Disorganized thoughts, because that's all I have time for

The conundrum, in a nutshell: my top priorities in my life are:

• my kids
• myself
• DT and our marriage
• my work.

The list is unordered, because each of these things is my top priority. They take precedence at different times, and in different ways, but I feel like I never get past these four things. What I've lost:

• completely wasted time -- although I'm intrigued by getting a Wii, for example, I feel like I couldn't justify playing it, unless DT and I played together and it was serving as together-time, or unless it really is strenuous and I could count it as exercise, which I haven't truly done in months.
  
• mental wandering time
• haircuts, etc.
  
• peace of mind.

It's the last one that's causing the problem. I feel such pressure on most of my time that I can't relax into whatever I'm currently doing, to borrow a yoga image. I feel guilty, right now, for writing this post instead of working on my dissertation, because I'm in the middle of a valuable, and short, block of potential-work time today. I'm writing anyway, because I need to begin to sort these feelings out, but I'm getting less out of it than I should because I feel the pull of other needs.

I just got back from WonderGirl's school, where her reading group put on a puppet show of a book they've been reading. I knew they were making puppets, but was surprised yesterday (yesterday!) to get a handwritten note in her school folder, "Dear Mommy: (her first colon -- I'm so proud) The puppet show is at 10:30. Please come. Love, WonderGirl." So, of course, I went. And I loved it, and she was happy to have me there, and I wouldn't have missed it, even if it took an hour out of my day for a 7-minute puppet show.

While I was there, waiting for the puppeteers to be ready, I basically attacked another mom, asking how she does it. Both she and her husband are tenured professors; she told me she was on the verge of quitting her job when she had her son because she just couldn't imagine how to do it. Their solution? Her mother retired early and moved here to help. I mentally list the other couples we know: one makes it work because the oldest child goes to the same school at which the father teaches; one mom works part-time, at home, when she can find a babysitter; one dad quit his long-distance consulting job to be home; one mom quit to stay home after the second child. We all have ad hoc solutions. For DT and me, I'm generally the ad hoc solution. He does everything he can to be flexible and pick WonderGirl up from school a couple of days each week, to give me an extra hour or two to work, but the fact is that he's the one who pays our mortgage and allows me to be a student. He only has so much flexibility, so I make the trade-offs, and the kids always win over the work. That's the right decision, and I make it knowing that it's the right decision, but I just wonder why I ever thought that I could do both well, much less put energy and time into my marriage and myself.

Mauling the language

My research involves doing a lot of computer simulations; I write nearly all of my programs in (get ready to be disgusted and swear you never read this blog) Fortran. This morning, I've been spending time trying to adjust some code so that I can compile a program on a few different machines - they're each persnickety in slightly different ways, and I have to be careful with different issues. If I can get it to work, it means I can use more machines, though, and therefore run my simulations faster. This, of course, will free me up to do even more simulations, which means more work, which means... oops, better not think about that right now.

In any case, I've been banging my head against one particular platform for the last hour or so, not sure why my program was giving funky results. I just realized, though, that I had a typo in a crucial function. While trying to multiply two matrices, instead of using the "matmul" function for matrix multiplication, I was eagerly encouraging the computer to "matmaul" the data. This may have been my first digital Freudian slip.

Tutti

Like many families with young kids, most of our grownup friends were introduced to us by our children. We've been lucky that our kids have good taste in friends, and we've slowly, but surely, developed a circle of families with relatively-similar temperaments, habits and drinking preferences. A typical weekend usually includes at least one accidental dinner party, where we meet up at someone's house and hope that our children play nicely so we can recharge with some adult conversation and wine.

(Side note: for a few years after I was out of college and my first bout with grad school, I used to complain about how hard it was to make friends in the "real" world. In school, you have a ready-made pot of people to try out and test for connections; once you're an adult it gets progressively more difficult to find opportunities to let those connections build. Now, I think kids are essentially the dorms of adult life -- if you're around the parents of your kids' friends enough, you're likely to find those gold nuggets of people that enrich your own life.)

Last night, we took the accidental kid-inspired dinner party motif much further than usual, and we had a semi-accidental chamber-music concert. One of our friends is also a former violist/violinist and has pestered me often to play with him. His enthusiasm for playing together is intense enough to overcome my incredibly rusty skills, as well as my natural inclination never to play my violin where someone else might hear me. We've played duets a few times and I always really enjoyed it, despite the shock of hearing how god-awful I am now. Last night, he'd arranged for two of his co-workers to join us and we had a true string quartet.

It's hard to describe, to someone who doesn't play, the intensity of being in the middle of a group of musicians. It makes your skin crawl in a good way, feeling the melodies and harmonies pass back and forth around and through you. It's almost like being caught up in a musical version of peristalsis. We played for a while, had dinner, played some more... it was one of the most rewarding evenings I've had for a while, not least because I knew my kids were listening and watching and absorbing that this was what adult life was like: you get to play music and relax with friends. While we were playing, I was thinking of my mom. Yesterday would have been her 65th birthday, and I'd been struggling a bit to think of how to appropriately honor her. The quartet was the right way: she was always the biggest supporter of my music, and if it weren't for her, I wouldn't have been in a position to be part of the group last night.

So, happy birthday Mom, and yes, I'll start practicing again. Thank you.

A truly random act

Last night we decided to go out for dinner. This time, our excuse was that DT and I deserved a rest after spending the day tackling the mother of all organizational projects: The Desk and Filing Cabinet. Without going into gory details, let's just say that The Desk doesn't give up easily, and it was only with startling bravery and steadfast determination that we won. But win we did. HAH!

So, we ended up at our favorite local Indian place for dinner. When we arrived at the fashionable family-oriented time of 5:05pm, there was, somewhat surprisingly, a couple already there, sharing a thali. We executed our typical drill of ordering the kids' meals before we were fully seated, since hell hath no fury like a child stuck in a wooden high chair with nothing to eat for 20 minutes, and settled in.

WonderGirl and Rocco were, for once, simultaneously on the peak of the sine wave that is kid behavior -- WonderGirl was coloring relatively quietly and only occasionally tricking Rocco into trading his full-length crayons for useless nubs, while Rocco was doing his best "I love you" smile to the other couple in the restaurant. Although they seemed friendly, I was trying to keep Rocco distracted and focused on our table, because it's obviously a bit awkward and creepy when someone's toddler is trying to seduce you while you eat. Instead of being irritated, though, the couple struck up a conversation with us, the man telling us that watching Rocco had made his wife tell him she wanted a baby. We joked about how they should stick around for the inevitable kid-splosion that would come later, and see how they felt about fertility and its aftermath at that point.

As our food came, we kept talking intermittently; the couple had never been to this restaurant before, and was asking what we'd ordered, because it looked better than their meal. They were friendly and interested in food, which is all DT or I really need to know about people. Eventually, they put on their coats and got up to leave.

As they passed our table, the man put a receipt down and said, "Your dinner is paid for. Happy New Year." DT and I both sat with our mouths open; apparently, "agape" is a cliched but apt description in that situation. We did manage to say thank you, and start to protest, but it didn't matter because they were grinning and pretty much ran out of the door. We didn't have much time to react.

I'm still not sure how to react. Here are the basics, as I see them:

• We didn't need the generosity, weren't in military uniforms, don't look particularly needy.
• Even though the above is true, these strangers still bought us dinner, for absolutely no reason.
• I was nearly in tears for almost an hour afterwards; just writing about it now is bringing back the drizzly eyes.
• It is stunning how much a small (or not-so-small, we eat a lot) gesture can affect you. Being on the receiving end makes it clear just how much random kindnesses can matter.
• I wish I knew a way to bottle that initial rush of surprise and appreciation; it's inspiring at the time but turns cheesy pretty quickly.
• For both DT and I, our first reaction was that we had to do something to make up for the fact that we didn't deserve the unexpected generosity. His first thought was to donate the amount of the dinner to a charity; mine was to resolve to give someone else that same sort of unexpected (and probably unneeded) surprise. I think we'll do both. I hope that we grin as much as they did.

Happy New Year, indeed. What a wonderful start.

A quandry and the year in review

First, a question: if a water main breaks in your city, and the powers that be recommend not washing in the water until further notice, is it better to leave your children in the known germs from holiday camp and day care, or to take your chances with the maybe-germs in the water? Discuss.
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Then, because everyone else is doing it, I thought I'd go back and recapture the first sentence from this blog every month over the last year. I started blogging in March, so you'll have to make up your own stories about the fabulous adventures I was having (and keeping to myself) previous to that.

March: Well.

April: My father and his wife came to visit this weekend.

May: I've been working on the first bit, I mean third, I mean half, no, huge honkin' chunk of my dissertation for a couple of years now.

June: I was just browsing the iTunes music store, on a quest to replace our broken tape of Sesame Street Platinum.

July: I love me some Sen. Ted Stevens.

August: Life has taken a turn for the busier over the last few days.

September: There's nothing in this article from the NY Times that is surprising, but that doesn't mean it's not depressing: there is a clear separation between new moms returning to work who are able to pump, and those who aren't.

October: Sandbags are useful not only during hurricanes, but also during chest x-rays for toddlers.

November: I finally took the plunge and have a post up at Begging To Differ: It is not a small irony that this, my first post at BTD, is inspired by Playboy.

December: Well, blog, I've clearly been avoiding you.

What can I take from this? Mostly that it's a miracle anyone reads this blog at all. I finally have a New Year's resolution: be witty and engaging in the first sentence of my blog each month. If that's too much to ask, perhaps I might simply aspire to use proper grammar in the first sentence... we'll see how it goes.

Perspective

I woke up cranky this morning. I have a cold that's not on the downswing yet, I haven't been sleeping well for a few weeks, I've got a lot of work to do for school and rapidly decreasing time in which to do it, both kids have holiday potlucks at their respective schools tomorrow (at the same time, naturally, and both requested foods "appropriate to your family's traditions" which, I suppose, means macaroni and cheese for us), did I mention that the potlucks are at the same time?, there are random items to be purchased for several events that I need to remember long enough to make a list that I will then forget when I go to the grocery store anyway, and to top it all off, this is the dead week in college basketball, when the players actually have time off for exams, so I don't get my favorite winter evening distraction. (Okay, my second-favorite.)

So, I woke up cranky. I snapped at WonderGirl and was oversensitive with DT. As we ate breakfast, though, I had a moment to see myself and remember that my prickliness was not pre-ordained. I told DT and WonderGirl that I was feeling cranky, and I was sorry for being that way. They were instantly forgiving. I'm grateful for that. It is amazing how much that one action can matter: admitting that you're in a foul mood and acknowledging that you're over-reacting to other stimuli because of it. I'm still feeling cranky, but it's no longer directed at other people, it's simply my state. What an improvement.

More beautiful things from the last day:

• The pictures waiting in my inbox of an old friend's new baby, and the knowledge that there is one more family who has dealt with pregnancy loss and now knows the joy and relief of a healthy, safe baby.
• The email from Dr. Nice that my current results are so encouraging that I should start writing my proposal and plan on presenting it in February.
• Going on a field trip with WonderGirl's class yesterday to see a puppet show, and having her unconsciously cuddle up to me during the sad parts.
• Watching Rocco and one of his friends manic-ly perform their entire repertoire of animal sounds.
  

Intent

It feels like a lot of threads in my life have been converging lately to convince me to spend more effort practicing intentional, mindful living. I've been impatient with the kids and with DT more than is warranted, and certainly more than I want to be. I've felt vaguely shaky and unsettled for the last few weeks, without being able to put my finger on the cause. I've been intellectually aware of how fortunate I am, in almost every way, without being able to work up the corresponding emotional appreciation for my situation.

At the same time, I've had the serendipity of finding several small, hopeful ways to adjust my perspective. DT and I went to a workshop on nonviolent communication that has given us some corny but useful ways to neutralize situations that often lead to arguments in our house. The facilitator also made a statement that has stuck with me: "Other people don't cause your feelings; the most they can do is to be the stimulus." It's a sentiment that I've always believed in, but that I'm not always able to internalize -- I am responsible for my own emotional environment, and when necessary, I can selectively let in things that improve it. Along those lines, one of my favorite bloggers, Karen of Chookooloonks, started keeping track of "kind blogs" which aim to be places of positivity and grace. Through Chookooloonks, I also found the blog Three Beautiful Things, a daily list of beauty in the blogger's world, which, in turn, gives me a daily dose of peace.

So, I'm working on it. I'm trying to be more mindful and to know that my perspective and outlook are just that -- mine. My goal is not to become an out-of-touch Pollyanna, but rather a balanced woman, wife and mother who has her eyes open and, when she has a choice, chooses joy. To acknowledge the internet folks who are helping me (without knowing it) I've finally signed on to Karen's kind blog effort with this blog, and I'll finish this post with three of my own beautiful things from this morning:

- When I heard WonderGirl come out of her bedroom after waking up, I went to meet her at the top of the stairs, where she was sitting and looking out of the window. Her first sentence was, "Look at this. It is such a beautiful sunrise."

- Empirical and theoretical results which match in my research.

- A good morning hug with DT which went on longer than normal.

It pays to be informed

I drive to school every day along a fairly congested surface street. There are several poorly-timed stoplights, where Rocco and I sit for one or two (or usually more) cycles. Sometimes we end up part of a truly modern phenomenon: a spontaneous, short-lived traffic community. When it happens, when we make a connection with Random Driver on Our Left, it's nearly always because Rocco is doing something cute. He has a sweet, flirtatious smile that gives the impression that it is only because he has seen You that he is interested in smiling, in fact, he's never smiled before, but You... You! are so wonderful that he's overcoming his natural shyness to give You the most genuine, innocent, slowly-spreading smile that has ever been given. He melts hearts, even in traffic. So, often, I'll realize he's flirting with someone in the next car and will catch the other driver's eye as they smile at Rocco or pantomime playing with him.

Sometimes the other driver will clearly be giggling at whatever odd object Rocco has decided he must clutch throughout the drive - a full-size Duke basketball, his ridiculously poofy winter coat, a wilted board book (upside down), a hat that he prefers to wear on his face instead of his head. Yesterday and today, I have to admit that I was hoping to avoid such an interaction. For some reason, Rocco has become obsessed with a booklet about the Mirena IUD that I brought home from an ob/gyn appointment. He turns the pages slowly and studies the diagrams and tables with a remarkably intent expression. I think it's funny, and tell myself that I'm doing my part as a modern mom to raise a male who will understand the importance of being educated about birth control; at the same time, I'd be just as glad if Rocco postponed any future traffic flirtations with the guys in the local waterproofing company's truck until he was done digesting the information.