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Life Looks Different Now

It has been awhile.  

I've decided to just jump in like no time as passed and see what happens. 

I am trying desperately to get my social media usage under control. Insert "The Social Dilemma"  plug here. I have every reason to delete all social media. And every excuse not to. For now, I have decided to use the season of Lent as a time to focus on moderation. I have set a screen time limit on my phone for social media.

At exactly 9:45 this morning, I hit my screen time limit.  Day 3 and my resolve is already waining. 

During this soul searching pertaining to my technology/social media usage  (or maybe perhaps, how it has gripped my life and started using me), I felt nostalgic for the days I would just sit down and write. Writing, second to running--I find very therapeutic. 

I want to write a book.

I have no idea what about.  

Or what genre. 

But if this is a goal that I want to take seriously, I must write and I must write often.  

So here I am....

I come to you, in my IKEA chair, sitting next to my snake house plant I got for Valentine's Day.  Jackson is playing ABC mouse while creating an annoying amount of noise with a remote control car. Both Haley and Owen are working through their math work for the day.

Haley is dividing with decimals. Owen is working on a word problem.

This is Friday now. 

Life looks different now.

It would be a regular ol' cliche, if it weren't for 2020. "Life looks different now" carries a much heavier weight than before 2020.  It is more than "something people say". It isn't a cliche, it is trauma.  Or at-least that is what my TikTok therapist says (yeah like I said, I had developed a social media problem). 

The irony of it. For us, life looks totally different, but it literally has nothing to do with the pandemic. It looks totally different because we chose to homeschool--even before the pandemic.

So instead of finishing up my 9:30 AM class at the YMCA, and slipping away for coffee with other spandex mommy types, I am sitting in my IKEA chair teaching decimals and basic arithmetic. In this exact moment, I feel no emotion about that as I write it. I occasionally miss those days, but I have found that the benefits for the children outweigh the yearning for my own selfish desires. 

The emotions are not always the same though. Some days, I am barely hanging on. Some days, I day dream of an empty, quiet, and clean house. Some days, I hide from my kids and sob into my hands. Other days, I get got so frustrated over teaching how to tell time, I knocked over a kitchen chair in anger.  I use past tense, because I am really really working on my patience and gentleness. 

I want to tell those stories. I want to push pause and savor the good, the bad, and the ugly. I want to look back, and laugh at 32-year-old me, and shake my head and smile; in the same ways I look back and read the words of 22-year-old me--trying to figure out parenting for the first time. 

So here I am. Life looks different now. And I am hoping to document that for the future. 

Welcome back. 

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