Slatternly

The mess that is the dining room

Around this time of the year i notice what a mess the house is. Mostly because the sun has started shining and it is apparent that the spring cleaning i did at Chinese New Year has not lasted till now.

Sigh.

So i woke up at around 2 am today thinking, i feel fat and i need my life back. I am currently suffering from an overdose of chocolate which takes place on the last day of the Easter term. When i say overdose, i think it was one brownie and a few pieces of Galaxy chocolate. I suppose by most chocoholic standards that is not much chocolate at all, but really for me, that is going too far. I feel the psychological guilt of having taken all that butter and sugar and i swear i can feel it jiggling around me in newly added fat cells.

The last days of term are exhausting. To be honest we have good kids in the school and the way we teach in Waldorf education really makes use of the children's natural inclinations. However, of course, children are children for a reason - the same reason we are adults. We bring things to each other which we could not do without. Children bring new ideas, new life forces into this world, we adults bring rhythm and we help introduce them to it - so that hopefully they take the best from it and are able to then make the most of themselves and what they need to do.

In other words, children need us to be adults, just as we need them to be children.

But holding this rhythm is the soul and spiritual equivalent of riding a horse. You are working all the time at getting the balance right all the time. Just as we cannot keep breathing out or breathing in all the time, both children and adults need to have this gentle rhythm to create health and well-being. And what we do effortlessly, or seemingly effortlessly as we breathe - although many people will tell you that most of us do not breathe correctly - we need to do consciously as adults for children and for ourselves.

So the exhaustion is really the same exhaustion i feel after an hour of horse riding. Except it isn't in my thighs, it is in my entire body.

I also think that the trick is not to let the whole thing fall to bits after the term is over, but to keep going with a rhythm. But as i look around and see the mess the house is i get a sinking feeling … which mostly has to do with … where do i begin?

Of course it does not help that i am mostly the only person in the house which feels the house is a mess and would like to do something about it. I think i am quite a visual person and having things a mess is more of an annoyance to me because i am visual. Because i am visual a pile of newspapers and random things scattered about tables and floors and surfaces, cup rings and dirty sinks with dishes piled higgledy piggledy in them drive me nuts. For other people this is just perfectly ok. For other people flooding the entire kitchen or messing the sideboard or just stuffing the fridge full of food they will never eat or allowing the entire recycling area to just pile up relentlessly or having a bathroom which looks like a student squat is perfectly ok. For me this is miserable and then when i am the only person constantly cleaning up it also feels completely unfair.

This is becoming a rant… but another thing i cannot bear is people starting things - new things - when the old thing was either unfinished or lying around the place. OR the place is a mess and the new thing actually DISTRACTS from the priority which is sorting out the old thing. I think it is ok if you are a child (although it is a good habit to get a child to complete something and to clean up after they have played with something, before they move on to something else) or if you have been asked to do the new thing and someone else is sorting out the priority, but if the priority is screaming at you and you are being distracted by the new thing… that has GOT to be my pet peeve. The other pet peeve i have is waste. It drives me nuts. When people complain oh we don't have this and that and then waste stuff around them, i want to just take everything they have wasted and then put it in their bedroom and say, well, you DID have this and that but NOT ANYMORE because you don't deserve it - not really.

I now teach the kids - my own kids - to clean a place before they start something new. Someone has to.

I think i'm in a bad mood cos i feel fat.

However venting the spleen is like getting a good clear out. I am pretty much sure that after this rant i will start cleaning the house. Actually i feel better now.

The truth is that really no one - especially me - has any reason to be in a bad mood. I am actually trying very hard to bring my negativity under control. I know i am tired and there is much to be done, but really, i have nothing to complain about. No one is putting a gun to my head and asking me to do anything. I have decided to do these things myself.

So, deep breath…

Actually, before i started thinking about how messy things are in the house and how fat i am now, i was also thinking of how lucky i am too. I now do horse riding once a week - and i am actually getting better with each lesson. I will hopefully be Forest School qualified by the end of the summer. I am a Steiner teacher which means that i get to learn new stuff constantly and work with kids and be with my kids and work with some of the most talented, beautiful and kind people i have ever met … and i also get to make a contribution to the world. So all in all, life is good. There isn't a lot of complain about really. I mean today i looked at what the kids had done over the Easter term and i felt quite amazed. We had done so much really - one of my colleagues said to me, as we watched them at the Easter concert, where did all the time go? I said, i know… and you know what, we lived every single day. She said, you know what, you're right, it is a strange thing to say, but you are right.

So i was thinking of starting a birdwatching-outdoor club in the school actually. Probably next year. Which will combine all of the things i love best. Art, outdoors, children… just once a quarter to start with. Then working up to every other month and then finally once a month. It'll probably take three years to get started, but we could end up with some really excellent activities. And IRELAND is filled with such opportunities! The habitat is just coming out of our ears, we should do something good with that.

Once the Forest School is sorted and a couple of other things on the personal front, it will be great. It will clear up so much time and space for me to do that.

Well, i know i that after i write my blog i ALWAYS feel better. It is called the writing cure. I don't know what i would do without it.