Last night, as I fluffed the pillow beneath my head, I closed my eyes and felt gratitude for the gift of tomorrow. A new day, a new week, a new outlook. Today, as people have been asking me how my weekend was, for the most part, I answer "pretty good" or "not too bad". A select few have borne the burden of hearing some of the details that might suggest otherwise. Was my weekend bad? Am I lying when I say it was "pretty good"? There were definitely some really fun and heartwarming moments this weekend. I even took a few pics of some of those moments, and might consider them social media-worthy. On Friday, my three-year-old daughter and I got to visit my 88-year-old grandmother, and have lunch with her. Just thinking about the collective joy we shared around her little dining room table immediately warms my heart. I can recall several really authentic and fun conversations I had with fellow-mom friends and family. I got to watch my son and the neighbor-boy catch crayfish in our river, and on Saturday night, the kids and I ate pizza on a table cloth on our living room floor and watched A Dog's Purpose. There was soccer in the yard, bike rides, and a hike in Pine Valley. I watched hockey games, got some yard work done, and got to spend a few hours with my 9-year-old as he prepared for his first communion. I even managed (with my husband's help) to get the laundry baskets full of clean clothes, that migrated and multiplied throughout the weekend, folded before I went to bed last night. There were many times when I felt joy, excitement, inspiration, and contentment. It's just that, when I look back on the weekend, those pleasant feelings were often fleeting and swiftly replaced with exhaustion, frustration, disappointment, irritation, or apprehensiveness. I was in a funk. Every time I felt like I had emerged, there was something that sent me wondering back into the fog... I think maybe it started earlier in the week when I felt like I was slowly losing ground on both our morning and our evening routines. Or maybe it was Friday morning when I decided it was time to reckon with the chest freezer (I had discovered on Wednesday morning the freezer in the basement had been mistakingly unplugged by our electrician sometime on Tuesday). Let me tell you, spending several hours tossing out frozen pizzas, boxes of pre-made cookies, and t-bone steaks, AND THEN chiseling through two inches of red-tinted chunks of ice on the bottom of a freezer can really get to a person. BUT, I managed to salvage the afternoon and had a really nice evening with the fam. It wasn't until bedtime, when I ventured out into the dark to put bikes away, that the fog moved back in. We've had contractors in our basement since February, so between the contents of our basement and a new boat my husband has been working on, our garage is stuffed so full that cramming three bikes in there (even with very low expectations for how wide of a path I needed to make it back into the house) was nearly impossible. I knew I was in a bad place, so after putting the boys to bed, I decided my best bet was to hit the rack myself and start tomorrow fresh. Saturday morning I woke up, got a run in, and was feeling optimistic as I ventured out to hockey with my eldest son. When we got home, my husband and I traded places and I took over the little ones while he got my 9-year-old ready for his second wave of hockey games. We'd been doing this back and forth thing for days now, leaving very little time to communicate, validate, and cut any tension that had been growing between us (like the tension I created when I stomped into the house the night before annoyed that our garage was stuffed full of his "crap"). By the time my husband got home from helping his dad out with a project on Saturday evening, the kids and I were grooving on our pizza and movie party. Now, looking back, in what I believe was an attempt to join in on our evening, my husband made a comment to my son about a broken bike reflector that was on our dining room table. I immediately reacted to his comment and interpreted it as him trying to make my son feel bad. My son corrected me and stated that what my husband said did NOT make him feel bad. Marital tension boiled over and words were exchanged. On Sunday morning, now that the lid on the tension pot was blown off, things were going pretty smoothly. We'd arrived home from church and were going to scarf some food before heading in two different directions again. What happened next was a rapid series of events (and questionable parenting decisions) that resulted in our pickup truck backing through the neighbors fence and into their front yard. Somehow we staggered through the remainder of the day, oddly enough feeling more "together" than we had all weekend. In between hockey, tending to three kids, and your typical Sunday chores, we squeezed in mending fences (and relationships) and looking online for a playhouse to replace the one that the truck had flattened.
This morning I woke up at 5:00 am ready to take on whatever the day had to bring. It was a new day, and it brought me the fresh start that I desperately needed. Boy am I grateful that both my husband and I have jobs to go to on Monday morning, the kids are able to be in school and daycare, and we have the means to fix things and make them right. I am also grateful for VERY UNDERSTANDING neighbors. Thank you so much Brittany and Matt for making a terrible situation a little less so. Please don't forget to subscribe if you want to be notified when I post something new!
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AuthorMy name is Alissa Anderson. I am the School Psychologist for the Esko Public School District in Esko, MN. I am also a mother of three and was certified as a Love and Logic Parent Educator in 2009. Archives
January 2023
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