Revelations of a Weekend

So over the weekend, I decided to have a little “vision quest,” and it really did me some good. I was able to work through some grief, both long-standing and more recent. I ended up tweaking some of my goals, too.

I had been thinking of the whole motherhood thing as a timeline that I really needed to get on and stay on. What I realized over the weekend is that there is quite a bit of work that I would like to do on myself before I take that step. I am not very doubtful of my ability to actually do it, at least. But it will take some time. Therefore I came away with the notion that it will kind of be a race: I’ll do my self-improvement stuff as fast as I can manage—self-work “boot camp,” if you will—and when I reach the point that I want to be, then I’ll go for it.

And if it’s too late by then? I guess it wasn’t meant to be. I know for a fact that I will have an interesting, satisfying, fulfilling life either way. I do really want to have offspring. But I don’t want to do it before I’m sure I’m stable enough that I won’t mess it up.

Another takeaway from my vision quest is that I really should not be so hard on myself for the ways in which I do not currently measure up. I fixed the biggie—the drinking problem—and it hasn’t been that long. Saturday will be 90 days. In the past three months, I’ve been learning how to “adult” without my pacifier. How to cope without my crutch. And I’ve been seeing so many things that I didn’t see before because I was blinding myself and numbing out. It can be a little overwhelming, taking it all in! I’ll fix the rest of it a little at a time. I cannot do it all at once. But I’ll get there.

The last area of my life where some light shone was on my personal relationships. I pondered and considered how to improve many of my relationships (including the ones I have with my cats!), and especially my romantic partnership.

It was not lost on me that alcohol has caused almost every problem in my life—whether it was my own drinking or the drinking of people close to me. And now I get to decide whether or not to “keep” someone who still struggles with that addiction, whether to allow that force of chaos to still influence my life, though I’ve let go of the bottle myself.

The answer is “to a point.” Remember how I said I have a lot of work I want to do on myself? Well, I don’t expect anyone else to be perfect either. He’s got time to work on his shit too. At the very least, I’ll give him as long as it takes me to get to where I want to be.

Maybe he’ll actually do it, since he says that becoming a dad is one of his goals. Maybe he’ll have his shit figured out by the time I have mine figured out. But the important thing is that he do it to reach his own goal. I don’t think it’ll work if it’s changing for me. If it’s changing for his goal, a goal that I share, it seems likelier to work than him trying to change to meet some standard of someone else’s (even mine).

But, either way, alcohol won’t be adding chaos to my life forever. There is some kind of expiration date on the havoc it can wreak. I don’t know when it will be or how it will come, but it will.

In the meantime, I’m actually content to just stick around and see what happens. After all, I have my own work to do. No sense in spooking at the idea of what happens if it doesn’t work out and running away prematurely. Also, it seems kind of shitty to bail on someone who is struggling with a problem that I also struggled with, that was fixed for me kind of only by pure luck. I feel like I need to at least make time for improvement to unfold naturally, for new habits to be established, for fuckups to come and go and get healed from. (I have no illusions that there won’t be plenty of fuckups. I’m just willing to deal with them as long as they’re not too bad against me.)

An important element will be space. I need a lot of time and space to work on my shit, and presumably he needs the same. Freedom and autonomy are super important to me, and if they turn out to be enough rope to hang oneself with, honestly, that is good in its own weird way too. Who people are when they’re free to be whoever they want to is super telling. I intend to just live, learn, and observe.

It’s actually kind of cool these days how we have opposite schedules—makes a lot of breathing room built in. And it makes the time that we do spend together really nice and special. 🙂

Parental Time Investment

I was just working on a spreadsheet to try to predict what my schedule will be like when I’m in grad school full time while also working full time and having children. I wanted to know how much “family time” such a schedule would permit. I found out it broke down like this:

• Work: 40 hours (possibly try to angle for 2 days of work-from-home)
• Class: 12 hours
• Commuting, including parking and walking to class: 13–15 hours
• Sleep (at 6.5 hours per night): 45–46 hours
• Homework (based on 1 hour per credit per week): 12 hours
• Partner quality time (after kids are in bed): 8.5 hours
• “Me” time (meditation, journaling, solo yoga, hygiene): 10 hours
• House-cleaning time: 2 hours (SAH partner will do most of this)

This left 18ish hours for “family time”—time I’d be spending either just with my kids or with my kids and partner both. Given that I hope to conceive easily and on a set schedule, if all goes according to plan, when I graduate, I’ll have a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old, who should be getting around 14 hours of sleep per day. The plan would be that I’d get my homework done on the weekends while they are napping or after bedtime.

I was curious about whether 18 hours was “enough.” It didn’t sound like much. So I Googled it. What I found was this article in the Washington Post from 2015 that said that the average mother spends 13.7 hours per week with their kids, while fathers spend 7.2 hours. That’s up from 10.5 hours / 2.6 hours in 1965. Huh.

I guess 18 hours is more than “enough” then, as long as it’s quality time. My vague game plan would be to try to get two days per week of working from home, so that I could spend an hour with the kids before starting my work for the day on those two days, then get the bulk of my quality time in on the weekends, since I’ll be in class till after bedtime four days out of the week. (The program I have my eye on has evening classes Monday through Thursday, from 7:00 to 10:00.)

My ultimate goal with this stage of life is to be there and spending quality time enough so that the kids attach securely and I get to see them grow up, but I get done with my schooling fast enough that the super-busy phase will be over by the time the older child starts to retain memories. I know that I don’t remember really anything before my 4th birthday, and not very much even up until about 6 or 7 years old.

My partner has expressed interest in being a stay-at-home dad (SAHD), so I’ll know that the children are well cared for while I’m gone. And he is a talented musician who can supplement our income with evening gigs once I’m home on the weekends—being out around adults will also likely contribute to his sanity, haha. With my continuing to work while in school and his additional income, we will be able to afford a babysitter every once in a while so we can have date night on his free nights after the kids are in bed, or so I can go catch his gigs occasionally.

Before crunching these numbers, I was wondering whether “doing it all” was even possible, but my spreadsheet suggests that its not only possible to do, but also probably to excel at it, as long as I’m diligent and keep my eyes on the prize—the prize, of course, being a career I love and happy, well-adjusted children.

Start at the Beginning

I’ll mess with the specifics of this site later (appearance, social media, etc.). For now, I just wanted someplace to start journaling my progress. Here are the things I’m working on:

1. Cobbling together my educational path to become a psychedelic therapist and herbalist—a modern shaman, if you will.
2. Getting out of debt so that I can undertake that path and also responsibly have offspring.
3. Exploring the world as a newly alcohol-free person.
4. Supporting my partner as he figures out how to break his own alcohol addiction.
5. Beginning a meditation and yoga practice.
6. Living by a more rigorous code of ethics.
7. Volunteering to help the environment.
8. General self-improvement.

For the first time ever, I can see the life that I want. Is it possible? Only time will tell. I would like to live in a tranquil nature space, working in private practice to heal individuals from addictions and other maladies through psychedelic and plant medicine. I would like to have a life partner, two children, a garden, some animals, and an extensive library and herb workshop. Ideally, I’d like to eventually have my own line of natural, plant-based medicines, skin and bath products, teas, home products, and condiments that I sell in conjunction with my practice and online. I’d like to write books so that people can help themselves via my teachings and recipes, and I’d like to hold workshops, classes, and retreats. Basically, I want to be involved in every step of helping people to be healthier, happier, and more in touch with an all-natural way of helping and caring for themselves.

The steps that I’ve identified along this path are as follows:

1. Get out of debt.
2. Ayahuasca journey to Peru.
3. Community College: Addiction studies certificate and prerequisites for Master’s
4. Master’s in Counseling
5. MFT, LPCC, and LAADC licensing
6. CIIS Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Research and Therapy

Somewhere in there will also hopefully be offspring and herbalist training, but I don’t know exactly when. I know—it’s a lot. But it’s what I really want to do!

Is it actually doable? We shall see. It’s going to require a lot of hard work, sacrifice, self-care, efficiency, and motivation. It’ll help if my relationship actually works out, but that part’s only halfway up to me. His journey will be his own. The hardest part is going to be the next six years or so, as I try to balance an existing career, a new schooling path, and motherhood. Wish me luck.