The Autumn of Our Discontent

Today I'm getting things out of the way -- you know, those little things that every time you see the item involved you think "I have to..." and then you go on with your day and don't do them? Okay, maybe it's just me. I cleaned the crap off the top of my dresser -- some baseball cards (into Angus's card bin), some bedtime story books (into Eve's bookshelf), the sparkly pipe cleaners with which Eve spelled "Mom" and "Love" (into my box of stuff Eve made me). I cleaned out a box of receipts and threw out the ones that I didn't need any more. I sewed a hole in a pair of tights that have been hanging over the stair rail since last winter.

Usually this kind of thing gives me an immense feeling of accomplishment. Today that immense feeling of accomplishment must be having the same trouble getting out that I am. I was supposed to go shopping with my Mom this morning because the last two nights I've been feeling like I'm coming down with something and it was supposed to be pouring rain. Today I feel fine (not sick, anyway) and it only rained until nine-thirty and then the sun came out. And I realized I'm just having trouble leaving the house. I'll be able to get out and pick up the kids, but I should have gone shopping with my Mom and looked for snowsuits for the kids and gotten some groceries and I feel this overwhelming urge to...not leave the house.

I always say I love fall, but I've realized over the past few years that, much as I like the cooler weather and getting back into the school routine and having more time to myself, my brain chemicals seem to want to go a whole other way with things, which is bloody inconvenient for me (and don't suggest exchanging them for other, more cooperative brain chemicals. I tried that -- no one wanted to trade). I have this pit in my stomach that I could ascribe to the fact that I'm taking the kids for piano lessons after school to a COMPLETE STRANGER, but really it's just a big chunk of free-floating featureless anxiety. Staying in the house seems safer, but then there's the whole I'm-useless-and-lazy-and-frittering-away-my-me-time-fretting-instead-of-learning-Japanese-and-weaving-washcloths thing to confront.

It's tiresome.

Is self-knowledge any use at all when it doesn't generally lead to self-transformation?

Anyway, yesterday was great. We were supposed to go to our friends' cottage with our usual four family group, but it was raining, so we took our potluck stuff to their house and they cranked up the big pool to hot-tub-temperature and the kids had three big floors to destroy instead of one tiny cottage and we had a bocce ball tournament in the rain (which my team dominated until I deserted my partner who was my friend's nine-year-old son to play bananagrams and he won with a sub and I didn't win a single game of bananagrams, and don't even let me get into how I feel about being better at a game that involves rolling big balls at a little ball than a game that involves intelligence and vocabulary, but anyway...) and it was lovely. I should have asked if I could move in. Collette would have made me leave the house today.

When we were walking in the door after leaving, we asked the kids if they'd had a good time and Angus said yes and Eve said "yeah, but I don't know about that bitchin' ball. I don't think I'll be playing that again." I don't want to play bitchin' ball either. I don't know how to stop.