Enjoying the View of a New Year

So it's about that time when those earnest New Year's resolutions start dropping like flies, we're all just getting the hang of writing "2013" on our checks, and regular life is taking over from where the holidays dropped us off. I can't say that I really made any specific resolutions this year; at age forty, I know all of the things that I should do (exercise more often, drink more water and less alcohol, write in months other than November [speaking of which, I made my word count in NaNoWriMo, thanks for asking!], read more good books, be less cranky, etc.) and I also know at times this year I will do well in some of those areas and poorly in others. The best I can do is try to make good choices when I can, one decision at a time.

What I found myself thinking, though, was how much better I felt at the start of this year than at the start of 2012. When 2012 dawned, I was still neck-deep in a series of commitments that I had started with enthusiasm in previous years but which taken together were overwhelming me. I knew an end was in sight, but it was many months away. In the meantime I was waking up with panic attacks nearly every day and spending much of my time being irritable and distracted. (Okay, much MORE of my time. I'm not exactly Ms. Warm and Fuzzy most of the time, but when your family starts to treat you as if you're going to go off at any moment like a carelessly handled tube of nitroglycerin, you know you have a problem.) I like being busy, accomplishing things, being responsible, and making a difference, but I had overextended myself so far that my life had become a to-do list, and I barely felt like I was staying one step ahead of what I needed to do.

This year, many of those commitments had been handed off months before. Admittedly, I woke up with a panic attack on December 26th thinking about all the undone tasks related to Son #1's rapidly approaching bar mitzvah, but it has been several months since a panic attack was my regular alarm clock. I've taken up some regular exercise (well, semi-regular over the holidays while the kids were home), given up Diet Coke, and revived this blog, which I had started the summer of 2011 in a burst of what I thought was optimism but which was actually desperation. I curbed my volunteerism at school somewhat, choosing tasks where I can help but where I don't have to call the shots. I've made some progress at getting the house in order, though admittedly a lot less than I had hoped to. I'm not exactly where I want to be yet (maybe not even in the same time zone), but I feel like the road I'm on is taking me there for a change.

It's nice to start a new year feeling happy about the steps I've made in the right direction instead of dwelling on the multiple areas in which I have failed. It almost gives me hope that this will be the year I find the floor of my garage, get rid of every unnecessary piece of paper in the house, succeed in getting my boys to put their dirty socks in the hamper every single time...and win the lottery. Okay, maybe not. But at least I'm starting this year in the sure knowledge that the light at the end of the tunnel I was stuck in at the start of 2012 was not, thankfully, an oncoming train. Here's hoping that your 2013 is full of positive potential too.

Like an Adventure...But Boring and Dirty

As I've been picking through my garage (a.k.a. the Pit of Despair) lately, beginning what promises to be a very long process of cleaning, sorting, and discarding, I've found myself thinking of the late George Carlin's routine on "stuff." I think I'm in the right frame of mind to be working on this task, because right now, I'm feeling very strongly that this "stuff" that I thought was so important to store (or at least was not willing to deal with in the moment, and thus chucked in the garage) is all sh*t. I have to admit, in the last couple of weeks I have entertained the notion of tossing a match on the lot of it, but I won't for the following reasons (not in order of importance):

• Objectively speaking, there are items of worth in there that can be donated and be of use to someone else.
• The garage is attached to the house, and therefore a fire in it could be less useful than I might otherwise suppose.
• The kids don't really need to see their mom go to jail for arson.

Due to the weather being hot and the garage generally being filthy and spiderwebbed, I have been working on cleaning it out in (very) short bursts. I tried to make these daily, but one day of a higher-than-average number of PTA emails and calls blew that plan (and my diligence has been sporadic ever since). Nevertheless, I've made some minor progress while causing an explosion of stuff all over what remained of the visible garage floor.

I started out by cleaning out the cabinet just next to the door into the house. When we moved into the house, the previous owners had used this tall, relatively shallow cupboard to store old paint and other chemicals, which my father pointed out was perhaps not the best idea given that it is right next to the water heater. Over the years I had filled it with old toys, empty boxes for our wedding china, spare tiles for our bathroom, half a bag of concrete mix, and various other odds and ends. In emptying it to restock the shelves with things I had definitely decided to keep (for now, anyway) and which had good reasons for being easily accessible from the house, I unearthed delightful items such as a rubber ball found years ago in a hedge, which had actually gone sticky from being in our overheated garage for many summers.

As I expanded my range I found items that I had once put away on the theory that I might want to use them again some day. However, standing (on average) knee-deep in old junk brought me the clarity to realize that I was never going to reinstall the brass toilet paper holder that I thought was too ugly to keep in the half bathroom. Likewise, I had stored some of the boys' old lunch boxes on the theory that if they lost their current ones, we would have backups. However, I cleared out the inventory because a seventh grader is more likely to choose starvation over using their old ripped first-grade Cars lunch box.

Not everything I found went into the trash. I took several bags of random old baby clothes and other oddments, plus the high chair, over to Goodwill last week. (Don't ask me how I keep finding baby clothes around here--I thought I had done a very thorough purge after Son #3's babyhood. Since I found a few more items AFTER my trip to Goodwill, I'm beginning to suspect the baby clothes are sprouting in the dark like mushrooms. Or else someone is messing with me.) On a day when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed and indecisive, I salvaged my cleaning session by dumping a large pile of old proofs from a year-old proofreading job in the recycle bin.

Finally, I sent my husband to the household hazardous waste center with more dead batteries (!) and an assortment of old electronics, including a TV antenna he guessed was from our apartment in Berkeley (and therefore completely incompatible with modern TV technology) and a cordless phone set we discarded because the rechargeable batteries in the handsets would no longer hold a charge. My husband, while not thrilled to go on this particular errand, I think accepted it as the price he has to pay for not having to sort through the junk himself, particularly given that he is not fond of spiders. Good thing, too, because I know there is a dead Xbox out there somewhere, and as long as we've waited this long to clean the place out, we're going to do it properly.

So I've made some reasonable progress on the reboot of the 1,000-Pound Project, as follows:

50.8 pounds donated clothes, shoes, household items, and high chair
19.8 pounds recycled proofs
11.6 pounds trash (including WTF items like the sticky ball noted above)
13.8 pounds batteries and e-waste

Total: 96 pounds

The bad news is that this hardly looks like I did anything at all, except make a bigger mess by tearing apart the carefully stacked piles of boxes and bags to investigate their contents. In eleven years of living in this house, we've transformed from a family of three with barely enough furniture to provide something to sit down on in each room of the house, to a family of five bursting the house at the seams with all of our stuff. The mess in the garage did not happen all at once; it grew gradually out of a series of decisions (or indecisions, as the case may be), which resulted in a growing accretion of papers, toys, appliances, sporting equipment, holiday decorations, luggage, and yes, out and out trash.

Do I wish I'd thrown more stuff out along the way? Bought less? Recognized when things that had outlived their usefulness here needed to head on to their second life somewhere else? Yes, yes, and yes. But I didn't, so now I get to enjoy my karma.

Karma always seems funnier when it is happening to someone else.

I Wouldn't Mind Some Instant Gratification Right About Now

I woke up this morning groggy, and in a low mood. Groggy, because despite being tired I've been staying up too late, and in a low mood because it hit me that the vast expanse of time that I thought having all three boys in camp represented is now almost over. And of course I haven't done half of the things I thought I should.

It certainly isn't as if I haven't done things. I started sorting the boys' clothes and made substantial progress towards clearing out the clothes that don't fit any more. I've got several bags of clothes to give to a friend whose son can wear the 3Ts and smallish 4Ts that Son #3 has outgrown, and then I've got several other bags of even smaller stuff, which somehow escaped past purges, to donate to charity. The Pit of Despair (aka, our garage) lost some weight this week as well, since hubby pulled out several bags of clothes that he had sorted to be picked up by a local charity and I stumbled across a stack of materials from an old freelance job of mine that went into the recycle bin. I made a tiny little baby step towards beginning to sort out old toys by boxing up the old peg puzzles (and yes, realizing that I had a drawer full of them was a classic facepalm moment--after all, Son #3 is only about 2 years beyond them developmentally). I even made major progress on a project that has been haunting me since last summer (and which will be worthy of its own post when I finish up the final niggling details, so I won't elaborate here).

So why the grumpiness? Well, the first part has to do with realizing that I'm past the fun opening stage of embarking on a new project (in this case, decluttering the house and simultaneously trying to restore some balance to my life) but still miles away from realizing my goals. I will soon run out of low-hanging fruit to pick and start running up against the obstacles that made me decide that, say, cleaning out the closets could wait until after I checked out what everyone was doing on Facebook.

The second part has to do with underestimating the size of the task. I had thought last summer that getting rid of 1,000 pounds of stuff would make a noticeable difference in my house. Well, between the bags of stuff we gave to charity, the papers I recycled, and the batteries my friend took to the hazardous waste disposal, we got rid of about 100 pounds of stuff in the last week. That's 1/10th of the total goal, and you'd never notice. To paraphrase Roy Scheider in Jaws, I'm going to need a bigger goal.

Getting rid of stuff hasn't been my only attempt at self-improvement. I started trying to exercise regularly shortly before the last school year ended, when I found that my anxiety was waking me up at a brutal 5:30 a.m. every day whether I liked it or not. (And for the record, I like sleep. I need sleep. I am more pleasant to be around, and not-so-coincidentally, my family is much happier when I've had my sleep.) It seemed much better to get up and walk/jog around the neighborhood than to lay in bed having anxiety attacks. Now, I can't really say that I've ever had a regular exercise program in my adult life, and my two favorite hobbies (reading and knitting) involve a lot of sitting around. My physical condition is exactly what you would expect of a primarily sedentary 40-year-old, except that I'm not overweight. (Won the genetic lottery there, because up until now I've done nothing to earn it.) My main accomplishments so far have been not quitting, and improving my jogging speed to the point where I might be the second person caught by the undead hordes in the zombie apocalypse, instead of the first. It's not nothing, I suppose, but I still feel like kind of a fraud when I put on my exercise clothes.

And why the lack of sleep? The public school system is adjusting their calendar to start earlier in the fall, which means the kids will get out much earlier next summer. In the meantime, though, this summer is being cut nearly a month short as we transition from a late-start to an early-start calendar. As I realized we had less than a month of summer left, the old feeling of anxiety that I left behind for a couple of golden weeks started to reappear. All of the plans that had existed in a cozy space of "wouldn't-it-be-fun-if" in my head (books to read, craft projects to do, time to hang out with friends) have now crashed smack into the reality that there are really only three weeks to go, and only one unplanned weekend, before the boys are back in school.

Last year I started the school year in the hope that I would be able to juggle my obligations and my interests, and ended up overwhelmed, hopping from task to task. I'm so hoping that it won't happen again, but I worry that just like last year, I am not far enough along in trying to make changes to the status quo to be able to maintain any momentum. I'm enough of a grownup to realize that I'm not going to transform my life and the stuff-laden crazy routine my family has gotten into overnight; it is more like trying to make a U-turn in a river barge. So yes, a little instant gratification would be nice right about now to keep up morale, but I'll settle for a random squirrel picture instead.

Hey look at that--I figured out how to put a picture in a blog post! The day isn't a total waste.

Progress at last!

The long-awaited trip to Goodwill finally happened today, as well as a trip to drop off hand-me-downs to a friend whose son is a couple of years younger than son #3. The 1,000-Pound Project, which had ground to a halt, is back in motion again! Here's a breakdown of progress since my last report:

7 pounds - Item given to my mom for the social group at her church to use as a door prize. Note to self: it doesn't matter who gave something to you; if you aren't using it, letting it sit around gathering dust isn't going to make you feel less guilty about not using it.

39 pounds - Several bags of toddler clothes given to friend's son

55.4 pounds - Goodwill donation of some of my clothes, some of my husband's, a few old toys, etc.

13 pounds - Old booster seat that I finally threw out (embarrassed to discover it actually said on the back "Do not use after December 2005," and even more embarrassed that I was immediately certain we hadn't; some consolation in that the plastic part of the seat was recyclable)

3 pounds - Trash and recycling from random bag of nonsense in the garage that I was inspired to sort through after disposing of all of the above

Total: 117.4 pounds

The good news: I am making up ground from the several frustrating weeks of no progress whatsoever.

The bad news: It doesn't actually feel like I'm making much of a dent in the mountain of stuff.

The project is now at the end of week 4, with a total of 185.2 pounds of stuff thrown out, recycled, or given away. That puts me about 15 pounds behind where I had hoped to be at this point.

Week One Wrap-Up

The 1,000-Pound Project is one week old, and I have gotten rid of 67.8 pounds of stuff so far, broken down as follows:

30.6 pounds of proofs from old freelance projects
4.2 pounds of old clothing (thrown out--not suitable for donation)
9 pounds of old papers
9 pounds of trash from garage bins, laundry room, and master bathroom
2.8 pounds of recycling
5.2 pounds of old gift bags
7 pounds of old gift boxes

I had hoped to make a trip to Goodwill on Sunday, to dispose of several bags of clothes that are worth passing along to someone else, but life, as it frequently does, got in the way. They may help to keep this week's total where it should be, because as of tomorrow my extra time will be absorbed by new freelance work coming in.

On the plus side, I did get Son #3's baby shoes sent off to be bronzed (it has gotten a lot more expensive since I had Son #2's done...my own damn fault for procrastinating), and I can actually see the floor of my closet for the first time in a year or so. Even better, I am taking a ruthless approach to the various items I have saved over the years. Yes, it is nice to save gift boxes and gift bags to reuse, but not every single one. My recycling bin was nice and full and my closet much less so. Here's hoping I can keep my resolve over the coming weeks...

Highs, Lows, and Humility Lessons

Yesterday my husband came home from work to find me sitting on the floor with the contents of three garage boxes in piles around me. After I displayed the various sections—kids’ clothes to be given away, a box of recycling, bags of trash—he suspiciously asked, “Are you pregnant?”

Nesting-like behavior notwithstanding, I am not. (Three kids is more than enough crazy for me.) It’s just that having experienced some early success with the 1,000-Pound Project, I am eager for more. And my sorting had unexpected dividends.

The organizational chaos in my house has frequently meant that things go missing. As I emptied out boxes and bags yesterday, I found three such missing things:

Found item #1: Years ago I bought the boys a Hanukkah Fisher Price set through a catalog. I only put it out for the holidays (mostly because I didn’t want to lose all the pieces among the other Little People sets they had, but also because the main piece plays Hanukkah music when you press down on the menorah and it gets kind of annoying after the fiftieth time or so). Two pieces of this set went missing two Hanukkahs ago. Found them in a bag of junk on the upper laundry room shelf.

Found item #2: A critical piece of our garment steamer—the cap to the water reservoir—went missing some time ago. I searched repeatedly for it and came up empty every time. I seriously considered throwing out the steamer since it was not functional without this piece. Found it in a bag inside a box in the garage. 

Found item #3: Son #3’s first pair of shoes. This was the biggie. Earlier this year we moved Son #3 out of the smallest bedroom and into the big bedroom, which he and Son #2 now share, so that Son #1 could have his own bedroom. (He is eleven and practicing to be a teenager.) At this point I realized that I had no idea where Son #3’s first pair of shoes had gone. This was a huge problem of my own making.

I say of my own making because I had both Son #1 and Son #2’s first shoes bronzed. It is hoky, yes, and one of those ridiculously sentimental things that makes my husband roll his eyes at me, but I did it anyway. To have to tell Son #3 that his shoes were not up there gathering dust on the bookcase with his brothers’ because I LOST them was not a conversation I was looking forward to having. It is bad enough that we have roughly five squintillion more pictures of Son #1 than we do of Son #3, or that almost everything he wears is a hand-me-down. I could envision him in middle age pouring out the whole sorry story to some therapist.

You can imagine my relief when I found those self-same shoes, all scuffed in the toes because he still preferred crawling to walking when we got them for him, buried in the bottom of the second box of outgrown clothes I sorted last night. My goal for today is to find the information to send them off for bronzing before I lose them again.

So those were the highs. The lows and the humility lesson part go hand in hand. I threw out half the contents of the bag of junk Found item #1 was located in without hesitating—so why on earth has it been sitting on a shelf for so long? How embarrassing to think that garment steamer would have ended up in the landfill for no reason other than my disorganization. And clearly we’ve reached the point where non-important stuff is overwhelming my ability to keep track of things that are important, if I spent half the year anxious about the location of those darn baby shoes. Finally, despite having emptied two boxes of old kids’ clothes, I have stacks of other boxes to tackle in the garage. What they represent is a lot of putting off until tomorrow what I should have dealt with in the moment. I may be fighting back, but so far the stuff is still winning.