I am in the unfortunate position of being tired/fatigued/burned out and in need of a restful break, but when I start to rest I get bored and antsy at being idle. That leads me back to doing something, which is the opposite of nothing. I think I need relaxing nothing, but I keep coming up with taxing somethings.

My tiredness today is fallout from the build up to and the battle with the boy going to pre-school. After last time’s hysterics, I was dreading today’s attempt. That kept me from sleeping well last night, so I was already behind the 8-ball. Also throw on a sprinkle of writing fatigue from last night’s chapter, and I was mentally spent by lunchtime today.

The good news is that school went well. There was some mostly unrelated pant-wetting, but who doesn’t pee their pants when they’re sad? Of course, after a successful day at school, all of my promises came home to roost. The boy was over-energized by the thrill of making it through the school day and he was hell-bent to do every thing I had offered as a school incentive. So off I went with a hyperactive/mildly crazy boy to MacDonald’s, then the mall. The mall took the little bit of gumption I had left and threw it into the garbage. Top it off with some whiteout driving on the way home, and a little dude who was too energetic to even approach napping.

I got dinner on the table and slipped away afterwards to finally have a break, got bored with the game I’m playing right now, and went back to cleaning the basement in anticipation of the big family dinner I am cooking on Saturday. More work, less relaxation, creating more need for relaxing. At least I had a shower today.

Wow, does that child love decorating the Christmas tree. He was going full tilt at it the moment the tree came into the house, and there was no slowing him down. When we tried to suggest that we wait for the tree to settle in and unfurl (it’s a real tree that had been bundled up, so the branches were bent close to the body. I hear by label the process of the branches spreading out and lowering ‘unfurling’. Deal with it. And marvel at the length of this parenthetical side-note. It’s a paragraph!), but any talk of delay was met with soul-rending shrieks of sadness.  It did not help his patience that we had been out all morning doing errands and he was ready for a nap.

After a brief skirmish, we decided to just let him go to town. sure, one side of the tree got the lion’s share of candy canes, and there are no decorations above his eye level, but we can fix that later. He was even singing jingle bells while he did it. It was the perfect Christmas scene, except for his being nude from the waist down. Oh well. Fa la la la la.

He’s settled on a Christmas present for me. Evidently, the small ceramic Buddha who sits on my dresser is lonely and in need of shelter. He wants to give me another Buddha to keep O.G. Buddha company, and a new house for both Buddhas to live in.

 

Edit:Totally forgot to talk about the big fiction project and the schedule. Even though I torpedoed a day this week, I’m back at it and you should keep seeing new chapters every 2 days. The last one should drop on Boxing Day, unless I decide to get ahead of the game and finish things of by Christmas.

It’s like the ice cream flavour you hate but end up eating when you don’t have any other option. You know you don’t like the flavour, and it will not sit well, but you keep licking anyway. That failure flavour is ‘self-inflicted and deliberate’.  Yesterday, I pitched a little fit at the world around me and as a symbol of my childish rage, I lashed out. How did I lash out? Why, by failing on purpose, of course. I decided to not write the chapter I had due yesterday, just to spite myself. It’s the way I like to punish the world, by making it watch me kick the crap out of myself.  Did I feel better? No. I have lost the taste for controlled failure.

Sure, sabotaging yourself is appealing. It means your failures never really bother you that much, because you sank your own boat on purpose. There’s no ego loss from a failure like that.

Contrast it with failing after putting forth a real, honest effort. This is something I have historically avoided, but as a part of slowly becoming an actual adult, I have embraced the concept of trying hard and accepting honest failure. I discovered today that I don’t like the taste of that either.

This failure was an emotionally complicated one.  Max was dead-set against going to preschool today, or even leaving the house for that matter, so I was faced with the unpleasant task of dragging him against his wishes to school. To set the emotional stage for this drama, keep in mind that we have just emerged from a 3 day stretch of snow days, where his mom has been home, and things have been topsy-turvy and without any pattern. The day after a weekend is traditionally me and the boy’s stay-at-home day, where he cocoons and gets his bearings. This is what he wanted to do today, so the idea of going off to school and being a brave independent boy was very upsetting to him. I soldiered on through the 20 minutes of near hysterical crying while we got ready, promising him rewards and fun after school. Even the prospect of seeing his best friend at school didn’t help at all.

On the drive over, he calmed down and burst back into tears at least three times, and after one last attempt at convincing him to play and have fun in the classroom, I gave up. It broke my heart to push him to that point, but I kept telling myself that it’s a normal parent thing to do. I had set an unrealistic goal for myself and him, and when I hit resistance, I kept trying instead of folding right away. I should be proud of being gently persistent, and stopping when it was appropriate, but I hate the feeling of coming up short after trying my best. Yet another emotional situation that I have to learn to handle, how to cope with a hard-earned defeat. Oh well. The postscript to the story is that the little dude calmed down and had a great day after the school attempt. That’s good enough for now. We’ll tackle next week’s schooling later.