The home stretch

Busy times at D's parents' place! We've finished almost all of our wrapping, but holiday activities have been ramping up with the arrival of more and more family members.

Things are quite different here this year -- D's brother, the next oldest in the line of four boys, got engaged in August and bought a house with his fiancée. So we've been given his old bedroom for our stay, which is much more private than the previous part of the house we'd been using before (the sleeper sofa in the basement, right next to the pool table and storage closets, both of which get tons of traffic).

I'm very grateful, to say the least. I'm uncomfortable admitting that I need space from people sometimes, but it's something I can't ignore -- I tried doing that last Christmas and ended up feeling horribly resentful toward everyone, even D, through the endless stream of activities I felt I couldn't escape. So this year, it's been a particular relief to have a little haven where I can get an hour of quiet time. It's made these last few days so much more enjoyable.

We've done almost one jigsaw puzzle per night with the whole family, played board games, shared cooking duties, planned the annual gingerbread construction project, gone caroling, and talked ourselves hoarse. And I've liked being part of it. Tonight, we're off to D's brother's house for dinner and then maybe some cookie decorating.

Hope you're all having good holidays. I'll post more once we're on our way to our next destination.

Tea and sympathy

That's what I sent D off to his office with this morning. We think he's coming down with something head-coldish, just in time for a very long set of flights, and we don't want it to turn into a repeat of our 2008 holiday -- a week of fever, sore throat, and achy muscles that started right after we finally made it to my parents' place. We went through such a travel fiasco to get there last year that I didn't even bother to mention that part of the experience when I was blogging the trip. But yes, we are laying in a stock of sugar-free Cold-EEZE and Ricola just in case.

So now I'm crossing my fingers that this goes away. Not just because I want D to feel better, but also because he's a very wounded-animal sort of patient. There's no comforting him until whatever he has is gone, and as much as I don't want to be annoyed by his sulking, after a few days of it, I'm not the most patient nurse either ...

Somehow, I don't think this is the answer

(Very tempting, though.)

I don't know what it is, but I'm just tired. Maybe I'm coming off end-of-semester deadline adrenaline and my brain has forgotten how to function without it. Or I'm running it ragged on pre-holiday stress and it's too amped up to respond to adrenaline anymore. Either way, I'm not making any progress on this recommendation I've been asked to write for a former student, and that student deserves so much better than I can produce right now. So I'm setting the paperwork aside until I don't feel like I have a haggis between my ears instead of the gray matter that's supposed to be there.

Without work, I feel a little lost. There are books I could read, movies I could watch, people I could call or e-mail, but somehow, none of these things feels right. Why is taking time for myself so hard? Or put another way, why is doing something I enjoy not enjoyable enough to make me want to do it?

I think it really is something about the holidays. Even when I'm not thinking about them, they're having their way with my subconscious, dulling my pleasure receptors, willing me to shut down. Every bit of me wants these visits with family (D's and mine) to go well, certainly better than they did last year (that's another story I might get into later, but it really requires its own post, or series of them). So D and I have been coming up with ways to help that happen. On our end, at least -- no promises about what other individuals choose to do. I think waiting to be on our way so I don't have to wonder how all that will shake out anymore is draining me.

Not quite two days left. I wish it were Thursday.

The things we do for love

So I'm stuck on the couch with a kitty in my arms. Doesn't sound too bad, right? It's not. Except the kitty is hell-bent on gagging up her antibiotics, and the only way to prevent it is to wrap her up burrito-style in a blanket and hold her upright until the urge to urp passes. With Simone, it takes about an hour.

Simone came to us with an upper respiratory infection (we asked for a foster who needed a place to recuperate -- it's a big help to the shelter since they only have so much isolation room to prevent the spread of germs). This is her second round of antibiotics, and we're hoping it works this time. It probably didn't help that we hadn't figured out how to help Simone keep her meds in her tummy for the first week's course, but she's definitely more adept at rejecting them than our last foster was.

While I've been sitting here, I've been thinking about these last few months since my return from Little U. on the Prairie. As much as life has vastly improved for me and D now that we're no longer doing the long-distance marriage thing, it's been an adjustment for both of us. I don't mean the little habits we each have that we have to accommodate now that we share the same physical space all the time. Those are pretty easy, and even welcome. I'm talking about the aftermath itself of having been put through the two-year emotional wringer of living in separate places, resenting the situation, and having to suppress a lot of those unhappy feelings in order to keep the marriage intact.

Bad things happen when you stuff your feelings into a dark hole and hope they never surface again.

Both of us did that to varying degrees, and sometimes the feelings leach out in the most unexpected ways. They lead to misunderstandings, arguments, confusion about why our emotions are suddenly running so high.

Lately, we've been trying to unpack all that, acknowledge how wounded we each felt, how we still bristle when our wounds get unintentionally poked. It's helping, I think, but slow. Both of us are different people because of the last two years. But because we weren't there to see the effects of that painful time on the other person, because we couldn't show those effects to each other for fear of making things too unbearable, we react to each other now as if the other person is still someone s/he used to be. When the differences become evident, it's sometimes saddening, disappointing. Or encouraging and relieving. You never know what you'll find out next. I guess that's what makes it scary but also compels us to keep pushing on. We can't not do this.

I just wish it could be a less exhausting process.

On safari

Thank the powers that be for the internet. Because of it, I'm essentially done with Christmas shopping and do not have to fight the crowds at the mall. And almost everything we've ordered is being directly shipped to Illinois and Texas (where we'll be celebrating the holidays with D's parents and my parents, respectively). Less to schlep, less to lose, less to have broken by those oh-so-gentle baggage handling machines when we fly out on the 17th. Yes.

Because we weren't under any crushing pressure to buy gifts, D and I actually did venture to the mall on Saturday. No, we're not crazy. We just have a little holiday tradition of our own, to preserve something meaningful for us in all the insanity: our annual ornament safari.

Each year, we pick out one special item to add to our small collection. For 2008, it was this fish (or one nearly identical to it in green instead of blue -- the one pictured was a gift to D's parents). We're hoping that someday, when we have little Troubadours to share these with, we can tell them a story about the ornaments, where each came from, why we chose each one.

This year's pick is the blown-glass bauble in the center of the bowl we keep on the coffee table (see above). Our tree is so small (six feet tall, not quite a yard at its widest) that there isn't room on it for everything we have, so we put the extras here. It spreads the sparkle around without much effort. We're all about no-fuss decorating.

In other news, my advisor wrote back to me, and all is well on that front. She is totally on board with my ideas about the direction of the manuscript and why that direction has had to shift. She's also excited about my initial structural suggestions (I'd put out a few in response to hers). So it sounds like I can finish this semester without quite as much worry about the next stages of the writing process.

My last submission deadline before winter break is this Friday, so I'm off to get busy on that. But before I go, I just want to say thank you to everyone who's been stopping by and saying hi here. You guys have been terrifically supportive, and it makes a huge difference. And your blogs rock.

La, la, la, la, not listening ...

The end of the semester is coming quickly, which means I have to send my 40-odd pages of rough draft to my thesis committee so I can get feedback before everyone disappears for the holidays. I was cool with that until earlier this week, when my advisor mentioned the one word I've been trying not to think about since my prospectus meeting in May ...

Structure.

My advisor is absolutely right in poking me about this bugaboo of mine. But I've been dreading it, knowing it was coming. If you've been following along, you know that my committee essentially told me to scrap the outline I'd come up with and just play with my writing, see what comes out, return to my intuition. So I did exactly that. I wrote in scenes, threw my heart into the emotional side of the words rather than worry about technical finesse. The result is that I have lots of solid vignettes on the page in raw form. But now, I have to find a way to string them together, to pin them to some kind of larger narrative arc. And I am horrible at that.

I wrote a long letter back to my advisor with my initial thoughts on what form that arc might take, based on the prospectus I'd submitted at the end of the spring, but I was fairly candid about how I wasn't sure it was the right way to go anymore. The reason: the family drama that occurred between then and now.

Yeeeeeeeeees, writing about family is messy on its own, but it gets even messier when your relationships with certain members of your family change significantly. So, basically, I'm not the same person I was when I wrote the prospectus, and the narrative arc I established then no longer helps me tell a true story from my current point of view, attitude, etc. Sigh. I'm glad that I've started the process of thinking out loud about this puzzle and that I've explained where I'm coming from to my advisor, but I really hope she writes back soon. I'm more than mildly worried that now she thinks I'm a total spaz.