No worries at all?

I have been working on my yoga practice to help manage anxiety and all sorts of things. And as part of that I have been working on meditation as well. I have used some guided meditations and recently bought a package from Circle and Bloom that specifically focuses on PCOS and fertility and cycles.

I was listening to today's segment and after some typical relaxation routines, she says to focus on when I was "ten years old and had no worries at all. "

And that kind of stopped me cold and all day long it's been running through my head. Because my life was being turned upside down and shaken when I was ten years old. My mom packed us up and moved us out, they were going to get a divorce, my dad just...unraveled, there were horrible, terrible fights where I was basically sobbing hysterically and begging them to stop yelling. They ignored me until my mother would tell my dad to look at me and see if this is what he wanted. To do this to his daughter.  Again. Neither one was willing to stop fighting until I could be the weapon to use against the other: "Look what you're doing to Annie!"

And then he was dead and I blamed myself for it, we moved back to our house and I felt like I had to take care of everyone. Someone had to take care of us.

I can't actually think of any age where I had no worries at all. My mother once tod me a story about how I was such a good baby. On Saturday mornings she did the big housecleaning for the week, and to keep me busy, he'd give me the old TV guide in my crib. And I would rip every single page into strips while she worked. My OCD therapist was quite intrigued at that.

One of my earliest memories is hiding with my mother and infant sister in the way back of this storage closet because we were hiding from my father. He was drunk and spoiling for a fight and we had to hide until he passed out. I would have been two.

When I was five, he said goodbye to us so he could go get help. He did inpatient alcohol detox at Hazelden. I think he was gone for a few weeks. I don't know if he completed rehab or not, but he was sober when he came home and AA was his religion for a long time.

He wasn't drinking, but he was still always up for a fight. Late at night they would argue and one night a large vase was thrown by one of them. Another night it was the phone, a heavy late 70's rotary dial phone. One night they came to check on me while I was asleep and got into a shoving match when they both tried to peek in the door at the same time. I pretended to be asleep.

When my mom would go out for her sorority meeting, he would seethe and get worked up that she wasn't there and would imagine all the ways that she was betraying him until he took it out on us. More than once he would come into my room and wake me up to make me clean it. If it was already kind of clean? He would just walk along the shelf with his arm out and knock everything to the floor.
I was in first grade being kept up on school nights just so he could poke at her, to try and make her stay home.

There was a lull for a couple years, we put on a good face. Then in third grade, things began to veer off the rails just a little bit. I can't remember if there was a triggering event, or if my brain was just already wired for worst case scenarios, but something happened in third grade, I was suddenly too scared to go to school. I could not handle it. I didn't like my teacher at all, but I think it was something at home. I would fight going every morning, looking back I recognize that I was having full on panic attacks. And then resulted to gagging myself until I vomited every morning to get to stay home. And I would take super hot baths and stay in the tub as long as I possibly could, I was probably the cleanest third grader in the world, I don't know if I felt safe in the water or if it was part of my contamination phobia/OCD. It went on for a few weeks. Until they brought me to school and my father had to carry me to my classroom and practically put me in my desk in front of everyone.
And then I had to talk to a nice lady named Karen every few weeks at school. The social worker.
And I would have been nine.

Sometime that summer I found his handgun. And I put it back because I was scared of being caught. But I was also scared that he might kill us with it. And then the next winter we moved out and he was dead by spring. Thirty-one years ago this weekend, actually.

Sew and sew

Since I have this fancy sewing room, I am using it.

I dug out a quilt top I made forever ago, and promptly screwed it up when I tried to put a binding on it.

So, I need to practice binding, so I made some runners. One of them....I had to cut the binding off and now it's an oddly thin scrappy runner with a terrible binding. Then I made another one from scraps and if you don't look closely, it's not as horrible. And I got to practice making strips and joining them to make a scrappy binding, which I think is actually pretty cute.

And then today I was feeling all kinds of sorry for myself and sad. But I figured out what this really pretty pre-quilted fabric I bought a while ago wanted to be.  A cute bag with pleats. So I gathered together some options and then looked all over the interwebs for a pattern that I liked.

I didn't see any I loved, so I decided to cobble together my own thing.


And then put it all together wrong.




Oops. The lining was inside out when I turned it. I had to rip.

And then I screwed up the lining again when I went to tack it down and I will have to fix it. But I can fix it tomorrow instead of tonight.

An all new craft cave

So, the painting and sprucing took a while, but I am pretty happy with how it all came out. I still need to find a cover for the existing ceiling light, or get  new light if it's not a standard size. The identical one in our bedroom exploded a couple summers ago, raining broken glass all over the entire room. So we took this one down in case it was a flaw in the glass. And then we didn't use this room for anything but storage so we never got around to getting a new cover. So it's a bare bulb for now, which is not cute at all.

My sign was getting all creased by staying rolled up,
I figured might as well hang it up.

I have so much fabric! My personal stash is in the closet.
This is all AP stuff.

My yarns, let me show you them.
And my beading supplies.

Looking into the room.The floor came out so well, I
loooooove it. And I have one trash can for trash, and one for
fabric scraps to be used somehow. Eventually.

Because lights are fun.

I had a small math fail and the curtains aren't as full as they should be.
But I love them anyway. They are fully lined.
And now the neighbor's living room won't be on full view when I am working.

ZIPPERS. Most of them. And my dishtowels that need to be ironed.
Why the fuck did I buy dishtowels that need to be ironed? Seriously.
My ironing board cover is gross, I know.
It's just water, Mary Ellen's Best Press spray, and scorch marks.
Mostly scorching.

It's a giant button that's a tin.
How could I not have it?

It will never be this clean again. The curtains fabric was how I picked the pain colors and the blue table is on it's third or fourth coat of paint. it has been white, red, cream, and now dark turquoise. The shelves are all closet cubes from target and I move them around like big ass Tetris pieces to fit whatever space I use or when I get bored. The floor is chalk paint with two coats of satin polyurethane.