Agency

I am still alive! Everything is fine. No big news. I've been busy, and distracted by other forms of navel-gazing.

First, news of the kids:

• Skipper can read. 
• Duchess is currently pretty much delighted all the time (except for breaks for door-slamming tantrums) right now. She's got a potpourri of good stuff going on.
• Her "Battle of the Books" team is doing very well and providing a lot of really joyful socializing (which was very timely, as she had been very sad for a few weeks about her lack of friends) at her team's "practices." 
• She has been hanging out more with her best kung fu friend, which makes her also feel much better about her social life in general.
• She and her best kung fu friend are officially starting to prepare for their next big promotion.
• She's been getting more playdate invitations lately, from unexpected quarters, mostly from boys. I think she may be the practice Girl for many of the boys in her grade, as her temperament (flexible, enthusiastic) and her activity choices (electronics, frisbee, basketball, running club) have made her the girl that most of them know the best, and as they look ahead and realize that they are going to have to start having actual human relationships with the girls they know, Duchess seems like the easiest entree. I am crossing my fingers that being the practice Girl will turn out well for her. 
• Skipper is angry a lot lately, and blames everything on everybody else. We're weighing whether we want to try to figure out a therapy route or just wait and see how it goes. Being a rage monster seems like a bad strategy for life, but therapy seems like a big, time-and-money-consuming step that may or may not be helpful. 
• We've all been sick this week, with some kind of cold/flu thing.
• We busted out the extra twin bed, so now the girls have three beds in their room. Duchess sleeps in the twin bed (which she fills alarmingly full - it won't be long before we have to invest in an extra-long bed) and Skipper has moved to the upper bunk of the bunk bed. This means that Skipper no longer gets a parent lying down with her at bedtime, which is kind of a big change. It has gone very smoothly, and she is very pleased with her new sophistication. Duchess is also pleased with what she feels is her new sophistication (a bed of her OWN!), and they're both excited to host sleepover guests in the empty bottom bunk.

News of the adults:

• Cook decided he needed a project, and is accumulating the parts he needs to build himself a bike, which is pretty cool. 
• I've made self-improvement my project, and have added a daily half hour of exercise to my life, which is also cool. The main reason I kicked off my project is that lately I've been feeling like I had a little more agency in my life, and this seemed like an important way to deploy that agency.

Talking to a friend last fall about the experience of being unemployed, under-employed, and tenuously-employed  (not to mention employed with an abusive boss who considered me to be useless), I realized fully for the first time how destructive that has been for me. It left me feeling like I could not change anything about myself or my environment, like I was an inert, useless person to whom things just happen willy-nilly.*

Having now been employed for nine months at work at which I am successful and where I am appreciated and welcomed by people I respect, I think that I have been slowly rebuilding my feeling that I am NOT actually a useless failure of a person. I'm at the point now where I feel like maybe I can make small gestures at changing things in my life that aren't working well.**

I'm not going to write about my exercise program here, because I am well aware of how incredibly tedious that is.*** I will say, though, that starting an exercise program at my current advanced age is really different, and much less rewarding than starting an exercise program 14 years ago, so it's requiring every bit of that feeling of agency. Further behavior change will have to wait until my confidence is bolstered more.


*Weirdly, the symbolic representation of this helplessness for me is my teeth. The last year has been an ongoing misery of fillings for me, along with dire warnings of future misery to come. I have tried to do everything I have been told might help, but the cavities keep coming, and I don't see a way to make them stop.

**Even more weirdly, the symbolic representation that started making me feel like maybe I can change things is that I've been doing self-care for blepharitis.  This involves putting a warm washcloth on my eyelids, and then wiping my eyelashes, so it's not exactly the most empowering or exciting lifestyle change, but it is a thing I can do that actually improves something about my moment-to-moment life. That's kind of powerful.

*** Yes, even more tedious than keeping an unremarkable blog about one's unremarkable parenting of unremarkable (but much-loved) children.