Coping/Not coping

Rocket Boy has been gone for two and a half months, and I really thought by now I'd be coping quite well. I'd have the housework down to a system, I'd be reorganizing the house the way I like it, fixing the meals I want to eat, I'd have time for hobbies, the twins and I would be going on outings every weekend... Instead, none of that is true.

The housework is a disaster. I can't keep anything clean or organized. It is -- not surprisingly -- much worse than when Rocket Boy lived here. Part of the problem is that I still haven't gotten my sleep figured out, still not getting enough of it, though I have good days. When you're tired all the time, and you still have to go to work every day, you (that is, I) have no energy for housework. I work frantically to keep things from falling apart completely. I have a big weekly to-do list that I try to hack away at every day. Yet every day, things get worse.

Positive counter-examples: for every negative thing in this blog post I'm going to try to say something positive. So here are a couple of positive housekeeping things.

1. The toilet broke last week and I fixed it. Yes, that's right, me. At first the toilet was running all the time. It actually kept me from falling asleep one night, and the next morning it wouldn't flush (I had to use a bucket of water to flush it, shocking the twins). I googled "toilet running all the time" and discovered that it was probably a problem with the flapper, a part I was unfamiliar with. I texted Rocket Boy and he agreed that the flapper was probably the problem and gave me some advice on how to buy a new one. He claimed they were all alike and I could just buy a standard one. But this turned out not to be true. We have an old toilet and cannot use the new style of flappers. So I had to go back to the hardware store and get one we could use. The photo shows, on the right our old crummy broken one, in the middle the new one I bought that didn't work, and on the left the second new one I bought that DID work. It was hard to do this, especially since I also had to scrub out the filthy toilet tank, but the alternative was calling a plumber which would have meant I would have had to clean the bathroom first. So I did it myself.

I actually need to go back in and adjust the chain, so the job isn't completely done. But the toilet flushes and I did it myself.

2. I organized the twins' sock drawer. The twins share a dresser, and it's so big that for the most part I can just put Kid A's stuff on the left side of each drawer and Kid B's stuff on the right side, and the clothes stay apart and it's fine. But the top drawer is different. It's divided into two sections and we keep socks on the left and underwear on the right. The underwear stays put; the socks don't. Rolled-up socks are round and they roll, and the socks get all mixed up, and this is annoying early in the morning. So, I made a drawer organizer out of cardboard. Actually, originally I bought a ready-made drawer organizer at Target, back in March, but it was too tall for the drawer. That stymied me until today, when I googled "how to make a sock drawer organizer" and learned that it was very easy, you just had to cut up some cardboard. Of course, for that I decided I needed an X-acto knife, and for that I had to call Rocket Boy in St. Louis, because although I was sure we HAD an X-acto knife, I had no idea where it was. I assumed it was in a junk drawer, but we have a LOT of junk drawers scattered throughout the house. Rocket Boy had several ideas about where an X-acto knife might be (he claimed we had two), but it was not in the first two places he suggested. I finally found it in the third place (a drawer in the workbench in the garage) and then I cut up my cardboard and put it together to form a drawer organizer. As you can see, it's really crummy looking, but it does the job. I'm very pleased.

Back to the negatives.

Food is a much bigger problem than I thought it would be. I had pictured myself making simple, healthy meals -- small, of course, because Rocket Boy wouldn't be here to eat them, but nevertheless lovely. Instead, I have trouble putting anything on the table at all. Several times we've just skipped dinner -- around 7:30 or so one of the twins will say, "Did we have dinner?" or "What are we having for dinner?" and I'll say, "Um, we're not having dinner tonight, can you just eat snacks?" At first this upset them, but they've gotten used to it, and THAT upsets me as much as anything. Rocket Boy and I have always been so good about preserving "dinner time" and here I am ruining it. And then on the nights that I do manage to make dinner (or heat up something frozen), it's almost always an entree and nothing else. No side dishes. No vegetables. Once in a great while I'll manage to heat up a package of frozen veggies, and occasionally I'll put out a fruit, like slices of watermelon. But that's it. I can't think when the twins last had a piece of broccoli. I'm planning that things will improve in the fall, but we've got a long way to go. The truth is that I hate cooking, and when I'm struggling, cooking is hard to make happen.

Positive counter-example: The refrigerator (as you can see above) is full of fruit, with some veggies too. I can see some bell peppers, apples, an orange, and a sack of grapes in the crispers, and in the main part of the fridge there's a thing of watermelon slices, a thing of strawberries, a thing of blueberries, a sack of cherries... We also have milk, orange juice, eggs, cheese... We're not starving and I will pull myself together on this front eventually. I will, I will. I hope I will.

I guess I'll stop here -- it's my bedtime, and I'm not in the mood to write more depressing things about my lack of time for hobbies and how I never take the twins anywhere. Suffice it to say that this is all a lot harder than I thought it would be -- or maybe it would be more accurate to say it's exactly as hard as I feared it would be. But we're still here, the kitties too. The kids go back to school in two and a half weeks, and we're even planning a little vacation for right before that. And the toilet flushes (though I do need to adjust that chain). We're coping.