Here, but hiding

I know, I know. It's been almost 3 weeks since I last wrote anything on here. The cyberspace silence is due partly to being busy, busy, busy these past three weeks.

For instance, in just 24 hours last weekend alone, we attended a birthday party for Charley's wonderful aunt...

...Anna channeled her inner reindeer...

...and we attended my niece's fairy tea party for her seventh birthday....

But before last weekend, we traveled to Southern Oregon for Thanksgiving...which feels like it was about a month ago instead of a mere two weeks.

(That's a pilgrim "costume," by the way, from Anna's preschool.)

We had a lovely visit at Charley's parents' house...but then we came home, and it feels like I've barely had any time to sit for the last two weeks or longer. Much of the first week and into this past week (not to mention the two weeks before Thanksgiving) was spent dealing with last kitchen remodel stuff--running around town to pick up stuff, being home for the contractors, answering questions, endlessly talking on the phone to deal with a snafu with the cabinet installers about the dishwasher or with the plumbing store about a two-week-delinquent kitchen sink...etc., etc., etc. Just...stuff. But hooray! As of about 5pm on Tuesday of this week, on Dec. 8, it's officially finished! (Well, the contractors' jobs are all finished, that is.)

It went from a tiny, unusable, ridiculous closet of a room...

(The old kitchen is on the other side of the wall behind the table, through the doorway on the right side of the picture.)

to an absolutely gorgeous, huge, useable, light-filled space....

(Sorry--the photos are only midprogress. The counters have been buried under too much stuff all week to get any pictures yet of the officially done kitchen. These 2 pics are from a week ago, with 4 or 5 days of work still to go.)

I love, love, LOVE the finished job. But I'm not totally done with my side of it; I still have to finish moving everything from the garage back into both the kitchen and dining room/office and then get it all livable again. All in all, the remodel wasn't that horrid or stressful; it's just been a lot of busy work. (But then again, death has a funny way of skewing what does or doesn't seem "all that bad" in comparison.) Mostly I just feel like I've been living in Suspend Mode or else under house arrest for the last seven weeks. It's absolutely worth it, but man, oh man, am I beyond tired of it at all...and I still have stuff to do for it before it's 100 percent done. Blech.

On top of the overwhelming task of getting my kitchen and dining room back to rights, we had the usual stuff this week too...shuttling Anna to and from where she needs to be, dinner with friends one night, and Anna's Christmas program for preschool Thursday night.

All normal enough stuff for the average person. But then again...I'm a widow. And it's December, which also means:

1. Dealing with Christmas.
2. Our wedding anniversary.
3. Charley's birthday.

What should have been our sixth wedding anniversary was this past Monday, on the 7th. And this year, I found I really didn't care about the damn thing. I was so tired and worn out from the kitchen remodel and the entire year in general that I just couldn't muster any energy to care about the date. And totally atypically for me, I made no plans whatsoever for it. Usually I'll have dinner with a friend or go get a massage and facial--just something small or a little treat to mark it as a "special" day--but this year I did nothing. Nada. Zip. Anna had preschool, the contractor was here working on the kitchen all day, and then we went to dance team practice in the evening. Totally and utterly nonspecial things, to be sure. The only semi-nods I made to the day were that Anna and I went and got a late lunch at a sandwich place at the mall, then went to Barnes & Noble where I bought her a few Christmas books (and one of my old childhood favorites), and then we had hamburgers and chocolate shakes in our car in the Burgerville parking lot after dance team practice. A very momentous day, indeed.

(Perhaps it wasn't very different from most people's sixth wedding anniversaries after all....)

But there was one thing that cast a pall over my anniversary, and over this week in general. Late Sunday night--the night before my anniversary--I got some bizarre unexpected bad sad inevitable unbloggable news about the sudden death of someone I know. And because of who it is and how and when, I can't even begin to unravel what I think or how I'm reacting to the news. Death sucks, no matter when or who it is, and there's never any "good" time for it...but right now seems even more conflicted than usual.

The crowning insult this week is that I caught a cold too, passed on to me oh-so-inevitably by my five-year-old little germ factory. It's not an awful cold--not like what I developed this time last year and that lasted for 3-4 horrid, miserable weeks--but it's just one more thing to lower my energy and make me feel cruddier, crabbier, and more short-tempered than I probably would have been already.

And Charley's birthday is in only nine days too. And while it's not usually a big deal anymore, it's still another something that needs to be dealt with and gotten past in an already tiring, tiresome month.

And Christmas. Ugh. I've been told it's only two weeks away (I'm trying to ignore this fact as much as possible). Other than most of my Christmas shopping, I have absolutely nothing else done. And for the first time in my life--including since being widowed--I could happily do absolutely nothing to decorate for Christmas and be perfectly fine.

I just want to crawl in bed, bury my head under the covers, and wake up on January 2 (or later). But at the same time, this hide-and-hibernate reflex doesn't feel the same as it did in earlier, active grief. It's not emotional, hysteria-inducing, reactive, or hypersensitive, and it's not because of Charley or from dealing with death--it's from having to deal with life right now.

The good thing is that I'm a pro at dealing with this crap by now. Oh joy. (Or maybe professional isn't quite the right word for it. I'm jaded...weary...experienced.) After almost 4 1/2 years of widowhood, I'm well-practiced at taking my internal self-care temperature and deciding what I really need to do. It's not the end of the world if I don't get a tree up anytime soon (or even at all), or if the only nod I manage to make is a tiny 3' tall fake tree purchased on Dec. 23. It's not the end of the world if my kitchen doesn't get unpacked for another month, or if the last 10 percent of my house remains in boxes for the next year. And unlike in the first years of widowhood, I feel no need to defend or argue about my choices. What needs to happen will happen, and what doesn't, won't.

But in the meantime, if I'm not posting anything here, it's probably just because I'm trying to hide from this month that is December. We're here, we're fine, we've been through far worse...but I'd sure love to be a bear right now and get to hibernate for a few months. Maybe then I'd wake and feel rejuvenated and refreshed....