29 June 2010

adjusting

I've been cranky with the girls lately. A lot. I have some theories about this and they involve summer vacation and heat indexes in the low hundreds, but also, mostly, they involve no longer having a thesis to obsess over and freak out about. When you have no choice but to firmly tell yourself that the messy house and unruly children must be carefully blocked out for the sake of the very important work you must do, it's a lot easier to ignore the fact that your house is a perpetual disaster and your children are whining and fighting over the same stupid things every half hour. Or, put another way, a lack of very important work to do leaves me with a lot more time to be irritated with how quickly a formerly-clean apartment becomes messy and how often my children bicker.

Apparently I need structure. You would think years of homeschooling and self-motivated projects of various kinds that sometimes even get finished (both children have quilts, our house had curtains, things have been painted, short stories have been written) would mean that I could structure my own time properly, but it seems not. Or at least I require a period of adjustment. It's not like I don't have things to do. I do. But the weather here has mellowed and I think it's time to find a new balance between working and enjoying the summer with my kiddos, who really don't fight all that often, especially when I take them outside and tire them out before bedtime.

It's the pacing that I need to acclimate myself to, a different rhythm that takes into account messes and fights and lazy summer days as well as the list of things to do that never really stops growing. I want to stop feeling like there's something important I should be doing and that all of this other stuff - living, if you will - is just getting in the way. My goal for this week? Make time. Time for work, time for play, time for reading and writing and thinking. I will portion this time out so that there's room for everything, or at least most things, and so that I don't feel like I should be doing six things when all I want to do is one.

I'll let you know how it goes.

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