So I am fresh off of Memorial Day weekend, gut filled with laughter and maybe 2 Sangrias more than I should have ingested. But a good time nonetheless.
My guests (my in-laws!) were a blast to have over, mostly b/c we know each other and don't try to entertain or woo each other anymore. My father-in-law is still a closet democrat and I am an ignorant republican and anything we can't settle in debate (none) we just settle with laughter and vino. It's our love language.
But as my guests leave I realize that it feels like Monday but in actuality it is Tuesday. This befuddles me. I feel behind already, like I lost a day.
And all day I felt that way, slightly unmoored and definitely not improved by the dietary choices of the weekend. Junk food and burgers, if you must know. Fuzzy brained.
When my mother and father-in-law drove off, I held my baby girl as she wept. She sited that she wanted to be with her grandparents and that they belong here, not in Iowa and not in Wisconsin. Noted.
I took her for a walk so she would stop talking about watching movies. It was hardly exercise, but involved listening to her jabber nonstop about NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING, jumping from one topic to the next like a jackrabbit as it jumps in zig-zag patterns.
And then we came home and waited for a contractor. Can we all just agree that waiting for people to fix things in your house is like waiting for a woman to go into labor? Just busy yourself with other chores and they will come, I swear. A watched pot never boils.
That, followed by trying to locate two new backup batteries for our sump pump. Our backup waited to screech its caw of death "Low battery! Low battery!" while our guests were nestling in their beds. Despite websites and toll free numbers plastered on the battery telling one where to purchase new ones, no help could be found. I almost began to wave money in the air yelling, "I have dollars! Please! I buy batteries from you." But salespeople for battery stores pick up the phone reluctantly hoping you won't ask them any questions as they continue playing vintage Atari on the company's clock. Go ahead, fight me on this. I dare you.
By the time noon rolled around, I had eaten two cookies, hardly any breakfast and fed Eve at least seven meals. Her boredom causes her to ask for food; this could prove a problem in the future, but for now she is only growing vertically.
So in my angst (Darn battery people. Crazy Tuesday.) I took the hedge trimmers from the garage and began pruning the bushes. The thing about hedge trimmers that one must remember is that they are an editing tool but they do not "unedit" whatever you remove. My newly pruned bushes resemble a little girl on picture day when her mother cut her bangs "real quick" before sending her off to school.
Upon trimming the boxwoods, I realized that one particular brown-looking one was not about to resurrect anytime soon, so I took to gingerly snipping off the bad branches and– for fun– attempted to dig out the root ball. There's no formula to digging out a structure which has spent its entire life entwining itself around earth, but I will say that if you can think of something maddening, you can use a lot more force when you plunge your shovel into its entrails.
By the time Morgan returned home from school she found a mother figure who was laying in bed, partly paralyzed by exhaustion and partly laid up due to dehydration. Eve was chirping around me, claiming that she needed to run down the street to visit a friend since she saw that I was unable to fight her. Children have antenna for when their parents are downtrodden.
I made dinner, realizing that I had forgotten to take Eve to her last Tuesday gymnastics class. It's Tuesday, not Monday, but all day my body said it was Monday. I sat down a bit and Morgan hit my thighs, asking me why they jiggled more than hers. I reminded her that my body gave her life and that maybe she should respect it. She smiled.
It was a day. I didn't conquer the world. But I'm still kicking.
Everything is going to be okay.
