Why did it take me all my life to sort this one out?
If I'm performing creative/interesting/inspiring work I can be tired but happy.
If I'm doing basic maintenance of self and surroundings, I can be tired but cranky and irritable.
It all takes the same amount of energy (the spoons) but the end result is far, far different.
Dishes can knock me out, standing, even meditating (thanks Kate), slopping around in the water, does me in. A cheery heart while doing mundane tasks does not come easy to me. Gratitude for being able to stand at all evaporates.
What I resent most about bad exhaustion is that is zaps me from any other activities. I'm not a methodical person by nature and I've tried everything - a reward of, say, a phone call, after the dishes are done doesn't work for me. I am too tired.
Whereas working on crafting (currently that sofa blanker is now heading into the stratosphere of 2 feet, thank you very much after so many fails), can see me making the call and knitting at the same time in complete bliss.
Finding a balance is difficult for me at the best of times. I do plot out my days, I do have an agenda with all the necessary tasks listed, nothing ambitious or even moderately over extending myself, but the overwhelm is present just about all the time. Call it Irish Catholic Guilt, engrained since birth. Today I feel up for the weekly family Zoom.
I attended an online retreat this morning, I wrote two cards to friends, made my lunch, took my gallon of pills, started on the Words for Wednesday post, read a couple of chapters of my latest book, played 14 games of Lexulous (stretching the old brain, a daily event for like, 15 years now). Meditated some. Worked on a memoir and a poem for a competition.
And yes I got dressed, braided my stupid long, long hair, and am now writing this post. I will march shuffle the 10 miles of halls to drop the cards in the mailbox in the main lobby later on tonight and see if I can stick my name on the weekly Covid laundry schedule and then fingers crossed, I am actually not too exhausted to fulfil that obligation.
So on it goes, a peak into my day.
And the dishes sigh on in the sink. But I am good exhausted.
It is weird isn't it? And I am sadly the queen of slow learners. I am still paying the price for over doing it in the garden. Work that I enjoy but which leaves me seriously knackered. I am on borrowed spoons to even do the basics today.
ReplyDeleteI think we need to ignore the Have Tos in favour of I want Tos EC. Maybe just have a generally awful day once in a while, catching up on the crap and then the next few are fun like gardening for you and knitting, etc. for me. It's just the Too much that does us in and getting to an imbalance with the spoons is deadly. Mentally and physically.
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Some of days are plotted but mostly not. I work the day ahead out in my morning shower. What please is the COVID laundry schedule?
ReplyDeleteWe have free laundry rooms on each floor. In the Before Times it was hit or miss on the machines. But now only 1 person can use the laundry room at a time. It works out better and tenants want to keep this arrangement - as you get to do your entire laundry using all machines in a brief length of time. Except, as you'd anticipate the one rule breaker who is deaf, lonely and old and loves to hang around maskless putting a knickers at a time in a machine for a full cycle of washing and drying. We have reported her but there is a mental issue as well.
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You need someone like me to live close by and come to do your dishes. I love washing up, I find it soothing to get my hands in hot sudsy water and make things shiny clean.
ReplyDeleteI never understood why people feel Catholic guilt, Irish or otherwise.
Oh River what a sweet thought! Irish Catholics in my time were raised in extraordinary shame and guilt, confessing our "sins" in abject shame on Saturday afternoons in confession. Often making them up if we couldn't find any like punching a brother or sassing a mother. It was an oppressive environment never allowing for free thinking. A cult.
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The only thing I ever feel about washing dishes these days is complete, blinding rage.
ReplyDeleteI live with 3 adult children who have always done their utmost to avoid dishes:washing or drying. I have asked, nagged, cajoled and blown my top but still they resist. They have improved slightly but not very much.
Someone told me recently that we have to make the transition from "parenting" to "co-habiting"
I think I have made the transition but they have not.
And there I go making it about me! I think you have done really well for your day. You obviously do a great job of writing and sending gifts to people you care for and that stuff is important. Add in a cooked meal, shower, braids, creative pursuits and it sounds like a fulfilling day.
That must be really difficult Kylie. My method would be to go on strike but then living with the mess would be extremely stressful. I'm sure you've tried talking/reasoning with them or maybe a kitchen schedule would work? That's what my grandgirl did when sharing a house with 4 others. And enforced it which astonished me.
DeleteIt was a good day, Kylie, the dishes still sigh today but I may tackle a few.
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I have photos of my children washing/drying dishes. If I can find them I'll erase the faces and post them. They did it willingly, taking turns. They cooked too.
DeleteThat afghan is stunning. I so understand the good exhausted of a pleasant job well done and the raving exhausted of an unpleasant job, done.
ReplyDeleteThank you Joanne, it took me so long to get there with this pattern.
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Dishes can always wait ...
ReplyDeleteExactly Tom and creativity can't.
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The dishes will not march away in the night. Go to bed...
ReplyDeleteYes, ma'am.I did.
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I go with e. The dishes can wait! Yes it's strange how a completed jop takes you differently after the nature of said job.
ReplyDeleteI'm often angrier when I complete a hated task, it sucks the positivity out of me and I'm totally drained. If there were anyone who could roll in here for 1/2 hour at the end of the day and do them I would gladly compensate them :)
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My comment for most of the post is "welcome to the club". Standing for long or walking for more than some meters exhausts me but, I have to do both whether I like it or not. Dishes particularly get my goat up and I simply have to wash them, dry them and stow them away before I can venture into making myself some tea. By and large I am the classic couch potato.
ReplyDeleteYou're more disciplined than I am Ramana. That system doesn't work for me and my huge mistake is having too many dishes. I've seriously considered paper ones, but environmental responsibility stops me.
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I'm an ( atheist ) Irish protestant married to an ( atheist ) English/Belgian catholic.
ReplyDeleteHe feels guilt, I don't!
I think Catholics and Jews of my era have loads in common, we are the masters of shame and guilt, even post-therapy, it's in the DNA, Anne.
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My mother-in-law was a devout Belgian catholic, married to an Englishman and living in England. She always maintained that the Irish catholicism she encountered in church there ( sometimes having an Irish priest for example ) was a different breed altogether to her Belgian one. In Belgium the nuns told the girls to always question, always think for themselves. As someone who grew up in Ireland where 99% of my friends were catholic I can confirm that that was not what the nuns told the Irish girls to do.
ReplyDeleteI would be that exception to that rule, Anne, I went to a marvelous convent private school and the nuns, many of them Phds, encouraged critical thinking, insisted on higher mathematics and let us run free in the science labs with "domestic science" (home ec) an option only, rejected by most pupils in a time when this simply was not done.
DeleteI feel truly fortunate in my education. A total rarity for girls in my era.
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That’s good to hear. I actually had an awful education in a tiny private school in Co Wicklow. We learnt no Irish which makes me furious and precious little of anything else! x
DeleteI am very thankful for the dishwasher. I decided 46 years ago, in our first apartment with a dishwasher, that we would never live in a place without a dishwasher, and so it has been. For one week, after I retired, I apartment-sat for a friend in San Francisco. It was a third-floor walkup which did not bother me in the least. Stair-climbing is good for me. The biggest problem, no dishwasher and clothes dryer. Appliances are very important to my level of comfort.
ReplyDeleteTry as I might, DKZ, my kitchen is so poorly designed that even a drawer type or counter-top does not fit. I have explored endlessly. I would pay a lot for anything that would fit and take this burden from me. This is the first time I've "lived" without one in over 45 years.
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I would guess that a rental would be near impossible to remodel and attempt a dishwasher. If it wasn't there when you moved in, it's unlikely to every be there. Our apartment in San Francisco had a dishwasher, and I complained about it as it was so noisy, I just knew it could be heard on the street, 17 stories below! We got to the point that we would turn it on as we were leaving the apartment. The apartment management wasn't going to replace the dishwasher.
DeleteI've lived alone for 30 yrs and in all that time, no fairies have ever come in the night to clean the kitchen when it was left undone. A great deal of satisfaction comes from completing a difficult task and more time than not, there was more time spent thinking about it than time spent completing it. Pace yourself.
ReplyDeleteI'm missing the satisfaction gene, Mona. Seriously. I have always resented housework, I come from a long line of non-housekeepers and our housekeeping was always reactive, as in when a guest was expected, etc.
DeleteI am lucky I have a good cleaner come in every couple of weeks, she is a treasure.
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I can work and work and work outside and be tired but absolutely content, so I get that. Housework bores me. (Except laundry and cooking, those I'm fine with.)
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