Rebooting

A learning experience is one of those things that say, "You know that thing you just did? Don't do that." --Douglas Adams

Today marked the start of the second week of school. I can tell we're already getting into our usual school routine because Son #1 announced at 7:30 this morning that he had forgotten to tell me that he needed a composition notebook for his theater class. One of us, however, is learning from past incidents of this nature, as I had squirreled a few composition notebooks away for such an occasion. Crisis averted.

Unlike at the start of last school year, I don't feel completely overwhelmed yet. But I realized last Friday, at the end of a day that had been largely frittered away accomplishing not much of anything, that I'm at loose ends. After two years spent completely overcommitted and in panic mode, having a day with a moderate to-do list and a reasonable stretch of time to finish it in feels alien, and lacking an adrenaline kick to keep me moving, I've been less than productive.

So this morning I made myself a to-do list, and put on it everything I hoped to accomplish before I picked the boys up from school. However, I made a deliberate choice to finish MY to-do list items first. So first I went for a two-mile walk (and not just because it's been hotter than the hinges of hell in LA the last week or so), ran an overdue household errand, tended to my email correspondence (including revising and emailing school fundraising materials out for approval), and started gathering some stuff to take to Goodwill. Overall I felt much better about my productivity today, even though a completely crazy packed parking lot meant that I made the snap decision to try to make my donation tomorrow, rather than risk being late for pick-up.

I know that I am in the midst of a reboot. This is something that I'm very familiar with, since my dad was the in the army and we moved regularly; at times, frequently. Each time it would be new house, new neighborhood, new school, new friends, and in theory, new me. I say in theory because I don't think I changed all that much from place to place, and I always tended to find my niche in with the brainy/geeky set. However, starting over amongst a set of strangers did give me the opportunity to leave inconvenient parts of my past behind (for example, my classmates in seventh grade blessedly did not know me as that girl who had to wear headgear in sixth grade). It also made learning from my mistakes that much less painful, since in doing things differently the next time around, I often didn't have to face any of the same people who had witnessed me screwing up the first time.

It's a little different when you know your life is changing but you're still in the same place you've been for the last ten years, and where you're likely to be for the foreseeable future. I've got a kindergartener now, and though I'm walking him into the same elementary school that at least one of his brothers has been at for the last seven years, I'm spending all my time on the opposite side of the campus from my usual haunts for the last four years. Few moms I know already also have kindergarteners, and so I'm meeting many new people after years of basically hanging out with the same group of "usual suspects" (so-called because we joke that when any volunteer task needs to get done, we "round up the usual suspects").

Now, I'm not fooling anyone. I know that I won't be able to reinvent myself by hiding out among the newbies. My reputation as a compulsive volunteer isn't likely to vanish because (a) the school is still full of people who know me very well and who know, say, if they call me at a moment's notice I will probably go pick up a stack of flyers from the copy shop or help them hang up posters, and (b) the chances of me going a whole year without volunteering for something are no greater than my chances of winning Mega Millions and paying the school $100,000 to lose my phone number. Somewhere between doing nothing and volunteering so much that the staff makes jokes about me sleeping in the office is a happy medium where I volunteer, enjoy it, and feel like I'm really contributing without feeling resentful about the things I'm not doing for my family and myself, or about all the parents who obviously aren't contributing if I have so much ----ing volunteer work to do myself.

So the question is, how do I find that happy medium without disappointing the people (many of whom I count as friends) who expect more from me? I do have real obligations this year--Son #1's approaching bar mitzvah being chief among them--that make it impossible for me to work at the level I have been. I'm going to have to learn to say no and stick to it, to step aside rather than rushing in, and to accept that the new me may disappoint some of the folks who are used to the old me. However, the last two years have definitely been a learning experience (see above), and regardless of the consequences, this reboot is necessary if I don't want my husband to commit me.

And in the spirit of rebooting, I've decided that it is time to reboot the 1,000-Pound Project. This time, however, I'm giving it a secondary goal. Our ostensibly two-car garage has been so full of crap for over a year that it has been impossible to park even one car in it. The first goal, as before, is to get rid of 1,000 pounds of stuff from my house. The secondary goal is to be able to park my minivan in the garage again before the rainy season starts (so I can forgo the pleasure of having three boys track a gallon of water into the house through the front door on every rainy school day).

It may not qualify as instant gratification, but I suspect that in my quest to get rid of stuff I'm going to find a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick in the garage. For example, one of the artifacts I didn't quite get to drop off at Goodwill today was the high chair, and since the "baby" is now five and a half, I think it is safe to get rid of it. We'll see just how many walks down memory lane and humility lessons I get before I can pull the minivan in out of the rain.

And rebooted me? She'll undoubtedly be older, and hopefully wiser, than Jen 1.0.

Yes, some of us otherwise intelligent folks learn things this way.