Detoxing Ungracefully

This weekend, for the first time in a long time, we didn't have any Saturday-gobbling plans. Ballet in the morning for Polly, church activity in the evening for which we would leave around 5:15 pm. Which meant a good long stretch of hours in the middle of the day for getting back on top of the flotsam and jetsam of Sloan Family life. This was good, because between parent-teacher conferences and American Education Week visits to the classroom and playing the harp in the evenings and having relatives and missionaries over, we'd been doing a lot of getting through things and not much getting on top of things for the past 2-3 weeks. So I was ambitious to do the following things:

• rake leaves
• pay bills
• finish/make progress on the crocheted rug for the girls' room
• scrub the bathtub
• do the Christmas letter
• file papers
• clean off my desk
• clean off the art desk
• move out the broken dryer and hook up the (hopefully) functional dryer
• go to the gym
• record and analyze our family expenditures
• finalize our December calendar
• catch up on my Book of Mormon reading
• make cookies for my neighbors
• do family history
• floss
• find a wheat grinder and grind the 50 tons of wheat we inherited from a sister in the ward.

(Okay, I may have employed some hyperbole in that list. Flossing, for example, might be expecting too much.)

Anyway, I actually got a reasonable amount done. After ballet, the kids and I made a Walmart run, and when we got home, I did a whirlwind cleaning of the house and then cranked out the bills. In the meantime, Dave went out to find some games from Goodwill for game night that night and do a couple of errands. The kids played played played (and by that I mean made a huge mess in the basement while intermittently gorging themselves on PBS Kids on the computer). After the bills, I tried to get up the energy to go rake leaves in the upper 30's gloom of a November afternoon, but I ended up curling up in bed to try to shake a headache and a bad mood. As I lay in bed drifting into a nap, I found myself wondering why I was so grumpy. Wasn't I glad that we weren't crazy busy? Wasn't I glad that we had a relaxing day with not much planned? Why couldn't I just be like Dave and take it easy in the morning and just enjoy a day off? As I pondered this, I found myself wondering if I was going through a detox process. It's not that I want to be busy all the time, or that I find myself depressed and without a purpose when I'm not busy and scheduled. I don't want my bow tightened all the time, and I look forward to the end of a busy season because I know that I need to regroup and get ready for the next round that will be coming soon enough. But I just don't really know how to detox gracefully. Detoxing for me means releasing all of the tensions and worries and nagging to do's that I've been thrusting aside while the Sloan Family Machine is functioning at full capacity. I've heard that when you start drinking a lot more water, it flushes toxins and impurities out of your system, and as they're flushed out, they make you break out and feel a little ill. But that's all just part of the process of getting them actually out. I don't know if the physiology of that is accurate, but it felt true to the emotional and spiritual process of coming off of a busy season. 

Anyway, this insight didn't necessarily change anything for me, but it gave me a framework for being patient with myself and for explaining to Dave why I'd been grouchy-ish all day. And it gave me the challenge of finding out how to detox more gracefully. Perhaps make sure that I'm listening to good music all day. Perhaps make sure that the gym happens before Walmart, since Walmart on a Saturday saps the life force out of anyone. Now the big question: will any of this help me to make the Christmas season more worshipful and meaningful?