brain dumping on Mother's Day

It's mother's day! Yay! I love mother's day. I love being a mother. It is really a lot of work, but it is also sweet and rewarding. I always knew I wanted to be a mother. I'm so glad that Danny and I have these five beautiful, amazing children in our lives. 

I'm not going to waste my time feeling guilty about the fact that I also want to pursue other dreams. I think that's okay, and there are lots of ways to do this well - in fact, as many as there are women. I guess there is likely to be a statistically significant number of women who have a natural desire and inclination for early childhood life and living. It's okay that I'm not always that kind of mom, and that I really deeply crave getting out of my house and talking to real people about ideas and theories about the world. 

[Side note: I spent a lot of time the past decade feeling guilty about this, but I am pretty much over that. It's okay to have multiple dreams if you have your priorities straight. Danny assures me that I do, and he is extremely supportive of my dream to go back to school and pursue a career in the weird field of linguistics. Somewhere near the area around computer-assisted language learning, corpus linguistics, second language acquisition and testing...something like that. Not quite sure yet, but that's perfectly okay!]

I got myself a mother's day gift. It was about $12. A series of bullet journals that I thought were really pretty. Basically, bullet journaling is another recent female trend like Kon-Mari-ing your house. It is a different way to write and keep a planner.

My friend Megan showed me her bullet journal in January. She wanted to design something for me, but I couldn't really figure out what I needed. My friend Karin showed me hers and I thought it was interesting. Somehow randomly I had already found an app called "a year in pixels" which is basically borrowing from the bullet journal concept, except as an app. It's been extremely useful for me to visualize my moods. 

I spent a little bit of time while nursing Joey in the middle of the night last night looking at ideas for bullet journals. I quickly got extremely bored with it for these reasons:

a. A lot of vloggers care a lot more about how the thing looks than how to make it useful

b. Usefulness > copycat picture-perfect designs. I got a few ideas, but mine is going to look a lot different; I don't like daily pages at all and I can come up with and free-hand my own designs with total confidence. Also, I will have a lot more mistakes. And I don't care about the pens. At all. Whatsoever.

c. I have good penmanship. I can write very beautifully. It's not important to me. Most vloggers were more interested in showing off same-y calligraphy than talking about the thing in action. 

But hey, I didn't look that extensively and it was like 4 am, so maybe I missed something.

I've really enjoyed the act of writing in a bullet journal. I have decided to use it as a way to record my achievements. I've had a system of post-it notes for a to-do list for some time now, and that has worked surprisingly well. I don't need to make huge to-do lists; I'm like, the queen of that already. What I need is to recognize the little achievements and accomplishments I have already managed to do. So this bullet journal is basically a way to track my projects as well as to list my achievements each week. It feels good. It's nice to see a fat, full page of stuff that I managed to do. My to-do lists never make me feel satisfied because my strategy is to make a list of 100 things and then accomplish 10. Danny says most people have a different approach: make a list of 4 things and accomplish all 4. I usually end up doing more things but feeling less satisfied. But this way I can focus more on just the 10. It's really great.

For example, this week I did really well on a mock GRE test. It feels nice to see that on a list of things I got done this week. 

****

In other news, I decided to stop taking antihistamines to help me sleep. I have been taking them daily since about February or March.

I have problems with:

- falling asleep

- staying asleep (I am a very light sleeper)

- falling back asleep <-- once I'm awake, that's it. I am awake. 

- occasional insomnia where it's not just 15-45 minutes to fall asleep but like, 3-4 hours. It is awful because usually I feel tired. I just can't seem to sleep.

On a side note, I always dream. Every night. I don't always remember the dreams for very long after waking unless I write them down. Sometimes they are pretty abstract and hard to put into words; somehow the words spoils it. I have vivid memories of my dreams, especially places. I also have nightmares fairly often. Definitely multiple times per week, I would say. Usually it's easy to trace the source, but not always.

So yeah. I'd been taking Benadryl (diphenhydramine) for a while but then when we ran out, I took Unisom (Doxylamine), a similar antihistamine. The effects of Unisom on my body are much more pronounced. I had to cut the pills in half so I would be able to function the next day, and for this past month I've still been struggling with kind of a brain-fog during the day. Also I am fairly certain it's increased my water retention (ugh bloating) as well as constipation (ugh more bloating). It also gives me kind of a dry mouth, which isn't that pleasant. But still, it's better than not being able to sleep.

I read some Harvard study that showed that there is a correlation between prolonged antihistamine use and dementia. I really, really don't want dementia! On the other hand, maybe it increased the likelihood from 1% to 1.5% - I didn't read it too closely (generally I try to stay away from self-diagnosis and health information on the internet because I am prone to obsessiveness and anxiety, the bedfellows of hypochondriac-ism. If I knew more Latin, I'd know the correct ending to that word. I bet it exists. Sigh). 

Anyway, the "ideal" is to not be on drugs anyway - and I've been really frustrated at my plateauing weight loss. So I decided to try not taking any pills to help sleep.

I am certain Joey gets a mild dose of it through the breast milk but it's one of those Class C drugs, and my OB/GYN and lactation consultant both told me it was okay to take while breastfeeding. But the thing is, that mild dose of it seems to affect him, too, because last night was the first time since October that I've needed to crawl out of bed to go feed him. Danny was irritated. He wanted to get a bottle to feed him. But the thing is...Danny is a heavy sleeper. It seems really stupid to me to tap sleeping Danny on the shoulder to wake him up so that he can be irritable and grouchy, while meanwhile I am laying there unable to fall back asleep, and the milk let-down is making a mess, and I feel a tremendous amount of guilt for causing Danny to be annoyed at me. "I'm not annoyed! It's always just this feelings of, "what's going on?" when I wake up," he assures me. But it certainly sounds really angry to me. It feels awful. Anyway, there's an endless supply of weird and interesting things to read and watch on my phone. It's better than lying in bed staring at the ceiling, listening to slurping sounds from the nursery down the hall.

We will see how long this experiment lasts. Maybe I will end up going back to Benadryl. The crappy thing was that not only did I wake up at 4:30 for Joey last night, but I also woke up at 11:45 and 1:30, both times with pretty lousy headaches. There is an enormously strong correlation between me getting a good night's sleep and my mood/anxiety being tolerable enough to function. 

On the other hand, maybe it's enough to try extra hard to make sure a "sleep routine" is in place. Laying in bed reading is - well, it can be - a super helpful way for me to calm my mind. Drinking some warm herbal tea before might be another option.

****

In other other news, I've spent the past few weeks juggling course schedules and I think I figured out the way to optimize both time and cost for my family. If I were to be a full time student and take 9 credits per semester, I could graduate by Fall 2022. That's six semesters over the space of three years. Maybe my parents won't have moved to Utah by then and they can be a real help to us with childcare.

Turns out, childcare for 5 kids is very expensive. I hadn't even looked at the cost before today.

Danny, always the negative Nancy realist, is skeptical that it could work with me having such a full schedule. But I've been looking at the times when the classes are taught and I've figured out that most semesters I can just take all the classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which would significantly decrease the load. And most of our kids will be in school - except Joey, who will need to be cared for. If my mom is still here and can help out, that would be great. There's one semester where the classes I have to take are taught from 2:20-3:30. That is a really crappy time of day when you have elementary school kids. But on the other hand, by that time Jane will be 12 years old and possibly old enough to babysit under very controlled conditions. But on the other other hand, that's the most important time of the day. Ugh. A nanny is like 3x cheaper than the after school care program, which is definitely not designed for families with 5 kids. And on top of that, Joey will still need to be cared for during that time. Ames is like 30 minutes away, and there will be some buffer time from when I leave class to get to my car. It's unlikely I'll be able to be home before 4:20-4:30. So that's 2 hours 4 days a week. I don't know. I keep feeling like there has to be a way to make that work but Danny is so negative and skeptical, raining on my dreams. It's good that he's there to reign me in from doing rash, impulsive things. It's also good that he can see costs that I can't. I have to keep reminding myself about that.

This is putting the horse way, wayyyy before the cart. I haven't even been accepted to ISU yet. So I have to like...apply.

This weekend we went on a date walking around campus. It was really fun and nice for both of us. It's a beautiful campus and there were all the graduating students walking around in their funny robes and hats. It was fun to read the comics and stuff posted on the doors of the English professors. Some of them would even fit in with my super liberal left-wing high school teachers :-) I mean, I know universities skew liberal, but I went to BYU where "liberal" looks like something else to most normal people. 

Time to go make dinner for my mom. I was at the store yesterday and the woman asked if I was doing anything for mother's day. "Probably cooking for my mom." "Oh that's nice. I wish my mom were still around for me to cook for." That made me want to cry. I love my mom. I love cooking for her. I love that she lives close. I am really anxious about them moving away before I get the chance to do this degree. I don't at the moment see how it will be possible without her help and support with childcare. But...people do it...so...it must be possible. It's just maybe the sacrifice will end up looking too big for either Danny or me. Oh man. I just really hope that isn't the case.

Thoughts about the Outdoors

Perhaps one reason why 'The Lord of the Rings' appeals so deeply to the men in my life, ranging from my dear husband to one of those guys (yeah, there are several! Ugh...) I dated-but-didn't-really-date-because-he-refused-to-let-me-win-him, to my older brother is because all of these men were also greatly fond of the outdoors.

I have read 90% of the trilogy before - I stopped somewhere three quarters through the third book about six or seven years ago, and so by now it's better to just read it again starting from the beginning. I have been listening to the audiobook with my 9 year old daughter. Audiobooks are fantastic. They allow me to actually participate in the world of books while getting the every day things done which need to get done. The reader for this book is excellent: a very easy to listen to British accent, which is a must for this series, of course. By now the recording is about 25 years old.

I am pretty sure that the first time I actually read it, I was actually listening to Danny read it aloud to me then, too. He read a lot of books out loud to me when we were first married. It was nice. There is no time for that kind of thing now because of his school work. He has been doing very well with it, but I think the poor man will be so much happier when he can have time to find and pursue his own interests and hobbies again. It has been about two years since he started this program. His hobby before that time was finishing our basement, which he did himself: framed, wired, floored (okay, I helped with that a lot), sheet rocked (we should have done that; we would have done a better job!), and painted. Before that, we lived in Houston and his hobby was his commute. It was 1 hour and 15 minutes there, 1 hour and 15 minutes home. Pretty miserable, if you ask me. That is why we moved.

Danny has it hard now, but I think I would literally wither and die without an outlet for my interests.

Once, when I was feeling particularly miserable because the editing process was so painfully dull, frustrating, and impossible, and I had been editing the first (and so far only) piece of writing which I have ever held in my hands as a book, I mentioned to my friend something like, "I'm never going to write anything ever again." His response made me feel so happy. Something like, "What!? Nooo!!" It feels good that people exist out there who want to read my thoughts and ideas. Even if they didn't, though, I would still have to share them. It's just part of me. I love to write.

Editing, on the other hand, especially co-editing...

Tolkien wrote long. His sentences are beautiful and full of descriptive language, but he's not just telling the story - he is really painting the setting itself in how he tells it. You feel like you are there. It helps a lot that I have in the background of my mind images of the characters, and a gorgeous New Zealand tapestry - but the movies just really don't have the space/ability to do the books justice because it's precisely the slowness, the wordiness, the how-ness, that makes this book so fun. Several times in our 2.5 hour car drive today I found myself just grinning uncontrollably because of some funny nuance in the language (the names of the hobbit families, for example). I had to stop the book to have Jane think about the sentence, “I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

That boy who I dated-without-dating called the collective works of J. R. R. Tolkien "literary masturbation" which forever gave me permission to not like them, aka to voice the inner frustration I had always found with them before. I think he did like these books, but they were just too long for him. All the other men in my life who love LOTR are deeply hurt by this colorful phrase. Perhaps it's because this series is the one thing that is not at all tainted by sexuality. Period. Or perhaps because their feelings for the series were deeply tied to feelings of loyalty to their boyhoods. I'm not sure.

It's not like I hadn't tried to read them before. I idolized my brother growing up, and he created an Elvish-esque alphabet and word for his name which he not only wood-burned into a beautiful plaque which he hung above the door of his room - the room in which we spent many long hours talking into the night about European history and fantasy/sci-fi literature - but also wrote onto the sides of all of my future hand-me-down school books along with VASICEK. There wasn't a chance I would grow up without longing to try Tolkien.

It's just that...well...I was always (and still am) a lot better at collecting books than reading them.

I like people.

And also, I guess another reason I never let Tolkien into my childhood was that somehow I got it into my mind to start with the Silmarillion. I should've gone with the Hobbit! Duh. I was an adult by the the time I finally enjoyed it as a book. Not as a movie series. Haha. Dunno, I could only stomach one of them.

I, too, loved (and still love) the outdoors. I didn't (and will not likely ever) have the same kind of relationship that the men in my life have had with nature because, well, unfortunately that wasn't an option. If I could have gone on camp outs, overnight treks, fishing trips, canoeing adventures - I would have. At least I had the great fortune of growing up in a part of the world that is forested. Our house abutted...well, here is a picture.

Was the quarry smaller 20 years ago? This is actually the first I have ever really studied the aerial view of this place. That was not the style or pace of things when I was growing up, to google a place and view it from all angles except perhaps the experiential one, the one which actually matters most. 

I knew the paths in those woods very well. I walked there alone quite often, or sometimes with my brother or even rarely, a sister. I liked it best to be alone there, though. There were some canal ruins by the creek, and an old waterfall. There were places where the water was really deep and still and you could see fish. I remember seeing deer and foxes there, too. And people riding dirt bikes. And suddenly you're looking down at the quarry, or you're in the middle of the burned out area (did Myst model the landscape after this place!? I used to wonder). 

I think what I loved about the outdoors as a child was the fact that it was a place where I could go and not think, but still think. The only inside place that is remotely similar is music. It's like...you can be thinking your thoughts, but your senses are overwhelmed with noticing other things, like the smell of moss or the sound of birds calling, or the stink of skunkweed which you accidentally stepped on - these things suddenly call your mind away abruptly to faraway places like, "What did the Indians who used to live here think of this?" or "can I walk across the creek on that log without falling in?" or other things like that. When I listen to music, it's like surrendering a piece of my brain to something else, letting it steer. It's like that for the outdoors, too. Both can be so calming.

As an adult, what is calming about being in the countryside in nature is the lack of worry. There's a huge field and the kids can run very far away. You can still see them, but they are free! There isn't a constant nagging fear about cars running them over or strangers talking to them or kidnapping them (!) or etc. It's just wide open skies, trees, fields - so comforting, so much relief.

Growing up is hard. I don't really know from experience what it must have been like to grow up in a male mind or body. It seems stressful in some specific ways that I did not have to deal with (while other things were probably much harder the other way around). Perhaps the strong emphasis on outdoor programming for boys (and not girls) in my church was for good reasons. I can be happy for the men in my life for having such wonderful experiences with scouting. To marry an eagle scout was always my naive wish - fulfilled, too. Though, I am not sure if I can do it without a hint of sadness that can sometimes be masked by regretful, defensive bitterness. I personally do think there were good reasons - along with some painfully stupid ones - for the way scouting worked. 

But I am just one person. What can I do against a problem that is bigger than a church culture, especially when it's as big as the entire world's culture? When I am brought up to believe in and strongly value positive discourse but the world teaches that criticism and campaigning is the only valid way to make your voice heard? What can I do when I see, feel, and experience a problem but do not have the tools to name it or even speak about it? 

Pray. That's pretty much it.

That is another reason why The Lord of the Rings is such an appealing story: the theme of the small and simple struggling to do what is right, and eventually even succeeding.

Will I ever write something great? Something that is read, shared, beloved, turned into a major motion picture, stained with teardrops on the pages, something so cherished and treasured that the names of my characters become names of generations of children? My forays into fiction have been unsteady. My only semi-successful writing has been in these small bursts (like blog posts) of concerted energy - disconnected ideas and thoughts, and none of it fiction; what compels me to write seems to be the lure of a possible reader. I know that I can write about Czech Genealogy, the Czech Language,  my faith, or even just dip the bucket into my inner pool of thoughts and splash it onto the screen. Could I ever hope to aspire to something even greater, though?

Perhaps. 

I wonder what would happen if I took my laptop into the outdoors and tried. The fact is, my life is tied up with caring for others, and though that is not a bad thing at all, it does make some logistics tricky. Me + the outdoors is tricky. It's not a casual thing in my life. It's a planned adventure. 

But I've learned that there are no easy paths for anyone. None. 

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with weary feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

The best we can hope to find are worthwhile quests and steady friends with whom to share them, and I feel lucky that I have a small handful of those.

There is only one friend that I have who can truly understand me, though, and for the time being he is not at all as tangible as I would like. Still, I feel a closeness to God when I am paying attention. Perhaps most of all when I am alone (at least in my head) in a beautiful place outdoors.