I was just finishing up work last night when the little angel breezed in. She is very firm with me -- when I say "three more emails," she stands over my shoulder and holds me to it. I was trying to fudge a little last night, so finally she flopped on the chair in my office in frustration.
"My feet need to feel the fresh air, Mommy," she huffed. "Hurry up and let's go for a walk."
And that? Was the best thing I'd heard all day. We abandoned the laptop mid-email.
The neighbor pulled into her driveway at 3:30. My home office window faces this driveway, my peripheral vision disallowing ignorance of their comings and goings. The 3:30 arrival kicks me into gear, reminds me if I haven't showered yet that I am somewhat pathetic, that my daughter will be out of school in an hour, that I have two and a half hours left to go before I really have to stop to make dinner.
Three-thirty is often when my blood pressure starts to rise, realizing I'm not going to finish the list I made at 7:30 that morning in time for dinner.
The list isn't realistic. But that doesn't matter to the panic, and that's something I'm working on but circumstances don't always reinforce.
Sometimes I let my mind wander to my life if my workday ended at 3:30, if it were me unloading my car and following my child around in the sunshine. If it were me off in the months of summer. My neighbor to one side is a teacher, to the other a guidance counselor. Jobs fraught with their own troubles, for sure, but these don't matter when I'm stressed and daydreaming about what it would be like to be someone else, someone in the sunshine. Reality doesn't matter in daydreams. Regardless of how much you love your work, daydreams make the world go 'round.
I let my daydreams play as day continued into evening and I went back to my computer after giving the little angel a bath. Just as I used to take the Sears catalog to my room when I was a kid and circle everything I would buy if I had a million dollars, I find myself reimagining my days if I pulled into my driveway at 3:30, finished with work.
And I wonder if she looks at my darkened windows when she leaves to teach at 6:15 am and envies me, still asleep.
I've been feeling a little overwhelmed lately. I've noticed I'm not alone -- a lot of folks in the blogosphere have been in a state of malaise for the past month or so. I think my main problem is that I've been running on adrenaline -- I can almost feel it downloading into my veins on an hourly basis -- for about three months now. In addition to my lovely full-time job, I've been planning this book tour (soooo not complaining, but let's be honest, it's a lot of work, but still, sooooo not complaining) in my "free time," and our family social schedule has kicked into preschool-ballet-class-recital-coming-up, backyard-barbecues, weddings-and-other-summer-travel, mow-the-lawn-every-week, full-on hypergear. And my child! My adorable child! Who suddenly has started fighting me about every decision, every movement of her little finger, from which toilet to use when she has to pee to what she'll be eating for dinner to which barrette will go in her hair to when she can give Bella her treats. EVERY DECISION. EVERY TIME. And lo, some days I am just NOT UP TO THIS.
Yesterday I hit a big wall. I called my husband crying after driving a half hour to my OB-GYN's office for the yearly appointment that apparently hasn't happened since 2005 (gulp - please cervical cancer, do not be there) and has been rescheduled twice, only to wait a half hour, get completely undressed, and then hear my doctor being paged to go deliver a baby as I sat waiting for him. Ten minutes later, and I would've been done. So I hopped off the table, rescheduled for the third time, and headed home. Two hours wasted. And I had SO MUCH TO DO. My husband, rock star that he is, gave me a very firm pep talk about finishing strong, and how these book events are like replacing the door hinges and light switches when you remodel a room. Why would you go to all the work to remodel a room and then ignore the details? And I know he is so right. I'm just so tired.
After that, I was talking to Blondie when she got some bad news, and then my head started trying to figure out how to also fix Blondie's life in addition to attending to mine, even though I know she doesn't want me to fix her life and GOOD LORD, SHE IS AN ADULT AND DOESN'T NEED ME and all that, but I think my concern for her then pushed me completely over the edge. I forced myself to focus on my job when I got back home (working from home again), and I made good progress, but I'm in the process of doing the technical equivalent of sorting a bale of hay into a new hay bale configuration. I made like 200 changes and was still not done with even one tiny section. FRUSTRATION. Five o'clock came. I realized I hadn't written my BlogHer post for Monday yet. By the time I was finished with that, I realized the little angel was going to be one of the last kids picked up at daycare AGAIN. Failing, AGAIN. Now I know some would say that is not a failure, but I hate how much time she spends at daycare, and if I hadn't had to blow two hours at the goddamn-someone-else's-baby (yes, I was in THAT frame of mind) doctor, MY BABY would've been picked up a lot earlier.
I brought her home. She was not fighting me. She wanted green eggs. We watered the flowers. She helped me make green eggs. We ate our eggs, then we sat outside while she ate pudding and watched for my husband to come home from his guitar lesson. We decided to go across the street to the park. I pushed her on the swing for a while, thinking how nice it was to have a park so nearby, and how much I really do love my new neighborhood, the neighborhood that I guess isn't new anymore, because we moved into Chateau Travolta a year ago next week, and how GOD WHY CAN'T I JUST RELAX ALREADY?
The little angel broke my revelry. "Push me higher!"
I pushed her higher.
"Push me higher!"
I pushed her the highest she's ever gone.
"Look, Mommy! I'm getting lost in the sky!"
And then, like Bailey on Grey's Anatomy, I think I was able to see the big picture.
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Exercise makes you smarter. Read the review at Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews.
