Remodeling This Life

I had a bad afternoon. I prepared myself all day for my follow-up appointment from the surgery I had 2 weeks ago. I was prepared to either hear bad news that what they removed was cancerous or good news that it was not. I received good news! Yay! Then I had to be examined to make sure that I am healing properly. I was not planning on the next part. You may want to close your eyes for this. Apparently, there was some skin not healing correctly and without warning, the doctor sliced and then burnt it off. No numbing. Yes, that’s right. I don’t think I screamed that loud in child birth. It. was. awful.

So I am in pain all over again and get to recover from THAT for another 2 weeks and then go back for another follow up.

I walked out of the office, horrified, embarrassed and in tears. I am a girl you could call very open. I wear my heart on my sleeve, I try to keep it real and tell it like it is, I allow myself to be vulnerable and open myself up because it makes me feel human and alive. But having my butt sliced and burned? That crossed the line. I was humiliated at the entire experience.

So there I was in my car preparing to drive myself home and I had the urge to go shopping. Do something for myself to make up for the pain and humiliation. I wanted to indulge myself in something good, yummy, or fabulously cute. Then I stopped myself and realized that there was nothing that I wanted more to ease the pain of the experience I had just been through than to drive myself home, hug my husband, kiss my kids and curl up on my couch with a glass of wine and enjoy us all giggling together.

I knew that there was nothing I could buy that would make me feel better. I had everything I needed right at home.

I was tagged last week by Lynnae at Being Frugal for a meme about making lemonade when life hands you lemons. I have actually written a post before titled just that, When Life Hands You Lemons. I’ll pull a quote from that post I wrote back in December.

Living simply has proven to be quite fun and fulfilling. Living in a home that is 100% your own and your taste is so valuable. I think back on the projects we’ve done, with kids underfoot, and what wonderful memories those are going to be someday. Showing Bug pictures of her putting tile down in the laundry room, painting our bedroom, helping with whatever she could. That’s home.

So that post was all about our home and what we went through to end up here and how we’ve made the best of it, but more than making the best of it, we’ve made something really truly wonderful. Not like those things that you hear like “wow, you look great for just having had a baby!” or “your house looks fabulous for having once been a crapshack!”. Crapshack once or not, we’ve made a wonderful and beautiful home with no need to even put a little footnote about what it once was.

I don’t want to write all about my house today though and how this lemon of a house turned into quite a gem that I have become very very attached to.

I want to write about my separation from hubby a year and a half ago. I don’t want to write about it, but it’s a part of me and it’s cathartic to do so. I still think about that time every single day. I think about how hard it was on him, on me, on our daughter, on all of us as a family. As I have said before, my hubby has depression. Last year, the lovely little life I had and the world I knew as rosy and wonderful caved in when his depression turned to anxiety, sadness, anger, and resentment at me, the house, our life, everything around him. It was a very dark time in our life together. It all came to a head when I packed up our daughter in the middle of the night one night and we drove 45 minutes to stay with my parents.

I was scared, I was sad, I was angry. I can still remember laying in bed at my parents house that night, curled up with my then 2 year old in my arms and sobbing myself to sleep. I had no idea what I was going to do. I was 7 months pregnant and had myself, my daughter and soon another baby to take care of. My mind raced with thoughts of going back to school to get another degree, finding a job to support us, where would I live?

Time passed. I didn’t talk to hubby for a while - probably only a few days at the most but it seemed like an eternity. We started making arrangements for what I would do and how we would amicably part ways. We had been seeing a counselor together for a couple months before this all happened and he decided he would start going to her again by himself. And then, finally, he admitted to me one day that he did indeed have depression, that I was right all along and that he wanted to get help for it.

I know that was so hard for him, admitting that he had a problem. He wanted so badly to just be able to say it was everything around him causing him pain and that he himself was fine. If only he didn’t live in this house, work at that job, or wasn’t married to this woman. But he knew, deep in his heart that it wasn’t any of those things making him miserable. It was his depression talking.

As he slowly picked up the pieces and started putting himself back together, everything else started to fall back into place also. He wasn’t so tired anymore so he had energy to work on the house. He wasn’t angry anymore so he wasn’t wasting his evenings arguing with me. He wasn’t resentful anymore so he started showing appreciation for what was around him again.

It took about 3 or 4 months which doesn’t seem all that long but it sure felt like it to get everything back together. He got the house into condition for us to move back home. He was a new person that day that we came home, me and Drew and baby Eli who was 2 months old at the time. It was a long and very hard time for me, our kids, him, all of us together. I take nothing from that time but gratitude. I am so thankful to have a man in my life who wasn’t too proud to get help when he needed to. Thankful for a marriage that has become much stronger because of what we’ve been through.

We still have our stumbles and we still have changes and transition ahead but in the end we know we want to be together and we want to make it work whatever it takes. Not everyone gets to see what we did together and have a bright and happy ending that results in a respect, appreciation and understanding like we have. Many people take for granted that their relationship works. While I think that is great, I think that what I have learned is that no marriage will work day in and day out for all of two people’s days without a lot of effort, a lot of respect and no taking for granted.

Me and hubby, we have a long life together ahead of us. I am confident if we made it through that, we’ll make it through anything. If that’s not lemonade, I don’t know what is.

Other bloggers have shared their own When Life Hands You Lemons posts as part of this meme, including

Skimbaco. She started the meme after having a sad event happen to her a couple weeks ago but wanted to see the bright side of it.
Mommy Gets PAID shared a heartbreaking and heartwarming story about her grandmother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s.
Debt Kid shares his story of losing his home.

We have our home phone and internet service through AT&T. Last week I get a call from them asking to speak to my husband. Well, we were in the middle of some family fun playing outside in the yard and I didn’t want to call him inside so I said he wasn’t available and could I take a message. The person proceeds to tell me that because we are such wonderful long time customers, they have a special offer for us to thank us for our service! Aw, how nice! Just about a month ago, we upgraded our DSL to a bit higher speed and that added about $12/month to the internet portion of our bill. The man tells me they are going to upgrade us to DSL 6.0 from the 3.0 that we have now! Just for being excellent customers! Oh thank you! Wait. The man starts babbling really fast and I can’t understand him all that well to begin with because English is obviously not his first language but I catch somewhere in there that our bill will be going up. Hold on there a second! You said you were calling to offer me something fabulous for being a wonderful customer and now you are telling me that this fabulous special offer that is just for ME because I am so amazing is really just a way to get me to pay you more money? So I stop him and say “Wait wait wait. Is this free? Or are you charging me? because if you are charging me, I am not interested. You told me you were upgrading me because I am a superb customer not because you want to squeeze more money out of me.” The man proceeds to say “Oh, okay, well, you don’t want to pay extra. We have a package we can offer you to upgrade on your phone service. You can get 5 features on your phone - call waiting, caller id, blah blah blah”. Okay, fine. Add that to my service for free because I am an awesome customer. Thank you. Then he keeps talking and I hear “blah blah phone service blah blah $31 blah blah”. Well, wait a minute. We’re cheap. We pay $19 for our landline. We have nothing fancy attached to it. We’re archaic and use an answering machine and not voicemail. We don’t have caller id. We just have a phone that rings. So when he said $31 I stopped him AGAIN and said “What do you mean $31? Did you just do it again? Try to talk me into signing up for something by saying that it was a special offer and acting like it was going to be free and it’s not? Goodbye.”

I’m not impressed, AT&T. I may be an excellent customer, but I’m not a stupid one.

No matter how often I feel like I am tidying, decluttering, putting things in their place around my home, it’s like it just never ends. Things pile back up if I slack off for a few days. I start to feel overwhelmed all over again. It’s a never ending battle. The bills and papers that come into the house, the art projects that get done, the toys that find their way under my feet all day long, everything that seems to stray from it’s rightful place to the other side of the house. It’s hard to manage it all. Well, it may be easier to manage it all if it’s ALL I did but I don’t want it to be all I do. I want to enjoy my days with my kids and not stop every 10 minutes to put everything back where it goes.

When I look at a room that is overwhelming me, there are a few ways I can go taking care of the stuff.

Throw it Away - If I don’t even let the stuff end up on a surface to begin with, I’m winning the battle. It is amazing to me how many things that have zero value end up on shelves, countertops, and tables in the bat of an eye. I can go through my house at any given moment and find 20 things that can be thrown away. Not things of value, but rather things that are just completely junk that have made their way around and settled on top of a kid’s dresser or a kitchen counter or the entry shelf. It’s amazing. And I don’t feel like I have an overwhelmingly cluttered home - the stuff just appears by way of the clutter fairy, I think!

Store it - I see in magazines all the time all these storage solutions like pretty bins and baskets and such and all I think is gee, my clutter isn’t really worth dropping hundreds of dollars on bins at Target to store it. And never mind that often just finding a pretty bin to put it all in is masking the problem. I have bought bins, I do store things in bins and I love me some baskets to keep things in - especially in the living room - they’re very handy for tossing small toys in and putting on a shelf so there are toys in there to play with for the kids when they aren’t in the playroom. I have to ask myself before buying a container or storing something if it’s worth it though. Is what I am going to put into the $20 bin worth spending that $20? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. A bin on my computer armoire to hold camera accessories and cords and batteries and SD cards is reasonable since those things are worth the value of what they’re stored in. If you’re using a $20 bin to store stuff that you don’t use, need or want just because it’s easier than parting with it, though, it may be time to question that.

Empty the junk drawer - Sometimes I can’t even get our junk drawer open, it has so much stuff in it. I know, embarrassing. At any given time, there are dead batteries, a hammer, maybe the toenail clippers, some princessy hair bows, whatever. It’s just unbelievable. That drawer is just another way to mask the problem. Someone can’t see it when they walk in - FABULOUS! Or not. Just get rid of it already and use your drawers as much more functional space.

Shred it - when you finally decide to go through all that paperwork, get out that handy dandy shredder, and let out some angst. I know I love the whirring of that shredder and seeing stuff destroyed. I am a little bit crazy, if you didn’t already know. And once it’s all shredded and you have that big box or bag of paper, you can turn it into garden mulch. What a seriously cool idea.

If you’re anything like me, you may find that the more space you create in your home that is clutter-free the more space you are creating for positive things to enter your life, like more time to relax and enjoy your family and actually enjoy your home. You won’t realize it until it’s done and the clutter is gone but it is freeing, relaxing, invigorating to not only feel accomplished at getting the task done, but also at being able to breathe in the space that you spend so much of your time.

Other clutter busting posts from around the web that you may enjoy are

Queen Declutterer
Decluttering With Children
10 Ways to Reduce Clutter and Clean Up Your Act

My blog has undergone a makeover. I was getting really tired of that racecar vroom vroom vibe the old theme was giving off. I’m really more of a relaxed laid back cozy kind of gal so now my blog is well, a little bit more relaxed and laid back and cozy. Thank you to my fabulous friend for the beautiful header. I hope y’all like it!