A November Welp

in which I say vulnerable things

Welp, it’s November.

I feel safe sharing with you that October was a massively, crazily hectic time. I slept in my own bed for around 6 nights, having spent the month alternating between work and a last-minute family situation that needed my help.

I’m grateful for the work, as intense as it is. It feeds my soul to feed others’ bellies.

I’m grateful to have been in a position that twice during the month I could tumble everything aside and fly 1200 miles to my sister and help with her 5-year-old son.  She and her husband have been camped out in the NICU by their new daughter’s side, coaching her through her first awkward weeks as a human who arrived far too early and far too tiny. This world can be tough, little Marley Ruth, so we’re all rooting for you to be strong.

I’m grateful she’s healthy and will soon come home and meet the rest of her family and support system.

These trips have been hot on the heels of five other, earlier trips back to my home state of Connecticut since March. These journeys involved caring for my parents while they both had COVID in conjunction with other illnesses; then alongside my siblings, moving my folks into assisted living, against their wishes. The other trips included heaps more sibling fun (there are five of us, of which I am #3) as we convened several times over the summer for weeklong cleanouts of the house we grew up in. My parents lived fifty years in this, our childhood home, where my mother’s compulsive shopping and hoarding became an additional, unwelcome, and unruly family member. My father’s only way of coping was to obsessively collect sports memorabilia.

We had a lot to sort through. So many decisions to be made, big and small, to get the house on the market to sell.

When I said I missed traveling after lockdown restrictions, this isn’t what I had in mind—a summer of musical (very old) beds, and fourteen-hour days of packing during a heatwave. I’m proud of my siblings and I for finding consensus and agreement on all the major stuff. Our big disagreements were not, in fact, big. We weren’t fighting over who gets what, but more along the lines of which recently found restaurant gift card we’d use for lunch, who’s crappy at loading the dumpsters, or who’d take which load to the dump or the local thrift shop.

I’m grateful we’ve had the chance to process these difficult transitions with our parents still alive so we can feel a full range of emotions, instead of attempting it weighed down with the grief that will ultimately drown us at their passing.

All of this back and forth-ing has come at a cost. I’m hella discombobulated. I have four sticks of deodorant and three tubes of toothpaste on the go. My diet is far from ideal—especially post Halloween—while my body is deprived of good exercise and my outdoor yoga classes. There are so many images and words in my head that the artist in me couldn’t coax out onto paper because of time or circumstance.

Will I wake up at work, at home next to my handsome hubbo, on a random couch, in a bed with threadbare sheets from my childhood, or with my five-year-old nephew in a full Pull-Up and his menagerie of stuffed animals piled atop me?

I’ve been living these past few months out of a bag, suitcase, or plastic crate. I’m a chronic over-packer which translates into schlepping a lot of shit up and down the eastern seaboard.

I’m grateful I’ve had so many options and have never been left wanting. I’m grateful for the airport rides, complete with snacks, provided by friends and family members.

I entered October with the intention of taking part in Inktober, an annual month-long daily drawing event on social media. I am excited to explore drawing a small universe of items extricated from my parent’s home. I want to find their meaning amid the hoards and let them tell the story of our house-emptying adventure. I was doing great with daily drawings until I wasn’t.

I’ve been dissolving, slowly. The daily practices that have kept me grounded for so long have become tidal, ebbing away then flowing back. Or slipping out, but not washing themselves upon my shores for a long while, if at all.

I vacillate between giving myself room to inhabit my circumstances and coming down hard on myself for abandoning what I know I need. I am, after all, the woman who coaches clients and writes to you twice weekly about daily practices.Why can’t I get my shit together? Where is my evening gratitude journal? Could I not have predicted that my ink pens would leak out in the bag leaving me unable to do my nightly drawings? Can’t I just tell me nephew to play Legos alone so I can work on my projects?

I’m taking the extra hour for me, to stare off into an arbitrary direction of the universe.

I’m weirdly excited to be home, and to settle back in my routines.

Or better yet, to take what I’ve been researching, learning, and writing about, and explore new ways of approaching my daily practices and building them back up for myself.

It starts with lemon water.

And an intention.

Thank you for joining me on the journey.

I’d love to know what you are doing with your extra hour. Is there a way you can spend it on you?