatted, and destressed together.
And finally, I'm putting purpose back in not only my relationships with my kids, but in my cooking again. I actually watched a new cooking show. My husband and I used to watch the Food Network all the time, and we ate well when we did. Somewhere along the way we stopped, probably around the same time life lost its flavor, we decided to take a literal turn with that and not really enjoy cooking anymore. I decided to find purpose again in what I feed my family and incorporate the boys into this. Each week one of them gets to plan, shop for, and cook a meal. We started this week and Eli and I made Caesar salad with homemade dressing, grilled naan pizzas, and chocolate pudding pie with homemade whipped cream. I took my son to the grocery store. We went to the grocery store and shopped together. He nearly caused two avalanches of breaking jars, but I was there with him. I had stopped grocery shopping with my kids. It had become too stressful and I somehow made it into another excuse not to be with them. I was cheating them of a life experience. No more. I might not take all three of them with me--that's just crazy talk--but from now on I hope to continue to include them in these tasks. Next week Sal has decided on some sort of soup, so I've been told.
So that's life right now. Finding purpose in everything I do. Hell, I'm even watching TV with purpose again. Before we'd sit down and just settled for sitcom reruns. Don't get me wrong, Big Bang Theory marathons are awesome, but they lack purpose when you've already seen them a few hundred times. I've committed to watching Orange is the New Black. My husband thought it was going to be another Downton Abbey and, well, let's just say his attention is held just a little better by lesbian jail sex than early 20th century tablescapes.
For the last six months, and for up to a year or more before that, I thought that my purpose was to provide (financially) for my family. And, yes, I did need to contribute. Most of us do. But that is a sidenote as a wife and mother. Repurposing is big these days: cribs into benches, TV consoles into bookshelves or puppet theaters, crib mattresses into reading nooks. This job allowed me to repurpose myself, strip down my original contributions to my family and find new, more useful, and creative ways to be apart of their lives.
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