If you make it to the end and it still makes sense, you win the prize

Well, I think I can safely say we are over the early 2007 stomach yuck. I hope.

That is, unless I pick up Bird at daycare and her teacher gets all snooty about how she had a runny diaper again today. Because, you know, I knew she was going to have precisely this kind of gross diaper today and I purposely kept that information a secret so that I could drop my kid off and go home and eat bonbons and watch Montel and scratch my butt all day at home by myself while somebody else takes care of my recovering-from-the-yuck child. mwahahahahaha.

Although, I do have to give the daycare lady a little break on her attitude, because somehow my child managed to poop in her face (yeah, read that again) on Friday. Some kind of splattering incident. So I guess she can be a little put out that I'm not stopping life to nurse my kid back to completely solid defecations before returning her to daycare.

And we are off to a wordy start!

Merry Effing Christmas
First off, let me vent in a vague way about Christmas and belated Christmases. We are making another (groan) trip to Indiana this weekend for yet another em-effing Christmas, which was sprung upon us yesterday, the result of poor planning and poor... whatever. Actually, I don't want to vent about this anymore. I just want it to be over.

The Rambling. Oh, the rambling.
So you know when you're getting ready to go out (do you go out? like with friends? really? can I come sometime?) or getting ready for work or something, and you put on a necklace that you really like, and you try on, like, everything you own but nothing looks quite right with the necklace, and after way too many costume changes you think, "Wait a second... I thought the necklace was the best part but everything is fine except for the necklace". So you take the necklace off and go out or to work or whatever without the necklace, wearing something perfectly acceptable and you know then that it was the necklace that was wrong in the first place?

Yeah, I know, not the clearest train of thought but it's the best I can do right now. Maybe I should have said "square peg in a round hole?"

The point is that I was beginning to feel like that about massage school. That school was the necklace. Having a month off made it seem like more of an obstacle than an opportunity. I started thinking about slowing down my classes. I started thinking about how if I could just get a few more freelance clients I could skip everything all together and just write newsletters and dumb articles and have even more flexible time at home with my Bird. That I could write in the middle of the night if I needed to, and save the kajillion dollars a month I spend on childcare. That massage was dumb and a hasty decision and more hassle than it's worth. That I could never grow a practice from scratch. That it would be too hard. Too much overhead. That I should just take off the damn necklace.

Class started today, though, and while this one is going to be a long and hard road, I'm excited about it again. The possibility. The learning. The work, the doing. The soft focus of it, the mindfulness, the connection.

And I realized that the necklace was a grand combination of things, no small part of which is the stalling between the frenzy of November and December and the real kicking-off of the new year-- that no-man's land after Christmas, before people start to look alive again, where you have no idea what day it is or when you last showered. It made me crazy. It made me lose focus and run in a million directions half-assedly in slow motion and spend an entire precious morning scrubbing my kitchen. I got pretty micro.

And in the stalling time, I had those few SAHM days. I got really jealous and entitled. I got sad about my Bird getting bigger and smarter and funnier "without" me. I felt like I didn't have time to waste with this school nonsense. I needed that quick fix, whatever would get me home with Bird. I envisioned how it would look when I quit my job and school and worked from home. The things we'd do. The places we'd go. The new and improved mother I would be. The new and improved craftsperson I would be. The glowing, healthy, happy person I would be.

What did I not envision? Doing the work. Actually working. Trying to find clients. Trying to find the time to work. Trying to find enough clients to pay the bills. I just saw me and Bird in the park morning after morning.

The stalling time made me scrambly to get to those mornings. Scrambly because I don't have a down-to-the-letter plan. Scrambly to know what "it" will look like. Made me really question my path because I can't see exactly where it leads.

So today in class, we had to do the talk-about-yourself thing, introductions, etc. And our instructor started by saying "So, I'll tell you a little about who I am... so far." And that struck me in just the right way. He told his story about how he came to do what he does, the little milestones and events along the way that were "supposed to happen when they did." And I had a little more perspective on my anxiety, my restlessness, my thoughts of scrapping everything because I couldn't see the future, right down to the dollar signs. I think (and you may need to remind me of this later) that I need to appreciate more where I am now, and let my self be surprised by where I'm going, as long as I pay attention to the things that are "supposed to happen" for me to see clearly. Because this is only who I am so far, and so far, I'm wearing this necklace.


ETA: However, I have a maybe-promising meeting with an ad agency to take on some possibly regular freelance projects. Nothing is scrapped, but that's the point. This is all going to fit together nicely, I just don't know how.