As it turns out, furniture making is not my God-given purpose.

The weather in St. Louis for the past week has been hot (really hot) and summer-like, so when I woke up this morning to gray skies and drizzle, it sort of occurred to me that this might be a writing day.  If eighth grade girls can predict their life's success by hairstyles or acne, then grown-ass adult women can determine their life's work and priorities by the emotional themes of a daily forecast.  {Insert eye roll}.  Writing was the thing I was supposed to be doing all year (since we enrolled Little J in all-day kindergarten, for this very reason)--but my time was clearly wasted on more important things, like purchasing dishware at Target, or running, or moving, or doing a stupid (STUPID) juice cleanse that left me bedridden.  Being a stay-at-home mom is supposed to be intentional and overflowing with purpose, but given a full school year to accomplish my DREAM, I realize that I am living a life of distraction.  House projects, school projects, facebook, Hobby Lobby, plans to sew quilts for the girls, home-made Christmas gifts, cake pops.   Now we are 14 days away from the end of the structure of the school day, and I am attempting to make it MEAN something; and this conundrum is clearly a metaphor for my entire life, as nothing is obvious, or relevant or significant until I am reminded that I will be spending the better part of the next 90 days solving the case of the ETERNALLLY-missing-shoes-that-were-just-on-your-feet-two-minutes-ago-so-obviously-they-are-in-the-bin-of-Christmas-ornaments-in-the-top-shelf-of-the-basement.  If I have anything important to say, it must be said NOW, before I am overcome with the RAGE of finding peanut butter on the bedsheets.  


I was about to begin living intentionally, but then I found a basket full of unfinished sewing projects, and decided to start crafting a pair of girl's shorts out of an old pair of red khaki pants.  Because clearly I suffer from ADHD, with a heaping dose of FEAR.


But I'm here now.   Doing battle over my purpose, and trying to figure out if I was created to sew shorts or to write something IMPORTANT.  Maybe important is the wrong word--I would settle for a book that inspires a mediocre screenplay.  You have to dream abusrdly, people, and then find yourself surprised and humbled when you are sitting 16 rows away from Tim Riggins at the Academy Awards.  I mean, Taylor Swift has this routine DOWN, and it seems to be working for her.


You might remember that a few weeks ago, we were gifted with a dresser that I decided to paint orange.  I was excited about this for approximately one coat of paint, until the gnats were all up in it, and it became clear that I have NO PATIENCE for painting (or gnats).  I would throw a layer of paint on it, walk away--and always seem to come back to something that was sort of streaky and not quite uniform in color.  I understood this to be what happens when you take something white and try to make it orange, and so I just kept at it in my free time, between laundry and twitter and facebook.  

Until Mike decided on Saturday that enough was ENOUGH, and under heavy protest, he just decided to move the damn thing into the house.  There were tears and arguments about how it wasn't ready and this was clearly going to ruin my life--how I had PLANS to sand some of the drip marks out, and buy a small roller brush, because we are only 27 steps away from PERFECTION!  Turns out Mike doesn't care about perfection, he is more concerned that we don't hoard furniture in our garage, or eventually, have a car sitting on cinder blocks in our yard.


Writing for me, is a lot like that orange dresser.  NOT ready.  NOT perfect.  A gnat trap in a dark garage.  Don't we all have big plans for something beautiful that is inadvertently, frustratingly, attracting bugs?   


Mike forced the dresser into the house, where it was revealed that a few of the drawers needed to be sanded down, because I put so much damn paint on there, they wouldn't close properly.  Whoopsie.  The mentality of just slopping another coat of paint on isn't always what makes something beautiful; sometimes the tedious work of making it perfect leaves little puddles in the corners of the trim, or streaks you can't see in a dark garage--and there just aren't enough hours in the day to fix all of the flaws.  


However.  If you could translate every project, or moment of your time into PERSPECTIVE, or a narrative of important words and ideas, this dresser would say:


You are not an f-ing furniture painter.  Now get on with it.