On Monday morning of this week, I woke up inspired. I’d had some vivid, strange dreams and woke up compelled to get my own act together. It has been 10 months since I took the doula training workshop, and I’ve done nothing towards working on the certification process. I’m employed, and actually enjoy most aspects of my position, but it’s not, nor has my job ever been, what I want to do when I grow up. I’m busy parenting, and living, and working, and working out, but I haven’t been focusing on steering my career down a different path.
As if compelled through the same cosmic vibe, another doula contacted me on Monday about getting together all the doulas in town for a meet-and-greet networking session. I perused some graduate school options, and looked into other formal training to set me firmly on this new road. I’m looking. I know that I will be able to pull this all together into a tightly knit grouping of skills that I will be able to use for my next career. Doula, childbirth educator, herbalist, and then what? Prenatal psychologist? Deep ecologist? Massage therapist? Somatic experience counselor? I'm not yet certain, but I am looking.
And speaking of inspiration, Nena has taken a great interest in cleaning. This can be readily summed up as being inspired by a movie that she currently loves, Another Cinderella Story with Selena Gomez. Nearly every day she tidies up, cleans off the table, the kitchen island, and the coffee table. She cleans the windows she can reach, and the refrigerator. She mops the floor.
Tuesday when I came home from work, she’d begun the process of rearranging the living room. I was surprised, and not necessarily motivated to help her complete the task, but once we got going, we REALLY got going. We scrubbed, and cleaned, and pulled apart all the electronics, we debated which way to arrange the couches and tables and where the TV should go. We drew our ideas on paper, and then discussed them with Daddy and Signe. All the while, we watched HGTV, and Nena kept getting inspired by more ideas along the way. In the end, we did a complete 180-degree rotation of the furniture, and it looks lovely. What I saw as limiting at first, given the constraints of our wood stove and the back door, turned into an excellent opportunity to clean, renovate, and redesign our living space.
I have never forced my girls to clean anything. I’ve asked for assistance on occasion, and probably ranted that I wished they would help me on more than a few, but I’ve never forced or required them to do chores. Seeing Nena’s inspiration to clean and her motivation to design the layout of a room has been so much fun. She has amazing neat and tidy characteristics, which play out in the meticulous care she takes to arrange her bed, and her dresser top, and they way she places blankets, pillows, and stuffed animals on her bed. It is truly fascinating to watch this develop.
Signe has random moments of cleaning inspiration too. Sometimes she’ll head up to their room, shut the door, and I can hear the sounds of bumps and footsteps and singing. After a while she’ll call out, “Mom! Come see my room!” And I’ll head up and everything will be picked up from the main part of the floor, and stuff will be bulging out from beneath the dresser, and shoved into the toy bins, and overflowing from the closet cubbies, and she will be beaming with pride. So cute.
As the summer wanes towards fall, I feel the changing of the season. The leaves are starting to turn yellow and orange. The late summer flowers are starting to die back. The mornings have been a touch chilly, and there is that indescribable feeling of change. It is happening.
