Back to normal - sort of

It's the day after the day after Christmas and a pack of gardeners have descended to tame the lawn that up to a few days ago resembled a swamp.  The roof fixing guys have come and gone after fixing a leak in the guest house roof.  Back to the gym, back to having to do groceries and cook since most of the left-overs are gone.  And I'll have this pattern for 2 days and then I'm gone.

Yes, I'm going to do the retreat that my husband did in September.  10 days of silence and meditation.  Do I need it.  Yes.  Would I have gone on my own accord?  No.  My husband had to push and then make all the plane bookings and the stop-over in BKK booking for it to be a reality.  Am I nervous?  Definitely.  What scares me is leaving the kids for 13 days while it's school holidays.  Not speaking to them for 10 of those 13 days.  Not being there for them to cuddle up to in the mornings, to chat to during the day, to gauge  their moods and feelings, to improvise from the routine when and where necessary.  They will be fine.  I know they'll be fine, and I know they and I and the whole family unit will benefit from me being away and coming back to some kind of an equilibrium point.

I haven't done this year's Christmas letter.  Coming to that I haven't done last year or the year before's either.  My husband did hint at it when we received them from other people, but how do you express what has happened in a light and breezy, preferably funny one page when much of what happened was anything but light and breezy.  I was reading up about stress the other day.  I don't consider myself really under stress, not really really deserving of the label, but reading that and thinking back to the period May to July this year, I guess I was pumping out every stress hormone know to womankind.  Thank heavens for chocolate, although my body is not thanking me.  It is all OK, it really is.  We've not lost a job, everyone is perfectly healthy, we can meet challenges as they arise with the right amount of financial and other resources, but it's not always easy.

I've been a bit quiet with blogging.  I've been busy, with guests, with Christmas - I decided to do something different this year.  Since we didn't know many people here in SG and the few we know wellish were away, we opened our home to 7 USA Marines for Christmas lunch.  When the request came from the AWA, my left leaning, anti-war, anti everything why are the americans interfering in the rest of the world feelings were completely put to one side as my mother and family feelings of 3000 people, children of someone stranded in a foreign country over christmas dominated.

I've also been doing some other rather intensive work.  We're still hitting blanks as to what exactly it is that makes my otherwise pretty bright and on the ball child struggle so much at school.  The latest was a trip to the OT to see if there was any physical mind/body matter.  But as I suspected, the child who can draw so beautifully, play the viola, run around a soccer pitch with ease and grace and accuracy has no fine or gross motor skill problems.  Relieved? Yes.  But still puzzled.  It's the inconsistency that bothers the school and the teacher.  Then one minute he's firing on all cylinders and its obvious he understands and can do everything.  The next it's as if he never learnt it before.  So we've been trying Cogmed.  It's been 4 weeks of 5 days a week for an hour to 90 minutes of intensive training on the computer.  Most of the time I'm sitting next to him.  Mainly for moral support.  And the moral support consists mainly of trying to keep him calm and balance out his emotional outbursts and frustrations as things get difficult, he misses the answer, gets things wrong, lashes out verbally and physically.  It's a strain.  The literature only puts the training in a small paragraph and the rest is all fancy statistics and happy endings.  There has been improvement.  Significant improvement.  I'm hoping it is as generalizable as they say it is.  I'm hoping it is as permanent as they say it is.  And if his pre-scores are anything to go by, he did have a huge problem with working memory which this has highlighted and promises to help.

It's intense.  And if anything has highlighted to me that there can be no mastery over anything if you have no mastery over yourself.  Which ties in nicely with going on this retreat and trying to master my monkey brain and pot-boiling emotions.  I cannot begin to serve as a parent and role model to my kids if I cannot manage and master myself.

So I'll be off and out of touch for a couple of weeks, and then hopefully I'll be able to report back that I could manage 10 days without my children and husband's voice, without the written word, without creature comforts and with little sleep.  I hope I'm up to the task.

A happy new year for when that rolls around.