Driven

My thoughts turned to my grandparents again today.  I wasn't close to either one of my grandfathers.  Both very different men.  My mom's dad was named simply "R" by his mother.  He signed most things "R.B."  for "R.  Boliver".  When he joined the army as a cook, he was forced to take a name, as they couldn't accept an initial on his paperwork, so he began to refer to himself as "Roy".  He worked for the Santa Fe Railroad.  He was a math wizard who would dupe his coworkers out of money with bets on whether or not they could solve specific equations.  He was a musician.  He was mean and depressed but never this way around me.  He smoked and cussed and drank and worked and worked and worked his entire life, including his childhood.  You might say his demons drove him.

My father's father was a different sort of man.  He was highly intelligent and smooth-talking. One of my earliest memories of him was going out to his ranch with my father and looking across a pasture.  A line of Fotomat booths sat out in that pasture, because he had bought a Fotomat franchise.  I remember cattle everywhere.  A miniature horse named Little Bit.  A dairy that he owned.  In his seventies he got his real estate license and stuck his fingers in the property pie.  He traveled.  I can count on one hand the number of memorable interactions I had with him, but I do know this...he could never sit still.  He was also a very driven person, and I think that when he finally passed away, it was very grudgingly.

I think about these two men that I'm related to and maybe I can understand the circumstances in my life at this point from what they went through.  I live a very stressful life.  Raising children is, in and of itself, challenging.  When you throw autism in the mix, it gets that much more dynamic.  You really do have to become used to a new normal.  And then there are other things that add to it...your interactions with other people, for example, can become supercharged, and some people can have a profound effect on your life.  This summer I found myself growing more and more restive and depressed.  My husband thought it was because I was tired of taking care of kids around the clock...but that wasn't really it.  It was true that they were getting bored and that I needed them to go back to school and be busy just as much as they needed it, but that wasn't really what was nagging at me.  What was bothering me, what was turning my restlessness into full blown depression, was the fact that I wasn't doing anything.

Increasingly over the last year I have found that staying as busy as possible works wonders for me.  The more stuff I can pile on myself, the more ambitions and goals I can make, the more I can focus and manage my life. In spite of this, I made a conscious decision this year to tone it down a little.  I decided to focus on my children, and on trying not to kill myself with overwork.  And I feel strangely lighter.  Still busy, and still very obligated to succeed...but not overworked to the point where I might want to rent a rubber room.