I have come to the realization that I don’t have anything really profound to say. Life, in itself, is profound; my thoughts about living it are more dirt and grit, mundane, absolute in their necessity.
My achievement today is making dinner out of nothing much. I haven’t been to the grocery store for anything more than the bare necessities in nearly a month. A month. I can’t even get to the grocery store. I can’t remember to brush my teeth on a Sunday Morning, or change the laundry, or pick up a friend’s kid at school. There’s so much I don’t do and feel guilty about not doing and feel stressed out about having to do — that I thought I should make a list of all the things I did today (or yesterday, as it were, because I never actually got around to writing this last night… didn’t do that either).
(Amendment: didn’t finish the post on Monday either. The irony is uncanny. It’s now Thursday and this is all about Sunday….)
I woke up at 5:45 am.
fed the baby.
fed the toddler.
got the juice, wiped the noses, changed the diapers.
balanced the checking account, and the business account, and the savings account
(hmmph, that didn’t take long).
took stock of the pile of debt that never dissolves.
started a preliminary budget for April (scary).
checked my email,
researched 5ks,
10ks
and Half-Marathons for
this summer,
as well as
Duathlons and
Triathlons
(for those truly inspired weekends).
I put the baby down for a nap.
Now it’s 9 am.
You could say the first few hours were spent on my butt, except for the repositioning of the baby, the kitchen runs for juice and bottles and snacks and anything to appease the early morning Sunday chirps of the children.
9:30
I make eggs and bacon and toast for the whole gang. Dan is now up. He slept in. Isn’t he lucky? Then I do the dishes. Soak the egg pan (what a mess).
10:30 I take a peek at Ethan’s room. We painted Saturday. Horizontal stripes on one wall. Varying colors. But because we are so lucky there was something wrong with the red paint. It was thick and goopy and globbed all over the wall and now we have even more work to clean it up and sand it down and paint over it. Ugh.
Try to sand it and it’s still wet. Bigger mess to fix. Great, another thing added to my head, almost as exhausting as weeding the flowerbeds.
We install new Ikea lights and shelves next to both bunks in the boys’ room. With a level and a drill and a lot of whining from a very tired 2 year old, it’s completed – but the shelves keep popping off the screws when bumped or nudged a little too hard. Great, have to fix that too.
It’s Thursday now and pretty much I can’t remember the rest of that day. The whole idea of the accomplishments I had made seemed so important at the time because often I feel so powerless over the great amount of work that IS the mothering of three, the housekeeping, the patience-stretching, sanity-keeping world that I’ve learned to breath in.
But I can pretty much gather that the rest of it went like this:
Lunch:made
Dishes:done again
Naptime:conquered
Toys:gathered
Laundry:done
Dinner:made (out of NOTHING, remember, that was the whole inspiration for this mess)
and again:dishes:done
Toys:re-gathered
Baths:swum in
Bedtime:FINALLY
I remember two things specifically-
1. that we installed the giant mirror over my dresser so I don’t have to hover in the teeny bathroom with bright blue toothpaste staring back at me from the 1970s sink, smelling that diaper smell, feeling soggy from all the showertime accumulated in one morning.
and
2. that Dan finally re-tackled the job of connecting the automatic water and ice thingie in the fridge door to the pipe. It worked again! Yay! And then it leaked. All over the floor and into the basement and we had to shut water off to the whole house. Of course. NOTHING is easy enough to be completed on the first try. Ethan’s paint, the boys’ lights and shelves, the damn water thingie.
And what’s my point and purpose?
I got some stuff done. Should feel good. But there’s always more stuff. And the stuff that was done ultimately created more stuff to be done. So why do anything again? Oh yeah, because it’s Spring and I’m reborn. Yes yes, I’m remembering now. But it’s hard to write from Sunday’s perspective when I was only just reborn about Spring yesterday while on my iPhone and didn’t post that Spring thing till today, Thursday, which is when I am trying to relive the moments of Sunday.
Okay, see, why try saying profound things when a brain with chatter like this just breaks it all to mush anyway. And life is really just one inexplicable realm we walk in.
Ugh.
Read More in health, motherhood, Sarah Writes, sleep, three kids