So Much Things To Say

I had started this blog intending for it to be a short bridge. Just a way to keep in touch until Aaron and I were redeployed into our new jobs. I never thought that I would have cause for it be in existence all this time later.

As much as we have both struggled to find work I have struggled to find confidence. Last week a friend of mine asked me to write for her website and I struggled for days with feeling absolutely inadequate to the task. This for a subject that I know a lot about, and for a friend who had complete faith in me, and yet I had to give myself a good talking to before I could say yes.

The casualties of long-term unemployment are intangible. At first the losses were real and tangible: foreclosure, huge debt, inability to pay bills, go out, travel. But now what is lost is the ability to be seen. I feel like a ghost walking amongst the living, albeit a ghost with a bad dye job. And I don't have the ability to relax -- that muscle is long gone. I've gotten all control freak-y and humorless. Thank goodness there is a 2 year-old around to make me laugh.

I hurt my back the other day while refinishing some furniture; it was almost inevitable since I am strung like a bow. I just needed a feather's touch to knock me over into injury. I find myself acting like someone that I would have made fun of 4 years ago: all strung out by the house being messy or the kid smushing potato chips into her hair, as though it matters.

But that veering from snappishness to laughter seems appropriate for the weird circumstance that is the stay-at-home Mom's. On one hand you are isolated from grown-up conversations, the hustle and flow of business life, the headaches of commuting and meetings, the connection of your morning coffee stop and chats with colleagues. On the other, you are without any moment of alone time -- whether you are eating or going to the bathroom or trying to take a phone call. There is no let up.

Aaron is literally working around the clock. There have been several challenges (of the un-fun kind) to his new position. The upshot is that he has had to be up at all hours on conference calls, trying to do the IT version of catching a tiger by the tail. We'd hoped to go away this weekend to Asheville, but we may have to defer to a more amenable time.

For my birthday Aaron got me a kitten, Jethro. He is a 2 lb bundle of nuttiness. It has been many years since I had a kitten and I'd forgotten their unpredictability. Though he has started a routine of gnawing my ear to tell me he wants to be fed. He and Sadie have reached detente, with each of them understanding that they are the favorite.

My days here have a sort of bockety rhythm to them, punctuated with meltdowns by either Olivia or me. We get up, argue over whether Olivia will watch TV, check the weather to see if we'll have more rain, go to the park or the Y, after dinner spend a couple of hours wrangling over bedtime. In between are chores and errands. Around it all is the sense that I'm dancing as fast as I can.