The Incorrigible Night Owl

When Robert left this evening to go back to work I had a brief moment of, “I can’t do this by myself!” I haven’t had that feeling since Eliza was very small and not sleeping. No, she hasn’t regressed; she’s not gone back to sleeping poorly. In fact, we are screaming up on the one-year anniversary of her beginning to sleep through the night.
I think the problem was more an accumulation than any one thing. When Robert walked out the door (to be gone an extra day this week) I was suddenly steamrolled by all the upcoming events and chores and things that I need to get done, which all crowded into my brain at the same time, clamoring for attention. You’d be surprised how often this happens to me, actually.
Any road, the ball has now begun rolling toward our busy, busy summer. Last week was lovely and quiet – the calm before the storm. This week things pick up and it only gets busier from here on out. There are trips to be planned for, the soccer season that just won’t die (I thought their last game was yesterday, only to be informed there’s tournament play all this week and next weekend), another ten days of morning and nightly school routines to get through (the school system seems to have specifically selected this month’s menu based on things my children will not eat, so lots of lunches still to be packed on top of the normal tasks) and Madalyn and I leave for Louisville in a week-and-a-half. Another key factor in my brief panic is that my house is an unholy pigsty. I have, no exaggeration, a minimum of fifteen loads of clean laundry waiting to be folded and probably another seven or eight loads to wash. The rest of the place is a wreck, too. Oh, and don’t forget that we are probably moving sometime this summer so the entire house will need to be packed up again. And yet I can’t seem to get motivated to actually do anything. I have my theories about that but, right now, theories won’t fold my clothes.
As you may guess, the sudden realization of everything I have to do (or feel I should be doing) is a bit overwhelming. Also figuring into the equation is that the way I get through Robert being gone so much is by having a “one day at a time” mentality. I wake up in the mornings and I deal with only what needs to be dealt with that day. If I look too far ahead at all the things coming up in the near future I start to lose my already-tenuous grip on having it together. The problem at this point is that a lot of our summer busyness has to be planned for in advance, which means I’m feeling like I should be working on, say, packing for Louisville right now AND cleaning the house in advance of our California trip AND planning all our outfits for the week of VBS AND keeping the house clean once I’ve gotten it tidied up.
A lot of the agony is self-inflicted. Take packing for the trip, for example. It doesn’t need to be as complicated as I make it. But, no, here I am with a slip of paper listing all Madalyn’s new shirts and bottoms and all my new/presentable clothing, and I’m going to sit at my computer and type up a list detailing which shirts will be worn with which shorts so there will be no confusion during packing (or dressing, on the trip). I probably really don’t need to have the house spic-and-span for when we are gone to California – but I feel like it should be, so even if I don’t get around to doing it I will still stress about it right up until the day we walk out the door, whenever that glorious day may be. The laundry – well, there’s no getting around that one. That does need to be folded. But there’s the whole motivation issue again. I have the best of intentions but somehow I simply can’t make myself do it. Then I feel guilty, which gets me down, which, in turn, probably makes me less likely to find the get-up-and-go to get it done.
Bottom line, I guess, is that I’m taking too wide a view of things this evening and allowing all the upcoming activity to crowd in on me. I need to take myself in hand and narrow my focus on today and, if needed, tomorrow. The brief feeling of panic disappeared quickly but I am still feeling a bit uneasy about it all, which I think would end up being counterproductive if I gave myself over to it entirely. Okay….bucking up, squaring shoulders, finding resolve, shaking off the Crazy…..