I feel like I am at a place in my life where I’m either on or off. When I am “on”, I can do it all – parent, keep the house clean, do the shopping, run the kids to their appointments, help out friends in need, blog, and even make dinner five out of seven nights (hey, Thursday’s Joshua has swim lessons and we always get fast food. The other night of the week I’m just inept.)
And then, there’s my “off” times. When I work as hard as I can during the 6- 8 hours or so a week that I have two kids at school and one kid napping so I can keep the house organized, and I can never get it all finished. ( Not that I can’t do housework when they’re all home, but…let’s just say when they are all home and awake I get adult ADD from the constant “MomMomMomMomMomMomMom” and the “waaaaaaaaaah” and my productivity plummets.) These are the times when getting Sophie and Jonah ready and out the door for morning preK drop off either has me on the verge of tears or screaming by 8:30 a.m. When I can’t do anything but the bare-bones, basic stuff my family needs to survive. When I don’t even have two seconds to text, email, or call a friend in need. Those times, I’ve got nuttin’.
There really seems to be no in-between. I can say, that always, I am doing my best. It’s just that sometimes my best is super-great and sometimes it totally sucks. This week, and last week, too, I am totally sucking. I kind of have a bad feeling that it is going to be this way through the fa-la-la-lidays. As a matter of fact, I am already looking forward to the week after Christmas because Bobby has that week off and the kids will of course be off school and Jonah’s 1st birthday and Christmas will be over and I think, oh, Bobby will be here, maybe I can breathe that week. Maybe I will get caught up on the housework. Maybe I will even get an hour or two to myself. Maybe I can flip the switch back to “on”.
Or maybe, the switch will be flipped before that. I sure hope so. At this point, I’m longing for a switch to mediocre.
