Superficial & Deranged

Tag: life

  • Parenting from a messy desk

    Parenting from a messy desk

    Anyone creative knows the dream; a clean desk to inspire writing, an empty kitchen to bake, quiet blank canvases to discover the true you. And then you have kids. Which somewhat ruins the dream.

    Not only do clean surfaces disappear like asbestos laced sand through your fingers, but your free time does to. You end up faced with bizarre non-comparable choices; do I shower or write, do I clean the kitchen or prepare a Miss Rachel level craft.

    Before children there was a logic to events, you got yourself ready, did your chores, made an ideal aesthetic space, and then creativity blossomed (or not). But now, you ignore the desk and write a blog post. You choose to make the mess in the kitchen worse to enable lunch, knowing the pile of dishes you hid in the sink will haunt you at the end of the day.

    It’s the old LinkedIn trope of normally a middle aged CEO talking about his success, which generally involves getting up early, either running or meditation and then working without distractions – and only later do we discover that they have a wife and/or a staff at home taking care of anything resembling domesticity. If only we all had a secret helper in the background taking care of all the mundanity of life. The endless washing, the food, the cleaning, the admin and the tiny humans who make and break our hearts on an hourly basis.

    On a serious note, I don’t think there is a single time I have washed clothes without contemplating becoming a nudist. It must cut down on the chores significantly.

    But I do have to wonder, what is more effective … focus or breath of human experience and space to inspire. There is no doubt that Steve Jobs and Michael Jordan, kings of focus, have achieved absolute perfection in their respective careers. But who knows, if they had space to grow, change and be challenged in other ways, less controlled ways, what they would have achieved. As we know from almost every dance movie from the early 2000’s, its when you add in different previously undiscovered styles that you win the competition/man.

    So here I am, writing from a messy desk, taking inspiration from imperfection. I don’t think I am any more productive than I used to be when I was in a wolf pack of one. But I guess my waffle and procrastination has been replaced with toddler crafts, cleaning white chairs (not my choice of furniture with small children), cooking and once in a while remembering to shower.

    Maybe I should pick up that book that I half wrote a million years ago, the messy desk might be the perfect accomplice to written nonsense.

  • In my bones

    In my bones

    I am tired, bone tired. The kind of tired where sleep doesn’t touch the sides and energy can only be gathered in 4 minute bursts. After which, the waves of tired in my bones lap at the shore once more.

    Broken sleep is for sure to blame. Although this baby is to be honest an absolute dream, most often going 4-5 hour stretches at night. Which compared to my first who rocked the ‘every hour’ wakeup schedule is life changing. But still, disrupted sleep is not used as a torture technique for nothing.

    Or maybe it’s my recovering body and flowing hormones that are to blame. 9 months of growing a human and now somewhat inexplicably feeding said human from my body. If I was to write a story where we converted blood into food for babies it would be seen at a step too far. But somehow that is what I am casually doing multiple times a day, without even knowing how. Fun fact, apparently Alien (the movie) is an allegory for birth. My C-section was slightly more chill than that, but I do see where they are coming from.

    How about the relentlessness of parenting? Even in the most delightful, wholesome day where the birds are singing and the parents look at each other so grateful for their polite and funny offspring – is filled with 1,000 negotiations and the sort of manic energy that you see in a cruise director as you swap from activity to activity all the while trying to remember to feed everyone. No matter how much you try to ‘put on your mask’ first, there is no way that the energy put in can touch the sides of the energy expended.

    Things can be magical, life enhancing and everything you always wanted while still being fucking tiring and just a bit too much.

    And all of that is without looking outside my front door, at the society that is seemingly crumbling to the ground. I always thought I would read the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, apparently I can just live it instead. Humans never did do well at being decent, but it has genuinely blown my mind how we can turn killing children into a debatable topic.

    To feel at odds with the world, with my own family just because I think that caring is a good thing – exhausting.

    To be so happy with life, to be living the dream, while tiredness holds your bones to the ground. Hoping that coffee or a 20 minute doom scroll will somehow fix everything – only to be surprised yet again that it did nothing.

    But maybe that is the ultimate lie of adulthood, there is no real winner in the tiredness Olympics. You don’t have to have kids to be tired. You don’t have to work 24/7 to be tired. Tiredness is just a marker to show that life was lived. Only children escape it, and not because they don’t feel it, but because it explodes out of them in tantrums and screams – they are not yet wise enough to know that the grumpy itch in their head and the concrete in their bones is what we like to call ‘a bit tired’.