The Uncommon Bond of Electricity, Coffee, and a Deep Freeze

This is what happens when you are a single mother and your daily things to do far outweigh the hours in the day…..

For several days now I have noticed a strange…..odor, shall we say…..throughout the house.  Having two cats, I made a mental note that I really needed to get upstairs to change their litter and completely clean out the boxes.  When I noticed the smell lingering in my bedroom last night, I began to think it may not be from the cats, but maybe a leftover from our old 18 year old pug who passed a month ago.  In the last weeks of his life he had uncontrollable issues with the eating and bathroom processes so natural to most of us.  Again, I made a mental note to clean my bedroom carpet, as I probably just did not thoroughly clean a prior area due to the overwhelming grief of losing our beloved dog.  I quickly put that painful memory aside and did not think again of the strange smell that seemed to randomly drift through the house.

This morning I was putting wash in the drier, and bent down to pick something off of the floor.  Noticing this ‘odor’ was slightly stronger in the laundry room, it made me pause.  The cat boxes are no where near my laundry room.  My bedroom is on the opposite side of the house.  Neither of my previous deductions would be the solution to the laundry room smell.  Being that the laundry room is more of a rectangle, and the washer and drier are right inside the door, I very rarely veer off to the left to the other side of the room. 

Early this morning making the veer to the left, I noticed the smell was more concentrated near the area by the deep freeze which sits behind the laundry room door.  It took me a moment to process.  I had not even finished one cup of coffee this morning, and was still not fully functioning.  I looked to the outlet – the plug on the deep freeze was dangling.  It took me a moment, but I did put two and two together, and sure enough it equaled four.  For at least a week if not longer, the food in the deep freeze has been left to its own devices.  Not thinking in my half comatose early morning state, I lifted the lid.  (Please let this be a warning to those of you with a deep freeze – should this ever happen to you – do NOT open the lid until you are ready with a mask and gloves to fully empty and clean out the remains.  And yes, I call them remains, because that is exactly what it smells like.)  Now my entire house smells like the inner most area of the rancid freezer. 

At this point I know you are probably calling me an idiot, and other not so nice terms, but may I please digress so you understand the cause of the useless opening of the dead freezer door.  I awakened earlier than normal this morning to find the electricity off for no apparent reason.  Even first thing in the early morning the full impact of this hit me – no coffee.  That is emergency status in my house.  If there was a code red for coffee issues, this would be a flaming hot red code.  Standing in the center of the kitchen I calmly assess the dire situation.  We have several routes to take.  The no coffee route.  I quickly move on, as this is certainly not an option, and I would rather eat coffee grounds than to even remotely wander down this path.  This thought leads me to thought number two; if I use the filter basket and run what’s left of the hot water from the tap through it I wonder if I would at least get muddy water that has any slight resemblance to coffee.  Not plausible, but better than eating grounds.  Thought three is a wonderment of what may be in the back of my pantry, and by chance is there instant coffee or cappuccino mix buried from years past that I could use with my dwindling hot water supply.  This is the option I am deciding upon, but I realize that the baby may have to forego a warm bottle in order to squeak mom out one cup of old, stale coffee from a mix.  In the grand scheme of things, I am okay with this.  The baby will still have his milk, albeit not warm, and I’ll still have semi-coffee.  It’s all about sacrifice, you know.

It is at this point that God knows what is coming next, and He must have decided not to torment me any further, as the electricity resumes its powered state.  Praise God!  The first thing I head to is the coffee pot – I am not going to take the chance that the powers that be in the electrical world will turn off the power again, leaving me in the dark.  I then immediately turn to the washer, as I have a full load to get in and decide to do so while the electricity is still cracking.  And, with this load of laundry, we come full circle back to where I digressed, and you may now begin to understand why I opened the lid in the first place.  I awakened early only to stand in the dark, and was threatened with the prospect of no coffee.  In my early morning haze, I decide to try and beat the clock while the electrical is back on – because really, who knows when it will decide to cease its magical power – and in my pre-coffee, early morning haze, I follow my reaction to open the freezer door to see if indeed this is where the smell is coming from.  Had I been more in my right mind, I would have never even cracked that lid.

I still can’t figure out how that plug got pulled, but in reality it does not matter now.  I pulled up my to do list on the computer, and added fix freezer and buy bleach to the list.  This is going to be a very, very long day….

Heart Particles

Sometimes our biggest fear is the fear of fear itself.  As a survivor, I can recall countless times that I did not do something because of the fear of the unknown.  Even though the past is completed and behind me, I still hold remnants of trigger points that can send me spiraling back to a previous moment in time.  To continue my journey in life is to continue on into the unknown, which can ultimately be the scariest thing – survivor or not.  I am a broken individual, but to some extent, aren’t we all?  Each of us holds pieces of our hearts that at one point or another have been smashed into nothing more than mere dust particles that could be swept away with even the gentlest of breezes.  We hold onto these heart particles tightly, envelope them deep within our souls, and do not want to let go in trepidation of what may happen if we do release our grip.  For to release our grip is in essence to let go of the control we all so desperately want. 

I am no different.  I grip and I grasp those buried, minute pieces of my heart until the breath is ostensibly sucked right away from me and I am left gasping for air.  The after affects can be monumental as I look around bright eyed at the authenticity of what is before me, which is nothing like the reality I once knew so well.  The truth of the current day is a stark and drastic difference to the life I left behind.  I struggle to identify myself as I am now, compared to the “I” I once was.  To be able to recognize and classify myself now, I must learn to let go of the particles of the heart that have been crushed beyond devastation.

Those tiny particles will always be a part of me, but the remarkable thing about dust is that it only builds up if you let it.  So, at least for today, I take a deep breath, and I blow.  I propel the heart particles that have accumulated throughout the years out as far as my breath can take them.  I watch as they drift and soar and disperse.  I exhale, and feel the gentlest breeze begin to float through my heart.  And I know the “I” that I have been looking for so long to return is finally beginning to reappear.

Hurricanes and Ocean Waves

It has been way too long since I have set aside time just for me - time to nourish my own soul so that I am able to support those around me.  Working from home, I have been so busy growing my business, keeping sales up, and figuring out why sales just dropped while still raising the kids, playing with the animals, and trying to maintain the house that it had all consumed me from dawn till dusk.  It had enveloped me to the point that I didn’t realize how much it had encompassed me, until I broke down a few days ago in a scrambling mess of insanity.  I woke up from this bad dream called life to realize my house though still standing was a mess – there was stuff – everywhere.  Even in the bathroom.  How did random stuff get in the bathroom? 

I came back to reality and it hit me just how exhausted I was, both physically and emotionally.  The past few months I had not even taken a reprieve in the shower; I would rush in only to emerge a quick few moments later.  The goal was to get clean in as short of a time as possible, so I could get back to whatever it was I was doing before I had gotten wet.  And the time I had spent in the shower (outside of using soap) was used to think about how I could grow my business, how I could get my oldest son more stability in the midst of the chaos he experiences at his father’s house, or a good solution to get the baby to stop screaming immediately every time he needed or wanted something.  Although I constantly tell my children to have patience, that I am only one person, I forgot to repeat that mantra to myself.  I was trying to be all things to all people in all situations, except the only problem was that I forgot about myself in all of it. 

The forgetting of self led to one late night where I literally stopped in the mass chaos of movement, looked at it all, thought about it all, dropped to my knees, and broke into tears.  The enormity of the situation and all I had to do completely overrode all I am and all I have to offer.  As the tears flowed freely, one of my cats carefully approached.  I grabbed that cat and hugged tight as tears dropped on to his back.  The poor thing was just dangling there – too afraid to move even though his back was drenched by this point.  Good for him, at least I taught him enough by this point for him to realize not to move in the midst of a crises.  After a few moments I let the cat go, not because I wanted to, but because I was getting tons of cat hair sticking to my tear stained face.  Even in a breakdown I did have some self respect.  Things probably looked bad enough without cat hair on the face.

As I began picking off the hair one by one, I knew something had to lighten up.  I just did not have the time to remove cat hair like that just because I had a breakdown.  Goodness, I had enough stuff to do that was actually important!  After the cat realized I had reached a plateau of being a bit more stabilized, he quickly (albeit calmly and quietly so as to not attract attention) slid into the other room.

Days later, I can now realize and point to the times during the past months when I should have stopped and taken a deep breath.  Even hurricanes have their down times in the ocean where they relax in order to pick up more speed to head back to land.  I am no different.  Just like a hurricane, I need time to step back and gain speed so I can conquer the land mass ahead of me.  Today is just as busy as last week, and there are still the same demands, but through my crises I did come to realize just how little time I was taking to recharge my own batteries.  The night I was crying on the poor cat I found my batteries to be dead.  No one – not even supermom – can function on a dying energy field.  So, just like a hurricane, the past few days I have found myself veering back out into the ocean to take some time to stop and gather energy from the waves around me.  Turning, I have headed back to land.  There are more land masses to conquer, and I need all the energy I can get!