real talk #1

It is a Friday night and LM is at the school dance and the Mr. is at a bar next to the school dance with all the dads just in case someone wants to leave early. I just finished a book and am sitting in a quiet house, which is a gift but I have this busy mind, haha sigh. Here are some hot takes and real talk from this moment!

The bee paper I found at my aunt’s seemed to point at my buzzing mind, haha!

I am two weeks and change away from this ankle and foot surgery. Is it bad that one of the things I’m most worried about is not working for 2 1/2 weeks? Since the pandemic, I’ve talked a big talk about having better boundaries with work and not having it be my identity… but, the idea of not working is really freaking me out! I haven’t taken 2 weeks off in a row since I had Lil Momma and was on leave. Obviously, I have more work to do (pun intended, sigh)…

Things are moving on clearing out my aunt’s house, but I am at the point where I have to make big important decisions about whether or not to do work or just put the house up as it is right now. It kind of hangs over a lot of things. We have an inspection to pass on Monday that will be a big determinator about which way we go, so hopefully I can get this out of my head for the weekend, at least, and control my controllables. 

I am looking at a bag of spring/summer clothes for LM to try on. Buying clothes for tweens is not my favorite thing, I’ve discovered. Her input was to find pastel colors and not the big baggy pants but more sporty but still girly… hopefully some of this fits.

On the other side of the clothes perspective is that I did a huge wipe of my own closet last weekend. The problem is I didn’t have enough clothes to begin with, sigh. My goal before surgery is to find five shirts I can wear on camera while working from home during my recovery that I’ll just cycle through each week…  I’ll worry about pants when I get closer to being able to go back in office in the summer.

I will end with a  story: we have had my mother’s hope chest in our living room for at least two years. It might be three. It was so heavy that just getting into the house was a huge effort for me and the Mr. It was so packed full of stuff, though, that the idea of having to empty it out and go through everything was just too much for me; too overwhelming and emotional and I just didn’t wanna do it - so, it became part of our furniture downstairs rather than go up into our bedroom closet which was the original plan.

Unfortunately, it’s going to be a tripping hazard during my recovery. Last weekend, I  gave myself an hour and said I was gonna empty the whole thing so we could carry it upstairs and then I would just repack it. I got by the first layer of stuff, which was cards LM had made for her Nana (to be expected) and then had my mind completely blown.

I found editions of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and  Martin Chuzzlewitz from 1867. 

I found a bunch of Polaroids from the first few weeks of my life. 

I found every report card my mother ever received from elementary school through the secretarial college she attended.

Most importantly, I found that a good bit of the weight came from:

Every wall calendar my mother had used from 1978 straight through 2022.  

There were so many of them. It was pretty wild to see how the designs changed over the years and to look back and see what appointments she and my dad had had and what she thought to put on a calendar.

That does make it seem like it was a nostalgic moment. It was not. We may have thrown them around a lot out of frustration, ha ha! What a life lesson to be emotionally afraid to go through something for years and then have it be calendars instead of spicy family secrets or hard truths.  

PS: we found all her pocketbook planners, too!

Do you keep calendars between years? As part of our New Year’s family tradition, we burn ours and hope for a fresh start…