I was absolutely exhausted yesterday. I have no idea why. Well, I have some suspicions. Eating too much pizza with a side of Toblerone with a side of coffee with a side of Doritos is probably not helping. Also, not getting to sleep until two in the morning and then being woken up four hours later by a toddler walking on my face. And the heat. I don’t do well in the heat, and not in a Delicate Flower kind of way, but more in a My Face Is Oily and My Stomach is NOT HAPPY and Should I Sweat This Much When I Sleep? way.
So I’m thinking some salad and real food should be on the list this week. And more water, less caffeine. I’m not going to give up chocolate, because that would just be silly. And maybe a nap in there somewhere. Because I’m sure I’ll find the time to take a nap and have a proper bath and maybe paint my nails while watching some British-y Masterpiece Theater selection with lovely men in cravats and Hessian boots. (The lovely men would be in the Masterpiece Theater selection, of course, and not actually in my living room with me while I hike my bare feet up onto the coffee table in order to paint my nails. Of course.)
I keep telling myself that things will settle down at some point in the not-too-distant future. Our cars will no longer need to go to the garage, and the weather will recede from a point of stepping out the front door and feeling as if one were slapped in the face with a boiling wet sponge. And my kids will magically learn to love sleep as much as I do, rather than fighting it until they pass out at midnight after watching a marathon of My Little Pony meets Peg + Cat. Maybe I’ll even have weekends again, as in a day that feels marginally different from the rest of the week.
Which… No. No, I won’t. Aside from the usual “I Have Kids So Nothing Will Ever Be The Same” song that is often sung, everything else is… different. I feel it throughout the day, and especially at night, when I’m in bed and trying to turn off my brain enough so I can fall asleep. For the last few years, our lives have gone a certain way. And a lot of that direction circled around my father and his poor health. And now that he’s no longer here, it’s like a huge exhale. Not a sigh, nothing as calm as that. More of that expelling of air one experiences when getting punched in the gut. And we even knew the hit was coming, but bracing ourselves didn’t really do any good.
So things have been crazy. Cars are being fixed up after a few years of neglect, and houses and yards and schedules are being put to rights. And it’s a slow process, and strange for the most part. I feel as if we need a Handbook For The Recently Deceased, but instead, a second volume for the ones who were close to the deceased and have to find their way forward again.
And it’s also interesting that I began this post talking about how hectic everything is, thinking it would stay on an even keel of kids and poopy diapers and trips to the grocery store in which said kids all fight over the same seat in the race car shopping cart. But instead, it became this. Which should probably tell me where my head is right now, how forty days (See how I still know exactly how many days it’s been since he died?) is nowhere near enough time to even chip away at the surface of the… the utter strangeness in which everything is currently suspended.
So, as I said, I was absolutely exhausted yesterday. And my stomach is still in knots. And my face is decorated with chains of little stress pimples. And I don’t dream much when I sleep. When I sleep, which isn’t as often as I’d like.
And maybe it’s not completely due to the pizza and the summer heat, now that I sit back and think about it.