Apple woes and the insanity of mothering
(My one hundredth post)
*10/17/06*
I forgot yesterday that it would have been John Dickson’s birthday. It’s also the anniversary of the day his mother died in 1979. I think John was born in ‘51, so he would have been 55. He leaves no one behind except his brother Joel, and those of us who remember him.
I am so bummed out. The saga of lost data has taken another vicious turn. I completed transcribing diary # 19, and then transcribed all of #20. I closed it to begin #21, then realized I wanted to add a post-script. So I opened it again, and only 2 pages out of about 40 were in the document. Very mysterious, because I KNOW I saved the stuff. So I spent a lot of time in fruitless search. Just meandered over to the disk utility program, just now I mean, and I’m afraid to try restoring or repairing to see if I can get the rest of that document back. I wonder, if when I was doing–no, if I’d mistakenly pressed the X when doing command shortcuts, it wouldn’t have deleted the whole thing back to page 2. It wasn’t selected. And I’d been saving all along. So what the hell happened?
I finally came up with an analogy for mothering that articulates to me the insanity. It’s as though I’ve taken a pill that shrinks me down to a completely different scale. A scale where more details are visible; such as a shag carpet looks like a forest. So where things on the normal scale had appeared to be seamless, now it can be seen that there are now gaps to be negotiated. So, to do one routine task, and move on to another is not the simple process it once was–now a bunch of subjobs have to be done in order to move from one to the other. (Such as, going through a front door–my cousin Lori described this–and discovering a child had pushed the button, and she’s now LOCKED OUT with stuff on the stove. So, an act you’d ordinarily do without thought becomes a complicated, multi-tasked task–problem-solving, alternative-trying, physically going to the other doors and banging–and that’s not even accounting for the emotions one may be feeling. And that’s only one moment in a 14 hour day with kids.)
The kicker in this, having to shrink down yet still accomplish the same things, plus more with a baby, is that nobody SEES that you’ve shrunk. Nobody sees or understands how much more effort it takes to do things that were once done so quickly and easily. Nobody knows, except maybe other mothers. For me, that’s the hard part is that I’m still expected to behave as if I’m with them on that larger scale, where things are done easily. People don’t understand my feeling tired, why I get upset when they do something that creates more work for me, and why I’m reluctant to take anything on.
Later:
Well I took on backing up my files from the laptop to a disk. Started from scratch, completely blind; the ‘get information’ files I got into incomprehensible, lots of acronyms and initials and no glossary. I spent hours. The result is a completely full disk, TWO of them actually which doesn’t make much sense; I don’t THINK I backed up that much. I was thinking about taking on networking this computer with the desktop, but not sure I have the energy left that would require. This hasn’t been the most restful of school days.
Things hanging over me with my folks coming either Thurs or Fri. Stuff to get done to make ready for them.
I find computers so completely bewildering…a complex and twisty path to get deeply into them, and I can never remember what I did to get there. The Help tools don’t seem to really help. If anything they send me in circles. This is a day to hope isn’t as wasted as it sort of seems: hopefully the floundering around I did with the computer has done me a little good as far as someday taking shape into a greater understanding. And yes, I’m aware that I’m a little anxious about needing to get stuff done before my folks come, but I think this will be a pleasurable trip (the last several have been), and then things will briefly get back to normal (5 days a week of kids gone). November’s the weird month at school and December’s kind of a write-off too.
It seems a shame to write off the entire week just because I have some obligations at the end of it. Like it’s a failure in my nature that I do kind of see it that way–a deprivation of sorts of the peace of having the kids gone. Sort of cut into yesterday because Gary was around underfoot all day, then knowing my folks will be here either Thurs night or Fri morning and Fri is going to be an all-day-Darlene day. And in the interim the guys are here working on the deck with their radio and their power tools. So I think I feel anxious that I won’t get what I need. actually, getting what I need seems pretty fragile since it’s kind of dependent on whether the kids get sick, and the timing with the school schedule. I’m looking at the possibility of being able to gracefully accept the inevitable without too much stake in one outcome or another; to not see it just in terms of what I’m losing in terms of time and peace, but the pleasure of what I’m giving up my time and peace for.
I’m so gunshy now that my data may be lost–I mean this document, in addition to the others. I just did a little research and it looks like I was a victim of a particular bug in Apple, which sometimes will revert to an original of a document and lose a shitload of work. Guess I might move on over to the Office program. Shit.
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