There is a special kind of tired one gets when one is world-weary, which happens after days like today: days when all I want to do is go to church and find some peace on this (theoretical) day of rest, but, instead, I spend the morning cleaning my kitchen for the Girl Scouts, who will arrive at noon so that I can teach them to cook mystery ingredients over a roaring campfire built in my backyard hibachi. Then, after the Girl Scouts leave, I help my daughter prepare for a school trip for what seems like hours. (Wait, it was hours; have you ever tried to help a 9 year-old pack for what she's sure will be the greatest experience of her life to date?) Then, I author my high school class notes, due last week (extension granted). Finally, I attempt to polish a newsletter for my job on which I've spent hours, only to be thwarted by buggy software rendering me unable to finish. Somewhere in there, the Guv whisked us out to dinner. I can't even remember what I ate.
On the one hand, this is the stuff of life. On the other hand, I'm tired... tired of being tired because I'm still not 100%, tired of not finding the balance in life, tired of never having enough time for anything I want to do anymore... things like reading the book for my book club on time for once. (It's "Little Bee," and I'm 1/3 of the way through and enjoying it, a page at a time.) I feel like I'm doing a whole lot of things for a whole lot of people -- things I value, perhaps, but they're of service to others and not, necessarily, for me. Somewhere in there, despite successful attempts at scaling back earlier in the spring, I'm at it again. I've overcommitted, and I've lost myself. How do I return to that place that I knew two months ago, the one where I wasn't this out-of-whack?
But just as I'm feeling most sorry for myself (and really, I loathe self-pity, so it'll end with writing it down), I look in on the kids, who've been bunking together for a few weeks now after Petunia has decided she isn't such a fan of the loft bed, which she thinks has "seismic safety issues" among other things. I look into Dash's room, and I find his sister lying next to him instead of in the top bunk. Her arms are around him, and he's lying right on her heart.
This, I think, is why all of the other schlock in my life doesn't matter. I've bitten off more than I can chew on too many occasions, over-promised and under-delivered at others, and yet: look. Can you picture them? He wears his favorite hand-me-down blue monkey PJ's while she sports her pink monkey nightgown (they don't plan to match, they just do); they hold on to each other, needing each other and loving each other so fiercely and protectively that, already, we fear the day when one will leave for boarding school or college. His ear is to her heart; he needs the comfort of the sound, and she needs his nearness to her. They can't get married someday, as Dash insists they will, but I do want to freeze this moment when he believes it, especially after a day when it seems like all they did was annoy the living daylights out of each other. It all comes down to love, after all.
Tomorrow, I'll wake up and greet Monday with joy. Most of my "work" is done for now, and, while I'll continue to do my various jobs, I won't raise my hand and take on anything else extra before the school year ends. Not that it wasn't fun to try to teach a bunch of little girls to cook over a hibachi fire I had no idea how to build creating food I'd never before cooked ... but, yeah, I won't be doing that again. My happy place is pretty far away from that, no matter how helpful I want to be. My happy place is under the covers with my own sweet little kids, listening to their heartbeats, which echo, "love you, love you, love you."
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