Happy Wednesday to you! This week is a strange one for me because my kids are spending their days at a local nature camp and my husband is traveling out west for the week, trekking through Yellowstone with his brothers, father, and nephew. Which means I am utterly alone, a rare occurrence in the world of a homeschool mom.
It’s been three years since I’ve done the morning hustle to get out the door each day: the alarm shattering the morning calm, clothes wrestled onto reluctant bodies, lunches and water bottles hastily packed, breakfast made and eaten, teeth brushed, shoes on, out the door. And then on the opposite end, the shoes and bags shucked off in the doorway, the questions of how their day went, probing them for more details as they scavenge for snacks and flop onto the couch, hungry, mute, and tired. Cleaning out the lunchboxes, washing and refilling the water bottles, laying out the clothes for the next morning. Lather, rinse, repeat.
All of it is so familiar and yet so strange, like a fragmented memory of another life. In those days I was a much different version of myself than I am now, anxious and exhausted, feeling behind in every conceivable area, trying so hard to solve an impossible formula with calendars and systems and sticky notes. The answer was always somewhere out there, just out of reach. A $60 planner; a laminated meal plan; a clock set five minutes ahead so I could trick myself into leaving on time. I don’t have to tell you that none of it worked, because the problem was not outside me, it was within me. The unbearable anxiety I felt as I raced from the bus stop to preschool drop-off to work and back again six hours later. The disconnection I felt from my children as they hauled their exhausted bodies through the door each afternoon and plopped down in front of a screen while I defrosted a package of chicken breasts in the next room. The rising tide of my overwhelm, threatening to drown me on dry land. The way everyone else around me seemed to accept that this was how life was supposed to feel, but how wrong it felt for me personally.
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