November 28, 2020
My suspicion is that I’ve been too busy to be a mess.Christmas may have been my favorite holiday as a kid but, as an adult, Thanksgiving was my jive. Thankful for a million things, no presents to purchase with the money I didn’t have and lean fucking turkey for days. Thanks, Mom! You let the food get cold because you’re pretty ripped and then you go on for entirely too long about all the things you’re thankful for because you suddenly remember like ten new things by the time it’s your turn to go.
Yeah.
But come back around to Christmas now that I have kids and it’s ON. The lights go up too early, the decorations are growing by the year and I am the ultimate Elf on the Shelf puppeteer. One, two, three GO!
It’s magic. It’s youth. It’s innocence and wonder. It’s beautiful and it’s stressful but I’d do it all again a million times over just for this small sparkle in their eyes. I plan. I create. I imagine and I endure. We don’t have Blue Harbor this year with their bunk bed rooms and their waterpark shenanigans and their Santa in the lobby with candy canes, Christmas stories and $7.00 ice cream cones. Breakfast with Santa while my kids tremble with excitement over their brunch of barely touched food. It’s amazing but we have to sacrifice…
So instead we have a puppy.
OOPS.
I said it would never happen but here I am and here she is, calling me ALPHA with her wagging tail. Rescued off the road of some Alabama town, scraping roadkill into her mouth and returning back to her two surviving siblings on the side of the road. You have a home now, pup, no matter what happens next.
Because now I need to be dead tired by 6pm. I need to have all the distractions and all the energy spoken for. I need to not be able to think, conjecture or ponder. I need to have my fins pinned to the floor so I can’t surface for air. I need to be encumbered, filled to the brim and saturated completely. I need to have too many clothes to launder and too many dishes to clean. I need too much schoolwork and too many reminders and all the extra crap that comes with potty/crate training a puppy with an infant and a toddler and a child and dinner to make.
My stockings need to be stuffed and my tree needs to fucking glimmer in the night sky.
I need not to look into the night or 4am sky and see all the stars and wonder where I am in respect to their stature.
“Don’t be concerned with me,” I tell them (over and over) while the silence stings my ear and the cold grips my chest. They all have a place – the stars in the sky, the moon in the shadows, the trees with their varying forms of life on pause – but me, I don’t know about me. I don’t really think I’m doing any of it too well these. Wife, mother, daughter, sister, employee, friend. I’m not quite enough and I’m a bit too much at times and they always seem to be the wrong times. I go out of my way and I then I sit still and wait and then I don’t act quickly enough or I react entirely too soon.
I feel more wrong than I’ve ever felt before and I don’t feel sturdy like I used to feel. I don’t feel sane or stupid but I feel…
Overwhelmed.
Breastfeed a baby, beg a 4-year-old to use the potty 20 times a day, run a dog out to the yard once an hour, try to calm an 8-year-old going on 18-years-old, be a wife to someone who WANTS a wife and cook and clean and launder and run and fall and dare yourself not to leave the house for fear of… Well, you know. For fear of everything.
I’ll stay here for now.
SIT. STAY. GOOD GIRL.