When Good Crafts Go Bad - the Holiday Blog

Note: I wrote this piece last year for the Second Wind Publishing blog on Wordpress, but figured it was worth a re-print. Merry Christmas

My husband has jokingly commented on several occasions that I have been channeling my “inner Martha” ever since I was displaced from my job in September. (In between the activities of my job search I will admit that I have been involved in a number of home improvement/beautification projects, and yes, I will further own up to having experimented with ideas from various issues of Martha’s magazine with varying degrees of success.) All of his jokes evaporated last weekend when he came home from work to find me, both kids, the dining room as well as most of our house coated in a fine glaze of glitter glue.

“What the h--heck are you doing??” he asked as he surveyed the dining room table covered in an old (but clean) shower curtain, about 20 plastic cups sprouting balloons draped with glittering strands of yarn, and the trail of glitter footprints (child sizes 5 and 11) across the floor towards the rest of our house.

Our youngest piped up with, “makin’ ormanents” reaching for one to show his father and knocking a recently finished balloon out of its cup, spilling the still wet yarn coated in glitter glue onto the floor as the balloon bounced about leaving splotches of glitter glue in its wake.

Stunned, he stood there for a few moments until he was handed a handful of the glitter glue yarn. Handing it to me and shaking his head, he left the room muttering something about ordering pizza, then canceling my subscription to Martha Stewart Living, and calling in an exorcist.

If patience is a virtue, I am rarely a virtuous woman

During a recent chat over lunch with my career coach, we got on the topic of what I am learning from my experience searching for my next position. Having a slightly sarcastic side to my personality, I had to exercise a great deal of restraint to keep my response appropriate to the context and company. Later that evening, having been unable to get the conversation out of my head, I realized that there are quite a few “take-aways” from this experience and not all of them negative. Perhaps the biggest for me is learning to have patience.

When it comes to me, personally, I have never been a particularly patient individual. I tend to expect a higher level of performance from myself than I would ever expect of anyone else. This characteristic once prompted a therapist to say to me, “Maggie, perfection is about heaven, and in case you haven’t noticed – you aren’t living there.”

Generally, I do tend to achieve whatever I set out to do. Unfortunately, what this means is that if for some reason my expectations are out of sync with reality, patience is in short supply. There tends to be a lot of introspective analysis of where I got off track and what it will take to refocus my efforts to reaching whatever end-state was so blasted important in the first place. Ironically, this rarely, if ever, spills over onto others and I am incredibly patient with children, even my own. Go figure.

This job quest is teaching me (the hard way) how to be patient with myself in general, but more specifically, when things are beyond my control. It has also taught me that there are a lot of things in this world that are beyond my control. A very sobering realization, I must admit. At the same time, I have discovered that one thing is universally in my control and that is how I respond to the situation.

This isn’t to say that I am serenely going about my day, calm and secure in a place of Zen. I’m not. Not even close. There are days that I am barely keeping it together and there are days that I can actually forget that my situation is so tenuous. And in between those two extremes are a lot more days where my expectations align with reality.