Spring Cleaning Work Weekend, Or What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger

I'M ALIVE!  And kissing the floor, mwah!  Mwah!

To all who saw me cowering under my desk as a cry for help, THANK YOU for your calls, emails and Facebook messages - it was a dark and stormy night in My Secret Hoarding Place and you got me through. You, and a little divine intervention:


Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can



And lo, a positive sign was sent:

Lost and Found - Things Are Looking Up :)



Then an angel came on Sunday afternoon and, get this: her name was MARY!!!    And, yes, her hands are always bathed in light:



"Help! I'm lost in a towering pile of delayed decisions!"



Mary Carlomagno comes armed with a labeler, and before long all the huge memories and emotions I've wrestled all weekend like alligators - purging and sorting piles and piles of special ed law, doctors reports, post-adoption paperwork, kid art, household papers, are...contained.  All the hopes and dreams, the false starts, the failures - in a binder, in a box. 

Mary keeps moving kid and house related files out of my overflowing go-to box.  It makes me nervous. I am used to squeezing my own stuff around theirs, and the box is looking disconcertingly empty.  Making room for...

"I have my eye on some nice folders for you.  I see sage green, or sky blue," Mary says, pointing to colors in my newly discovered carpet. "You're going to love putting your work in them."   Making room, for my work.  In my office.  My Secret Working Place:



Better

 Phase 2:  Still to come: The Desk (there's a story about the desk), what to do about the Largest Printer Known to Man, and letting go of my 3 rolodexes (Mary may have to pry them out of my cold, dead hands).  Stay tuned for a final reveal that will hopefully have my children running around the former Fire Swamp shouting, "Inconceivable!" 

P.S.  Just tuning in?  Operation: Find My Floor starts here.  Adventures with Mary Carlomagno start here.

Progress

Hello Carpet, My Old Friend!

Spring Cleaning Work Weekend - Saturday, well past midnight

Office 1, Patty 0

Help

How did it come to this?  Follow Operation: Find My Floor, or Patty faces her fear of clear spaces, here

Operation: Find My Floor, Day 9 cont'd. The Fire Swamp

Mary Carlomagno is coming up the walk.  "ABANDON SHIP!" I scream in my head. And then I run away. 

Actually, I was predictably late getting R to pre-school, and Mary, being the organizer, was right on time.  I let her in the house, giving her enough time alone to witness the state of affairs and flee. 

"I wonder if she'll be there when I get back,"  I thought, half expecting to hear her car screeching away.  "In that case, I could take the morning off and go get a latte!"

I don't know what my problem is.  Most of my friends would kill to have Mary, the woman who wrote the book on living simply (actually, 3 of them, see here) help them clear out and start fresh.  But I'm afraid.  I blithely declared that I would face my fear of clear spaces by attacking My Secret Hoarding Place and booked Mary before I could change my mind.  But now, laying bare all my bad habits to a stranger who writes books doesn't seem like such a great idea.

Until we enter the Fire Swamp.  Remember Wesley and Buttercup entering the Fire Swamp in the Princess Bride? First, there's the tangle of vines and underbrush (cables overhead and toys/papers/objects of unknown origin underfoot), and THEN, there's Quicksand, Fire Spurts and Rodents of Unusual Size.  OK, no, there aren't actually rodents of ANY size in my office, I am speaking figuratively here!

Alone, I am overwhelmed by fear and self-loathing in the Fire Swamp.  But it turns out Mary is a valiant Wesley, tackling cables ("Ziploc bags, Patty, c'mon, Ziploc Bags!"):

and bookcases on the verge of a nervous breakdown:

And me.  Seeing myself through someone else's eyes, saying goodbye to things I've held onto forever, I want to scream and cry and jump in her arms and have her carry me to the other side.

This is me, throwing out some of my most prized possessions.  A story for another day, when I've completed the mourning process (I am still in denial).

This is 5 years of stuff my thrifty self thought had value:

But compared to the things I found:  a portrait of my husband as a child taken by his grandmother, ripped by the closet door that was jammed by a BROKEN LAMP (see it there in the picture above!  Why was I holding onto a broken lamp??).  A beautiful photograph taken by a friend, the documents I need to register R for kindergarten.  Most of the stuff they were buried in, I really don't need.

Three hours later, I'm exhausted.  Mary made me face the Fire Swamp at its worst and I lived to tell the tale, but there is still much to be done.  She leaves a list of homework to do until we meet again.  I am pleased "return the trivet to the dining room" is not written down (spare me some dignity, please!). 

So, on the eve of Spring Cleaning Work Weekend, Princess Buttercup is going back in!  Please don't leave me to the quicksand alone - send messages, bring beer, post pictures, and vote, vote, vote to win a copy of Mary's book "Secrets of Simplicity."   And check back here Monday to see what progress we've made.

I wonder how much a broken lamp would go for on Ebay.

P.S.  See how Day 9 started:  Operation: Find My Floor - Day 9, Urge to Purge  

Win This Book, Change Your Life!

"Things Do Not Change, We Change" 

Henry David Thoreau, quoted in Secrets of Simplicty by Mary Carlomagno

What can you let go?  This is the first question I often ask in a yoga class, and it's the first question Mary Carlomagno asks in her book, Secrets of Simplicity:  Learn to Live Better With Less.  With inspiring quotes from the likes of Lao Tzu, mind-expanding exercises for envisioning a fresh start, and practical steps for achieving real goals, I feel hopeful for the first time in my clutter-riddled, chaotic life.

I want to share this book with you!  You incredible fans have cheered me on through facing so many fears, you've nominated FFUD for lofty titles and voted again and again, affirming our efforts to transform our lives together. 

As a big thank you I'm going to send 5 of these books to 5 fans who vote 5 or more times for Facing Forty Upside Down in the contests we're currently in:

Top 25 Funny Moms, at Circle of Moms (vote once a day til March 28): http://www.circleofmoms.com/top25/funny-moms#_

Top Mom Blog at Babble.com (Clinging by my toenails to Top 25!): http://www.babble.com/babble-50/mommy-bloggers/nominate-a-blogger/

Other ways to wave the flag: 

Like the FFUD  Facebook Fan Page: http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Facing-Forty-Upside-Down/153479621367760

Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/UpsideDownPatty

Become a Public Follower right here:

Send me a message saying you're clicking 5+ times and you'll be entered to win Mary's book.  You've won my heart already.

xo Patty

P.S.  Mary turns out to be Wesley to my Buttercup - watch us attack the Fire Swamp here:  http://upside-down-patty.blogspot.com/2011/03/operation-find-my-floor-day-9-contd.html

Operation: Find My Floor, Day 9 - An Urge to Purge

Baby steps.  That's what the first 8 days of the first serious Spring Cleaning of my life have been. Thinking about it, reading about it, talking about it, taking "before" pictures, and buying clothes to clean in.  Oh, that last bit is sooo bad, I know. 

At Target, shopping for kids birthday presents, I half expect a store announcement declaring a flagrant foul going on in the dressing room.  "I'm breaking every cardinal rule about spring cleaning," I'm muttering.  "I should be giving away my T-shirts, not buying a new one.  This is exactly what is so bad about American consumerism, cheap clothes that make it easy to accumulate more than you need.  What am I doing?  I hate myself.  But, how cute would I look cleaning in this?"

I did purge, a little - 12 bottles of nearly empty toiletries went in the trash on Day 1 (let's not discuss how many remain), and in 1 hour on Day 7 I found 25 pens scattered around the office where I swore on Day 6 I had none. 

Why Yes, I Do Have a Pen!

On Day 5, I discovered a still-full hot water bottle under a stack of work and momentarily felt embarrassed for not remembering how it got there, but then elated that moving it reduced the stack by 2 inches in one go.
That was all before the panic hit.

Day 9:  Mary's coming in an hour!  This house looks like a crazy woman was locked in here with wild animals for the winter!  I can't show her this!  Who can live like this?  Mary, the author of Live More, Want Less, is coming to save me from my disorganized and overflowing self.  If she can get in the front door.

After 40 years of accumulating I am experiencing my first urge to purge.  It feels like this:

Framed Arnold Roth picture, gift from an old co-worker.  What does THAT say??

In honor of Mary, I move 2 sleds, 2 shovels, 4 sets of snowshoes, 2 bags of ice, a pair of crocs and 2 newspapers off the front porch so she has a chance of entering.  Darn, that means it will be easy for her to escape as well.

Here she comes!  I hope she brings her own shovel.  We may need it, and I don't remember where I put ours.

P.S.  Just joining in?  I went public with "My Secret Hoarding Place" and declared Operation: Find My Floor, 46 days of releasing my attachments to earthly things for Lent, with great gusto, here.  And scheduled a Work Weekend March 26-27 here.  PLEASE DON'T LEAVE ME ALONE WITH ALL MY STUFF!!!  Post comments, send stories, pics and progress reports. Together, we'll find our outer order and inner peace!

P.P.S.  Find out what happens when Mary sees the house (hint: one of us runs away):  Operation Find My Floor: Day 9 cont'd - The Fire Swamp

There's Life In Me Yet

Annual check up and the news is good - I've got a resting heart rate of 51 bpm and the lung capacity of a teenager.  It's official: my kids are not actually killing me.  It just feels like they are! 

Worry lines aside, maybe motherhood is good for my health, forcing me to put all that yogic pranayama breathing to work.  When things get crazy (ha! as if they're ever not crazy!), if I remember to unclench my jaw and take a deep breath, my heart slows down.  All the oxygen to the brain helps me form words - like "Pants! On! Now!" - despite the shrieking I'm hearing in my own head. The fact that I teach yoga to kids with special needs and it would be extremely bad pr to freak out at at my own kids with special needs in front of others means I get lots of practice.

That said, stress does take its toll.  Dr T suggests a muscle relaxant and an antacid.  I bristle at the thought.  I am a yoga teacher! Shouldn't I have all this under control?

The truth is, even yoga teachers who preach the importance of self-care have a hard time finding enough time to sleep, exercise, eat well, relax, and not let things get to you, every day.  Before kids, I could cultivate awareness in my own body and mind ad infinitum (not that I did, I was too busy working).  Now, what's going on in their little bodies and brains is often all I am aware of.  Yes, my stomachaches might stop if I identified what was triggering them, but managing a child with 6 food allergies is all I can handle right now.  Pass the Tums!

Dr. T also prescribes cardio, five times a week.  I think: Yeah, right.  I'm a yogi.  I sit. I don't run unless I'm being chased by somebody, or there's free food involved.  I teach and take classes several times a week, when am I going to find the time to do more?

But then a little voice reminds me I'm 40.  I'm fit now, but I can't take that for granted.  My kids, with all of their complicated health issues, are going to be around a long time. They demand a mom with the strength and stamina of an Ironman.  I'd better figure out a way to take care of them AND myself. 

So, more cardio, here I come.  If anyone wants to join me for trail walking, Wii dance partying, or a swim, let me know.  Or if you're serving free food, ring the dinner bell.  I'll strap on my running shoes and be right over. 

How do you take care of yourself?  All advice/pleas for help, welcome!

Top 25 Funny Moms and Babble's Top Mom Blog - Vote for Facing Forty Upside Down!

Thank you to the fan who nominated me for Circle of Mom's Top 25 Funny Moms List! 

Please don't tell me it's the Top 25 "Funny" Moms List. 

Oh well, I'm happy if people are laughing, even if it's AT me! 

Please, please vote for Facing Forty Upside Down here:

http://www.circleofmoms.com/top25/funny-moms#_

I'm hoping if I make Top 10 we'll get to move into a big house and party while competing in challenges like Battle: Potty Humor.  Imagine this:  one by one, we get voted off, until the winner receives the grand prize of...a butler and a maid!  Click, people, click!  You're allowed to vote once a day until March 28. 

AND, Facing Forty Upside Down is at #24 on Babble.com's Top Mom Blog list right now.  Please vote to keep us in the Top 25:

http://www.babble.com/babble-50/mommy-bloggers/nominate-a-blogger/

Have you seen our happy dance for breaking Top 40?  Imagine what we'd do for Top 25??  Suggestions welcome!

P.S.  I'm on Twitter! Follow (@UpsideDownPatty): http://twitter.com/#!/UpsideDownPatty.

Operation: Find My Floor, Day 7 (Don't ask how it's going).



On My Desk:  Not a single pen.  But there is a "Wood Carving Basics DVD"
Don't Ask.

"I know what you need!" My dear friend Kim calls, all excited.  I get excited, too - she's usually full of great ideas, like "Are the kids asleep?  I'm bringing over dessert and wine!"  I can't wait to hear what I need.
"You need what I need - a weekend by yourself, in your house...cleaning!"

Phffffffffft.  That's the sound of me deflating. 

That's the difference between me and Kim.  We both have secret hoarding places - although hers is contained to her office, mine is my whole house - but she yearns to clean hers up. All she wanted for Christmas was 24 hours by herself to organize.  Me, on the other hand, thinks about DH (dear husband) and kids leaving me trapped with all our stuff and wants to throw myself at the door screaming "Take me with you!!!"  

One week into Operation: Find My Floor , precarious piles are coming down and things are messier than ever. Given the gift of 2 hours of child free time this very morning, I took one look at my office and took to my bed.  The bed is right next door. How could I resist?

But, Kim is not finished.  "Imagine:  you teach your yoga class in the morning, come home and drink some yummy tea, and then turn on great music and work for a few hours.  Then maybe a friend could come over and work with you for a while (or bring you beer), and then you could take a walk, and work a bit more and maybe reward yourself with a movie.  You would have free rein over your entire house, you can spread stuff out, see what's really in those piles and get to the bottom of them.  At the end you'd know what you have and have a place for everything. Wouldn't that feel great?"

Yoga, tea, friend, beer, a place for everything...that does sound kind of great. 

So this is it.  I'm declaring Spring Cleaning Work Weekend March 26-27.  I hope you will too, and report back your progress!  Let's place bets on how many tote bags I actually own.  Who's in??  

Kim, you'd better bring beer.

P.S.  Kim is used to giving me that extra push.  When I asked a random cyclist at Kripalu if she would teach me to ride a bike there was an understandable moment of silence, into which Kim blazed forward: "She's never learned to ride a bike, she's trying to face her fears before turning 40, it would mean soooo much to her."  The lady said yes.  And you can read what happened here.  Thanks, Kim!

P.P.S.  The pressure is on. Check out what happens when I realize a book-writing organizer is on the way:  Operation Find My Floor, Day 9- Urge to Purge

Japan.

What we can do:  pray, om, donate, volunteer.  AFYA Foundation is collecting needed supplies, if you're in the Yonkers area you can also volunteer to sort and pack:  http://afyafoundation.org/.  I have things they need.  Spring cleaning is now a mission.

My Secret Hoarding Place

Truth time.

Y'all know about My Secret Hiding Place.  Yeah, I was happy to have that little corner of heaven splashed all over Good Housekeeping Magazine.  But it sort of begs the question, what am I hiding from?

Well, when more than one friend asks pointedly if I've ever watched the show "Hoarders", when all the clutter-control books I've received as "gifts" would require x-ray vision to locate, it's probably a sign that I have a problem. One I've tried to kick before, without lasting success, to the point where I'd pretty much given up trying.  "I'm messy!  I've got larger issues to worry about! Our house is FULL OF LOVE!  I'm a yoga teacher, I'm peaceful ON THE INSIDE!"

Until the second social worker told me to clear out the house...for the kids.  "Kids with disabilities have a harder time regulating and organizing themselves internally," she says, tactfully. "If they are surrounded by disorganization externally, it makes it that much harder."

It's time to make a change.

I declared it here, January 1, 2011:  "I am going to seek professional help for my fear of clear spaces.  Y'all who've seen my house and car can stop laughing now, I mean it.  The Queen of Clutter is going to find her desk!"  And now, at the start of Lent, I'm declaring 46 days of releasing my attachments to earthly things. More than just a purge, I'm hoping to experience physical, mental, emotional and spiritual shifts by Easter, and ongoing transformation from there.

I sure know I won't get there by myself, so I've enlisted a simplicity guru - Mary Carlomagno of Order. and author of Live More, Want Less and Secrets of Simplicity.  Not just any prolific filer and labeler, Mary wants to get to the bottom of why I'm attached to every gift I've ever been given, every word my kids have ever written. "I want you to start thinking of your office as your yoga mat," she says, and something shifts in my heart, right then and there.

So here it is, My Secret Hoarding Space.  I'm terrified of sharing it with all of you.  But I'm hoping you'll be cheering me on (and perhaps clearing out some space of your own?) along the way.

Operation: Find My Floor.  Starts.  Now.

P.S. How long before I hit a wall?  Check out progress report Operation: Find My Floor, Day 7 (Don't Ask How It's Going)

Race Relations

A thought provoking discussion of race is going on over at Lisa Belkin's Motherlode Blog today - in her guest post, "A Brown Kid Like Them," writer Amanda Freeman shares her experiences as the mom of a blended family.  She is white, her daughter from her first marriage is half-white/half-Asian, and her husband and step-kids are black.  How others perceive her children differently is eye-opening, realizing how she herself perceives others is soul-searching.  A sensitive take on a sensitive subject.

I am Asian, DH (dear husband) is white, and our kids were adopted from China.  I sometimes say he looks like the au pair of our brood (a joke I feel I'm allowed to make as one who has been mistaken for a nanny at the park more than once).   When he proposed to me I asked if he realized what he was taking on - a lifetime of minority status-by-association, of thinking about issues of race in a way he never had to before.  He didn't realize what that meant then, not really, but took it on nonetheless. In the 20 years since he has listened with openness and empathy to how I, and now our daughters, navigate the world.  It's gotten so that in certain situations he says he sometimes forgets that others might not automatically know that he is related to us and interpreting things from our point of view.

As our girls grow up in America, they are culturally American, physically Asian, and will learn about the many powerful histories that run in our family, which include Holocaust survivors, Estonian freedom fighters, and Chinese Nationalist leaders.  10-year old G tells everyone "I'm one-quarter Jewish!" with pride, as she should.

So although every time I experience or hear stories of fears, misunderstandings or prejudices between the races I am deeply pained, I hold onto the hope that interracial relationships, friendships and families will eventually break down every barrier.  That the moment you promise someone that for the rest of your life you will try to see the world from their place in it, new understandings are possible.  That the moment you join forces to raise children to embrace multiple world views, you sew sutures into a fractured society.  Making healing and new growth inevitable.

Are you part of an interracial family?  How does race factor into your interactions with the outside world?  With each other?  If you're not part of an interracial family, is race something you think about or talk about much?  And for all:  do you feel hopeful, or doubtful, about the prospect of true understanding between people from different backgrounds?  Sharing our thoughts and listening to others is a great first step, I hope you'll join in here or at Motherlode.

Traveling with Children Abroad

A great Huffington Post blog post, Six Tips For Traveling Internationally With Children by Michael S.Kaye, president of Costa Rica Expeditions, brought back a lot of memories. Before we had kids DH (dear husband) and I envisioned one day hiking the Alps with our babies strapped to our backs, or discovering out-of-the way eateries in third-world countries where our multi-lingual kids would order their food off the adult menu, and teaching them wherever we went, to spot and flee tourist traps of every description.

Well, let's just say all that was easier said than done.  I am the first to admit our own weakness and fatigue are mostly to blame.  Our two trips to China to adopt our daughters turned us into KFC fans for the first time in our lives.  We paid outrageous sums of cash for Haagen Dazs bars wherever we saw them.  I almost cried when I lined up at a McDonalds and didn't know how to order french fries in Chinese.  We loved all the authentic Chinese meals we had with relatives, but with a new baby blowing our minds and re-shaping our entire lives, anything that reminded us of home came as a welcome relief, as if reminding us: "You know this.  You can do this." 

How great then, to see Michael S. Kaye, a travel professional, defending familiar food while traveling with kids?  And it is true, that for every cup of oatmeal or peanut butter and cracker sandwich we wolfed down out of our suitcases, all of us, tried new things.  Even G, 6 years old at the time, sampled the local river fish steamed with herbs we've never heard of and loved it.  Armed with Cheerios as a back-up, both girls often chose dumplings or noodles with every kind of filling and sauce for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

Michael also recommends turning off digital devices once you arrive at your destination, and although our daughter's DS helps her wait out many a situation at home, some of our best vacation memories (the longest game of war ever on a 4 hour van ride across Costa Rica, the journal we kept by writing and drawing every morning at breakfast, the pictures-often the most interesting of the trip-snapped from a child's eye view) would not have happened if she were attached to her stylus. 

We never imagined, pre-children, how grueling jet-lag, illnesses, and taking care of kids with special needs would be abroad.  And after each trip (particularly the one in rural Spain where both kids got the stomach flu - searching for medicine in a foreign language is stressful - pack as much as you can with you!) I swear I will never do it again. 

But Michael's last tip - to let your kids miss school to travel because they are guaranteed to learn more that way - is quite appealing.  We have relatives in London, who can show our kids real castles.  They will probably like the gift shop best.  But that's okay.  One day, when they read Shakespeare they will remember the castle they set foot in themselves.  I think I'll go renew our passports right now.

What are your tips for traveling with children internationally?