I'm a Runner: And no, Nothing was Chasing Me, Thanks

If you are wondering if the world is ending, it may be.

I have decided to take up running.

Shocking, right?


I decided the other day that I hate this anxiety so I'm going to do something that I hate even more than the anxiety and that is running. Oh I hate running. I mean I've never really done it, but the one time I did I ran maybe 200 feet and was like ok, that was fun.

It is so anti-me that I have a funny story.
I texted my husband to ask if he wanted to go running with me when he got home.
He said sure.
He got home and I asked him to go change into his running clothes (as it was getting close to dinner). He comes back in with jeans and a thermal on.
I ask "are you wearing that running?" and he says yes and gives me an odd look.
I ask him to help get the boys' snowsuits on, as it was beyond freezing and I wanted them warm for their trip in the jogging stroller.
"Where are we taking them?" my husband asks, and I reply to the jogging track that's nearby.
"Why?" he asks.
"To go running," I reply because duh I've already said running like eight times.
He thought I meant running errands. Because never in a million years would I run. I loathe it. So we went running and it was pretty pathetic.
Well actually it was beyond pretty pathetic.
It was 17 degrees and felt like 3 with the wind chill. The bitter bitter windchill. And to make matters worse, the track was thick with slushy snow, so very hard to push a stroller on. We made it about half a mile before the littlest boy got cold and started crying.
And also, my husband got a stress fracture from running.
Pretty pathetic right?
ButI got a girl friend to run with me the following day and I ran 1.5 miles (jogged, ok? Geez) without really stopping so that was a success.
Can I walk today?
No not very well.

But I'm going to stick with it. Even though every minute is full of hatred for it.

I'm hoping if I can conquer running, then maybe there's a chance I can mind over matter this anxiety.

Or at least get in shape.

Creativity is Dead

I fear that perhaps I am best suited to be a stay-at-home mom forever. I'm just too thoughtful. It works well for being a mom of young kids, not so much perhaps for the working world, and definitely not for having "adult relationships".

Last night while laying in bed, I asked my husband what he thinks happens to your soul when it dies. Does it float up (or out) to heaven? Are you instantly transported to heaven? Is it like waking up from a dream when you don't remember what happened but obviously some time has passed? I was thinking these things because who doesn't ponder death before bed, right? Totally normal. I was thinking about the number of people I knew who have died, and the number of people I was around right before death (I was thinking about the horrible "death rattle" which if you are unfamiliar with, thank God). I was in the room when my grandfather died, and I wondered if I had been paying more attention would I have noticed his spirit leaving his body? I was with my mother-in-law just hours before she passed, and definitely into the alive but not alive stage.
But regardless of my weird pre-sleep ponderings, my husband took awhile to answer and finally guessed that they just go into waiting because we are all waiting for the return of Christ. "So Heaven in empty, or just filled with pre-Jesus people?" and he eventually got annoyed with my questions. He replied that he certainly doesn't think about things that have no answer.
And that's where being a stay-at-home mom for life comes in. All I do is think. I think about this and I think about that. I think about them and I think about me. I wonder what if and why and where and how come. If I had done one thing differently, or made a different choice. I'll spend hours on wikipedia looking up bubonic plague and side effects of common drugs (like ibuprofen) and birth defects and celebrities. I have so many questions. I'm curious.
It seems that most of the world despises curiosity. Mind your own business.
My son just spent the last 20 minutes telling me about ghosts. You need to walk quietly or you pop their dreams, he tells me. And they definitely are "mean ones" who steal your toys when you are asleep.
This is the kind of world I can get behind. Not ghosts, but make believe. Questioning things. And even if its silly, then why not? Silly is better than sad. Make believe is better than anxiety.

Here's to the silly ones.

THIS PAST MONTH SUCKS

Ok, perhaps all caps is unnecessary.
But truly come on universe.

I sat down with a friend yesterday for a cup of coffee (and wine, whatever, don't judge) and told her all about my life lately.
It's incredibly jarring.
I hate opening up to people because it's just very depressing.

Not that my friend would have in a million years expressed that. But really, when you are dealing with some crappy things in your life, you hate to scatter your crap everywhere. I almost want to lie or just omit the truth because it brings others down.

"How are you?!"
"My husband lies to me about his drinking!"
"Whelp see ya later."

See? Not very fun.

"How's the job hunt?"
"I've applied to over 30 jobs in the last 2 months and the only people who want to hire me offer $10/hour. I can't get a babysitter for that."

Or even more fun,
"How are your kids?"
"You mean the one that I just miscarried or the two that have been clinging to a respiratory virus for the past 3 weeks keeping us homebound?"

Who wouldn't want to hang out with me?

And I keep buying wine with the expectation of partially drowning my sorrows but then my damn husband drinks it all before I can.

I told my friend I want to start a church for broken people, for honest people.
I'm tired of fake.
I'm tired of lying.
I'm tired of people acting like everything is grand so they don't give a bad image to Christianity.
Well guess what? Anyone can have crap happen to them- good people, bad people, saints or satanists. It is inhuman to smile while suffering. That's why it's called suffering. Isn't it better to reach out to people instead, to say "I am hurting" and "I need help" instead of pushing them away and trying to rely on your own strength?
Whatever, I should take my own advice.
Instead I have been hibernating in my house so as to not cough on people, wondering if the bleak winter will swallow us whole for another 4 months, and whether or not I will reemerge with the will to try this all again, to put myself out there, to have hope.
I'm not suicidal. I'm not depressed. I'm just slowly being drained of optimism.

What I am, apparently, is a product of a controlling household. Who married a control freak. Who can't do anything without being told what to do or how to do it.
I ask God for guidance and have no way to proceed.
I'm in a maze and paralyzed by indecision.
I'm a bad metaphor.

I also saw a psychiatrist who said I don't fit any of the classifications for disorders. So I'm just anxious and depressed enough to be a joy to be around (ask my husband who leaves work early to go drink and not be around me), while not being quite crazy. He suggested some drugs for me but I cannot cope with side effects at this stage of my crazy. He suggested yoga.

Here I go trying yoga.

Method to the Madness

See, I didn't start out as a cleaner. I am sloppy by nature. As a kid, when my mom had friends over she would shut my door so as to avoid embarrassment. I just didn't care. Same in college- I'd drag home my laundry over break that I had been saving up for weeks. But things have changed out of necessity. If I were to avoid laundry altogether for a week, I would have over 8 loads. Now the cleaning happens because I am the sole cleaner. And also the mild ocd anxiety issues I have about cleaning. But as I have said before, I am QUITE lazy. Whatever I do, I must be efficient and quick. I clean the bathroom twice a week, but I'm only in there maybe 15 minutes. And this is a full clean, a full top to bottom scrubbing the floors clean. Granted I have a tiny closet-sized bathroom.

I start after bedtime. Whoever goes to the bathroom last (usually my oldest), I'll spray the bowl with cleaner after the flush. Then I pull all hand towels, get one wet, and use the wet side to wipe down the mirror, and the dry side to wipe it off. I'll throw those in the hallway, along with any towels. I shake out the bath rug, and hang that over the shower curtain rod. I'll spray down the bathtub (start at the bottom, with the drain, faucet, sides, working your way up to you don't get cleaner raining down on you. I'll then spray the sink and sides of the sink. After that, I can either go finish up with bedtime, or if kids are asleep, I'll go back with my dish gloves. Dish gloves are my Godsend. Mine are nonlatex and have a cotton lining. Fab. I scrub the toilet bowl first, in case some of it sprays off toward the floors. I then spray the toilet bowl edge and underside of the seat, wipe, spray the top of the seat and back of the lid, wipe, and then top of the tank, handle, and top of the lid and wipe. I am super unecofriendly and I use toilet paper for this toilet clean, mostly so I don't have a dirty rag to worry about. I am conscious of how much tp I use, so it's not exorbitant. Then I clean the sink, then the bathtub. I start with the top working my way to the bottom. Now comes the floor scrubbing. I spray the floor closest to the door (sometimes the walls and baseboards around them if they are dusty or dirty- usually the bottom foot of the wall or less) and wipe up. I use the same rag I used for the sink and shower, just much rinsing in hot water. If you don't clean often, maybe you should use separate rags for each section. The rag gets rinsed out thoroughly after each pass. I work in small two foot sections, mostly because the floor gets slippery if not completely rinsed. I work my way to the tub, then to the sink, and finally to the toilet. I wipe the walls first (do this one day with a white washcloth and you will never look at your toilet the same way), then the sides of the toilet, and finally the base and the floor. I rinse the rag a lot, and when I'm all done with the floor around the toilet, I'm done with the rag. That goes in the laundry. I wash my gloves off, turn on the shower to rinse everything down the drain, and job over. 

I can do this in a quick fashion, especially since I do it twice a week. Some woman on the internets was saying how you shouldn't use water when cleaning. I don't know how I feel about that.

Anyway, I've learned if you set up a method for your cleaning, a schedule per se, you will get done so much quicker, and if you clean regularly, you'll find your cleaning sessions greatly shortened in time. 

For example, cleaning your toys, etc that can be bleached. Most people do this like twice a year maybe, or only after a sickness, right? I try to do it once a month, usually on a Sunday. Sunday tends to be my cleaning day. I wait until all of my dishes are done and after bedtime, as I don't have to worry about my sink being off limits. Then I just throw all the toys that won't be harmed by water into the sink and dump a cup or so of bleach in. Then I just let it sit overnight usually, and drain it in the morning. Be sure to use a white towel or one you don't care about, since even after rinsing, some bleaching of the towel will occur.

Also once a week, when I run out of my cleaning solution, I will make up two spray bottles. I just added a bottle with a bleach solution to my arsenal, so we shall see how useful it will become.

If you try to make certain cleaning practices into habits, your house will look cleaner and you'll get quicker. Have you ever had a kid who had the stomach flu, or had it yourself? It's horrible. You will do anything to avoid it, and afterward you clean like it's your job and rent is due. I feel- why clean after it happens? Maybe cleaning beforehand like you are cleaning up after will prevent it from happening at all. 

But I could be wrong. Call me crazy.

Can't Wait

On Friday this chub monster will be 2 years old.
I can't even fathom how fast the time has gone by.

Now that's a lie.
I worked for the past year, so that made time go by a bit quicker. Cut to me back as a stay-at-home mom, and I remember why I considered part-time work again.
The.
Days.
Drag.

I hold my own pretty well until after lunch and nap, and then I have no plans. We don't have disposable income so I can't go shopping or cart them around the mall. Plus they are loud and hate to be confined by strollers, so the mall turns into an epic screaming battle anyway. Which other shoppers don't seem to enjoy.
Go figure.

I feel the day creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep by. I text my husband to ask when he will get home. I try to come up with a game plan for dinner (hahaha and by game plan I mean I avoid it and internalize all the guilt for not having started some organic slowcooker meal 7 hours previous). I text my husband again to see if he was just kidding and he will actually be home sooner (he doesn't have an office job so some days he gets out earlier than others, but not really as of late).
I told my counselor I was depressed. Maybe I'm going through a midlife crisis, I ask her.
But the reality is, and she was observant enough to note and reply back, I'm going through a crisis of faith. I'm at war within myself about what I believe and what I know, what I feel and what I can see. It's not that I'm doubting my faith, because I am a Christian and I am not for one second doubting that. Where I am having issues is that I am a grey girl (my counselor called it like she saw it and it seems to fit). I see so many variants of grey. My husband, he is a black and white man. Things are very clear cut for him. He may not follow the tenants he believes to the tee, but it's either one or the other. I have a hard time with the grey. The pastor says one thing, and I think- what about that? He says that Jesus is above all names that can be named, including cancer and autism. When we believe in Him and take Him as our personal savior, we too are above all names that can be named. Then I think- what about my mother-in-law? She was one of the most spirit-filled people I have ever met. She lived a life of walking with God. She was diagnosed with cancer and decided to believe fully in the healing of Jesus, of being above all names that can be named. She passed away 2 months before our oldest was born. It was devastating. When pastors say that believing and following God's word will put you above all names that can be named including cancer, I want to shout out FALSE. Don't get me wrong- I believe in miracles and I believe in healings. Throughout the Bible people are getting raised from the dead and healed and cured. Nowadays people can still be cured and healed, perhaps even raised from the dead. But that, in my belief, isn't up to us. It's God's will. If He wants us healed, we will be healed. If it's His plan for us to die, then that's what's gonna happen. When pastors straight out claim that by His stripes we are healed and above the name of cancer, autism, etc, maybe they need to explain further. If they mean something completely other than belief equals full healing, then I need the sermon to be dumbed down for me. So instead of crying in the back of the church, I can understand what they are trying to get across. When a Godly woman like my mother-in-law doesn't get a healing, when she leaves behind 7 children who have already been abandoned by their father, and a pastor wants to say it is because she needed more gospel? I have something to say about that.
There are some other issues that I have racing around my head that I am trying to grapple with, about marriage, about my role, about direction, etc. I'm just a giant mess.
And then I wonder why afternoons are so hard, and I'm just struggling to make it through each day until bedtime.
I know that time will pass in a blink of an eye. Before I can say it, it will be a year from now, my baby will almost be 3, and I will wonder what happened. Maybe I'll have my life in order; maybe I won't. I don't know this. It's like when I was nearing the end of my pregnancy. I knew that I would eventually have a baby on the outside. I knew that I would have to get through labor to get to that point. When you are in labor, it is horrible. There is pain, there is doubt, wondering if this giant thing can even get out, will they be alright, will I be a good mom. The waiting part is torture.
As a society we hate to wait. In fact we don't wait. We need faster internet, faster social media. Kids want to grow up faster. We get extensions because we can't even wait for our hair to grow.
The waiting game is difficult.
And right now, I just have to cope with waiting. This rough season of life will pass. I just have to know that on the other side will be some clarity, some path, some purpose.

Clearing the Air

Let me start by saying that if you told me a year ago that I would be giving tips on cleaning, I would have laughed. Or smacked you. That just wasn’t my bag.

Before I had kids, I had a friend that I thought was the quintessential mom. She had her poop in a group, was doing everything naturally and organically, yada yada, and her house was a pit. She was really my first friend to have kids, and so I didn’t really question it. When I had kids, I was the same me- messy, cluttered, LAZY- but with two crying diaper-soiling machines to help further the cause. When I had friends over (and I use the word “when” to mean “never” as in I never had friends over) I would wave away the mess. “You understand,” I would apologize. And for the most part, people would understand a bit. I didn’t see the stacks of dishes or the trash and toys everywhere; I saw happy kids who got played with and loved.

When I started work about a year ago, same deal. Fast forward to about six months ago when things started getting stressful. There were some major issues going on at work that whoopsie daisy spilled into my home life. I was at stress level red all the time, worried about my kids getting sick. I went to my doctor about two months ago because I couldn’t stop stressing, and cleaning obsessively. She wisely told me that I was channeling my anxiety into something that I could “fix”. I couldn’t change the swirling vortex of insanity in my life, but I could clean the daylights out of my house. That insight definitely helped me step down off my soapbox filled with Lysol, and I eventually took a hard look at my life and decided the stress of the job was too much for me.

Fast forward to everything being peachy keen. Nope. Still a bit anxious, as this was all less than a week ago. However, I’m not going to let my house get back to where it was pre-freak-out. I realize that my house can be a source of pride (I know, body-snatchers have taken the old me away. It’s a very strange feeling, I assure you). I like knowing that if my kids come down with the pukes again, it is not because of the cleanliness of my house, and I can give the stink eye to the kid’s museum or their cousins or whichever viral incubus they were subjected to. So looooong story short (and way too much TMI but that’s what my life is- one big overshare) I am a wealth of cleaning knowledge. Or at least a well-oiled machine of cleaning proportions, as I am not one to spend hours upon hours, just minutes here and minutes there.

My recipe for all-purpose cleaner

Backstory- I had Mrs. Meyer’s All Purpose cleaner, which I am a big fan of. It smells great, seemed to do the job, but when you are in FREAKOUT mode, you need something more to add to the mix to make sure you have your bases covered. I used Lemon Verbana, so I can’t speak to how well the scents will mingle if you use another flavor. I have tried others, really enjoyed Clementine I think it was, until I got pregnant and had morning sickness. The smell of Clementine reminds me of that and is in the back of the cupboard and will never be used again. Much like that first liquor you overdo, you can’t go back. Impossible.

I have a big ol’ spray bottle. I got it on Amazon. You could use any sort of spray bottle. I suggest one that hasn’t been used for anything else, especially something soapy. Could be an issue- just saying.

I eyeball the portions, and some days I switch it up a bit, but for the most part:

1/10^th of the bottle filled with Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day Lemon Verbana All-Purpose

1/10^th Thieves Oil Household Cleaner (whether or not you believe in the mumbo jumbo of essential oils, etc, they do leave a nice smell- and when you are a nut about germs, you can use all the mumbo jumbo you can get)

Fill to about half with vinegar. Depending how much of the other two ingredients you have used, it may be more or less vinegar. If you want to put in half a bottle of vinegar and then add the other portions, go ahead. Sometimes I use a whole lot of vinegar.

Fill the rest of the container with hot water. Just shake the spray bottle before you use it and apply liberally (disclaimer- I read online (thanks Google) that vinegar shouldn’t be used on marble. I don’t need to worry about that as I am a commoner and won’t ever be able to afford marble. If you have marble you probably shouldn’t use vinegar on it. Or instruct your cleaning lady not to use vinegar.). I use the spray on my counters, flat-top stove, microwave, windows, and on our wood dining room table. It seems to strip the varnish off of the chairs, but the whole set we got for $75 from a local thrift shop, so the varnish could probably stand to be stripped. If this isn’t your idea of a good time, test it first.

Does it leave a vinegar smell? For a bit. I like to think that’s the smell of a clean house. My mom came over after I had cleaned the other day and said she smelled a hint of cloves, which I believe is from the Thieves Oil. She didn’t say anything about hint of vinegar, so I have a feeling that dissipates rather quickly. I have a couple spray bottles and I just fill them both up at the same time. I spray this pretty frequently throughout the day, whenever there is a spill or mess or after meals. It cleans up the highchairs, boosters, appliances. Two thumbs up.

I'm a Giver aka here have some advice

Who doesn't enjoy the great blogs out there that show pictures of domestic bliss, clean tables with floral arrangements and tidy floors, or gorgeous pastries whipped up in only 4 hours with 16 ingredients? Or pages heaped with directions to knit your own organic diapers and hand-sew table runners for the fancy parties you throw for your neighbors?
Well this is not it. I lack a domestic gene. I hate washing dishes. I have two little boys who make more messes than I could have possibly EVER imagined before I dreamt of popping them out. They also can sit still for about 5 minutes of a craft project. And they can put up with about 5 minutes of my absence before they start enacting Lord of the Flies.
I recently gave up Facebook because it gave me high levels of anxiety over the imperfection that was my life. How could I not be making gingerbread houses with my boys? Or cooking meals that included at least 5 power foods and no wheat/dairy/sugar/salt/air? Where was the romantic dinner for my husband that I prepare after the children are asleep? Why haven't I learned how to do a perfect cat-eye?
I just am not that cool. Or organized.

Instead of feeling guilty about all the things I'm not, I'm going to celebrate the things that I am-
Cluttered
Sarcastic
Mildly cleaning-obsessed
Dorky

And I need a place to put down what works for me and what doesn't, all with a good amount of sarcasm thrown in. I want to replace what Facebook was going for- a sense of community- with an actual community. And if it's just me and myself having a good ol' time, I can deal with that, as I make myself laugh and buy myself ice cream.
Ben and Jerry's.
Blueberry Graham.
Oh yeah.
First piece of advice- a pint of ice cream a night is probably less considered "a treat" and more considered "a habit".
You're welcome.

At least I'm habitual-
Bailey