Imagine you have a friend, and you see that she is sad and stressed and upset, and you say “Oh dear, why are you so sad and stressed and upset??,” and she looks at you, her tear-filled eyes full of suffering as well as the aforementioned tears, and says in a quavering, about-to-fall-apart voice, “Because people are coming tomorrow to clean my house for me!! so that I won’t have to do it myself!!,” and collapses into fresh sorrow and distress. How ridiculous. It is I: your ridiculous friend Swistle.

This evening I wondered if honestly I don’t prefer to just clean the house myself. Is it SO BAD? especially now that it’s been over a year and I have a bit of a system going? Which would I rather do right now: go through the rest of this evening fretting senselessly about tomorrow morning, and then go through tomorrow morning—or clean three toilets and be at peace? I’d rather clean three toilets. But ask me again tomorrow mid-day, when the cleaners will be gone and my house will be clean, and it will be the longest possible time before going through all this again. And when I will be looking ahead to day after day of not having to clean three toilets or three bathroom floors, not having to vacuum or damp-mop, not having to move everything off the kitchen counters to wipe them thoroughly, not having to deeply resent everyone I married and everyone I gave birth to. Someone else will have taken care of all of that / partially prevented some of that.

OH OKAY LET’S TALK ABOUT MOTHER’S DAY!

I would say that, for me, the absolute KEY was to shift to the approach of making some arrangements so that I’d have a nice day even if no one else did a single thing. (This is also the approach I now use for Valentine’s Day.) I don’t LIKE that this is the way it has to be, but I also don’t like feeling sad and resentful (and as if maybe I am a terrible mother and that’s why my children don’t love me), so I take what power for change is available to me. I aimed for arrangements that, instead of seeming like “I am celebrating myself!,” would hopefully seem more like “Mother’s Day is a fun day full of treats!”

I can’t remember which arrangements I’d already told you about, but here they are:

• I ordered pastries for us all to have for breakfast

• I ordered some nice chocolates to put out for all-day partaking (you’d think with five children the chocolates would be gone in a FLASH, but they are all very Suspicious about chocolate-box chocolates)

• I bought a few small/medium things (another kind of fruit jellies I wanted to try; a bottle of nail polish; a new moisturizer) that caught my attention in the week or two before Mother’s Day, without mentioning those items to anyone else as “Mother’s Day things”—just, I saw each thing and I thought “Ooo, I’d like to have that. Oh! It could be a little Mother’s Day thing!,” and I ordered it

• I said that I wanted to watch a movie of my choice (at home) and have snacks again, like we did last year; attendance was not mandatory, it was just on offer for anyone who wanted to join me

• I brought up the topic of what-dinner-should-I-not-have-to-cook-on-Mother’s-Day, and I suggested pizza (easy and we all like it), and Paul counter-offered that he could instead expend vast time and energy making lasagna and rustic rolls, and I accepted his counter-offer

• I presumed as if it were A Given that we would be going for “our usual” (i.e., we did it for the first time last year) Mother’s Day trail walk, so that we could have a pretty background and rosy cheeks for the annual Mother’s Day picture of me with the kids; I said that if anyone didn’t want to go on the walk, we could do a photo in the yard first, and then anyone who wanted to go on the walk could go from there—but everyone opted to go on the walk)

 

And I had a nice day, all day long. I woke up feeling happy and excited about the treats stretching ahead of me throughout the day. I did no cleaning all day long. Some of the children DID do Mother’s Day things; Paul had privately prompted/reminded them several times over the last few weeks. (Though one unvaccinated-and-non-driver’s-license-possessing child handed me cash and a printed-out photo of what he’d wanted to buy me, saying he hadn’t been able to figure out any way to obtain the item—so Paul could perhaps have been a little more clear on his availability to ASSIST.) One child had the good idea of baking a kind of cookie (oatmeal scotchies) that is widely known to be a kind MOTHER particularly likes even though everyone else is meh about them, and I felt that was a stellar idea, and showed some encouraging empathy development, as well as demonstrating to all concerned that a financial outlay is not required.

 

I would be very interested to hear stories (good and/or bad and/or mediocre) of how YOUR day went, if applicable, and/or if there is anything you want to change for next year.

I am so glad I placed some Mother’s Day orders for myself. At the time of the orders, I felt…silly, and self-indulgent, and like I didn’t even CARE that much about Mother’s Day, so why do this? And now, as Mother’s Day looms, I feel relieved and happy to have things on their way. I ordered some pastries for breakfast (something we will ALL enjoy), and I ordered some chocolates for all-day snacking (something we will ALL enjoy), and I ordered OPI Cajun Shrimp nail polish (something at least two of us will enjoy) after seeing a discussion on Twitter about how it was the best summer pedicure polish color ever. Oh, and I ordered another box of Saint Siffrein fruit jellies (I am planning a whole post on fruit jellies, but I am still in the testing phase; so far these are my hands-down favorites); they probably won’t be here in time, but just knowing they’re ON THEIR WAY is happy enough, and besides, we’ll have the pastries and chocolates.

I DON’T care all that much about Mother’s Day, but I DO care about dreading it, and about feeling upset and resentful and unloved/unappreciated. And, as with Valentine’s Day (which I didn’t care much about either, until even small easy plans were apparently too much), this is to some extent within my power to change, and I’m the only one having a bad day, and I’d rather not spend another Valentine’s/Mother’s Day wishing I hadn’t married and hadn’t had children, and simultaneously feeling like it’s spoiled and entitled of me to want anyone to do anything, so. Last year for Mother’s Day, I told them all ahead of time that they shouldn’t try to do anything, because the pandemic made things too dangerous, and that what I’d like to do is watch Knives Out at home and have popcorn and candy (something we would ALL enjoy); and we did that. And that made a nice transition to this year, when I said I wanted to do that again with a different movie. And then we discussed what would be done for dinner, the way we do for birthdays, for Father’s Day, etc., and I said we could order pizza (easy, and something we’d ALL enjoy), and Paul suggested lasagna and rolls, both of which he makes, and I said yes. And I ordered the pastries, and the chocolates, and the nail polish. We are going to have a nice day dammit, and they are going to think of Mother’s Day as a fun day when we do fun things and have treats.

And then, the day after Mother’s Day, I am going back to my library job. I am having to continually remind myself that I WANT to go back, that I LIKED my job—because right now I am panicking. I think as soon as I am back, I will feel fine, maybe even GREAT. This is just anxiety because of impending change. Having to learn a new way to do things. Trying not to worry that my co-workers resent my long absence. A big shift from the daily schedule that has become normal. The stress of not knowing if by going back to work I might bring home a fatal virus. Etc.

Time and time again, I find that TELLING YOU about something seems to be exactly the kick in the pants I need to do something about it. I think part of it is that it puts the task into perspective: it seems…odd…to spend an hour writing a post about why I can’t make myself take 15 minutes to handle a chore.

Anyway, this morning I tackled all the cleaning supplies and baggies/foils from my parents’ old house. I’d kept thinking I needed to GO THROUGH THEM and COLLATE and COMBINE and DECIDE WHAT TO KEEP and so forth, but all I REALLY needed to do was cram them all into the same places where I keep back-ups of those supplies. When I run out of quart-sized baggies, I will find my parents’ partially-used box of quart-sized baggies on the back-up baggies/foil shelf; when I run out of laundry detergent, I will find their partially-used bottle on the back-up laundry supplies shelf. This issue will now automatically self-resolve with time.

It took maybe 10 minutes to handle it, and that counts the part where I dealt with the bins/boxes the items had been in. And now an Oppression Spot is just GONE, and also I have eliminated a Housecleaner Anxiety Area (“They will think I am hoarding cleaning supplies!!”). Why did I wait months? Brains are a treat.

Additionally, I noticed that every single time I went up the stairs, I saw a spot on the landing floor that made me feel bad for not damp-mopping the entire house. So this morning I took a few squares of toilet paper, dampened them in the sink, and cleaned that one spot. It took less than one minute, and now it doesn’t bother me EVERY SINGLE TIME I GO UP THE STAIRS.

Abrupt subject change!

Are any of you already familiar with a charity that addresses homelessness in the United States? (Ideally an organization that doesn’t combine this pursuit with religious evangelism.) We’re doing a family project to try to familiarize the kids with making charitable donations (choosing an area of concern/interest, investigating the charity on Charity Navigator, etc.), and each kid is picking a charity for us to send a donation to. William has chosen United States homelessness as his category, but is having trouble choosing from there—mostly, I think, because he is kind of overwhelmed doing college online in a house of seven people, and would like to be done with this additional project now. It also may be that his scope is too broad and that he needs to narrow it down to a particular program in a particular state—but he would prefer something national. I am going to look into this myself, but I love having other people’s recommendations.

I want to tell you about this book, which many of you have already read; but some of you have not, and perhaps for reasons similar to mine, which I would like to talk you out of:

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman (Target link) (Amazon link).

This is a book that was recommended to me many, many, many times. Several people recommended it on the Books Worth Buying post, but Claire pointed out that something very bad/traumatic happens to children, which could violate this thing I said when asking for recommendations: “and nothing where a major plot point is the abuse and/or traumatic death of an animal or child—unless somehow the author pulls it off, and there ARE books where that happens,” and that is probably why I didn’t add it to my To Read list at the time.

For me, this was one of those books where the author did pull it off. But I want to tell you my actual reasons for not reading the book even when I saw it recommended all over the place, because I had forgotten ALL ABOUT Claire’s warning when I finally read it.

The first reason is the cover, which communicates that the book is being marketed as Chick Lit. I read a lot of books marketed as Chick Lit, and a lot of them are great—and a lot of them are what I will kindly refer to as “fluffy.” Another reason is the title, which is whimsical; another reason is that the name of the main character is deliberately over-charming and not right for her age. These things are not absolute deal-breakers, but they are common signals that I am not going to like the book. The whole package reminded me of Evvie Drake Starts Over, another VERY RECOMMENDED book, which I finally tried, and it was an absolutely competently-written book by someone who had decided to write a book, and I didn’t catch the magic of it at all.

But the thing that REALLY kept me from reading it before now was the description on the inside front cover, which, like the description on the inside front cover of A Prayer for Owen Meany, was so off-putting to me that I almost couldn’t even make myself TRY the book, FOR FREE, from the library:

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: she struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding unnecessary human contact, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.

But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen, the three rescue one another from the lives of isolation that they had been living.

So, absolutely not. This is a movie starring Zoe Deschanel or Maggie Gyllenhaal as Eleanor, and Chris O’Dowd or the serious version of Will Ferrell as Raymond. They will be beautiful people dressed as nerds, charming people being charmingly awkward, and we will get to know their separate lives a bit, and then they will meet awkward-cute and have an awkward-cute relationship, probably bumping into each other awkwardly and losing their glasses and so forth, and a charming old man with twinkling eyes will be involved. I’m out.

Okay, but finally TOO MANY people had talked about the book, and then Hello Korio recommended it and said it reminded her of Fredrik Backman books, which I generally love, so FINE: I will read it if only so I could say “Nope, I tried it, not for me.”

Well, and of course I loved it. LOVED IT. It was EXTREMELY MY THING. I totally agree that it’s like Fredrik Backman, especially the one with Britt-Marie and the one with Ove, where you start by thinking the person is so unpleasant you don’t want to read about them at all, and then after awhile you find yourself succumbing to their charms and to the charms of all the wonderful imperfect lovable human beings around them. (If you never got the magic of Britt-Marie or Ove, Eleanor Oliphant may not be your thing either.) Or it’s like the TV show Schitt’s Creek, where everyone tells you to PERSEVERE through the first season where you hate everyone, to get to the part where you only hate Roland.

And, as Hello Korio points out, there is an unreliable narrator thing going on—and it’s the kind I LIKE, where the narrator is unreliable to THEMSELVES in a way where YOU start thinking “Wait…wait a minute here…” and feel smart for noticing. The book gradually REVEALED ITSELF to me as a totally different book than I’d thought it was, and I felt amazed by it, and I enjoyed the whole thing, and I liked everyone, and I want MORE BOOKS ABOUT THESE PEOPLE.

I am feeling empathetically sad today: something sad happened to someone else, and I keep thinking about it and feeling sad. I was wondering if we could balance that with some empathetic happiness. Maybe you have a treat tucked away for later and you have been thinking about it happily. Maybe your tulips are coming up / about to open. Maybe you have something good on its way in the mail, either from you or to you. Maybe you have something fun you’re looking forward to. You could tell me! And then I can feel happy about that with you.

We are having a little bit of a scramble, because we realized at this late date that we need something to REPLACE the Egg Hunt this year. We have done an Egg Hunt to one degree or another since Rob was a preschooler. First it was just Paul and me hiding a few eggs for Little Rob; and then we hid them for Little Rob and Little William; and then my parents started coming over and sitting in lawn chairs to watch, and the adults would pass around buckets of candy; and then my brother and sister-in-law had kids and started attending too; and then Rob and William were too old to want to hunt and so they started helping with the hiding; and then it was the pandemic.

And last year, the first year of the pandemic, we found that our kids seemed to have outgrown the hunt entirely: the younger three looked for eggs for awhile and then were sort of floppy about it—like, “HOW many more do we have to find??—like that. Which is not a fulfilling thing, when you as the parents have spent considerable effort to put together something fun. But on the other hand, our youngest is a teenager, so we can’t say it was a total surprise.

I guess, though, that I was cruising along picturing us all just eating the candy out of buckets as usual. But without the hunt first, that doesn’t seem right. So instead I want to do Easter Baskets. BUT: ABSOLUTELY NOT the Christmas-stocking kind of Easter basket, with presents and toys. I am not up to it, and don’t want to start with that; it’s PLENTY to do it once a year with stockings. What I want to do is the kind I grew up with: chocolate rabbit plus miscellaneous candy, and the basket was hidden somewhere in the house. I remember one year my brother and I made our parents re-hide the baskets because we found them immediately and felt not enough effort had been put into it.

We are all set on baskets: they’re not gorgeous or anything, but the kids used baskets to collect eggs, so I don’t need any of those. I am not buying Easter grass: I was charmed by this lovely green-and-flowers kind, and used it for an Easter package for my niece and nephew—and as soon as I emptied it into the box, I realized my mistake. And that wasn’t even the clingy plastic kind! ANYWAY, I am using tissue paper. I had some trouble finding a package of just green, so I am changing tacks and I will use different colors to code the baskets: Edward should search for the basket with RED tissue paper, and Henry the basket with ORANGE tissue paper, and so on.

I have ordered chocolate rabbits, and have made what is probably a mistake by having them shipped; is there ANY chance that hollow chocolate bunnies will arrive unbroken? Well, in the moment it seemed like the right thing to do: getting them ON THEIR WAY. I would have chosen a solid-chocolate option but oddly none of those were available for shipping.

All the kids sleep late now, so Sunday morning I will get up and assemble the baskets and Paul will hide them, and it will be a little Easter surprise! And kind of fun to do a holiday a different way.

A happy thing is that the little bowls I made in pottery class a few years ago are getting almost constant use: they are so small I thought they’d be useless, but William in particular is using them daily as snack/ketchup/mustard bowls. A sad thing is that so far three of the bowls, plus one of Elizabeth’s (she took a pottery class, too) have been broken. It is difficult not to HOARD special things, never using them so that they won’t be broken, but that is not the strategy I want to use here. Still, it’s hard to see them disappearing one by one.

Paul was able to glue one back together so that it can be used as a trinket bowl even though it won’t work for food anymore. The others were shattered to smithereens; I don’t think I’ve ever typed that word before. I don’t know what our kitchen floor is made out of, but anything dropped on it is absolutely toast. Even PLASTIC bowls have shattered on it. Our old kitchen floor was 1950s linoleum, and dropped items would bounce lightly before coming to a gentle, unbroken rest.

I am drinking a cup of Starbucks Spring Day blend, which tastes exactly like regular Starbucks coffee to me, but it comes in a pretty bag and I appreciate the pretty bag every time I see it. And it is satisfying to use a SPRING coffee, no matter the actual weather, as a little defiance in the face of continued cold, and/or as a little spell cast to coax the daffodils.

I am reading A Prayer for Owen Meany (Target) (Amazon), which I thought I had read BUT IT TURNS OUT I HAD NOT. I was so sure I had! But then some of you were discussing it on Twitter, and posted some excerpts, and I read the excerpts and thought it went beyond my usual inability to remember a book after reading it: I didn’t recognize the excerpts AT ALL, and in fact ANTI-recognized them. So I got the book and am reading it and I can see why people like it so much. I’ve definitely never read it before. Wonder what book I was thinking of!

This book was such an odd/surprising reading experience:

Little Weirds, by Jenny Slate (Target) (Amazon)

I started reading, and almost immediately was like oh, yeah, no: this is one of those PAY ATTENTION TO ME PAY ATTENTION TO ME PAY ATTENTION TO MEEEEEEEE books where the author says gross things and bizarre things, and talks about her body and how horny she is, because she’s learned that those are good ways to get a lot of attention, and actually I think she’s had enough already.

By the end of the book, I was completely enchanted. She is a darling and a sweetheart, a brilliant and sensitive person, and no man is good enough for her. I felt like those memes where someone posts a picture of a cute little animal and writes “I WOULD DIE FOR THEM.” I went from “Whoo, good thing I got this from the library instead of buying it, because I don’t think I’m going to make it through the second essay” to PUTTING THE HARDCOVER IN MY ONLINE CART.

You know how some of us get all choked up at terrible school band/chorus concerts because of how PURE AND EARNEST the whole thing is and how so many people have worked so hard to make this happen? And how some of us almost can’t bear the sweetness of society deciding to go to considerable expense and effort to make playgrounds—with grown adults even specializing in playground equipment and playground design and so forth? That is how the author sees things, too. Her use of the word “little”; her references to treats; the way she felt about other passengers on the plane; the way she talks about her house; how charmed she was by other people putting effort into a little surprise for her; the way she felt about a question the landscaper asked her.

Anyway. I still recommend getting it from the library to begin with, because for all my change of heart, there is still a hearty measure of my first impression. But by the end, I was seeing it as The Artistic Temperament, and finding it a very valuable temperament indeed when combined with the intelligence and self-awareness she shows throughout.

I have sent the last of the Galentine’s Day care packages, and it seems perfect that it is one month exactly after Galentine’s Day. I am trying to be happy than it happened rather than sad that it’s over, but last night while making dinner I was talking to Paul about how I could just keep sending packages forever. It was just very, very fun.

I’ve seen other people mentioning that their faces have noticeably aged this past year, and it was a relief to know I was in good company. This morning I peered at my face in the mirror: was the skin EVEN MORE delicate/fragile/crinkly-looking today than yesterday?? I did one of the face masks (remember when that meant a beauty treatment? that is how I mean it here) that build up in the medicine cabinet because it never seems like enough of a special occasion to use them, and it was a fun peeling gold-glittery one, and I would say it made a 0% difference but it was pretty fun to hope for 20 minutes there while it dried. Peeling it was also fun, and made me want to put Elmer’s glue on my hands.

I keep writing this paragraph and deleting it, because it keeps sounding so stupid to me, but what has happened is that I have several favorite walking routes that all include a certain stretch of road, and I’ve had to stop doing those routes because of some guy who keeps talking to me. He seems friendly/harmless, heading for Lonely Chatty Older Man territory, but I should never have taken off my headphones the first time he said something, because now he wants to chat for an extended period every time we cross paths, which is pretty much any day I use that part of the road, even if I go at a different time. It’s a little extra difficult because he has a dog with him who wants to say hi, too, and he will let the dog off its leash to come run to greet me, and then he follows. I see him talking to lots of other people, women and men also, so I get more lonely vibes from him than creeper vibes—but I am not even talking to my FRIENDS in person right now, so I don’t want to talk to a relative stranger. But I feel upset about losing the walking routes, and upset that somehow even by my age I couldn’t/didn’t stop this from happening. I get stuck ALL THE TIME talking to strangers/acquaintances because I can’t seem to say “Welp, gotta go, see ya, have a good day!” and walk away, and I feel like the visibly aging skin goes with someone who should be able to do that. But also: today I DID say “Well, see you later, have a good day!” and walked away, and he walked with me, so now I am more angry at him than angry at myself, but I’m still losing the walking routes because I don’t really have anything between the level of what I did today and the yelling/pepper-spray level.