Sticks and Stars

Peg so kindly asked to know more about “things that my current life prohibits but that are so important to my idea of being a good parent and a happy human” and I’ve been tossing around a blog post on that very subject, so let me take this occasion of a sick child at home and thus me at home too to expound upon that very topic.

First:
In the morning my boys and I leave our house at about 7:45am and get home at just before 6pm. My boys go to bed at about 8pm and if I am being good and attentive to my sleep needs, I go to bed at about 10pm so that I can get up at 6am. I wake my boys at a little after 7am and I dress them while they are still sleeping/sleepy because the otherwise-battle is not worth it to me and because we really need to leave the house on time so that I’m not late to work. Mostly my six year old eats breakfast at school because that means I can wake him up about ten minutes later. Our morning are generally rushed and everyone is grumpy because everyone wanted to sleep longer.

My six year old spends a half hour in his before-school program, then a half hour on the bus, then six hours in school, another half hour on the bus, and then two hours at his after-school program. My three year old spends nine and a half hours in daycare. By the time we get home we are all tired and we only have a short time before bedtime for the boys, during which time I need to make a dinner that they will eat and that will meet some minimum level of nutritional validity. Frankly, despite the fact that I have missed them all day, the last thing I want to do is play with them. I just want to be quiet and lazy and spend my evening reading or watching a movie.

Second:
I really like my six year old’s school but I think the school could be so much better if the parents could get their shit together and do a better job of supporting it. Unfortunately, it seems like the parents who have the time to volunteer are the parents who have the least to offer in terms of actual skills. I’m not saying that I’m some super dynamo, but I at least know how to organize a project and keep track of the details, and I have a decent sense of aesthetics. But my inflexible work schedule really limits how much time I can spend at the school and much of the work to be done at the school requires a physical presence, at least some of the time.

I also dearly wish I could teach a class at the school. Parents are allowed to teach “electives” covering topics in which they are knowledgeable and there is absolutely no technology-related education at the school. I would love to teach tech skills to these kids — from basic computer literacy for the kindergarteners, to web “politics” and basic web development skills for the 8th graders. But again, there’s no way I could just randomly leave my job for a couple hours every day to indulge in such a project.

Third:
Already my six year old is complaining about how boring school is. Despite his school being very emotionally supportive and exposing him to lots of new ideas, he’s not being challenged to learn. His reading and math abilities are virtually unchanged from what they were in September and although his teacher keeps assuring me that things will pick up soon, I feel like things aren’t really going to “pick up” until the rest of the class is caught up to him, at which point he’ll leap forward and then stand still for another few months while they get caught up again.

I know that at some point he’ll have the basic skills to seek out new knowledge on his own but I hate that he’s not being encouraged to do that right now and I hate that he’s already learning that school (and therefor learning) is boring. I worry that will be a hard lesson to unlearn.

And so what this all adds up to is me wishing that I didn’t have this 9-5 job that’s actually an 8-6 job that takes up the majority of my time and leaves me feeling extremely stingy about my freetime and resentful toward anything or anyone that dares to intrude.

If I could make my own schedule I could spend time with my boys at my leisure. Like today, for example, when we are all home and I’m working on a website for a friend, and they feel free to come and interrupt me to ask me for things or to ask me to play with them. And I do, and I feel fine with it because I like the breaks and I’m not tired and I’m not trying to fit too much into a tiny little chunk of time.

If I could make my own schedule my boys and I could sleep in every morning and follow a more natural schedule. My six year old could easily sleep 12 hours a night but he doesn’t get anywhere near that and he sometimes falls asleep during our drive home in the evening as a result. I really hate to see my kids not getting something so basic as the amount of sleep they need, and it’s all because they have to get up too early in the morning.

If I could make my own schedule I could homeschool my boys and ensure they are being challenged appropriately. At least for me, homeschooling isn’t an always-on activity, much of how I envision homeschooling involves independent work and even lots of play, and so it doesn’t seem unreasonable that I could spend time doing my own work around them.

If I could make my own schedule I could participate in the things I want to participate in. Of course, if I was homeschooling my boys, volunteering at their school wouldn’t be an issue, but maybe I’d want to teach tech classes to other homeschooled kids, or maybe I’d want to teach tech classes at some public school, or maybe I’d just want to do any manner of day-time volunteering activities. Whatever I wanted to do, I’d have the flexibility to do it…and I’d have the flexibility to include my boys.

Overall my life feels like a pretty good place, but it seems like all the things that make me feel some amount of unhappiness stem from one single source, namely my inflexible schedule. It seems like a shame to not take steps to change that if there are possible steps to be taken. And indeed, there is one huge possible step, super huge, that would allow me to leap off the cliff and see if my parachute of self-employment will open, but I’ll have to write about that later because that’s a whole other really long post.

Woohoo!!! I just turned in the final assignment for my JavaScript class (and only three weeks beyond the original deadline).

Ego pleasers I received from my instructor during the course included his surprise at how well I was able to debug my scripts without any assistance (my job, where I used to generally have no idea what I was doing, taught me very quickly how to break down a script in order to figure out what the hell was going on), and his comment (after I complained to him that I didn’t expect the course to be so hard) that some people have a natural proclivity for programming and that I am clearly one of those people (emphasis mine). (That last one still makes me grin like an idiot because when I read the sentence I was totally expecting him to say something like, “and it’s okay if you aren’t one of those people.”).

Now I will take a month off to finish a couple websites for friends and then I will dive into my third class, this one covering SQL. Considering that I spend about 70% of my workday using SQL, I’m guessing that this course isn’t going to be too revolutionary for me, but at least it should go by quickly.

I registered my own personal domain a while back (as in my-name.com) and I’d really like to post something on it. I wrote up a draft of a paragraph about me and my skills but then I realized that it wasn’t so much about me and my skills as it was about some future me and her skills and she has far more skills than what I can honestly claim, no matter how much I might like to.

It would fine and dandy for people who don’t know me to read, like future employers and whatnot, but it would be embarrassing if, say, a co-worker came across it and given that it is my-name.com, it’s not unreasonable to think that one might.

I was also thinking of starting a “professional” blog where I talk randomly about my experiences doing database and web development. However, a lot of my talking would be summaries of useful things I’ve learned and that would quickly reveal my relative level of expertise…or inexpertise, and that might be embarrasing.

The thing is, I feel like my life is repeatedly nudging me toward the idea of doing freelance work and/or starting my own web development business. I’m not sure that I’m necessarily interested in this idea (and I am nowhere near skilled enough — although that will come) but I also recognize that it would allow me to do things that my current life prohibits but that are so important to my idea of being a good parent and a happy human. And having a professional website with a professional blog where people can see that I know shit (at least some shit) and have some kind of established presence would be a good thing, right? Or, assuming that I don’t spend too much time talking about my masturbatory habits, it couldn’t be a bad thing, right?

There’s this woman in my life and I’m at a loss as to how to handle her. Or rather, I’m not at a loss at all, my solution is to not handle her, to step away from the friendship we seemed to be forming (and indeed, that’s what I’ve done), but I don’t feel exactly right about it, like maybe I’m just being too sensitive or defensive or something.

I’m never good at making these kinds of determinations. There have been plenty of times that I’ve gotten unnecessarily upset about an interpersonal relationship due to excessive sensitivity on my part, but there are also plenty of times when I’ve convinced myself that I really had no reason to feel upset until years later when I looked back and thought, jesus, why did I tolerate that for so long??

I always feel like this woman is judging me. I’ll happily comment on how, say, I just bought my son a pair of like-new shoes from a consignment shop for only $5 and she’ll reply by telling me that’s great…but that she buys all of her kid’s shoes from some local cobbler and how it’s $80 per pair but it’s really important to her to support local businesses/local artisans/free range leather/what the fuck ever.

Of course, it would be fine if it was just one thing, I know that everyone picks their battles and her local artisan cobbler might be my co-op organic dairy, but I sometimes feel like everything that comes out of my mouth garners a response from her that shows how whatever she does is far more virtuous than my pathetic choices. One time I was lamenting how much I wished I could have some time to myself but how hard it was to find a babysitter who’d accept $10 an hour. She responded that it was even harder for her because she insists on paying her babysitters a living wage and wouldn’t feel comfortable offering less than $16 an hour. Another time she asked me about using Netflix. I explained the whole process and why it works well for us and she replied by informing me that she prefers to buy her movies from Goodwill and then donate them back when she’s done so that she can support nonprofits.

I guess the thing is that even if I am being oversensitive, the end result is that I still feel bad. I spend a lot of time privately and quietly reveling in my happy little life. I have a good job that I love with a very promising career path, I have a beautiful home, I have two awesome little boys who I am parenting well, I have money in the bank. I have my shit together! All by myself, I gathered my shit and got it together and I am successful. I really can’t tell you how proud I feel about that, and how I love to roll it around in my mouth and savor it. But when I’m with this woman, I don’t feel successful. I just feel…less. And so even if her comments are entirely innocent, what really matters, at least to me, is how I feel on the other side of them.

The straw moment came a couple of weeks ago when I invited her and her kid over for a special dinner. I bought lots of special ingredients and even a bottle of wine because I wanted it to be nice, not just our usual happen-to-be-in-the-neighborhood-wanna-have-a-playdate. But at the last minute she canceled because she didn’t feel comfortable with how our kids were playing together lately…and she went on to comment about how her kid plays with another kid from their class and never has any trouble, which made me feel like it was clear in her eyes where the problem lay. And indeed, our kids do have conflict, but it’s often because my son will say something to her kid like, “You are a stinky underwear head!” and her kid will burst into loud wailing inconsolable tears in response. I’m not saying that my kid should be insulting other kids, but I do think her kid’s responses are a bit excessive.

But anyway, so she canceled at the last minute, which made me feel bad, but then she called the next day and asked if they could come over and hang out for a while while they were waiting to go to a meeting. That just made me feel confused and somewhat insulted, that they couldn’t hang out with us when we made special plans, but they could if they just needed some time filler.

Mostly this whole thing doesn’t bother me so much except that I was happy to be moving toward a casual hang out friendship, the kind where you invite each other over on the spur of the moment and, even more importantly for single parents, the kind where you drop your kids off with each other so that you can do things like get your hair cut or buy new bras instead of having to take half a day off work because that’s the only other time you have reliable childcare. I have so many friends who are just an email or a phone call away, I just wish I could have some of those same friends in my city.

I will never, ever, ever, ever, EVER not hire movers again. EVER. In fact, from now on, I may hire movers to entirely pack up all my stuff and move it while I retreat with my children to a beach resort for a couple of days. It’s a damn shame that I can’t hire movers to unpack and set it all up and then cook us a nice dinner as well because I would do that too.

The one wise decision I made with regard to moving was to move and immediately unpack all of our kitchen, bathroom and clothes items before I started moving anything else. That allowed us to live in relative snack-toilet-paper-and-underwear-having comfort while the rest of the move dragged on and on and on and on.

Did I mention that I will never again move without movers?

The biggest problem is that I have some large items of furniture that are currently living in my garage, that really need to elevate themselves up one or two flights of stairs. And these items are things like bookcases and heavy wooden toy storage and are thus required before any of those smaller items can be placed inside them, which means that none of that shit can be put away until I improve my levitation skills, hook up a pulley system outside my balcony window, or grow myself some massive muscles and maybe an extra, really long arm.

Actually no, that’s not even the biggest problem because I could theoretically slowly and carefully maneuver those items up my stairs and I wouldn’t even gouge huge dents into my walls (small dents, but not huge ones). The real biggest problem is that although I initially moved items up the stairs and into their intended homes, eventually time started getting short and I just shoved things into my garage. And of course, since I moved the most useful items first and the least useful items last, and since at the very end I was just shoving items into any space where they’d fit in my damned garage, every access to the point the garage is now dammed up with useless crap (kiddie pool and portable air conditioner anyone?) leaving me unable to access anything I actually want without unpacking the whole damned room.

Moving with movers is so much easier. Why did I not hire movers?? Both times I’ve hired movers I was entirely unpacked that same day!! Given the current state of things, I should be entirely unpacked right around the time my lease runs out.