SquarePeg Books

“… I sobbed: quietly, trying to make no noise… Crying because I’d reached the limit of what I could repress.”

James Alan Gardner, Radiant

 

This isn’t really a writing post, or even a super positive or funny post, so you can totally skip it. I won’t get upset.

 

It’s been happening for a while, actually. There’s a lot of pressure I feel that most people don’t see or view as pressure. I’m a stay-at-home-mom. How stressful can that be?

You’d be surprised.

I’ve stepped away from one volunteer position (because, drama). I thought I’d step down in September from the second one – that plan went to shit when husband went to the hospital. It was quite catastrophic, for one so young, but he survived and now we’re doing the recovery dance. A backlog of housing maintenance, hailstorms, insurance denials and just a pinch “aw, fuck, that too?” thrown in for flavor.

But this post isn’t about the drama in detail.

You see, I, hilariously, thought that summer would bring me more time – that things would be easier, that I’d have more time to do the Required Things and the Me Things. Because I won’t have to race around to dance class or cub scouts or tutoring or choir practice or try to be patient with homework, or worry about letters from teachers or, or, or…

Even more hilariously – I always think that! Every time we approach summer, every time we approach school beginning, every time we approach a scheduled school break – “Now I will have time for ALL THE THINGS!”

And every time, Reality says “Ah, no.” (In the beginning, Reality snickered maliciously and danced a hateful little jig while making its cackling pronouncement. Now it just kinda lounges on the couch and listlessly throws a piece of trash in my general direction while mumbling. I’m not sure that this is an improvement.)

The Required Things are just what they sound like – Required. Things that must be done in order to maintain a house and some semblance of organization and health among the family members competing with each other to get first consideration with the Events and Appointments Coordinator (that would be me).

The Me Things take a distant second place to that. Sometimes even a fourth or fifth place. Practicality demands it.

The last few years have been passed with the mantra of “If I can just get past this event/date, I can focus on the other things.” But so many other things get pushed off to the side to allow for the prep-and-do for the moment in question, that the mountain of Other Things seems to grow.

And grow.

And Grow.

Because I can’t do the Other Things (a combination of Required Things and Me Things) when the Immediate Looming Thing is in my face. But I slog along, trying to do what I can to whittle away at ALL THE THINGS while spending most of my time working on the Immediate Looming Thing.

Eventually this catches up and bites me in the ass (and not the in the excitable, good way that the Muse sometimes does). Unexplained sobbing episodes. Panic attacks. Moments in which the best I can do is sit and stare.  Fatigue. Short temper. Memory issues.

All of these have been problems for the last few years, but most people don’t know it just by looking at me (except for maybe the fatigue and temper bits).

The mountains of Required Things and Other Things and scheduled Immediate Looming Things stare at me. It’s overwhelming to think about working on them. Even breaking the mountain’s composite tasks down into smaller tasks seems impossible some days – the breaking down of the tasks into smaller bits (first A, then B) is easy. It’s the time requirement to accomplish the tasks that weighs me down.

And when can I schedule for Me Things? I hope that stepping away from the volunteer positions will free up that time, although I look at the range of Things and wonder how I can justify working on the Me Things when there are so many Things clamoring for attention.

Despite my slow but steady efforts to whittle the list down, it seems to grow. I cross off 3 items, but three more have come in to take their place. Looking at this post, I can kinda understand why it feels like the rest of me is resisting in some fashion. There are days where I’m too tired to even lift my feet – those days I honestly believe I’m not safe to drive. There are days when I stare at my two-hour physical task for the day and wonder – “How am I supposed to do this?” when all there is to do is open the can, dip the brush and apply the stain. There are days when I hide downstairs, sewing the new patio shade not just because it needs to be done, but because I know if someone talks to me, I will fall apart and sob for no apparent reason. I need to be alone so I can cry quietly, because if someone asks “what’s wrong?” the answer will either be “Nothing” – which no one believes, or an incoherent outpouring of everything that resembles an anxiety attack requiring prescription-strength meds.

Even the Bucket List taunts me. I was so close to making that archery goal and then this fucking tornado appeared at the goddamned finish line.

I’ll be honest – writing is an escape, but a delicate one. It can take me hours or even days to get over a negative episode, and trying to write during that time doesn’t often work out. My father once said that I had “a distressing tendency to deny reality” with my writing. I can’t say he’s entirely incorrect, but I can say that it isn’t correct the way he meant it, either.

“Just take the time to pull yourself together.”

Oh, honey. If I did that, nothing would get done. The Not Me Things list would become so huge it would turn into a National Security crisis, complete with drones, neighbors commenting about its “sudden” appearance to on-scene reporters, and politicians looking very nervous as they try to scoot away from the cameras and get into super-secret-squirrel meetings about how, exactly this mountain of Things got here and what can we do about it before the constituency lose their damn minds? (on the plus side, I might be eligible for federal disaster funding should that happen…)

I can only grab moments, here and there. And in grabbing those moments, I have to acknowledge I’m ignoring a number of lists.

But sometimes the stolen moments in between the various listing moments are helpful with the writing. Sometimes words just barf out onto the page.  Which then makes me look around my “office” and think “hmmmm… I may want to invest in some organizational tools to keep myself from loosing all these awesome notes that are just pouring out, even if they never get used.”

Which goes onto another list.