Saying Goodbye to My Thimble

What we need and what we leave behind

my “thimble”

Sitting in my office, which is in complete disarray, partly because I am moving all the necessities out to where I will be spending most of my week, and partly because of the emotional fog of existential dread. Partly from the fact that democracy is buckling under the weight of so much BS, and partly because a medication I’ve been taking has brought anxiety and catastrophic thinking to the table for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and especially that lovely late-night snack. Even as the wee chicks chirping behind me, full of new life and chicken shit, aren’t enough to distract me from the drain my brain is circling. Still feeling some minor fog and headachiness from the accident, I’m cutting the medication ASAP because if I can’t keep my mood and mind in order, the MFA becomes a moot point.

I’m thinking about cutting news out for a while, but that’s probably a bad idea. I’ve never been one for the taste of sand, and now seems like a crucial time to keep my head out of it. As we’ve been driving to and from San Marcos, it seems like when I’m there, I am buoyed by the idea of the new life that awaits me. And when I’m home, I am steeped in all I’m leaving behind. It seems that in packing up half my life, I am bringing all the things that give me joy with me and leaving the things that weigh me down here. All of my memories of mothering are wrapped up in this place.

We recently brought out of storage the bed my son co-slept with us in for six months and set it back up in the bedroom in San Antonio. Even the sound of the wood creaking as I crawl in makes me remember those sleepless nights snuggled in, just the three of us in a new world. When we first had my son, we were still living on my husband’s old family farm on 140 acres just outside of town. I was working in advertising then, and had to make the long commute that would sometimes take upwards of two hours in the afternoon. Before my maternity leave ended, we decided to buy a house and move into town to this place. This tiny suburban home fulfilled the dreams of a little girl raised in eccentric chaos, always on an acreage that felt overwhelming, and she longed for something more sane, more normal.

Two bedrooms, one bath, with a place in the backyard just for me.

From the beginning, I would come back here to work, to escape, to show my son old VHS videos of Mr. Rogers and read vintage children’s books from the stacks I was selling. This was our secret getaway place. Once, when he was napping in his crib, I came back here to work. After an hour or so, I heard him calling to me and realized it was not on the baby monitor but coming from outside. He’d somehow managed to climb out of the crib and out of his clothes and made it out the front door, and was standing outside our gate calling my name.

Looking back at my old mommy blog, I pulled up this little nugget from 2007, when my son (the bub as I called him in online writing back then) was two years old.

Was over at the Office Max this morning buying a new printer, and now I am in my office trying to liven up my second home. I spend so much time out here, and yet the floor is always layered with trash and the desk is covered with unpaid bills, scratched CDs, canceled checks, and other Dilbert paraphernalia.

I am thinking back again to that book I read (now the name escapes me) about that writer who was vertically challenged who moved to Maine and renovated a home, spending extra special time on her "working" cottage out back that she so lovingly referred to as her "thimble." Ever since reading that, I've always wanted one, but the dream is far less difficult to muster than the reality. I have the space, but alas, there is no time. Every day, I see about 80 things undone that need to get done, but you have to pick and choose, and for the most part, you are only able to get done the same 20 things over and over again every day.

Wake up

Feed the bub

Get the bub on the potty

Read the bub a million books

Drive to some off-site activity with the bub

Paint/since/dance/play guitar with the bub

Put the bub down for his nap

Write/Blog/Work/Eat

Feed the bub again

Get the bub on the potty again

Make dinner

Clean the house

Eat dinner

Tub the Bub

Read more books

Get bub on the potty

Brush the bub's teeth

Put the bub to bed

Brush my teeth

Pass out

Notice I did not list all the things I used to love to do... read, watch movies, take a shower... Mind you, those things do occur, they are just so few and far between that sometimes I feel like they don't actually happen, but rather are just dreams or some brain fart from too much acid in the 90s.

I know whaaa, whaaaa. It is really not as bad as all that. I do love my life, and for the most part my whining and procrastination stands between me and what I want to do far more than the wee one. It's funny. I went out with a group of other mommies last night for wine and salutations, and it was strange how everyone was having a different version of the same problem. Kind of the "Who am I?" syndrome that comes from having spent a few years pouring every ounce of your being into another life force.

Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't trade staying home with my son for anything in the world. I think it is important and honorable and the best thing I will ever ever ever do for my life, but I don't want to give too much of myself away, otherwise I'll end up one of those moms who lives for her kids and wakes up one day to find they've all abandoned her and she is all alone with only Wheel of Fortune and reruns of Matlock to keep her warm.

It’s funny, because years later, we did renovate this space, just when I needed it, and it became my official “thimble”. My place to escape and create. Even later, when I worked from home for four years during the Covid pandemic, it was my real office. Unlike the old days, I get to read all the books, watch all the movies, make all the things, and take all the showers I want now. The book, by the way, is Katharine Butler Hathaway's lovely memoir, The Little Locksmith, about overcoming limitations due to spinal tuberculosis and renovating a home in the 1920s where she lived and wrote. This space, like Katherine’s, has been everything I ever wanted and dreamed of, and seeing it in disarray again, culled through and filled with only the things I don’t need, feels bittersweet.

I’ve been at this crossroads before. When I was three, my father took a new job, and we moved from Florida to Indiana. Then, a year later, when my father left us, we moved from Indiana to Pawley’s Island, S.C. When I was 13 and my grandfather died, my grandmother sold the house we were all living in, and we moved from South Carolina to Virginia. When I was 19, I dropped out of college and moved from Virginia to New York. When I fell in love, and we left the city for Texas when I was 30. When we sold the house in Virginia after my mother died when I was 40-something and had to pack up, sell, or trash everything I’d ever known or loved as a child. When we sold the farm when I was 50, and we left another place we loved.

Every time I left behind the things I didn’t need, and every time it felt just like when I was three, saying goodbye to my father and taking the train away from him forever.

Off to something new.

My son doesn’t need me anymore and is, in fact, in an almost constant state of irritation that I need him so much. And I do need him. I will always need him. But, I don’t need this place anymore, this back room where I made quilts and wrote stories and drew pictures and found myself again after years of being a mother. I don’t need all the things I’m leaving behind in it.

But unlike the other times, it’s not going away. It will still be here waiting for me on weekends and whenever I want to come back. But I don’t need it.

I need something else now.