Bad Breaking

Good morning Doves, sorry for the absence over the last few days.  I planned to be away from here on Tuesday, but Wednesday just sort of got the better of me. A few times a year Joe leaves the Studio and goes to work at a college, teaching film students and mixing student films with them.  The place isn’t really near here, there’s a two hour commute, usually some snow and ridiculously long hours. Joe’s been leaving the house at eight or nine, and I don’t see him again until midnight.  Yesterday I saw him for three minutes in the morning as I handed him a container of soup and told him to have a good day.  He looked sort of unfamiliar.  In the past, when this period of being away has coincided with the March Break, it has been a challenge to our relationship. (Understand that by "challenge" I mean that by day four I was a lunatic screaming "How come YOU get to leave the house" while the three children I was sick of who were desperately sick of me looked at him like he was the last lifeboat leaving the Titanic.) This year, when Sam announced she’d be away, and Joe announced that he would be away at the same time, I sort of did a little dance in my soul. 

I love me a good mumcation – just me and the cat, both of us relieved of our responsibilities (sort of) five days stretched out in front of me like an oasis.  I could do (sort of) anything I wanted for five days? Anything? I imagined wonderful things. Coffee and long meanders through knitting books, then catching  up on all my favourite blogs.  I would spin and knit of course, like never before, skeins of newly plied yarn piling up by the wheel as whole sweaters came together by my knitting chair.  It would be like I lived with elves.  The house would be spotless, I would make myself nutritious little meals, and go for runs, and I would probably lose at least five pounds.  It was going to be amazing.

I have no idea why I thought this, except that the delusions that take over a woman in March in Canada are varied and crazed.  Case in point: on Sunday it was so lovely out that I thought it was spring. I got all happy about it and looked for flowers.  Lunatic. It’s MARCH. There’s at least three snows to go.  It’s desperation I tell you, it makes you deranged.  That same kind of wild thinking had me believing that this five days, this five days mid-week, were going to be a poem written about filling your own heart with time spent lovingly with yourself.  

It was total bullpuckies.  This week has been almost the same as any other.  I don’t know what I thought was going to happen to all of my jobs, but I still need to write, edit and manage my inbox, I still have errands to run, the cat is still committed to barfing somewhere random on the stairs at regular intervals (I know what’s happening. She’s trying to make me step in puke. It’s not going to happen I tell you) and of course I filled up the week with a thousand extra little things because I was going to have all the time in the world – which is nuts I tell you. Nuts.  I have the same amount of time, and Joe always works a ton and Sam’s not that much work – the only difference between this week and any other is that I have been working super hard to be busy, because it turns out that for the first March Break of my life, I am a tiny bit lonely. 

I know that somewhere in Northern Ontario there is one of you who is snowbound with three kids who haven’t been to school in six days and just read that after stepping on lego and there’s banana smeared on your leg while three kids say "Mum? Mum? Mum? Hey, Mum? Mum…." and right now you’re staring at what I just wrote and saying "LONELY? Tell me more about this loneliness.  Is it nice? Do you like it? Is it that thing that happens when you’re alone, because I WOULDN’T KNOW."

I don’t mind a little lonely.  It’s just what being alone feels like, and I like being alone quite a bit.  I just have to remember that it’s cool to feel that way. It’s not a trigger to go find something to do or someone to talk to,  or a sign that I’m not working hard enough and should get moving again.  I know that if I sit with the loneliness a bit, it gives way to thoughtful, productive alone-ness…

and right after that comes all the other stuff.  Like way more spinning.  Pictures today are this weeks yarn production.  A 50/50 merino/silk that’s been in the stash for a while. Unlabelled, but I think it was from BMFA.  Spun up into two pretty nice skeins of yarn that I rather like.  More about it tomorrow, when – you know.  I’ll have twenty.

Are you spinning first this week? How’s it going?