Today marks a year that we’ve lived in our “new” house. I’ve decided that I should officially stop calling it our new house, hence the quotation marks. I’m fighting an awful cold, as are a couple of my children, and we spent much of today on the sofa. As I flipped through the channels, I kept thinking back to a year ago, and contrasting what a different day today was than last December 27th! Four huge truckloads of stuff, and the last one wasn’t unloaded until nearly midnight. The kids were on Christmas break, and the weeks that followed were downright chaotic. It’s hard having bored kids underfoot while trying to unpack. It was nice to look around my cozy house today – even littered with new toys from Christmas, it’s a much different scene than it was a year ago.

Two thousand and nine was a tough year in a lot of ways. It was such a year of change for our family, with the new house and new schools. Even when change is for the better, it’s so difficult to go through it. And unfortunately for myself, I spent much of the year feeling like I wasn’t changing for the better. So many times, I felt like I couldn’t find my way. I wanted our house to instantly feel like home to me, to feel like the sanctuary our old home was, and to feel uniquely ours, the way our old home did. Of course, that can’t happen immediately – it takes time to make something your own. It takes time for people to get to know you. It takes time for children to stop being “the new kids” at school. And it takes a hell of a lot of time to go through a house and put your own special touch in every room.

I should point out that I am not an organized person by nature. (My husband is, thank God, or our lives would be falling down around us.) Between my messy tendencies and my unfortunate propensity for feeling guilty about my many flaws, I dealt with a massive amount of anxiety this past year. It’s only been in recent weeks that I’ve started recognizing the role depression has played in my inability to get shit done. Last year, right around this time, I stopped taking the antidepressant I’d been taking for years. I was going through a period of health concerns and serious headaches, and I was trying to pinpoint exactly what was causing my headaches. I decided to wean myself off the antidepressants to see if my headaches went away. They did! And I seemed to be doing okay, so I never refilled my prescription after our move.

I’m realizing now that I made such a dumb decision in doing that. For me, depression manifests itself not in sadness, but in anxiety and in feelings of being so overwhelmed that I can’t figure out how to tackle a situation. And I don’t really understand why it’s so hard to take my own advice – I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve told girlfriends of mine not to be afraid or ashamed to take antidepressants, because depression doesn’t just go away on its own. When it comes to my own health or my own psyche, it’s like I’m a total dumbass, though.

That’s one thing I intend to do differently in 2010. I work so hard to take care of my family, but think nothing of putting myself last – like I just don’t have it in me to think about my own needs. I heard someone recently compare it to putting on your own oxygen mask on an airplane before helping someone else. How can I really be supermom if I super-suck at taking care of myself? I started taking my meds again a few weeks ago, and already I’m feeling better. Now if I could just shake this stupid cold!

That’s a Snoop Dogg lyric, did you know that? Betcha didn’t. I don’t imagine Big Snoopy D-O-double-G was considering the plight of the stay-at-home-mother when he wrote it, but I can sure relate to it.

Things are swell. Things are great! Things are a train wreck and a half! I keep thinking that if I just embrace it and own it and realize once and for all that this is our normal, I’ll deal with things better. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m just going to write about it so it all makes sense for me, because I really think it’s scariest when it’s inside my own head. Once I get it out in the open, it’s like, eh. No biggie.

My oldest child is seriously struggling in school. We’re almost mid-way through freshman year, and thing’s aren’t going well. She’s so painfully unmotivated, and it’s something we’ve been dealing with for the past four years now. I can’t even begin to list all the many ways we’ve tried to light a fire under her ass. She’s just so damned apathetic, and it’s something I see over and over with kids her age. We want so badly for our kids to have what we didn’t have, and to not have to struggle or go without, and because of it, they value NOTHING. My husband grew up poor, and actually was homeless several times as a child. He’s mentioned many times that he wishes our kids could go through a safer version of what he went through, just so they’d know what it’s like to not have electricity or to have to sleep in the car. I don’t know that we need to go THAT far with it, but I sure wish there was a way to boot these kids in the ass a little, and make them realize that the world doesn’t revolve around them and their skinny jeans. I think I’m going to start dragging my daughter out on Saturday mornings to volunteer in a soup kitchen or something.

Besides the drama with the teenager, I feel like I’m losing my mind a little in this crazy house. Or my hearing, anyway. I’ve never been around such LOUD children before. From the time they wake up until the time they snuggle up and fall asleep at night, they are SHOUTING at one another. I’m sure it’s at least partially genetic, since I’m married to the loudest man on the planet. Normally, I’m not bothered by it at all, but it seems like they’ve cranked it up to eleven this week. We need to start a marathon round of The Quiet Game.

And when I left my house today, it was CLEAN. It even smelled good. Every bed was made, every inch of carpet vacuumed. Within an hour of returning home with four monkeys, the house looked like I hadn’t touched it. I found toys, shoes, books, and clothing on the floor in five different rooms before dinnertime. Erma Bombeck once said that trying to clean house when you have small children is like shoveling while it’s still snowing. I can’t think of a better comparison! Still, I’m thankful that I have my five monsters, and we have a roof over our heads. Things could definitely be worse.

Tomorrow, I think I’m going to take myself out for sushi.