Work in perpetual progress.

I spend a lot of time getting ready to live my life.

(And no, before you jump to conclusions, this isn’t a post about the hours it takes to do my hair.  But it does.  Take hours, I mean.  But it’s worth it.  Anyhoodle.)

What I’m trying to say is that I spend a lot of time planning things that I rarely end up executing.  I have big ideas, big dreams, and big problems with time management.  And it’s only getting worse as I get older and more foolishly ambitious.

People in movies and books always seem to have a lot of time to do THINGS.  They sit with coffee and stare out windows, they take classes and tidy their houses and do art projects that don’t end up sitting on the dining room table for three weeks.  They don’t seem to work, or go to the bathroom, or chase around a toddler who pulls everything off all the shelves and eats her board books as a hobby.

And I… well, I have a lot of works in progress.

I have shelves of sticky-noted cookbooks, painstakingly combed through, with recipes for all occasions lovingly marked.  At last count, I’m supposedly making four different kinds of dessert and six appetizers for Thanksgiving.  I’ll end up baking one pie at 3 o’clock in the morning, haphazardly substituting forgotten ingredients and cursing while freebasing diet Pepsi.

I have a closet full of yarn that is someday supposed to be an army of hats, scarves, and cowls.  In fact, I might be a little obsessed with buying yarn, hoarding it, and rarely making anything out of it.  Hubs expressed his concern to me just the other day that at some point he fears I will spend all of our money on yarn and it will be stored in every nook and cranny in our house.

“YOU CAN’T PAY BILLS WITH YARN,” he said.

“I know,” I replied.  ”I will pay the bills with the money I make from selling my yarn creations!”

“We’re going to be homeless and have to sleep on piles of yarn.”

“AT LEAST WE WILL BE COZY!”

As an adult and ostensibly the creator of my own destiny, I think I’ve gotten stuck on the preparation phases of life and haven’t done much about moving on to the actual living.  And the problem with that, among others like yarn hoarding and culinary pitfalls, is that you get caught up in the how and never make it to the what.  And that means nothing happens.

Will I ever be the girl who makes coffee and sits there gazing into the cup whilst thinking deep thoughts and dreaming dreams?  No, probably not, unless I want my toddler to eat my cookbooks and use the household yarn surplus to lasso the dog.

But I’d like to to be the mom whose daughter remembers the fun things we did, the activities we tried, the traditions we began.  I’d like to be the person who finishes what she starts even if it ends badly, who doesn’t try to take on more than she can handle, and who isn’t as frazzled as she used to be.

I’d like to be the girl who DID, instead of the girl who was GOING TO.

And I’ll start with that damn yarn.

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Written by tia

Tia is a mommy, hairstylist, freelance writer, and blogger. She believes in eyeliner as a defense mechanism, equal rights, and Marc Jacobs. Her favorite things include story time, RPattz, and the overzealous use of parentheses. She lives with her husband and daughter in California.

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