You know it's been a long time since a post when Blogger "forgets" you. Bummer.

There was this big irony yesterday. I was asked to lead the women's Sunday School class, and the topic was Boundaries. I'm still rolling on the floor laughing at that one. What on earth could I possibly say about boundaries, given that, well, I have absolutely none myself. In a friendship gone remarkably wrong a couple years ago, I was given a book on Boundaries, called, I think, just that. I had kind of read or skimmed through it at some earlier point in my life (yes, my boundaries have been pretty fuzzy since about day one), but I read it then and I read it again this week and boy oh boy, I hope there's no multiple choice quiz on the thing. I guess I just don't get it. Actually, I do get it, loud and clear, while I'm reading. Nancy: you suck! But the second the book closes, I can't remember for the life of me at all what it said, other than that the only way to get some boundaries if you aren't blessed to be born with them is to spend $100 an hour on therapy with someone who will not provide you unconditional love. And to have a support group. And that there are a gazillion kinds of boundaries that I wouldn't want to have to differentiate in a final exam type situation. And I probably have none of them. And I can't even entirely figure out where my boundaries went out of bounds.

So here were the nuggets of wisdom that I did find and share about boundaries, along with the props which are still in my purse. There are two verses about a gazillionth of an inch apart in the microscopic-printed Galations in my Bible that seem to contradict each other--one that says that we are to bear each other's burdens, and one which commands that we are to carry our own loads. Huh? So the way this book explained it, the Greek word for "burden" meant something like "enormous things that would crush us if we tried to carry them by ourselves." Like a boulder. And the Greek word translated here as "loads" means the daily stuff we carry around. Like our knapsack. Or my purse, which these days is big and full enough to be more than just a "knapsack" with daily items and, indeed, does currently contain a miniature boulder. Because, see, I have no boundaries and haven't managed to evacuate from my purse the pile of small plastic animals, Fisher-Price fences, miniature knapsacks, and four pound rocks that I put in it to try to get me through this discussion yesterday.

Anyway, the point is, I suppose we are not intended to carry the boulders in our life by ourselves--the things that would crush us. We need help with those, and if we fail to ask for help with them, we'll be crushed, and that would not be a good thing. But we should carry our knapsacks by ourselves. This means that we shouldn't, at 38, be begging our mother for money or coercing "friends" to pick up our children every single day because we are always late, and other things that I can imagine myself doing if I had a mother or had friends who would comply with that kind of thing. And boundary issues arise when we confuse our boulders with our knapsacks or our knapsacks with a boulder. I like the image, actually. Always thinking in metaphors and not afraid to mix them, I imagine that we could also see boundaries as a cell membrane. What they don't seem to be is a wall. A wall doesn't have openings (unless it's my wall, which has a lot of holes from various projects gone wrong, nails in and out, doggie gates ripped straight out of them, spots where I was going to recess bookshelsves, etc.). But a cell membrane is porous and permeable, and bad stuff can come out, and good stuff can go in.

In my weeklong stewing about what I could say on Sunday morning that wouldn't turn into outright whining, TMI, shameless begging, wallowing in self-pity, or dissolving in a puddle of tears, I did manage to do all of the above while plumbing the depths of my problem with saying no to things. And what a week it was to do it in, since I was the queen of resentment and overwhelmedness when I accidentally double booked some spots on my schedule not just once, but three times! Three separate days of heart-pounding, blood-pressure raising, what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do-now-because-they-don't-clone-humans-yet two-timing. It was pretty awful. And embarrassing. Tuesday night I told someone who had a legitimate issue that I would meet them at the pool to collect some papers for dive team *at the exact same moment as Frances was getting out of dance class 20 minutes away.* On Thursday I was supposed to be at a director's meeting and a Boy Scout new parent orientation meeting that is a requirement for signing up for summer camp. Sunday I had set up a lunch date downtown with someone at the same time that my daughter was singing in church, and by the time I realized it, I couldn't get in contact with the person. Yikes. I felt so awful. And there was all that blood-pressure raising, heart-pounding crap with it. It all worked out, but I was beyond a chicken with its head cut off!

So here I am with boundaries. As a result of last week, I did step out of my typical conflict-averseness and stand up for my own needs. It hasn't gotten anywhere yet, but I'm ready to pursue what I really need so that I can avoid a year's worth of stress and strife for my family. I'm trying to put some time parameters around my swim and dive board obligations. There are questions I can't answer, loops I'm not in, and I am eating myself up with guilt when I pass along wrong information, get sucked in the middle of confusing information, and don't keep up with every single email without a clear antecedent. I spent much of Saturday blaming myself for something that it turns out wasn't even something I had done. But I didn't know that and assumed I must have been the source of the screwup, since I didn't know for sure that I hadn't. I surely can't rely on my memory any more. I have the memory and attention span of an 85 year old with Alzheimer's these days.

It's all been a signal that I'm doing too much. There are many things that aren't really working in my life, things that I'm plodding through with one foot in front of the other while they still manage to take my time. I have a hard time saying no to things, and I'm trying to trace it back to something I can blame my parents for. I'm reading in all these books that this is what I'm supposed to do. Of course, knowing the root may not get me anywhere for tomorrow. But still, I could stand to pitch a little blame at someone other than myself these days!

So my analysis is that even though I had thought that I grew up in a perfectly "normal" and typical home, I really did heap upon myself some sense of responsibility for proving that my parents could have a "typical" family despite their disabilities. I think I may have felt a sense of obligation to use my various abilities (we're not talking extraordinary gifts--we're talking about basic ability to walk and talk without physical difficulty, to get around in the world, to get to where other people are) "to the fullest" because there are people who are not able to do these things and I should not take them for granted. So perhaps I started doing, well, everything. I was the person who went up to the stage something like 17 times during our junior and senior year awards ceremony because there was hardly a club, publication, society, or activity that I hadn't been a part of. And I also don't think I ever really stopped seeking my mother's approval, perhaps because she thought that I walked on water, and even though she didn't mean to, she may have conveyed to me that I must live up to her seeming belief about me. The thing is, she has been dead for seven years, and quite frankly, no one thinks I walk on water any more, and the wetness up to my neck that I'm feeling as I try to keep my head above water these days is ample proof that yeah, I neither walk nor float.

My solution these days is kind of a drastic one. Instead of actually getting some balls and making changes so that I become a more likeable person, a person that I would want to be for myself, and a person who has a shred of sanity, I've determined that the only viable way out is to move to Colorado. Alone.

To that end, I've decided that I should probably enlist the help of a counselor. This is partly because walking right out on your family is probably legally considered abandonment, and it would be best to have gone through the proper channels to CMA, just in case I did act on this urge. If I was in Colorado, I could conceivably reinvent my entire being, drop my own pretenses for myself, and start from scratch. And I've never actually been to Colorado, so it has to be perfect, right? It just sounds very far, far away. And I don't know a single soul in the entire state. That's a part of the appeal.

What I'm hoping is that a counselor will urge me to either leave part of my family right here where I am or will help me fix all that is wrong with me and make me a less "mean" person who is a better listener. Trouble is, this would be the 4th counselor I've seen, and I'm still pretty screwed up and haven't changed a whole lot. I've even been told that I'm becoming even more mean and cold and horrible at listening, actually, since those previous attempts happened. I'm starting to think that the mean girl thing might be something I should actively embrace, since it may be here to stay.

On the proactive front, I did make some decisions this week. I can't work without childcare. That stupid aquarium is depriving me of things that I really want and possibly need in life. The cleaning/new pump/dead fish of the past week cost more than an entire week of camp for a kid, camp that we supposedly "can't afford." A less-than-one-week-break-that-isn't-really-a-break-because-I'll-have-a-5-and-an-8-year-old-still-home when I don't get a vacation at all from my job, however chosen it is, lost out to a piscine extermination camp that leaked all over our floor and ruined it. And we're still throwing money at it. It went out on Craigslist on Friday, but so far it's still sitting in my living room. I also determined that while I may not exactly bring in any real, useable money, the least I could do was change how I was spending it. We didn't sign up for any classes other than a preschool class for Rutledge while I'm teaching writing and Frances's acting class, which I'm kind of regretting right now because I am going to be playing tennis on Wednesday and can't figure out how I'm going to be in two places at once. I think I'm saving somewhere between $275 and $350 by doing this. I also have been religiously avoiding Starbucks for about 3 weeks now. I've gone once, and it was on what I convinced myself was a special occasion, though now at past midnight a week and a half later, I'm having a hard time remembering exactly what was so special about it. I estimate we'll save about $100 a month just by denying myself that little ritual. If I really need coffee, which I don't, I can make it at home (though the coffee press just smashed to bits in our dishwasher and our drip coffeemaker is missing a pot). Or drink tea. Or drink water, which would be even better. What I'm trying not to do is substitute my Starbucks addiction with a fountain soda one. But at least they tend to cost about 1/3 of the price of even a smallish mocha frappacino. The last thing I did was determine that I must liberate myself from what the Flylady (who I really don't like) calls CHAOS--Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome. Boy do I have it. My house is mortifying. It is so gross, and much of the gross in it can't be fixed. Like the people who leave the dirty, inside-out socks all over the place and the food wrappers and used tissues on the floor.... Oh wait, I meant the things that couldn't be changed are the things like the water and pee stains that have ruined our wood floors and the lack of sealing on them that makes them impossible to truly clean. And the carpets that are more than 20 years old and that have holes down to the backing in some places, a whole gallon of yellow paint spilled in one spot, and appalling stains. And the walls with the incidental child "artwork" on them and the greasy prints. So I went on a little campaign this weekened. I painted my family room turquoise, which is Pantone's 2010 Color of the Year. It's a little frightening, if I do say so myself. It's not especially "grown-up" looking. Probably more of an accent than an all-over wall color. But there it is. A tropical paradise right in the middle of suburbia. Merely the fact that it's not dirty is a plus for its column. Then I tackled the especially filthy and ball-point pen and pencil desecrated areas below our kitchen chair rail and up our staircase. This had been a brownish color called "Nomadic Desert," but I took it one tone lighter on the paint chip and made it "Divine White." Unfortunately, the red wall next to it seemed to make it 'pull' pink. So I threw myself at the mercy of the Sherwin Williams guy and asked him what the safest neutral for new homes is. What we determined is that instead of changing my wall color, I should change my trim color to a more pure white. I thought I had a very white-white, but after seeing it on a paint chip next to whiter whites, I discovered that it does have a bit of a yellow tone to it. So I bought a particularly over-expensive gallon of semi-gloss to redo my trim in the areas with the new Divine White, and I have to say, the sample spots I did with the new paint may just be able to redeem the pinkish feel and turn it to the "neutral" I've always dreamed of.

There were, in fact, a lot of things that happened this weekend, even though, by some of our ridiculous weekend standards, it was less eventful than some. Walter and Ollie are now officially Boy Scouts. They have their Scout badge and have their first camping trip with their new Troop in less than a month. Their crossover ceremony was on Friday night, and there was a life lesson moment there. They had not done their Arrow of Light, and quite frankly, neither had I. They don't even know where their Webelos books are. So they didn't get to go up with everyone else and receive an award. I told them that if this was important to them, they would have taken some initiative. They didn't. So you don't get the award. But Arrow or not, they are now real Boy Scouts. Saturday night we went to a progressive dinner. This just intensified my feeling that our house is really weird. These houses were so perfect, so tasteful, so...clean. Who knows--they may have someone who comes in to clean once or twice a week. Their kids may be scarred for life because they have to keep things perfect. They may have spent the past 25 hours before we arrived scouring every baseboard and hiding all of their inside-out socks under the beds upstairs so that their downstairs was immaculate. What I can say is that they had the right paint colors. And no one had a turquoise family room!

I play tennis tomorrow morning, and then the suburban season starts the next day. I am played tonight against a friend who is very evenly matched with me, and I won, which felt good. I needed that this week. I can't believe that spring is really here. Rainy. Wet. But here. And I am determined that this is my year to move up to 3.5. That is, if I don't move to a tennis-less hamlet in Colorado!