Winds of Change

I have to warn you, the "after" pictures are still pretty disgusting. There are a lot of gross things about our house, and this cabinet is pretty high up on the list. It clearly sustained a lot of leaking in the past and the resident handyman decided the best fix would be to slap some contact paper on it. I cannot tell you how many layers of contact paper I had to peel off of the shelves when we moved in. Incidentally, lining deep(and I mean deep, like four feet) cabinets with fresh liner while seven months pregnant in August is a terrible idea. Anyway....

This is the caddy that scared me. Can you blame me?

Four inches of bilge water. Luckily I have years of practice of breathing through my mouth.

And after. Like I said, it's still kind of scary despite the definite improvements.

Doing things I'm scared of is part of my new lifestyle. I realized recently that I spend a lot of time thinking about the sort of person I'd like to be, but not a lot of time actually becoming that person. This is a common practice usually indulged in while in a fancy store, and one that salesman know and love. They know that if you see yourself in that slinky dress or those fabulous boots, there is a whole new persona that goes along with that outfit. Often it is the fantasy of our new selves and not the actual merchandise that makes the sale. I do this a lot. Not usually with purchases(not a big shopper), but very very often with activities. At least once a day I'm grateful that ESP is not a real thing and no one besides me can see how rich my fantasy life is. The ability to fantasize is a great thing, especially if you spend a lot of time with children. The danger, however, is that the difference between your fantasy life and your real life is often disappointing. Especially if you are a procrastinator, which I am. I have invested hundreds, maybe thousands of hours visualizing the sort of person I want to be, and hundreds, maybe thousands of hours more putting off actually becoming that person. It's hard. And it's work. And I can't do any of it while sleeping in and then spending two hours drinking coffee in my pajamas. I am not a morning person. I prefer to do my partying at night, staying up until I'm so tired I can't keep my eyes open and then stagger to bed and fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. I consider anything prior to 9 a.m. early, and anything prior to 7:30 a.m. positively ungodly. So God thought it would be hilarious to give me a kid who is the perkiest early-riser ever. Seriously, Jack puts farmers and birds and dawn itself to shame, springing to life at 6:45 every morning bright-eyed and curious about the day, the world, and all the exciting things that might be going on in it. He's also totally in love with his dad, and waking at 6:45 is the only way he gets to spend any time with him in the morning. Aaron usually leaves the house no later than 7:30, so that's usually when Jack starts coming into my room and whispering urgently about his desire to make a machine that takes old garbage and recycles it into new toys using a complicated system of conveyor belts and pulleys, all of which he describes to me in desperate lisps at a time when I'm still having trouble understanding English. I can usually ignore him for about half an hour, but by 8:00 I'm tired of being bombarded by his grand schemes and I stagger out of bed and head straight for the coffee. I am not proud of my morning routine. There's not really much routine to it, for starters; more like a delay, as if I keep hitting the "snooze" button on my life. Then the other day, I was giving a really moving speech to one of my little brothers about adulthood, and how the hallmark of becoming an adult is the ability to enforce and respect boundaries. So, just to make sure we're all on the same page here, I am a procrastinator, NOT a morning person, and a hypocrite. No wonder I'm having so much trouble instilling discipline in my own children; you can't give what you haven't got. Life has a funny way of backing you into a corner, of insistently applying ever-increasing pressure to change. We all know how much I love to change. But the time has come. It started with Jack's eczema(not, as one might hope, with his birth. I resisted even then.). He's had a small patch of it on his ribcage for about two years, with another small patch(about the size of a nickel) on his inner arm. We don't really do anything to manage it because he hates cream of any sort, saying that even the gentlest emollients sting. I didn't press it because it really didn't seem to bother him that much, but shortly after we eliminated white flour from our diet his eczema flared up in a serious way, the patch on his ribcage doubling in size and two new patches springing up on the backs of both hands, all of it looking red, inflamed and generally angrier than I'd ever seen it before. I'd gotten really enthused about switching all of our white flour products over to whole wheat, and thinking back over our previous meals I realized that in my enthusiasm for whole wheat everything, I'd fed him wheat four meals in a row. So now, faced with the suffering of my firstborn, I was greatly compelled to make some changes and we have now removed wheat from our diet entirely. Within four days, his eczema calmed down. It's still there, but it's no longer red and angry-looking and with the application of 100% pure shea butter(the only thing that doesn't bother his skin) three times a day I think we're keeping it under control. The whole process got me thinking about the way I engage with life, and the fact that until I'm faced with serious consequences I rarely to anything productive. This must stop. I want to stop being reactive and start being proactive. Today. Now. So I've been asking myself some very hard questions, and coming up with some very uncomfortable answers. I try to catch myself in Fantasy Mode and force myself to work through what I'd actually need to do in order to turn that fantasy into reality, and ask myself if that's what I really want. Then I have to be on the lookout for Denial, because that's another tool I'm very good at using. For example, I've always wanted to run a marathon. At least, that's what I used to tell myself. Now I realize that I don't actually want to run a marathon, I just want to be the sort of person who does that kind of thing only without having to put any actual work into it. Problem: running 26.2 miles isn't the sort of thing that happens by itself. You have to work for it. My trainer suggested recently that I train for the Seattle Marathon happening in June, and I say I'm interested. For a few weeks I delude myself into thinking that, just by talking about it and entertaining the possibility, I am now the Sort of Person Who Runs a Marathon. But then I start doing some reading about training schedules, mental coping mechanisms for running through pain, tips on keeping hydrated throughout the race, what to eat the night before, what to eat during and after, and I realize there is an awful lot of work involved in this marathon business. My heart gets all fluttery just thinking about it. So I start compromising, telling myself that a half marathon would be good enough, 13.1 miles is still a pretty good distance to run, etc. Then I start telling myself that I can run 13.1 miles by myself, I don't need to sign up for a marathon and pay $85.00 to sweat for two hours. So I have gone from being the Sort of Person Who Merely Talks About Running a Marathon to being the Sort of Person Who Merely Talks About Running a Half-marathon Unofficially, and I have yet to log a single mile of my training. This is not the kind of thinking that produces excellence. This is not the sort of person I want to be, but in order to make any changes I first have to accept the cold, hard reality that this is the sort of person I am. This will not stand. Unless I plan on raising a bunch of mediocre kids with mediocre ambitions who put forth only the minimal effort required to succeed on a mediocre level. I don't plan on raising those sorts of kids. So, hear this: on June 26th, 2010 I am running a marathon. The whole thing, not just half of it. I will devote time and space to the proper training, I will work hard to be well-prepared, I will suffer through the fact that I absolutely hate running with glasses on my face, and I will show my kids that if something is really important to you, you work for it no matter how hard it is. Did I mention that the marathon starts at 7:00 a.m.?