New Gig, New Digs

I started a new job last week. Since my twins were born – 13 years ago – I’ve worked primarily as a freelance writer. This has allowed me to (mostly) work around the kids’ schedules, from pre-preschool through elementary school, soccer practices through sick days from school, toddling to as-tall-as-I-am. It’s also meant that most days I have worked from the home office – and sometimes the dining room table.

The new gig allows some work-from-home time, which is great. It also involves two days in an actual, not-at-home, office, which is also great. But it’s a transition. I haven’t had to commute regularly, at least not beyond the two flights of stairs from the main floor to the upstairs office, for 13 years. I’ve gone to work in my slippers, or flipflops, depending on the season, for more than a decade.

Last Monday, I climbed into the car in work clothes and real shoes, full travel coffee cup in hand, and headed along the backroads between New Hampshire and Vermont to a new (to me) office in an unfamiliar town. Along the way from home to work I drive through a handful of other small towns, past houses older than our republic, along fields mowed for generations and rivers older than time.

And then I arrive in a quaint New England village not unlike myriad other quaint New England villages dotting the landscape from the northern mountains to the eastern seashore. There is a tall, white-clapboarded church standing next to a small green, with a general store just across the road from the old house where my office sits. Mine is a room upstairs, on the right, with two green-shuttered windows looking toward the neighboring house, a placement very similar to my childhood bedroom in the 1720s house where I grew up (in another small town in a different state).

My second day at the office, I headed out for a fresh air fix. My colleague suggested I explore the short trail through conserved land just behind the office. So I walked a little ways down a quiet road, then turned into the woods and continued on a path that followed a river (I don’t know, yet, the river’s name) and traversed tall trees and giant glacial erratics.

I was happy to learn of this path so close to the office, and I expect I’ll walk there many times as the seasons shift. Eventually I popped back out onto Route 10, walking past the elementary school and the post office, then stopping into the general store to peruse the offerings.

The driver of the first car to pass me when I returned to the road waved as if I were an old friend. Perhaps she thought I was someone else. But I like to think it’s a small town thing that – like the school and the general store, the church and the common – translates from one place to another. Whatever the reason behind the wave, it contributed to the feeling of welcome I felt in this unfamiliar-familiar landscape, a bit further from home than I’m used to being. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the January 24, 2020 issue of the Littleton Record.

Shifting Normal

I have a confession to make: I don’t always know what to write about.

I consider this space, which I’ve filled twice a month for the past nine years, to be a place of mostly happy, occasionally bittersweet, musings. I’ve written about gardening and hiking, skiing and stargazing, loving pets and raising kids. These are the things, often, that fill my time.

But there are weeks when I come up blank. Maybe, if you’re a regular reader here, you’ve noticed some columns – the weeks when I struggle to find relevant subject matter – are a bit less zippy than others. Then again, the columns I consider mundane are often the ones people seem to like best. I guess there is value in the everyday.

I often dismiss the ideas that come to mind for various reasons. The kids don’t always want the details of their day-to-day lives shared, and I have to respect that. I don’t like to write about anything political, because there are other places for that – and, quite frankly, I’ve never been all that great at persuasive writing. There are things that happen in my world that I sometimes want to write about, but can’t figure out how – or that I figure no one really wants to read about anyway.

And there are weeks like this, where anything I’d care to share seems, well, just plain trivial.

Australia is on fire and has been for weeks. Closer to home, the weather is all sorts of out-of-whack in what feels like a new normal – until it changes again. It’s snowing as I write this, but we’ve only had a few very cold days this season, and Saturday’s temps are forecasted to top 50 degrees. There’s no longer any such thing as a January thaw, because we’re in a repeating freeze-thaw cycle.

There is political discontent everywhere you turn. It’s exhausting on so many levels – and we haven’t even made it to the First In The Nation Primary yet. 

The kicker is that my children have asked me several times this week if we are on the brink of World War III. For all you grownups out there who think kids aren’t paying attention – well, they are. They hear more than we think they do, and they understand more than we adults often give them credit for. And this is the stuff, sometimes, of playground conversations.

This week, it just feels like writing about the snowy woods or the busy holiday break just passed or the joys and struggles of raising almost-teenagers is a bit like ignoring the many elephants in the room. And yet it is that ordinariness – getting the kids up and out of the house in the mornings, meeting work deadlines, driving the Mom Uber – that keeps us moving forward.

Somedays the weight of the world is heavy, no matter how little of it each of us is charged with carrying. It is hard, on those days, to know what to do or say or even feel.

And so I carry on, as people have forever, with the day-to-day. I go into those snowy woods with the dog. I ski and write and watch the kids play in the snow. I help with homework (when I can) and figure out what to make for dinner. I snuggle with the animals and love the kids and keep looking up at that starry sky. And all the while, Normal keeps shifting. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the January 10, 2020 issue of the Littleton Record.

'Tis the Season - of Calm AND Crazy

The winter holiday season is, to me, a bit like summer vacation. Let me explain. Every June, as the last day of school arrives, I get giddy with summertime excitement. This began, of course, when I was a kid, but persisted through my college years of working summers, when I moved on to the workforce and no longer had a summer break, and now – when my own kids anticipate that delicious freedom of warm, unscheduled days – although summer often means more complicated juggling of various tasks for me.

Ditto with Christmas. In my mind, I picture calm evenings curled up by the fireplace with a good book, the lights of the Christmas tree twinkling peacefully nearby, everything tidy and cozy, and – of course – sprinkled with a good dose of holiday magic. Because that’s what Christmastime should be, right? Cocoa and cookies, peace and joy, everything wonderfully exciting while simultaneously calm and bright.

In reality, this is crazy time in our household, further magnified these next few weeks by all the hustle and bustle associated with the holidays.

Because much of my writing work focuses on skiing and winter recreation, I am – thankfully – extra busy on that front this time of year. The kids jumped into their ski racing program the day after Thanksgiving, and that occupies – happily, I will point out, but also exhaustingly – most of every weekend from now until April. I also coach in that program, which means there is little downtime for any of us. Throw in a lengthy list of home improvement projects and the related upheaval those bring, and I often feel as if I’m barely afloat in a sea of household chaos.

But here’s the thing… I love it. Yes, the decorations we shoved partly in haste back into the storage closet last January cause me some consternation as we try to figure out where to fit all our favorites – the ones that make it feel like Christmas, like OUR Christmas. And we have to move the living room furniture around to find space for the tree, then trim said tree with lights that actually work and our assorted plethora of ornaments that seem each year like they’ll never all fit on the tree.

The extra stuff can seem overwhelming in an already sometimes cluttered house, and the added tasks can be challenging to shuffle into an already overflowing calendar. But this is a good kind of crazy.

It’s fun – and amazing – to pull ornaments from the bin and remember what each one means. There are decades-old ones from my childhood and my husband’s, handmade ornaments the children created in their earlier years, and others from places we’ve visited. Likewise, there are homemade and school-made decorations that join store-bought ones on the mantle and windowsills. There’s no color coordination or underlying theme – just a hodgepodge of holiday treasures that maybe look good only to us.

This week, we have pulled out the bins of decorations and cleared the mantel of its non-holiday décor to make room for Christmas. Some evening this week, I hope, we will get our tree from a local tree farm, stand it in its regular place by the front windows, and string it with lights. This tree – with its woodsy fragrance and twinkling decorations – will be the centerpiece of our living room for the next few weeks. 

The very sight – and scent – of it inspires a bit of calm in me, calls me to take a breath and focus on the bright rather than the crazy.

On Christmas eve – when the children are tucked all snug in their beds, when the presents have been selected and wrapped, when I have prepped as much of Christmas dinner as I can and set the table to festive, when the stockings have been hung hopefully by the chimney – I will sit by the tree. I will pause and take it all in and thank my lucky stars – and those twinkling Christmas tree lights – for holiday magic, and for the moments of calm and bright amid the wild and crazy of the season. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the December 8, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record.

Home Work

The other day an elephant watched me as I worked, its fuzzy gray trunk resting atop the table, its unblinking eyes gazing vaguely in my direction while I typed. Last week an inanely smiling purple cow sat in the elephant’s place, seemingly laughing at me – a reminder, perhaps, to not take myself too seriously. Some days there is a Lego brigade of emergency vehicles – fire trucks and police cars and rescue vans – lined up at some cordoned-off crash scene across the room.

These are things a person who absconds to a more traditional office will likely never encounter while settling into a work day. Sometimes they are a hindrance to my work, a reminder that I will have to pester the kids when they come home to pick up yesterday’s mess, or this morning’s, let alone whatever clutter develops today. But these things are also a reminder of why I am here, working at the dining room table of my home rather than at a desk in an office somewhere else. I’m pretty sure there’s no place else I’d rather be.

My life changed in many ways when I became a parent. One of those was that I replaced the unpredictable schedule of a small town reporter with the equally hectic, but very different, world of caring for two newborns. For a while I was almost completely lost in mothering twins, then another baby two years later. There are chunks of time during those first years I simply do not remember. But amid the relative chaos I started to seek – and slowly find – work as a freelance writer.

At first, it was the occasional article for a special section of the newspaper, then press releases and other copy-writing for area businesses, and eventually a book and some sporadic magazine work. By the time my youngest was born, I was busy enough to be working at the keyboard while she slept in a sling wrapped around my torso. Not ideal for physical comfort, but being able to do work beyond changing diapers and feed small children – while still being around to change diapers and feed children – was important to me. It was essential to holding on to that part of myself that exists beyond the Mom Realm.

Once upon a time, I was the kid who needed absolute quiet to do her homework; if my brother’s music in the next room was barely audible, I couldn’t concentrate. In college, I kept my tiny dorm room tidy to bolster my focus. Any semblance of neat-freakness I once had, however, disintegrated with the arrival of children in my life. Keeping track of myself is one thing, managing three other beings – and all their stuff – is a whole different animal.

These days I typically set up shop at the dining room table, smack dab in the center of my family’s bustling activity. I try to make sure the breakfast dishes are put away and the table-cum-desk brushed of crumbs before I bring the kids to school so that I can get right to work as soon as I return. I’ve become pretty good at tuning out the hum of the dishwasher and the snoring of the dog. The dust bunnies don’t bother me if I focus on the notes in front of me.

Still, it is sometimes hard to fully concentrate on the task at hand when that task is surrounded by a home full of other tasks to do. It’s also not ideal – for any of us – to have my books and piles of notes scattered across the table, the kitchen counter, the dining room chairs.

A couple of years ago I spent a good bit of time and effort organizing my neglected home office. And for a while I worked there, where the biggest distractions were the view of the sun peaking over Mt. Washington in the quiet early morning hours and the fact that my coffee maker was two stories down.

Gradually, I stopped going to the third-floor office, for a few reasons. It’s hot up there in summer and really cold in winter. And the old dog won’t climb the stairs with me anymore. I’ve become accustomed to her company, even if that company is mostly sighing snores as she naps nearby. She also has a knack for interrupting me with a beseeching take-me-for-a-walk look at the very moment I need such an interruption.

Alas, I am preparing to return to the upstairs office, relocated now to the side of the house without a mountain view, to a space that has served during our time here as a cluttered and rarely used guest room, storage of extraneous stuff, and the kids’ playroom. Now it is a place where I can spread out notes and not have to gather them into a pile and hide them away before dinner.

I like the idea of the office as a place I can be focused and serious when I need to be. The call of household chores will be quieter in this space, tucked away in the top corner of the house. There will be no silly purple cow laughing at me from the next chair over. But it’s good to know the dining room table will be here, with its familiar grooves and divots, its skim of crumbs leftover from breakfast, surrounded by reminders of both work and home – and all the ways they are intertwined.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the May 13, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.