Magenta-Flecked Puce

When I'm depressed, I usually want to sleep. In fact, that's generally what gives me the heads up that I've entered the blue phase. though why it should be called blue -- which evokes healing and calmness and serenity -- baffles me. It should be called the puces.

Puce is that sickly mustard blah color that better depicts the flaccid jelly I become when in the doldrums. Magenta, also, seems an appropriate color to augment the puceness of my state when depressed. Magenta-flecked puce.

Magenta, because it is a color that screams. A color that overwhelms the senses and deviates from any normal protocol. And that, too, is what I feel when depressed. I'm overwhelmed.

And that is why sleep seems so blissful in my magenta times. My magenta puce times. I just want to sleep.

So yesterday I had driven a long way to a hiking trail near waterfalls with my kids and met up with my daughter's scouting group to work on our hiking badge and direction finder award. It was raining and though it was a nice hike and I loved watching the children interact, as well as connecting to some adults I admire, the trip was way beyond my exhaustion level.

I humped back home, stopping for cocoa with whipped-creamed straws and decaf coffee; dealt with parental disciplinary actions at home and then went to a friend's house for dinner. By bedtime I was magenta. After connecting with my husband and exchanging stories of our days, I rolled over in my bed, completely puce.

It got me thinking: what does one do to climb out of the slippery sludge that lines all sinkholes? How do you surpass the panic and terror? How do you make it back home to YOU? How do you make it back HOME at all?

Often I write. Sometimes I journal or write an essay -- but other times I make a list. Today's list (written in my head) was to purposely ignore the kitchen and the eighteen-inch grass in the backyard and instead focus on my children's bedrooms.

I have to say it. They were vile. I cringed every time I tucked my sweeties into bed and I feared lasting damage to their psyches from living and sleeping in such stagnancy.

So we cleaned.
For hours.

And now both their bedrooms are beautiful, there is a sense of accomplishment in the air and we've come to Chuck E. Cheese's to celebrate. Two and a half hours later I'm looking at the clock, but my luvs don't want to leave. Sigh.

Another list (a mega one this time) plagues me until I write it down.

1. my bedroom
2. my bathroom
3. kitchen
4. garage
5. laundry room and 1/2 bath (also hanging and putting away clothes)
6. phone nook and bar
7. dining room
8. living room
9. back patio
10. back yard
11. gardens
12. office
13. entry
14. staircase and landing
15. learning closet
16. upstairs bathroom
17. front patio

If I dedicate one day to each off these tasks (and some will be hard-pressed to fit into one day -- like the yard or gardens), and exclude the days we have out-of-town guests, or plans that take more than half the day (and maybe a day off once in awhile for good behavior), I could be done with a major house cleaning by July 7th. Wow.

I don't know if I should be excited that I might be on top of things finally, or depressed further that ONE: it could actually take seventeen plus days to clean my house, and TWO: that at the end of said seventeen days I would have to start all over again! Ug.

Thinking now about the state of, say, the dishes if I waited seventeen (or even THREE) days without addressing them; I wonder about extending the July 7th date out even further. If I did that (crazy and unforgivable thing), I could add in one day a week (gasp! should it be two?) for maintenance purposes. That would take me to July 14th -- the day before the kids fly home with Fernanda. Three weeks in Massachusetts with Vavo, their Portuguese grandmother.

Now wait a minute. The puce starts rolling in again. I am not going to spend my entire stay-cation sans kids on cleaning the house! (Slave that I am.) Ha!

I WILL read a whole shelf of my glorious books. (snort) Maybe THREE. Realistically, reading twenty books in three weeks won't do, if I want to retain anything.

I WILL write everyday! Even on heavy cleaning days. I promise.

So with a couple of game plans and a list, plus a successful day of cleaning behind me, I see the magenta-flecked puce fading and while it is time to get the kids home and to bed, I'm not crabby and ready to hibernate for twenty-one days like yesterday.

Unless, of course, I spy the kitchen on the way to my bed.