Lower Than Low

I was on the phone with my mom this morning once again bemoaning the fact that the inside of our freezer is warmer than our outdoor temperature by double digits yet again.  Hundreds of schools and colleges are closed in our state (not ours, mind you, but let's not go there) because frankly, it is just too damn cold outside!  Before moving here, I never really gave a thought to the crazy folks who chose to live in areas where double digit sub-zero temperatures were possible and now I am one of them. My mom, who in a moment of weakness and extreme love for her only grandchildren, dragged my dad and moved out here as well, told me that she feels as if she knows how the pioneer women lived as they moved forward across the country, facing harsh winters to finally settle here. She questioned why the heck they didn't turn right around and head back to the beautiful coastline and forget about wide-open spaces, freedom and all that nonsense.  They had the beach, for heaven's sake.  I told her I felt that by mile 705, their brains were probably frozen rock-solid so they were not thinking anymore, merely moving forward in an effort to maintain some body heat to keep from freezing to death.

My friends back home ask me how I stay warm in weather this cold, but the truth of the matter is that I am never really truly warm, only less cold, despite the maxi-length down coat, heavy boots and thermal gloves I wear daily.  Gone are the days when I obsessed about what I was going to wear because no one sees me without that silly coat until at least the end of March. Some days I feel as though I am single-handedly keeping Bath & Body Works afloat with the amount of lotions and creams I buy in a futile effort to keep my skin from turning to sandpaper from the extreme temperature. For that matter, ditto the makers of Excedrin to combat the migraines I get worrying about the weather and the snowfall totals, the gale force winds, the thickness of the ice on the roads and whether or not we will be able to see asphalt sometime before June.

There is not a day that goes by that I am not thrilled with my car's heated seats.  My children love them, too, although I have more children than heated seats which has afforded me the opportunity to use them as a bribe.  It is amazing how cooperative children can be when the thought of being relegated to that lowly unheated third row in my car comes into play.

So, today, as we once again descend to a -40 temperature with windchill, I am here in body only because my mind and my heart are warming with dreams of warm sand and crystal clear water...without an iceberg in sight!

Stuck

I am struggling with whether or not to move forward with blogging as I am so frustrated and agitated with our life right now that nothing seems right. I seem to have nothing positive to say. We are hamsters in a wheel running as quickly as we can, but failing to move forward. I am growing more tired by the minute with nothing to show for it.  Yes, the workout might be great but even the most successful exercise routines are founded in variety.  It is, after all, the spice of life or so I have been told.  This, my friends, is the problem. I write about things about which I am passionate and for the past four years that has been our struggle with my husband's on again off again employment status. Honestly, as I wrote those words I had to stop and 'take a moment' as it seems surreal and so exceedingly outrageous that this issue has perpetuated for four years and counting. I have such strong feelings about our situation that I could talk and write about it 24/7, but I do realize just how monotonous it must for my reader. Believe me, I would like nothing more than to stop thinking and talking about it myself. The problem is that I am stuck, emotionally, creatively and mentally, cycling round and round like that hamster, unable to push forward with a fun idea about which to write. Unemployment permeates every facet of our lives and despite trying to come up with some new and exciting topic, all creative roads seem to lead me straight back to our lack of a job.

So, where do I go from here?  Do I stop blogging until my husband gets a job?  With our track record that might take a while. Cranky and resentful?  Yup!  Do I continue to whine and share said crankiness via my blog because, in some way, it is cathartic?  Perhaps. Right now, I don't know which decision is the 'right' one or if in fact, there is a 'right' one at all. Maybe I will just focus the bulk of my blogs on my son's impending high school graduation and departure for college. Then I could switch from a tone of anger and desperation to sadness and worry. Trust me, if you are looking for a light-hearted and fun read, you are definitely reading the wrong blog. On some level, though, reading my blog is uplifing.  As my friend said to me (yes, she still is my friend despite saying this), "whenever I feel down, I think about your life and know how lucky I am because I could be you."  Nice, huh?

Auf Wiedersehen 2013

Good-bye and good riddance to 2013, not our finest or happiest year for sure.  While that is not entirely true because there were high points such as college acceptances, enjoyable school shows and concerts and all the joy that children bring, there was a mighty low when my husband lost his job again. So here we sit, poised yet again at the start of the new year full of promise and opportunity. The only difference is that this year, I am not feeling it at all. This is the fourth year that we are in the same position without a job and to be honest, I have grown fearful of being optimistic.  More to the point, based on our experiences over the past three plus years, I feel foolish being optimistic only to get my hopes up and then have them dashed yet again. To dream about a better job this time, one more stable and (dare I even say it out loud) one that actually pays well seems almost ridiculous.  But, since the new year is all about fresh starts, resolutions and change, I have decided to adjust my unemployment battle-weary approach to the year ahead and embrace a new, fresh attitude.

This year, I say to hell with positivity (a word I detest even on a good day) and to being the 'bigger person' (my mom's mantra) all the time. Somewhere along the way in my journey these past four years, I got lost.  Terribly cliche, no?  Between this seemingly endless search for yet another job for my husband, the constant tumult of our lives as a result and the chaos I feel we have heaped on our children, I stopped being the 'me' I used to know. These days, I am filled with self-doubt and concern at our inability to turn this rotten financial situation around. I have been second-guessing my choices and I am in a state of perpetual stress.

So, though I am not a believer in resolutions for many reasons, I have written some goals for myself on Post-It notes so that I can carry them with me as constant reminders of staying the course.  While I am hoping that 2014 brings lots of positive change for us, based on the past few years, I am even more cautiously optimistic than usual.  I do know, however, that I am going to try to get a little bit of my old self back by not listening so fervently to what other people feel I should be doing but, rather, to do what I want to do even if that does not make me the 'bigger person' as often as my mom might like.

Happy New Year!

A New Venture

Frankly, I never really knew what I wanted to be 'when I grew up.'  My eldest has known he wants to be an attorney since sixth grade, never wavered in his decision, not once. I, on the other hand, wanted to be everything and nothing, which I always found odd for a person who sees only black and white in life, not a drop of gray.  I toyed with a variety of professions from psychologist, which I discounted because I was never totally sold on the prospect of being around people who might be unpredictable, to being an attorney which was a dream I never followed through with for a variety of reasons.  Although I always felt that I was the corporate type and proved quite successful as an electronics buyer for a major department store, I knew I had finally found my calling when my first son was born. In an instant (okay, more like 13.5 hours of hard labor), I realized that being a mom was the reason I was put on this earth and just to confirm my suspicions, I tested my hypothesis three more times just to be sure.  I simply cannot believe that in a mere seventeen years since my first was born, I find myself readying for the inevitable departure of said firstborn as he heads off to college.

So, with that moment hanging in the all too near future and with my husband's constant urging encouragement, I have decided to find a little something to do (in addition to taking care of my three other adorable children, that is) to occupy my mind so that I don't go totally insane worrying about my son being away at college. Tall order for this mom, but I am giving it a whirl (the old 'college try' wink, wink). Interestingly, the process of deciding what to do now closely resembled the process decades ago only this time it included my husband lobbing ideas at me, too. Editor?  Nah, been there and did that. Proofreader?  Bor-ing!  Teacher?  Nope, adore my children, but other people's children sometimes not so much. I wanted to utilize my writing skills but I really wanted to work from home, not a fan of traveling in our long winters plus this wallflower works best when she works alone. So, after much deliberation and far too much agonizing, I decided that I was going to try being a writing consultant. Kind of interesting, a blend of using my skill set in an environment in which I am most comfortable, a soft re-entry into the work force, so to speak. There you have it.  Who knows where this decision might lead in the long run, but for now, I am enjoying the planning process and trying not to count the days until we pack the car for the first trip off to college...imagine the blog I will be writing for that journey.  Grab your tissues now, folks, I promise it will be ugly.  

Outside the Box

I am currently in the process of transferring items from one website to a new site I just started using a new hosting service (www.intentionalmusing.com).  Since I just had to reread all the essays on the old site, I could not stop myself from writing a fourth entry (!) in what was supposed to be a trilogy of unemployment essays. Lucky me, the saga continues. It seems we are stuck in the same place and yet time has moved forward making me feel ever so ineffectual and wildly agitated. Unfortunately, I seem to lack the ability to find a new job for my husband all while being terribly sad that one of my children seems mired in an issue that I cannot resolve fast enough for my liking. Control freak, who me?

I desperately need some sort of outlet for all the stress and frustration I have been feeling and while writing has always been my 'thing,' my way of finding focus, it, too, seems to be failing me right now. After careful analysis, I now realize why I am not getting as much out of writing as I used to in the past. I write best about what I find most close to my heart and the personal stuff in my life right now is just plain old depressing. So, I have decided to think outside the box and go outside my comfort zone, my comfy wallflower, duck the spotlight safety zone, and totally throw myself out there. No, I am not becoming a cabaret singer or selling everything off and moving to some foreign land no matter how tempting that might be these days. I have always tried to model for my the children the importance of facing your fears head on and so, feeling at a loss about the next topic to write about, I am turning it over to you, dear readers. I have read enough blogs to realize that this is an interesting way to not only discover a little about my readers, but also to perhaps shove me out of my inertia.  Don't be fooled by my bravado because I am a nervous wreck as this suggestion is a double-edged sword. What happens if no one has a question for me or what if I need to face a critique of my writing that might not be so PC?

Well, I suppose I will just have to 'buy a coping skill' because nothing could be worse than being trapped in your own mind or thoroughly bored with your own ideas. I need a distraction from my life right now. Who's brave enough to be the first one to offer a topic or ask a question?  I look forward to reading your comment.  This could be fun all around.

Self Talk

Those who know me well know that I come from a long line of women who worry and being the type A+ person that I am, I have taken the worry gene to new heights. I obsess about everything from the smallest issue like whether or not I can have one load of  laundry washed/dried and put away before we leave for school to how we are going to survive the third round of unemployment without imploding. Both my mom and my husband agree that I even worry about the fact that I might not have anything to worry about though sadly, that has not happened since 2002.  Right now we are facing a struggle with one of our children that has me impossibly sad and being the proactive person that I am, I need (notice I did not say want) to fix this, but the remedy seems somewhat elusive right now. We are working it though and part of that process for me means that I need to talk about it 24/7.  Talking and communicating help me process and order the chaos in my life.  Unfortunately for me, the same is not true for my husband which has led me to talking to my dog, Phoebe, almost non-stop. Poor Phoebe lived through what we in our family call the Boston Debacle, essentially Round 2 of unemployment, and she is sick of listening to me. I have said this before but I swear if she could talk like Martha the Talking Dog, a children's book that my son and I have read over and over, the first words she would say to me are 'shut up!'  Those words might be followed by the suggestion that I get some therapy and fast.

My mom has told me for years to 'talk to myself' when feeling stressed and by this she means that type of calming self-talk which would not only help me to put the situation in perspective, but might perhaps offer a more 'glass half-full' approach to my stressor. Over the past few years, I have talked to myself in this manner so many times that I have begun to tune myself out, basically my self-talk pretty much consists of me telling myself to shut up. Obviously, my 'self' has been talking to Phoebe.

Recently, Phoebe saw me watching my son's new beta fish, Shark.  Afterward, she pranced over and started barking at the little Art Deco tank in which Shark swims happily, staring at us as we watch him swim or nestle in the pretty pale blue blue rocks on the bottom of his abode. At first, I thought Phoebe was jealous that I was paying attention to Shark, but now I realize she was trying to clue him in that he might be my next 'therapist.'  I think if she could speak she would want him to know not to make eye contact with me or I might start prattling on and on about this problem or that, one stress or another, bemoaning how we ended up in this infuriating and frustrating situation. Phoebe truly is precious to want to protect her little fish sibling from me. I actually wish my children were as kind to each other as Phoebe is to Shark. That said, Shark had better watch out because while Phoebe can walk away, he is the proverbial sitting duck and I am feeling very chatty these days.

Get Back

I have never been more frustrated or stuck in a bad place in my life before now.  Emotionally mired in muck. My son often talks about having a teleporter and where he might visit and how quickly he would get there. I know exactly where I would go right now, back in time approximately five and a half years. Why that point in time?  Just to get out of MN?  Actually, no, though my readers would have to admit that my time in MN has not exactly been stellar or particularly happy, but I would want to travel back to the point where we had the option to take the job to come here or to turn it down. The writing was on the wall had we taken the time to read it and I may have (okay, I definitely did) strongly suggested to my husband that we turn down the offer to move here since the offer had been rescinded and then reinstated and I took that as a bad omen. But, no, with no other offers present, we took this one and our free fall into this maddening abyss of bad luck commenced shortly thereafter. Having my car broken into and my purse stolen, having to testify against the perpetrators of the crime in a series of trials that were postponed every three months over the course of two years, the loss of three jobs in fours years and the failed attempt at selling our home, not once, but twice over a twelve month period to name a few annoyances we have had to endure. Seriously, I am starting to believe we will never catch a break.

Unfortunately, all this stress and flux has now started permeating the lives of my children and I am totally ticked.  Mess with me, mess with my husband but don't dare mess with my little ones...yes, I know they are not that little, but they always will be to me. While I joke with my children about wanting a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes or a to die for Celine handbag for Christmas, all I really want is nice strong dose of pre-MN normal.  Hey, Santa!  Are you listening?