The Arrangement Of Life

So after a long unhappy talk about the situation at hand, Philip and I have come to exactly no conclusions. Not only that, it has made him very unhappy to find that I would so willingly walk away from this thing we've spent a whole year creating. In his mind, if you do anything at all, you do it to win or to succeed. His question for me was "So did we make any right decisions in the past year?" And "Do you even like living in Oregon?" For him, to walk away from something is to have made it meaningless and a failure.

I don't see it that way. Because I'm so zen, I tend to look at what I've learned, what progress I've made, and what fun I've had in getting as far as I have. It shocked me that he could question whether I am happy we left California. As much as I love California, moving back to Oregon has been a dream come true. I love being in Oregon and unless circumstances forced me to, I would never choose to move back to California. I've pretty much said this every day for a year. With glee.

The Williamsons are notorious for their sentimentality and their inability to let go. Of anything. Even when it's far past the time to let go. This is something we don't see eye to eye on.

So I cried a lot. I desperately want to arrange my life so that I can make it easier to make healthier choices for myself. It is healthiest for me to stay home. This I know. But even though I'm not a very sentimental person, letting go of the store intentionally feels like a betrayal. This feeling was amplified by Philip. It is very cool, this business we've built. It is also just beginning to build momentum.

There are a couple of incontrovertible facts:

• In order to keep the store Philip will have to get full time work elsewhere.

• This will require that I am in the store full time.

• This means my dog will be home alone all day long. Chewing on things or in confinement.

• This means my kid will have to go to day care.

So how important is our store? What will it do for us in the future? What do we want our lives to be? What is most important to us? Can I be a homesteader as well as a storekeeper? (In other words: are there 48 hours in a day?) Will there be a time when we can hire some teen-ager to work in our store for minimum wage?

The soul of the store is in the things I make for it myself: the aprons, the pot holders, cocktail napkins. I told Philip that if we keep the store then I stop making things for it because I can't do both. Being the retailer and the manufacturer at the same time is not a good idea. So if you're thinking about doing that yourself, I sincerely recommend that you rethink your dreams. However, the proudest part of having a store, for me, is designing goods to go in it. I have finally gotten my own label, a lifelong dream. The truth is, I'm really a designer and manufacturer moonlighting as a retailer. The other truth is that not sewing for the store would feel more like a failure to me than letting the store go would be.

No, I don't want to give up what we've made. I don't want to stop designing and making things because it's exciting to me. Especially right at a time when our work is beginning to gather momentum.

A couple more thoughts about this whole mess. One thing that will have to go is being involved in the politics of having a store. I can't stay on the promotions committee. I can't go to Downtown Association meetings. I can't have any extraneous complications in my schedule or my work. They are tiny little things. They really don't take up much time. But they take up brain space. They are an element of something more I must think about, remember to attend, and then get frustrated in how tangled up in bureaucracy any big group of people becomes. I am much too busy trying to keep my business floating. Maybe if a time comes when I have employees to work in the store for at least half the week I'll be able to be a participator.

If I am in the store full time then somehow I need to work it out for Max to come to the store after school. I need to set up the office as a play room with a TV so that I can play legos with him or set him up with a movie. I can't put him in daycare. Kids pay a big price for a life in daycare. So many parents have no choice but to put their kids in care, you do what you have to do. But if you don't have to do it? Then you owe it to them not to.

I need to get an extra freezer and fridge so I can store a lot of Trader Joe's food in it to relieve the cooking thing. If I can't cook, at least I need to not eat food from downtown every day which is expensive and almost always fattening. The only choices that aren't fattening are so tasty it's like putting sawdust in my mouth. Not only that, but obviously I need the extra freezer space for all the preserving I'll be doing this summer because I have SO MUCH TIME ON MY HANDS.

If Philip can't get a full time job the store has to close anyway.

What's frustrating about all of this is the feeling that things are really beginning to roll.

I feel deeply guilty that I am not a robust person like Martha Stewart, or Alicia Paulson, or Rachel Ray. Why is it that they have the strength to balance it all out, to juggle so much every day? They all built empires of varying sizes.* And as far as I know (and maybe I know nothing) none of them have to take psychiatric meds just to get through life. Me, I am pretty sure that if life keeps going at the current pace I will need heavier doses of meds, something I have hoped to avoid.

There are so many things I could be doing to relieve stress but all of them require money I don't have (for things like therapy, massage, chiropractor) or time that it's already hard to find for things as important as playing with my kid. Do you know how much our kids need us to play with them with our undivided attention? I played with Max for just twenty minutes last night, fighting off the bad-ass bionicles in huge battles, the kid lights up from inside. He doesn't get this kind of attention from us very often because the store is a bigger baby than he is, requiring constant nurturing.

Stay tuned for the unfolding of a messy life. I'm off to keep my promise to Max to commence with last night's bionicle battle.



*I realize that Alicia Paulson hardly has an empire in the way that the other two do, but from my very limited perspective, she has built a successful business and writing career for herself as well as still carving out time for her own crafts and home arts. I've read in an interview that she finds it challenging to balance everything in her life, but she still does it. I consider her to be a mini empire because she has built a very specific world of crafts and words and a very large following. And once you've gotten yourself if three or four magazines, you have certainly arrived, whether loudly or quietly.