I have this little problem. I have a hard time being bad at things. This is a problem because there are a lot of things I really want to do/be able to do and I have enormous psychological issues getting past the ‘beginner’ stage. I would rather madly love to be able to sew and be crafty. When I run into small issues I more or less stomp my feet and declare that I just can’t do it and I go cry. Very mature and all that. But I don’t exactly want Shanna to be like this because there is a whole world of things she currently can’t do. So I need to start working on this. It’s hard for me.
I also have this problem of feeling like if I take downtime then obviously I am a lazy git and I just suck. This isn’t true, but guilt overwhelms me a lot of the time. This is even worse because I project this onto Noah and treat him like he is a lazy git for wanting down time. It’s not very nice of me. In my defense I have done a lot of work on that and I am way better towards him than I used to be. I can still improve quite a bit though.
Some days I feel overwhelmed by the long list of ways in which I am a deeply flawed human being. There are so many things “I need to work on” that I feel like there isn’t much of a point and I should just quit. I obviously suck. Why bother working on anything? ARGH!
I finally got the Google Reader set up today. This pleases me. Now I can actually keep up with the myriad of neat parenting and homeschooling blogs I like. See, I did something new to me. I realize it wasn’t rocket science or anything but that little hurtle is a big one for me.
We finished doing the insulation! By “we” of course I mean Taylor. I think I owe Taylor something like five years of favors for this project. I do help…a little… but mostly he has been doing the work. Of course I feel a lot of guilt for this. This project has given me some interesting stuff to chew on. I really admire guys who are handy and into household projects. I think that is just fricken awesome. Of course then I married a guy who isn’t like that. It means that I have a hard time appreciating it sufficiently when Noah does stuff because I treat him like he still isn’t doing enough–that’s not exactly incentive for him to try, now is it? Let me be clear here: Noah does a lot of stuff around the house. He just doesn’t do house projects for fun. They are different categories of stuff. Noah’s idea of a fun project is something involving a computer and several hours of me and Shanna leaving him alone. 🙂 It’s different. So if I want house project stuff done I should work on getting better at doing it myself. I am more grateful to Taylor than I can adequately express in this space because fiberglass insulation by myself with Shanna would be an f’in nightmare. Thank God I didn’t have to do that. It would have taken me a year. But I need to stop getting myself into situations where I expect a man to come rescue me. I need to get better at doing stuff myself or not starting at all. Erf.
I’m having a hard time finding balance between social time and time at home. I feel super super busy lately and I’m falling behind on house chores. But if I stay home much more I start feeling depressed and lonely. I don’t know where the ‘just right’ balance is here and it’s hard. Maybe part of the problem is that I spend too much time out of the house being social and almost zero time in my house being social. Hm.
Balance is hard. Balance on a lot of different axes at once is really hard. *sympathy*
Good for you for doing hard things. I admire that in you, and I also admire your openness in talking about it here.
I feel supported when I know that people I know are doing some of the same kinds of hard things that I’m trying to do. (And boy, wanting to be able to do things without ever being at a beginner phase of doing the thing? I have struggled with that. A lot.) It’s easier for me to do or continue to do hard things then. So yeah, thanks for doing hard things and talking about them here where I can see them. 🙂
Sort of on the subject of house projecty stuff….I have a couple of friends you may have met (or not) who do house projects, and the one thing that has kept them from going insane is they go ahead and enroll in the Home Depot or whatever workshops about “how to do XXXX to your home yourself” before they do it, so they get a day playing with the tools and the materials and seeing how it works before trying. If you think you might want to do more of that kind of thing (tile your floor, crown mold your ceiling, whatever) maybe a class like that would work. Or would that be too much public exposure while you were learning something new?
Figuring out the social balance is a fundamentally hard problem, I think. I mean, I”m an introvert, so I’m hardly the person to talk to about balance. But I also spend nine months of the year being a complete and total hermit, followed by three months where I feel like I should be getting things done but also want to go see people except I got out of the habit of seeing people and it’s hard to get started again. And I don’t have to think about the needs of a kidlet. I can’t even imagine how you manage to figure it out.
Of my three long-term relationships, I’ve had one guy who knew how to do things around the house but didn’t like to, one guy who didn’t have a clue about how to do such things, and one guy who knows how to but whose physical disabilities prevent him from doing many of them. I’ve gotten pretty good at doing them myself, and it’s a source of a surprising amount of satisfaction.
However, I wouldn’t dream of trying to hang insulation all by myself, even without a baby.
i hear you about hating the beginner’s stage.
makes me krazy, too.
there’s so much i’d love to do but can’t stand the thought of not knowing what i’m doing or not being able to learn/do it fast enough.
yet,
y’know,
think about it.
how much we’ve learned
and how often we’ve been beginners
and just sort of cruised by it.
really…
before we had kids, what did we know about that?
not a fucking thing.
before we started driving, what did we know about that?
not a fucking thing.
before we started kissing, what did we know about that?
not a fucking thing.
honestly,
the list goes on and on and on.
maybe we’re just stubborn dumbfucks
who *think* we don’t like being a beginner
when actually what we’re really good at is being a beginner.
kiddo, i say we should embrace our ignorance!
let’s each pick something we want to do, but won’t.
pick just one son-of-a-bitching fucking thing.
just one.
then do it until we’re past the stage of beginnerdom.
see if it kills us dead or what, this struggling to learn.
we can be ignorant frustrated asstarded beginners together.
what say ye?
pick something – dammit – i double-dog-dare ya!
and then, so shall i!
and then we’ll find out how sucks the most at being a beginner.
i mean it, man.
i’m serious!
and i challenge anybody else reading this to join us, too…
Oh, I so hear you.
My husband does do stuff around the house, or tries to at least. He’s better with the computers, but it seems that when he tries bigger home projects, things seem to go awry and that makes him feel really awful – but mostly because he’s an mechanical engineer, so he feels like this stuff should be easier than it is for him. I try to tell him that designing something on the computer is vastly different than being a skilled carpenter and that his dad never sat with him as a kid and taught him any useful skills – things that USED to be passed down from generation to generation.
You get better by practicing and by learning from someone who is good at it so they can show you the ropes, tell you the tips that they leave out of the instructions, and help point out where things could go wrong.
So…sometimes, you HAVE to be dependent on someone else, for a little while anyway to learn from until you are confident to go it alone.
Here is a link to a post I had about not finding balance, but finding harmony instead.
http://raisingsmartgirls.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/maybe-balance-isnt-what-im-after-either/
I can’t figure out if or how livejournal accepts hyperlinks. I’ve tried it two different ways now to no avail. Sorry, if I can’t figure it out, I guess you’ll have to cut and paste the link to a new browser window.
Let me try something else:
[url=http://raisingsmartgirls.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/maybe-balance-isnt-what-im-after-either/]http://raisingsmartgirls.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/maybe-balance-isnt-what-im-after-either/[/url]
okay, no how ’bout this
http://raisingsmartgirls.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/maybe-balance-isnt-what-im-after-either/
argh…forgettaboutit.
Hey, perhaps your computer whiz husband can tell me how to set up hyperlinks when I comment.
thanks.
You use HTML. 🙂 Syntax can be found here.