Winter Doldrums

It’s been a bit of a strange day so far. People have expressed varying levels of impatience and irritation with me, and the day is still quite young. I’m feeling a bit confused by it. It’s also grey and overcast today. Not cold, thankfully, but the kind of constant unending gray of lands with no sun. I’m reminded of The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis. I can’t even remember what the sun was like, much less convince anyone else that it exists. Which, I suppose, brings me to confession time. I have a confession to make. I hate this time of year. Hate it. Loathe it. Despise it. Can’t express forcefully enough how much I hate this time of year. I feel slow and cold and sleepy all the time. Mostly cold. It all starts when the clocks change for daylight savings time. The days get shorter and shorter, but you don’t notice it so much until the hour changeover. Then, you step outside of work and it’s DARK. Not even 5 PM and black as midnight. So depressing. Also, I’m not a big fan of the cold. So I approach every winter with some trepidation, like an animal past her prime who fears this winter will be the one to do her in, the one she doesn’t survive. I try not to talk about this much. In fact, I try not to think about it much. One, because it seems kind of crazy. I’ve heard about circadian rhythms and seasonal disorders and a lot of things that can possibly describe what I experience during the winter, but I’m not prepared to completely buy in on those theories. Two, thinking and talking about how horrible things are has a strange way of making them worse, especially when they are the sort of thing there are no solutions for. There are places with mild winters, but no place with none. And every place on the planet has a winter solstice. If I could muster up some enthusiasm I’d say I can’t wait for the warm, sunny, long days again. I think I could bear the cold better if it wasn’t so dark all the time, or bear the darkness better if it wasn’t so cold. The combination is pretty overwhelming, though.

And that, kind reader, is why I’m a failed Goth. Yes, I was once quite a Goth. I adored the cloak of night. I welcomed the ink jet of darkness covering me, smoothing me over, hiding me, protecting me and keeping me alone. I also liked wearing lots of velvet and listening to Sisters of Mercy. Actually, I still like those things, but I don’t think that’s enough to keep anyone from revoking my Goth membership card , and quite frankly, I don’t want to be in the club anyways, as I find most Goths to be quite scary. It has taken me many years to realize that it wasn’t the darkness itself that I loved. It was the isolation. There’s nothing quite like the night to break you away from all humanity everywhere. Safely alone, conversations with a moon who always listens can be a lifeline for someone who just doesn’t understand anyone or anything. Being the last person on the last bus at two in the morning and riding noisily through deserted streets is a remarkably enlivening experience.

Hmmm, I kind of thought I had more to say about that. Had mentally envisioned that section to be about four paragraphs, wherein there’d be much delving into my history and recalling some of the great anecdotes that have made up my youth. Apparently, I’ve found myself too apathetic to go into anything in depth at the moment. I suppose I do have one thing to say, though, keeping myself busy in November with NanoWriMo helped me through much of the usual winter misery, and I plan to do that again this year. Oh, speaking of writing. I skipped Yoga yesterday, just because I didn’t feel like going, and decided I’d go on Wednesday instead during Sacred Hour. At first, I had planned to write last night instead, and do a swap. Of course I didn’t do that. So now I’m all kinds of behind on the writing schedule. I managed to play some Animal Crossing, though. I love that game.

Sophia brought home her first piece of refrigerator art last night. It was a stoplight with bits of colored paper glued in the three circles. It’s hanging on the fridge right now. I’m very excited about that. She did it in Toddler B class, which apparently she hangs out in quite a bit. She adores the Toddler B teacher (Ms. Vicky), and anytime I say anything about daycare she chimes in with “Bicky! Bicky!” just to reassure us that she knows exactly what we’re talking about. Because of her history of being reluctant to go to people and the whole thing where she didn’t want to leave her earlier class (Infant A), I’m really encouraged by her growing attachment to her future teacher, Ms. Vicky.

Also in daycare news : Sophia now has her providers going to other classes to retrieve books for her. The Toddler Classes have no books in them for the children to play with. I am not sure why this is, but I imagine it has something to do with the difficulty of keeping books hygienic. I have never been troubled by this, as Sophia has more than enough books at home to make up for that. Apparently, her teachers discovered by some chance (or possibly Sophia’s talking about it, she has recently started saying “book” with greater frequency and clearer emphasis) how much she loves to read books, and so they went into the older kid classes to bring books back for her. So when Kurt went to pick her up one day last week, she was playing alone (as she often is) with a stack of books that no other children were competing with her for. That’s my girl! Maybe in a few years she’ll be spending her entire lunch recess in the school library picking out new books to read the way I did in elementary school. The provider told Kurt, “She really loves books! You should take her to the library sometime.” Kurt promptly replied that we bring her library books all the time. One of the things I wanted to do is keep a list of the library books we brought with notes on particular favorites, but alas, that is among the things that will have to go undocumented. You should see her scrapbook. It’s a big cardboard box that I stuff papers into. Someday there’ll be a book, and glue, and pretty things to look at. Someday. Maybe she can help me with it when she’s like six or seven or something. There’s one other daycare story from the past week or so. Kurt went to pick up Sophia and they were in the process of bringing the kids from outside play to inside. There was plenty of screaming and crying, but apparently Sophia came in without complaints (at home moving from outside to inside causes much wailing and kicking and falling down to the floor for full on tantrums). As she came inside, though, she was also saying, “Inside! Inside!” which is something we say a lot at home (both inside and outside are regular parts of the vocabulary) but apparently not so much at daycare, because Sophia’s repetitions caused Ms. Shannon to say to Kurt,”That Sophia is sooooooo smart.” This is the second such instance of a Toddler teacher noting that Sophia is smart. I’m a little hesitant to take such labels at face value, but I’m sure it’s meant as a compliment, and that pleases me. I don’t really know if I want my kid to be extra smart. Extra smart doesn’t seem to get one much in the world. All the intelligence in the world doesn’t guarantee she’ll be happy or healthy or wise. On the other hand, I can’t help but feel the classic geek thrill at being told my child is bright.