Bounce

I did not know how much lifting, stretching, twisting and bending I did until I was enforced to refrain.

 

Truly!

I had myself well-pegged as much more lazy than I apparently am, if the discomfort that I was feeling from being refrained was anything to go by.

I mean, it wasn't all doom - I did do some reading, and a bit of quality napping happened.  But whinge - oh, I am sick of my own whinging.

A week (ish) has gone by and I am just now getting to the point of thinking "ah yes, I get it" but its possible I don't just yet.

On top of that, we are currently without a Paris in the house and this is harder than I thought that it was going to be.

I have spent a little time THINKING ABOUT dipping my toes into genealogy's pond - but that gets bigger before I make a start and I leave only slightly ruffled around the edges.  I also binged (interspersed with napping) a few UK Who Do You Think You Are episodes.  One of the good things about watching such stuff about people who you actually already know nothing about is that chances are, you know as much about their history as they do.

I did also go through my photo albums and loose photos and have discovered about 3 of the last 23 years in a pile with no labels - and the other 20 are either in a box downstairs or on (hopefully) the hard drive.

I have not mopped the floors or spring cleaned the windows or sewn up a storm.  No go me!!

The child currently at camp (yes, we are pretending that this is normal and not a previously unthinkable hurdle cleared) will, however, return to find her room tidied - I know, that sort of horrible mother.  

The good news is that I can interrupt her protests with showing her a photo of the person that I was who actually tidied a whole share house when she moved into it in 1994 (?).  I can't show her a photo of the house (although it was a truly awesome house) because apparently the early 1990s were before photos were the disposable commodity that they are today.  It was across the road from The Valhalla, and awesome little cinema that always had a double feature on Sunday nights, and from The Craven, the coffee shop next door that I frequented for other cleansing purposes.

I will show her the photo and say "see, its nothing personal" and no doubt launch into the moral tale about the 26 coffee mugs but she will pay scant attention.  She is at that age - where the phone actually commandeers her waking hours.  And I know, just say no - but the moments of no are filled with the desire to go back on its a constant battle.  That being said, there are cracks appearing in the shell - there is the whole going to camp and rock-climbing and her living through the last week a little bit older.  

We were discussing parasites recently (as you do) and I mentioned how one version of her blog name had an association with such, as when I was pregnant with her I had a tag that was "Parasitic Alien Life Form" (for some reason only one post comes up with the tag these days...)

I did mention that it was also due to the Paris Accord (and not really because it was Copenhagen by the time she got around to being born and V mentioned that his view is now offers no sense of humour about environmental agreements). 

She might have listened.

 So I am off to bed now.  Again.  And being quietly proud of Paris.

Imposter Syndrome

When I was a kid, I remember this one particular afternoon - it was a school swimming lesson and I would not have been more than 7 - I can't remember if it were before or after the lesson - but I remember walking past one of the "big girls" - Susan or Joanne or someone like that - and thinking "imagine being THAT grown up.

And then I was that big and I realised that it was not so very big any more.

And thence in boarding school.

I often marvelled at those around me who really had their acts together - I was alternating between trying to figure out if there were a defined set of rules that I should have read somewhere, and trying to read them by braille.

I really was stumbling myopically - figuratively AND literally. 

There was one other girl with my first name in the whole school - my name was not a pencil case name - and not only did we have the same first name, we had the same surname initial, we were in the same year - and we were both blind as bats. 

And we were both too vain to wear our glasses around the school. She was slightly ahead of me in the alphabet due to strategic vowel placement, but I had it all over her in being a klutz.

Boarding school was five years, during which time my knees hit bitumen and cement and rock, gravel and grass so often during those years that, for some periods, there was skinlessness and other descriptors designed to make you shudder.

Ejected by age and matriculation, I went to university still largely thinking "at some point in my future it will all start to make sense, and then you will be deemed a grown up." 

This was interspersed with thoughts of "Grown ups. Ha. What do they know. Who'd want to be one of them."

Then I got a proper job. One a thousand more KMs from "home" and I did stuff. Proper grown up stuff like catch public transport and pay rent and buy  alcohol and other stupid things.

I remember once saying to my sister - another grown up with a proper job far away - as we ordered a meal together: "this is what it must feel like to be a grown up."

But I also was a bit - well, contrary might be a word we should consider.

Because I still didn't quite understand how this game worked. 

I must admit that a lot of my 20s and 30s I lived a life that, when coming to forks in the road, I would choose every time the path less travelled. Not because I was adventurous and foolhardy, but because it looked like fun and was slightly foolish.

When I turned 30 I had a beautiful baby. 'Salina really was good clay. Moving up a generation must get me my grown up badge by default.

My 30s were very much a "lash to the mast" rideout.

Then I moved to Paradise and met V and got married and surely that's got to be grown up, hasn't it?

P&C President (to be fair, myself and the whole P&C were as shocked as you. It was a case of needs must rather than the winning of any popularity contest.) Grown up enough?

Having my own business, even. I mean, not a hugely successful one as I had no confidence in my boss. Still. Grown up?

Baby. Taxes. In the thirteen clients/jobs I have had in the last fourteen years, I have been confident and successful in twelve (including the one I am currently in). I must be getting close.

But things erode confidence. Teenagers. Car troubles. A pandemic. Cancer.

In two days having a renovate with all things hysterical banished - I am making some room for audacity. 

Not a "save your life" manoeuvre this time - more an "improve your life" issue.

I am starting to think that I really must be a grown up by now.

Although I still haven't found the manual.