This has been??? The longest???? Month of my life????

It’s obviously the snow. I genuinely feel, like everyone else in the state of Utah, that it has snowed more days than it hasn’t. Wtf. It has literally made me cry more than once. I’m just… so tired. I just want to be able to walk the girls to/from school. I want them to be able to ride their bikes around. I want to do my favorite activity: outdoor reading. I have never felt like the weather was personally standing in the way of my health and happiness until now. And I am not being dramatic!!

It has also been over a month of disruption. Not for one single week did we have a “normal” or “standard” schedule. There were constant trips, Ryan was out of town, family events, and a billion appointments. It’s hard to feel like you have any traction when every day is an exception to the rule. I do think most of it is slowing down for April, but at the very least we WILL see a decrease in the snow. It’s keeping me going.

Good

• TAYLOR SWIFT. Back in January a friend posted that she was selling 2 tickets to Taylor in Vegas. I snatched them up and made it happen, even though it was not the most convenient arrangement for me and my best friend, 7 kids between us, and Ryan already out of town that night. But I am SO glad we made it happen. We got a quick 36 hours in Vegas with our best friends and got to see the most incredible show. I am just so proud of Taylor.
• Reese has now successfully attended Activity Days twice! We kind of halted every extra activity before Christmas. It was just too much for her. But we’ve been easing back in and she’s doing a terrific job.
• Dash is 2! We got to celebrate our favorite Dashyboi down in St. George. I love every second I get to hang with him.
• Stevie is 3! Stevie’s birthday is 10 days after Dashy’s, and she’s 3 years old now. 🙁 That part should go in the “bad” section because I’ve weirdly had a lot of conflicting emotions about it. Overall, we had a great time celebrating her and the sunshine she brings into our lives.
• PROGRESS! This month Reese had a long-awaited neuropsych evaluation, which went really well AND did testing to see if she qualifies for the gifted program within our district (in the hopes that the district expands it to 3rd grade). It’s felt like we’ve been both treading water and fumbling through the dark, and now we have a roadmap!
• Therapy!!! I found a new therapist and we already vibe even better than my last one (whom I saw from 2015-2016). AND she can meet with me via Zoom which will make my life roughly a billion percent easier. I loved therapy before, and I’m so excited to get back into it.

Bad

• My book club did a winter retreat at the beginning of the month and suffice it to say… the house did NOT match the listing. We laugh about it now but it was honestly a huge bummer at the time. (They said a heat lamp in an unfinished basement was a “sauna” and the hot tub was ice cold.)
• In keeping with the cold theme, going to St. George was supremely disappointing. It was chilly, windy, and rainy almost the entire time. It sounds silly, but it truly was demoralizing. Like, we cannot escape the cold.
• I spent so much of the month whimpering to Ryan that “I just can’t do it all!” mostly with work. I complained about it last month too, and unfortunately probably always will. There is just too much to do. Even with all the help and privilege I have, I can’t hang, and it feels really defeating.
• I’ve been in a bit of a reading rut. I finished 8 books this month, but reading often felt like a chore—and I didn’t have a single 5 star. :'(
• Bickering might short-circuit my brain. Reese and Loney just. can’t. stop. I suppose it’s healthier than Reese just bullying Malone and Malone crying, but honestly, it’s so much more annoying and exhausting. Time for me to reread Siblings without Rivalry.
• I’m already feeling some dread about Spring Break and summer. I know, I know. I just whined about the cold, but it’s just the whole kids-home-in-my-house-all-the-time-every-day thing for me. I worry about my energy, patience, ability to be a good, fun mom. And my sanity.

On My Brain

• I spent a SIGNIFICANT part of this month following the Brianna Madia vigilante drama. Basically, she’s an influencer whose hate-followers over the years have radicalized to creating their own subreddit, taking cyberbullying to extreme levels, and even interfering with her personal life and relationships. She worked with a digital forensics investigator to identify over 200 of these “anonymous” online trolls and has been exposing them. She’s even suing for defamation and stalking! I felt so alive following it! And I think it’s the opening to an important age of the internet. We don’t know what laws we need until we need them, and internet bullies have been long overdue. Something will come from this. I don’t know what, but I can smell it in the air.
• This headline made its way around the internet this month, and I loved every second of it. I read Fair Play a few years ago, then refreshed it in January with my book club—so I’ve been thinking about it A LOT. Domestic work enables capitalism, and yet we act like it isn’t helpful or important or $valuable$. I’ve also had some friends experiencing divorce the last year or so, and it’s both awful (they face scary financial futures in exchange for the time they’ve dedicated to their family) and amazing (ex-husbands realizing just how much was being done for their tiny baby man lives). We still have a lot of work to do to make our roles equal.
• I watched grown ass Taylor Swift tell a crowd of 65k people “I’m gonna play you a song I wrote for my 9th grade talent show” and then heard every single one of those 65k people scream it at the top of their lungs. That does something to a person. It made me think so much about, well, eras. How we change. How we don’t. How we can own those stages of our lives, even if we’ve grown so far past them. I really struggle with my past selves. Taylor found a way to live with hers. Maybe I can, too.
• Why do Mormon men keep murdering their wives in lieu of divorce? I read the new Chad Daybell/Lori Vallow book just as I moved past the Enoch family annihilator and just in time for the dentist who poisoned his wife (and the list is much longer than that). As a person who is fascinated by A. True Crime, B. Sexism especially in families/marriages, and C. The LDS Church, I find myself completely engrossed when these particular cases pop up. Have we overemphasized the celestial kingdom marriage sealing? Have we made divorce seem like the end of the world? Have we created a culture where men are able to put on an easy, flawless mask at church or in their communities, and the idea of their shitty underbelly being exposed is just too much? Why doesn’t the Church do more to educate and protect? Why are we so reluctant to see red flags in “good” men? I’ve been feeling a lot of feels about this but mostly the feel is anger.
• I still have teacher dreams occasionally. (This isn’t about school shootings. I’m not ready to think/talk/share/do anything about that right now.) Like, the bell is ringing and I’m in the break room in my underwear (??) or I realize I have no lesson plans. In the span of one week, I did a goal-setting lesson at the request of my Laurels and then two presentations about reading at a local school. And my soul was absolutely on fire. I love it. So much. I am good at it, both naturally and because I worked very hard for a long time. It was like a sip of Diet Coke when you’ve been drinking water all day, except it’s been 8 years of water. I’ve done lots of interesting things and I’m so grateful for the opportunities and experiences. I love being a writer. But damn. Teaching is my Diet Coke, and I’m just scheming over here trying to find a way to be in classrooms, in front of teens, in schools, but not full-time and not for minimum wage.