weekend lookback, labor day 2014

Row 1: School starts, summer ends; dinner lingers; Row 2: Flowers last

So perhaps you heard, but last Friday I woke up with yet another migraine. I did my normal routine of taking meds, and getting Neel and Cal out the door. While they were showering and getting ready, I edited some photos because sometimes it helps the pain when I concentrate on something like that, and all they while I was congratulating myself on holding my shit together pretty well. Cal had been at school for an hour before I realized that never fed him breakfast.

Lovely. Mother of the year right here.

Look. He was fine. And he normally takes care of himself on the weekends or over the summer, and once he got to school he grabbed some BBQ chips and Lifesavers (?), so all was well, but clearly I'm not holding the shit together as well as I thought I was. The thing about the migraines is that the pain and ensuing attendant symptoms are cumulative, and when you have a string of these things you start to get beat down after awhile. It's troubling too to feel like you're doing everything you can and still feeling so, so sick. By Sunday I'd hit five in seven days, and I was pretty much done in. I'd already decided to head to the doctor today when it occurred to me that I might just be a sinus infection that's causing this round of misery.

Lightbulb. Now that I've self-diagnosed, I'll still be heading into the doctor. But hopefully for some more immediate relief.

We still had a nice weekend. Met friends from out of town on Saturday for a long day at the beach filled with much talk and catching up. Met friends we hadn't seen all summer for a leisurely brunch on Monday. Moved slowly. In the between times Neel worked hard on his class, Cal worked on his homework, and I tried to recover. I thought about it a lot this weekend, and lately really too, how hard we all work and how important recovery is. The first week of school is hard on all of us, and recovery is so important. Have you seen that thread running through the internet over the past months, "Stop the Glorification of Busy?" I've been thinking about that article a lot this fall as Cal starts back to school, and Neel has been working every weekend. The glorification of busy.

Here's how I see of it: Busy is a four letter word.

We're all busy. Who isn't? Kids to day care and dance lessons. Up late with homework and practice after school. Running from one meeting to another. Re-writing curricula and managing colleagues. Meeting deadlines and making dinners. And yet I have so many friends and colleagues who trot out their schedules like they are resumes, as if their self-worth is to be found in the tiny cramped lines of their calendar pages. How many conversations do we start with, "I'm so busy..."

Well, we're all busy. Every single one of us has a plate that tends toward too full. But is that who we really are? Is that where we think our value lies? In the endless conveyer belt of things we do? If your calendar is more packed than mine, do you matter more? What would happen if, when we sat down to meet a friend for coffee or dinner or ran into them on the way out to the car, we focused instead on how we were doing instead of what we were doing? What if we spoke about what we felt our hearts? To my mind that's where our real value lies.

So we're busy. Eh. That's not why we matter to each other. That's not why we matter to the universe. Simply because we are here, living life upon this earth, we matter. We are bigger than all the things we do.

weekend lookback, august 25

Row 1: Gathering from Scratch, Sunset, Fairylight Supper; Row 2: Breakfast by Vermeer, Farmhouse Window, Farm Life

So I snuck away this weekend. Let me first say that leaving Neel and Cal home alone during the 12-day Simpsons marathon on FX might have been my best parenting decision EVER. When I got home yesterday afternoon, they hugged me by patting me on the back vaguely, before their eyes glassily veered TV-ward again. So, win-win?

There were no back-to-back-to-back Simpson's episodes for me. There was instead a 300 year-old farmhouse, the oldest stone farmhouse in the Shenandoah Valley. There were the rolling hills of West Virginia. There were lab puppies! (Swoon.) (I told them as I was leaving not to count heads. There might be a puppy coming home with me.) (There wasn't.) There were horses and sheep and pigs and cows and goats and chickens and parrots and peacocks who flew onto the roof each night at twilight. All of that was pretty amazing.

The food was pretty amazing too. I don't want to say too much today because there are so many photos to download, but each meal was so beautifully presented and served on stunningly laid tables. One of the hosts, Rebecca Gallup, from A Daily Something, is a prop stylist, and I could have spent the entire weekend with her just learning how she makes each decision she makes. Beth Kirby of local milk is a recipe developer, stylist and food photographer, and she handled that end in addition to keeping us fed. The food, and just being fed? That part alone for someone who does the feeding in the family, well, that was pretty special.

It's possible that I'm not the best workshop attendee. Too introverted, perhaps. Although I met so many wonderful women and enjoyed every moment with them, it's not the thing I'm best at. And let's face it. I'm not so great at the practical part of learning things either. Not great at taking advantage of having the experts on hand to guide me. I can ask questions and pick brains, but when it comes time to try stuff out and get help, I freeze up a little. It's also possible that I'm just a crappy stylist and always will be and no amount of workshops is gonna change that.

Don't get me wrong, simply being there and soaking up every moment was a really, really good thing. And some of the women there unfolded like flowers, and that was a beautiful thing to see. If I wanted to come home having fallen in love with styling, it's really okay that I didn't. I thought for the longest time that it was that I just didn't know enough, and once I knew more, I'd be okay. It might be that it's just not a good fit for me. Instead, I came home with an appreciation for gathering around the table and tending to my family with food. That sense has been sorely missing since I've been ill this summer. I came home more in love with my little Fuji than ever. I came home having made some really lovely friends among some really talented women.

I have more to tell you, all the lovely details of how well tended to we were all weekend, and all the beauty of the farm we stayed on, but you know what? My kid starts 9th Grade today, and that's the crazytown most important thing. Another school year begins, and I think I hear his alarm. Cinnamon rolls are on the menu, so it's a good thing I'm feeling rejuvenated.