I have come to the end of my leave of absence. Well, the last official day was June 2nd but today is my regular day off so we are counting today. I went into this thing with big plans and a schedule to keep, but as per usual with everything else in my life, nothing ever goes according to plan.
I wanted to blog about what I accomplished each day and keep myself accountable and do what I set out to do. I wanted everything in my life organized, clean and neat. Anyone who knows me or even knows what a creative person is like (or most of them that I know anyway), that is a fantasy. I am, by nature, a disorganized person, whose life is full of clutter. I always have the best of intentions, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with.
I also wanted to take control of my health and plan and prep my meals and eat only healthy things and stop eating out (CupBop Korean Barbeque will be my downfall). And excercise every single day. I wanted to establish new and better habits. Again, that road to hell.
Something unexpected that did happen while I was on my leave of absence was that my Etsy store got more orders in the last 30 days than I have gotten in the last year. That kept me pretty busy, but the kind of stress free busy. I love painting and all the orders, save one, were hand painted glass or tea set orders. Those are blissfully calm and therapeutic for me.
I didn’t read, sketch, clean or organize the way I wanted to. I didn’t make a single piece of jewelry. I didn’t walk or hike. There is a lot I didn’t do.
What I did accomplish, if you can call it that, is a new found love (albeit frustrating at times) of fishing. The main frustration for me is that my reel is different than the one I used when I was 13 and tangled my line a lot. I didn’t catch any fish, but my boys did. We have plans over the summer to try and go once a week.
I had lots of down time with my kids with great conversations, a few meltdowns and plenty of take out dinners. We failed miserably at fishing. We got on each others nerves, argued some and spent plenty of nights driving for Uber eats and listening to good and less than stellar music.
We suffered through a crappy last month of online school with plenty of tech problems and failures of communication. We celebrated good news for my son who has ADHD, when our (his dad and I) advocating for him and taking on the school resulted in getting what was best for him. I do not like confrontation and would just as soon walk away rather than attack, but I used my voice and I was not nice when I needed to be not nice and walked away feeling kind of badass. I realized that fighting isn’t always a bad thing when you are fighting for what is right for someone you love.
I napped when I wanted to nap, we went for drives when we got bored and pretty much did whatever we wanted every single day.
I came into this leave of absence stressed, worried, exhausted, angry and fighting off depression. I had one month to do whatever I wanted. An unpaid vacation. We really didn’t accomplish anything by society’s standards or what mine used to be. Probably still are, but for one month they were forgotten. I am coming back to work a much more relaxed, calm and content person. I am looking forward to having a normal schedule again. There is still the possibility that I may get furloughed come October and I am at peace with that. I don’t believe that God brought me this far just to take it away. But if that is the plan, then so be it. I hope not, but I am at peace with whatever happens. Until then I will do my job, plan for the worst and keep hoping for the best. And I will keep doing things that make me happy. And, damn it, I am going to catch a fish.
My Forties Reboot 