cool weather and warm, syrupy distractedness

The weather has cooled off here quite a bit the last few days, and so I’m inside listening to the last of a suppertime downpour drip off the leaves in my backyard, feeling warm and cozy after a roast beef dinner Manny cooked for me, and with the urge to knit. Strange how quickly my thoughts can turn to fall when we get cool days in August. Although it really is the beginning of the end of summer here – often we get a long stretch of warm weather through September, but around now the nights start to get cool and somehow everyone knows we’re on the downward slope towards harvest and autumn and the pool closing and the start of school and my annual borscht-making extravaganza.

What to write about when so much has happened that I have left unrecorded? C is 9.5 months old. It is such a cliche, but I am boggled by how quickly the months go by. It really is stunning.

I am learning to feel settled into this part of life. I’ve realized how much my mind has changed; I no longer have the focus I once had. I can’t fully concentrate on anything anymore – my attention is always divided. Watching a movie or having a conversation, listening to music at the folk festival, trying to make lists of things I need to do – all of it must share space with the attention I’m paying to C, even if he’s upstairs having a sleep. It is a strange feeling in a way, being unable to get straight to a point in conversation because the tangents are irresistible or because I get distracted switching him to the other breast or laughing at him getting stuck under the couch because he can only move backwards right now, or not being quite able to lose myself in a film or even a book because he is always so very present in my mind. It’s a wonderful feeling, but strange. I can barely remember my mind before – it has been taken over so completely that all I know is that it used to be different, and I have a sort of nostalgia for how it used to be, but the warm, syrupy distractedness is so pervasive that I cannot muster frustration or even desire for a change. Probably there is some excellent illustration of this sort of thing in literature but, of course, I cannot retrieve it even if it is somewhere back in the musty stacks of my memory.

I am wondering what to do to earn some money once my maternity leave benefits run out. My last job was a contract which ended shortly before C was born, so I don’t have a job to go back to. And I am not at all interested in going to work full-time and leaving him in childcare for long stretches like that. Between what feels right for me and us as a family, the expense, the stress – it just doesn’t seem worth it. But I’ll need to figure out some way to make some money, since we can’t get by on Manny’s income alone without making some major changes, like moving to a different house. And I really love this house. In hindsight, it would have been wise to have chosen a slightly more affordable house for this very reason, but this house called to us and we answered. Frankly, the way the market has been here, we could easily spend nearly the same as what we spent on this house for something half the size and in no better condition. So for the long haul, this house is perfect for us. We just need to come up with some creative ways for me to contribute financially that won’t include shelling out nearly half of what I make on childcare.

I have some ideas of things to do, and I’m finding it hard to move beyond the idea stage and start making anything happen, though it has just now occurred to me that I don’t have to commit to anything, really. Like, I can do one or more of those things and stop doing any or all of them if they don’t work out. Whew! That is a relief! I tend to be fairly loose with making plans to find employment – generally, I go with the “the Universe will provide when the time is right” sort of approach, and this has worked much better for me in the past than sending my resume out to every conceivable employer. Naturally, I tend to freak out a bit when money gets tight, but in the end, everything works out ok. And of course, if I have to go back to work full-time and put C in daycare, I will. It’s just that without work that is meaningful for me to return to, everything is just a way to pay the bills and so it becomes a lot less interesting to me as a way to spend my days and C’s waking hours. I’m pretty sure I’d feel at least a bit differently if I had work that I loved or even cared about, but I don’t. So for now the plan is for me to find part-time work or ways to work from home so that I can continue to spend my days caring for our family and in the company of the wee creature I love the best in the whole wide world.

Advertisement