I’m embracing a spacious tomorrow, as the Summer of Renovations continues with a house purge to end all house purges.
I’m so tired. It’s been a long time coming, my friends.
Purging my office was as scary as anything. And I have no one to blame but myself. I’m focusing on how productive I’ll be when I move back in!
So, my horoscope today was most encouraging: “Find comfort in your work today, Scorpio…. checking things off your list is the most rewarding activity today… Mountains that seem too daunting to climb will continue to grow bigger until you take the first step upward. Your perseverance will inspire others.”
Yes, I’m tired, but I’m also energized at all the fresh space that’s appearing!
Because we’re moving walls in our kitchen, we’re replacing and updating all our cabinets and appliances. It’s a splurge, no doubt, but I set aside my bred-in-the-bone waste-not-want-not frugality in light of getting a gas cooktop – and a steam oven! Oh, the fun I will have! Plus, all our current cabinets and appliances will be going to new homes, so it’s win-win.
But before that can happen, everything has to be emptied. Everything.
We’re also replacing all the flooring (five cats, four dogs and three birds took a toll) so all the furniture has to be moved to the basement. Everything.
It’s a purge of massive proportions.
So far I’ve taken six carloads (I think, maybe more) to Goodwill. The phone desk and junk drawers in the kitchen are empty. The laundry room is empty. Six closets have been purged and reorganized. Today I’m clearing the pantry and china cabinet. The room over the garage is totally empty, ready to become what the builder calls a “nanny suite.” One day, for real estate purposes, I’ll call it that, I suppose, but for us, it’s a guest suite. In this house, for now, the time of children is past.
Which is what gives this process such emotional weight, for me.
The thought of clearing this house has been a dark, shadowy mountain looming over me for the better part of a decade, since my chicks started leaving the nest. Our last one left for good a couple of years ago and letting go of her, of them, of that stage of life, gutted me in a way I did not expect. This is a family house, where we ate meals around the table, played games, cared for all those pets. Those front stairs have seen three prom dresses and one wedding dress. Here is where we finished raising them, for better or worse.
It feels like an ending. But it’s also a beginning. This is where we started clumsily building the foundations of adult relationships with our daughters. This is where we started navigating our marriage as a couple now without children.
The stuff represents so much…. life. So much love. But there’s so much more living and loving in store for us. Clearing away the stuff that no longer serves us now makes room for what lies ahead.
So I continue to climb the mountain, and will take comfort in checking tasks off my list today, lovingly letting go of yesterday to embrace a spacious tomorrow.
Some of you know we recently traveled to China. It was an amazing trip, but I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow because we’ve all lived through slide shows of Uncle Morris’s trip to Wisconsin as a kid.
But I will relate one story.
If you’re… delicate… you may want to give this one a miss. Otherwise, here goes:
Squat Toilets 101. Consider yourself introduced.
Everyone, it seems, is curious about the bathroom situation in China. So yes, we saw squat toilets. Yes, we used squat toilets, yes, we remembered to bring our own TP and yes we managed just fine. I’m also pleased to report that Western “potty” toilets were available in many places. Not the smaller tourist spots, mind you, so, ahem, scheduling is important.
Ah yes, scheduling. You’ll understand me when I say that sitting in an airplane, traveling across time zones, eating different foods at different times, being sleep deprived and experiencing bathroom anxiety can all play havoc with a person’s system. Schedules get disrupted. Sometimes schedules come to a complete halt. You getting me?
The Silver Caves at Yangzhuo – see? Not just about bathrooms.
Now, we’d brought with us a small arsenal of pharmaceuticals, prepared for pain, sprains, coughs, congestion, motion sickness, dry eye, crowd anxiety, what have you. We assumed the worst-case scenario would be an explosive case of food poisoning.
Wrong. In fact, after several days of progressive… sluggishness… I would have welcomed a little salmonella. I finally admitted my distress to one of our travel companions. He’s a doctor. I’ll call him Dave.
Tell me you wouldn’t be rationing fluids, too.
“Dave,” I said. “I have one goal today. It’s the same goal I had yesterday and the day before and the day before that. Can you help me?”
“Sure.” He handed me a packet. “Take this.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s the stuff you take before a colonoscopy. Drink it before bed. It’ll put you right.”
Those of you who’ve had colonoscopies know where this is going.
“Dave,” I said. “It’s bad enough in the privacy of your own home. But while traveling? IN THE LAND OF SQUAT TOILETS?”
“Just take a little,” he said.
Which reminded me of when I went for pregnancy ultrasounds and they were running late and I’d drunk eighteen gallons of water that morning and the nurse, upon seeing my distress, gave me a little medicine cup and said, “Pee out a few tablespoons.”
Except so very much worse.
Declining medical advice, my husband and I took to the streets of Beijing, looking for a convenience store. Surely there’d be some good old Ex-Lax out there somewhere, we thought.
Nope. We ended up in an herbal pharmacy, staffed by people who spoke zero English. We typed the word “constipation” into our English-Chinese translation app and the clerk understood immediately. She sold us a package that looked like this:
Oh, that helps.
With instructions that look like this:
I was using a fabulous little app called Pleca, which works thusly: you hold your phone over the words you need translated and BOOM, you get the English version.
Decoding the translation requires a little effort, because the characters have meanings that depend upon the characters before and after them, so they could mean many things. Here’s a partial snapshot of the box, as translated by Pleca:
My favorite part is the description, in small letters that you probably can’t see:
Write pill? Wha…?
“… for real hot product delay due to consumer lag…”
It’s a lyrical language, isn’t it?
The box contained eight packets filled with tiny red beads.
“Do I eat them?” I asked my husband. “Do I smoke them? Make tea from them?”
“I don’t care,” he said. “We have a two-hour drive to the Great Wall in the morning. This ends now.”
Rafting down the Yulong River was so much fun!
So, I dumped them into a glass of water, shot it back like wormy mezcal, then lay down on the floor next to the bathroom and waited for them to work.
They did not.
But two hours later, as I was imagining the Chinese herbalists enjoying my method acting, and rethinking the colonoscopy prep idea, my dear husband, who’d happened onto a fresh fruit stand, saved the day by plying me with fructose and fiber. Consumer lag ended shortly thereafter and life returned to normal.
I hiked that Great Wall like a spritely rock star.
Life isn’t a box of chocolates, my friend. It’s a very large bag of cherries.
The brilliant author Nancy Robards Thompson​ recently issued a #100DaysofHappiness challenge and I’m taking her up on it. If you’ve been following me for a while, you might recall my 100 Days of Bikram Yoga challenge, where I not only did 100 straight days of Bikram yoga, but I blogged about it most days as well. 100 day challenges apparently work for me.
So here’s my entry for Day 1.
My baby, all growed up.
As some of you know, our youngest daughter left for university this past weekend, leaving me a little… forlorn. Motherhood has been my primary identity for well, most of my adult life. Natural childbirth, breastfeeding, homeschooling, the works. Attachment, baby. All the way. Plus, I’m a Scorpio. We grab on. Tight. (Mama Doesn’t Share Food!!)
Which was all great. Until now when my primary task IS to let go.
Some things were easier when our girls were smaller. For instance, we could tuck them into bed, set the alarm and know they were safe. Some things were almost unbearably sweet: the fresh-from-the-bath smell when tucking them into bed. The full-belly laughter. The innocent, wide-open trust in their eyes. The hand-holding.
But there was lots to counteract that easy sweetness: screaming fits, hours-long bedtime rituals where I just wanted to spray them with Nap-Time (come on, you’ve thought about it too!) not to mention the power-struggle between 30 pounds of arched-back fury and a non-negotiable car-seat. In the dreaded mommy-van.
As our daughters have grown into independence, I’ve morphed as well. But this milestone, last chick launched, is forcing me to evaluate my life and goals. The Next Stage of my life is here. How do I want to play it? (And for the last time, Honey. Naked Wednesday is NOT a thing.)
To mark the event: a Celtic infinity knot, symbolizing the mother-child bond.
So this is my Day 1 of Happiness: I’ve got a wide-open world ahead of me, with three fantastic adult children and a husband who loves me even when I get broody and existential. I’ve got a career I love, with readers who remind me that exploring the landscape of relationships through fiction is important. I’ve got excellent friends who also love me, despite my neuroses, or what I call The Adventures of Roxanne’s Brain.
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